“The traditional answer in macroeconomics is nominal deflation: falling wages and prices. But because workers have already priced themselves into jobs, nothing more will come from the wages route. So why would firms cut prices?”
My usual take: why don’t progressive economists ever think outside the box to (or at least include in) the alternate possibility that labor in the US could (in the abstract at least) be at German level (or at least highest historical US level) union density — which would reset every other economic (and political) calculation?
Which leads to a wider (I think wholly PSYCHOLOGICAL question — the way the human mind does not work):
Why can economists have no trouble (could not possibly leave out) citing Euro debacle v. never happened Euro debacle — European austerity v. never was European austerity …
… yet don’t just as automatically bring up US disappeared labor union density v. never disappeared US labor union density …
… in the same automatic, inherent fact/counter factual way?
Must I verbally emphasize automatic — why must I emphasize? Labor union disappearance is the root in almost all the rot in our society: political as well as economic.
Just a (I think wholly) psychological thought. Something about being blinded by (trapped in?) the culture we live in. ???
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
CROSS-POSTED FROM ECONOMIST’S VIEW: my response to a comment of my post above (here):
cm said in reply to Denis Drew…
Union decline is not a root cause. Look at where unions have still maintained ground – more or less occupations that are location bound, or cannot (or will not) be outsourced to another low bidder, or workforces cannot be switched out at will due to barriers to entry or high frictional costs.
This used to be the case for manufacturing when unions were strong (or rather the other way around), but it no longer is.
The mangement will only make deals with you when it has to. And now it mostly doesn’t have to.
— Reply Saturday, March 04, 2017 at 05:49 PM
***********
***********
Denis Drew said in reply to cm…
The fragmentation of labor is remediable via something else besides mere unions that you find in continental Europe, not to mention French Canada, even Argentina and Indonesia — also the Teamsters Union’s National Master Freight Agreement.
It’s called by “centralized bargaining” or “sector wide labor agreements”: where all employees doing the same type of work (e.g., retail clerk; e.g., McDonald’s, Target, Walmart — airline pilot, main or regional) in the same geographic area work under a single contract for all. Ends the race-to-the bottom; also ends fragmentation attacks on contracts.
“I had assumed, since there were only 33 Teamsters working at Gentile, that the strike, even if it went badly, wouldn’t have repercussions far beyond the dealer’s lot. It turned out, however, that the Teamsters didn’t just represent the Gentile workers, they also represented nearly 200 employees in the half dozen other car dealerships in town. Over the years, the Teamsters had bargained with all the dealerships in Racine to create a roughly equivalent wage and benefit pattern at all the dealerships. The brilliance of this kind of pattern bargaining is that it stops competing companies from trying to undercut one another by paying lower wages to their employees. Pattern bargaining means that workers are no longer pawns in an industry’s war. Of course, when one company breaks the pattern—as Gentile was trying to do—the system collapses.”
What fragmentation cannot weaken is the political power of labor IF (IF, IF, IF!) union density is high enough to legislate — hopefully German level high, at least post WWII American high. First you get the density; then you get the laws mandating centralized bargaining (as done all over the world; sometimes just by culture, not even law).
All you need to do to get high union density is to put some teeth in long existing (80 years!) labor law. Union busting is already illegal — got to make it a punishable felony — under current conditions starting progressive state by progressive state. Just allow people to organize if they just feel like it, no intimidation, and then just get out of their way. 🙂
**********************************
GETTING BACK TO THE POINT OF MY ESSAY: it really was about mindset. You can see it in the links for 03-94-17 above: Is Wall Street Responsible for Our Economic Problems? – New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/is-wall-street-responsible-for-our-economic-problems?mbid=rss
Here are your top progressive thinkers (top thinkers period) and they don’t discuss everything in terms of US with unions v. US without unions …
… the same way they would discuss Europe with the Euro debacle v. Europe without the Euro debacle — or — Europe with austerity v. Europe without austerity.
There is never any real sense that everything that is wrong (right down to big pharma gouging and the for profit college nightmare, etc.) starts with an economically and politically de-fanged middle class and poor. .. and politically …
I get so tired of reading all these complicated comprehensive analyses that barely if at all notice the Tyrannosaurus in the room.
— Reply Sunday, March 05, 2017 at 07:30 AM
Of course (as I slowly wake to) a big difference in the PSYCHOLOGY of being acutely conscious of Eruo debacle v. would-have-been no Euro debacle — and — austerity v. no austerity …
… is that these were high profile choices, very consciously made at specific points in time …
… not something that evolved seamlessly (to some/many inevitably) over decades. Overcome that PSYCHOLOGY — save the nation.
—Reply Sunday, March 05, 2017 at 08:33 AM
“It’s a miracle! You are able to learn something!!! For months I’ve been stating that everything I am putting out there is part of one consistent theme, and for months you and Beverly keep accusing me of continuously changing my story.
“As to the holier than thou attitude… you’ve called me all sorts of names over the past few months. I would submit that the holier than thou attitude is yours.”
I responded:
““EMichael and I do not dispute that everything you’re putting out there is part of one consistent theme, Kimel. To the contrary, we’ve been saying for months now that everything you’ve been putting out there is part of one consistent theme.”
“The inconsistency is decidedly not in the theme. It’s in the fact that when accused of pushing the actual theme you’re pushing, you deny that that is your theme. And that you based one or another wholier-than-thou (not a typo) argument on a statistic or fact or sociological claim that you did in fact use to support your absolutely consistent theme and that is either inaccurate, or utterly irrelevant, or lacks any acknowledgment that there are significant other facts that correlate in time with the statistic you claim is THE CAUSE OF … whatever.
“These happen again and again and again and again.
“A related hallmark of yours is that you misunderstand, or claim to misunderstand, or conflate basic straightforward statements by EMichael, Longtooth, Coberly, Joel, me and other critics in these threads. E.g.: that we’re disputing that you’ve been putting out here a consistent theme for months, cuz, well, there’s no difference between, on the one hand, saying that you’ve been putting out here for (many) months a virulently white ethno-nationalist theme that, I learned a few days ago from an article summarizing some Breitbart article from a year or two ago, are taken virtually verbatim from those articles, and, on the other, saying that when confronted directly about the nature of your theme you outright lie about what its actual nature is and also deny that you’ve said things you explicitly said.
“I do want to emphasis: Your posts here are virtually identical to articles by a leading white ethno-nationalist published on Breitbart during Bannon’s tenure as editor there, and in the months shortly before Trump announced his candidacy. The article I read said that some of what Trump said in his announcement came directly from those articles.
“So Dan Crawford is effectively playing the role of Steve Bannon on a blog that still bills itself as left-of-center. Whether he understands that or not, I wouldn’t know.”
EMichael had responded to Kimel:
“We just differ on what your ‘consistent theme’ is.”
Life is what we make it, not as we program it, nor how we assign it to be.
” In the spring of 1981, a young violin teacher named Roberta Guaspari Tzavaras, newly arrived in East Harlem, held the first concert of the violin program she had just started at Central Park East School (CPE). The concert wasn’t very big, and it wasn’t very fancy. The program was hand-lettered by Roberta, decorated with a picture she had drawn herself. As word spread of the dynamic violin teacher at CPE, her program spread to CPE’s two affiliate schools, CPE II and River East. It grew from about 40 students to 130 and more. Every year there was an end-of-the-year concert that brought parents and grandparents to their feet, clapping, cheering, and crying. And every year there was a hand-written program with a picture drawn by Roberta.
And then, in 1991, disaster hit. There were budget cuts for New York City public schools, and the violin program was axed. But Roberta wasn’t giving up. Working with parents, other teachers and volunteers, she founded Opus 118 Harlem School of Music. Violinist Arnold Steinhardt, impressed by Roberta’s music classes, engaged colleagues Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern to organize Fiddlefest, a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall to keep the violin program alive. Arnold’s wife, Dorothea von Haeften, began working tirelessly to help save the program. Not only did this first concert shine a bright light on Opus 118, it became the first in a series of Fiddlefests with acclaimed musicians such as Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin and Mark O’Connor joining the students in performance.
Roberta Guaspari’s passionate struggle to keep music instruction alive in Harlem’s public schools has inspired two Oscar-nominated films: the 1996 documentary Small Wonders and Miramax’s 1999 feature film Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep. ”
Just a thought. Words from:
A Self-Fulfilling Expectations Led Recession?
Simon Wren-Lewis
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2017/03/could-we-still-be-at-bottom-of-self.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+MainlyMacro+(mainly+macro)
“The traditional answer in macroeconomics is nominal deflation: falling wages and prices. But because workers have already priced themselves into jobs, nothing more will come from the wages route. So why would firms cut prices?”
My usual take: why don’t progressive economists ever think outside the box to (or at least include in) the alternate possibility that labor in the US could (in the abstract at least) be at German level (or at least highest historical US level) union density — which would reset every other economic (and political) calculation?
Which leads to a wider (I think wholly PSYCHOLOGICAL question — the way the human mind does not work):
Why can economists have no trouble (could not possibly leave out) citing Euro debacle v. never happened Euro debacle — European austerity v. never was European austerity …
… yet don’t just as automatically bring up US disappeared labor union density v. never disappeared US labor union density …
… in the same automatic, inherent fact/counter factual way?
Must I verbally emphasize automatic — why must I emphasize? Labor union disappearance is the root in almost all the rot in our society: political as well as economic.
Just a (I think wholly) psychological thought. Something about being blinded by (trapped in?) the culture we live in. ???
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/05/15/former-alarmist-scientist-says-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-based-on-false-science/
Last night in Sweden they were reading a Breitbart article. Apparently.
https://nyti.ms/2lpXwyu
@Sammy,
Evans’ denialist claims were Fisked at the time. They are even more anachronistic six years after your link was published.
https://skepticalscience.com/david-evans-understanding-goes-cold.html
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2012/06/23/a-torrent-of-errors-in-david-evans-case-against-global-warming/
https://patricktbrown.org/2013/03/29/response-to-david-evans-opinion-piece-on-climate-science/
CROSS-POSTED FROM ECONOMIST’S VIEW: my response to a comment of my post above (here):
cm said in reply to Denis Drew…
Union decline is not a root cause. Look at where unions have still maintained ground – more or less occupations that are location bound, or cannot (or will not) be outsourced to another low bidder, or workforces cannot be switched out at will due to barriers to entry or high frictional costs.
This used to be the case for manufacturing when unions were strong (or rather the other way around), but it no longer is.
The mangement will only make deals with you when it has to. And now it mostly doesn’t have to.
— Reply Saturday, March 04, 2017 at 05:49 PM
***********
***********
Denis Drew said in reply to cm…
The fragmentation of labor is remediable via something else besides mere unions that you find in continental Europe, not to mention French Canada, even Argentina and Indonesia — also the Teamsters Union’s National Master Freight Agreement.
It’s called by “centralized bargaining” or “sector wide labor agreements”: where all employees doing the same type of work (e.g., retail clerk; e.g., McDonald’s, Target, Walmart — airline pilot, main or regional) in the same geographic area work under a single contract for all. Ends the race-to-the bottom; also ends fragmentation attacks on contracts.
Yesterday I read this terrible story of Teamsters auto dealership employees in Wisconsin having their contracts wrecked — unable to defend against fragmentation.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/confessions-of-a-labor-editor
“I had assumed, since there were only 33 Teamsters working at Gentile, that the strike, even if it went badly, wouldn’t have repercussions far beyond the dealer’s lot. It turned out, however, that the Teamsters didn’t just represent the Gentile workers, they also represented nearly 200 employees in the half dozen other car dealerships in town. Over the years, the Teamsters had bargained with all the dealerships in Racine to create a roughly equivalent wage and benefit pattern at all the dealerships. The brilliance of this kind of pattern bargaining is that it stops competing companies from trying to undercut one another by paying lower wages to their employees. Pattern bargaining means that workers are no longer pawns in an industry’s war. Of course, when one company breaks the pattern—as Gentile was trying to do—the system collapses.”
What fragmentation cannot weaken is the political power of labor IF (IF, IF, IF!) union density is high enough to legislate — hopefully German level high, at least post WWII American high. First you get the density; then you get the laws mandating centralized bargaining (as done all over the world; sometimes just by culture, not even law).
All you need to do to get high union density is to put some teeth in long existing (80 years!) labor law. Union busting is already illegal — got to make it a punishable felony — under current conditions starting progressive state by progressive state. Just allow people to organize if they just feel like it, no intimidation, and then just get out of their way. 🙂
**********************************
GETTING BACK TO THE POINT OF MY ESSAY: it really was about mindset. You can see it in the links for 03-94-17 above: Is Wall Street Responsible for Our Economic Problems? – New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/is-wall-street-responsible-for-our-economic-problems?mbid=rss
Here are your top progressive thinkers (top thinkers period) and they don’t discuss everything in terms of US with unions v. US without unions …
… the same way they would discuss Europe with the Euro debacle v. Europe without the Euro debacle — or — Europe with austerity v. Europe without austerity.
There is never any real sense that everything that is wrong (right down to big pharma gouging and the for profit college nightmare, etc.) starts with an economically and politically de-fanged middle class and poor. .. and politically …
I get so tired of reading all these complicated comprehensive analyses that barely if at all notice the Tyrannosaurus in the room.
— Reply Sunday, March 05, 2017 at 07:30 AM
dam
another one
or maybe the same one
CROSS POSTED AGAIN — as I slowly see the obvious.
Of course (as I slowly wake to) a big difference in the PSYCHOLOGY of being acutely conscious of Eruo debacle v. would-have-been no Euro debacle — and — austerity v. no austerity …
… is that these were high profile choices, very consciously made at specific points in time …
… not something that evolved seamlessly (to some/many inevitably) over decades. Overcome that PSYCHOLOGY — save the nation.
—Reply Sunday, March 05, 2017 at 08:33 AM
Drew, along lines similar to your comment here, I just posted a comment in response to Mike Kimel in the thread at his most recent post, at http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2017/03/todays-taboo-and-where-to-from-here.html#comment-2903437.
Kimel wrote:
“EMichael,
“It’s a miracle! You are able to learn something!!! For months I’ve been stating that everything I am putting out there is part of one consistent theme, and for months you and Beverly keep accusing me of continuously changing my story.
“As to the holier than thou attitude… you’ve called me all sorts of names over the past few months. I would submit that the holier than thou attitude is yours.”
I responded:
““EMichael and I do not dispute that everything you’re putting out there is part of one consistent theme, Kimel. To the contrary, we’ve been saying for months now that everything you’ve been putting out there is part of one consistent theme.”
“The inconsistency is decidedly not in the theme. It’s in the fact that when accused of pushing the actual theme you’re pushing, you deny that that is your theme. And that you based one or another wholier-than-thou (not a typo) argument on a statistic or fact or sociological claim that you did in fact use to support your absolutely consistent theme and that is either inaccurate, or utterly irrelevant, or lacks any acknowledgment that there are significant other facts that correlate in time with the statistic you claim is THE CAUSE OF … whatever.
“These happen again and again and again and again.
“A related hallmark of yours is that you misunderstand, or claim to misunderstand, or conflate basic straightforward statements by EMichael, Longtooth, Coberly, Joel, me and other critics in these threads. E.g.: that we’re disputing that you’ve been putting out here a consistent theme for months, cuz, well, there’s no difference between, on the one hand, saying that you’ve been putting out here for (many) months a virulently white ethno-nationalist theme that, I learned a few days ago from an article summarizing some Breitbart article from a year or two ago, are taken virtually verbatim from those articles, and, on the other, saying that when confronted directly about the nature of your theme you outright lie about what its actual nature is and also deny that you’ve said things you explicitly said.
“I do want to emphasis: Your posts here are virtually identical to articles by a leading white ethno-nationalist published on Breitbart during Bannon’s tenure as editor there, and in the months shortly before Trump announced his candidacy. The article I read said that some of what Trump said in his announcement came directly from those articles.
“So Dan Crawford is effectively playing the role of Steve Bannon on a blog that still bills itself as left-of-center. Whether he understands that or not, I wouldn’t know.”
EMichael had responded to Kimel:
“We just differ on what your ‘consistent theme’ is.”
F u kimel,
Life is what we make it, not as we program it, nor how we assign it to be.
” In the spring of 1981, a young violin teacher named Roberta Guaspari Tzavaras, newly arrived in East Harlem, held the first concert of the violin program she had just started at Central Park East School (CPE). The concert wasn’t very big, and it wasn’t very fancy. The program was hand-lettered by Roberta, decorated with a picture she had drawn herself. As word spread of the dynamic violin teacher at CPE, her program spread to CPE’s two affiliate schools, CPE II and River East. It grew from about 40 students to 130 and more. Every year there was an end-of-the-year concert that brought parents and grandparents to their feet, clapping, cheering, and crying. And every year there was a hand-written program with a picture drawn by Roberta.
And then, in 1991, disaster hit. There were budget cuts for New York City public schools, and the violin program was axed. But Roberta wasn’t giving up. Working with parents, other teachers and volunteers, she founded Opus 118 Harlem School of Music. Violinist Arnold Steinhardt, impressed by Roberta’s music classes, engaged colleagues Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern to organize Fiddlefest, a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall to keep the violin program alive. Arnold’s wife, Dorothea von Haeften, began working tirelessly to help save the program. Not only did this first concert shine a bright light on Opus 118, it became the first in a series of Fiddlefests with acclaimed musicians such as Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin and Mark O’Connor joining the students in performance.
Roberta Guaspari’s passionate struggle to keep music instruction alive in Harlem’s public schools has inspired two Oscar-nominated films: the 1996 documentary Small Wonders and Miramax’s 1999 feature film Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep. ”
http://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/kc/about/opus-118/
That is better . . .
Bravo
Oops. Sorry, Denis. I meant to say, “Denis, along lines similar to your comment here, ….” Not, “Drew, ….”
Not the first time I’ve made that mistake, either.
Perfect riposte, EMichael. And a perfect illustration.