On Nov 23, 5:13 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:



Paul Revere was a businessman, not a wage-earner, having acquired one
business from his marriage to his first wife; another from his father; and
foundry and copper-plating companies from his own entreprenuership. He built
a gunpowder plant. He was a petit capitalist and a pioneer of America's
Industrial Revolution. Wage-earners were working for *him*.

Can you give me a cite on Paul Revere acquiring a business by marrying
Sarah Orne? All the things I can google up say that Paul took over
his fathers business.


And then someone I know said :

"True enough. If you're a real theorizer and if you can back 'way off
from
the real lives of real people, you can even see it as a good thing
that will
work out just fine in the end. Milton Friedman is one of those. Thomas
Friedman is, too.

But you still have to ask what has driven that trend upward. It isn't
simple, and you won't find many serious economists who ignore the long-
term
effects of unions. "

That's right. We were talking about globalization and the eventual
(theoretical) leveling of wages across economies, however, which is a
different subject.

Actually we were talking about wages going up because of increased
productivity.
The global part came in when I said one has to consider the whole
earth now instead of just the US.

Labor economics is a very complicated subject because there are so many
variables and few clear-cut controls. Most of the literature that addresses
the subject of labor's effect on overall wages is based on cross-industry
studies. And the weight of evidence those studies provide supports the
conclusion that unions increased wages across the board in their early and
middle history, often at the direct expense of profits. Profits got
re-distributed by unions.


You admit is is a complicated subject, yet say that it is a FACT that
without unions .................. I at least do not know that. I do
know that there were unions and wages did go up, but unions were not
the only force changing society.
What would have happened without unions? No way to know. But if
unions were the only force, and there was no improved productivity, it
is obvious to me that wages would not have gone up.


The fact is that we had the history we had, and there is no way to
prove or disprove what would have happened without unions. But the
Friedmans are pretty serious economists.

Well, Milton is. Thomas (no relation to Milton that I know of) is a
journalist who writes about economics and the Middle East. He's considered a
lightweight on economics by most observers; it's not his area of training.
He does sell more books than Milton these days. g

But, again, we weren't talking there about the effects of unions. We were
talking about the eventual leveling that comes from free trade. That doesn't
address what the level will rise to.

I think we were talking about the eventual leveling that occurs from
increased productivity considering that now one has to use the whole
earth, not just the US.

The unions had an effect,
but I contend that the end result occurred because of other things as
improved productivity that meant that more people could consume more.
And that is what grew the middle class. I don't think that the unions
are a big force now because of all the other things, and as a
theorizer I can back way off. Anytime you throw in things about"real
lives of real people ", you are getting away from theory and going
toward emotions.

We're getting away from macroeconomics and going toward microeconomics,
which is about the real lives of real people and real businesses. Our
disagreement is over macro issues, which is more theoretical. Micro starts
with case studies; macro starts with historical statistics.

Unions certainly are not a big force now. IIRC, only something like 9% of
workers in the US are presently organized, which is the lowest it's been
since the days of the labor riots at the beginning of the last century.
Their effect, which is getting harder to measure, will show up more in terms
of developed-country standards in competition with developing-country
standards. In other words, globalization's evolution will tell us some
things, but I don't know how measurable they'll be.



I can accept your opinions, but do not think they are facts.

There are plenty of facts behind my opinions, Dan. There's no controversy
over these particular facts in the economic history of the US: The modern
labor movement started when the industrial revolution had progressed to the
point that companies were able to drive wages down because of the extreme
bargaining weakness that labor had, in the 1870s and particularly in the
late 1880s. Capital was competing on an amoral ground at that time. The
owners could justify anything for the sake of competition, and the first big
successes of the labor movement were in reducing the hardships of child
labor. The Fair Labor act of 1928 was a direct outgrowth of agitating from
unions.


Sinclair Lewis probably had nothing to do with anything.

Wage trends are harder to isolate but there were two instances in which
unions kept wages from dropping. The first occurred in the 1880s, and the
second in the period of 1910 to roughly 1925. First, large-scale
industrialization, and second, the Taylor system and the "deskilling" of
labor made it possible for companies to reduce wages. Strikes, often violent
ones, are generally credited with keeping the wage floor from collapsing.

I see the deskilling of labor made it possible for unskilled labor to
be employed and join the middle class.

These issues were not the subject of much argument at the time. They've been
lost in the historical revisionism of conservative think-tank publications
and in the generally vague idea of history that most Americans have today.
There's no reason that issues like those should be a subject of disagreement
today except that the grain of labor history is pretty fine and
broad-brushing it won't yield those details.

I have no disagreement with the actual history. But do disagree with
which forces were necessary to create the middle class. If the
unions are not necessary to maintain the middle class now, how can you
be sure that they were necessary to create the middle class? I see
the unions as being created by the fact that "Capital was competing on
an amoral ground at that time." I do not see that capital had to
compete amorally in order to create the middle class. If capital had
not been amoral, the unions would have not been created, and we would
still have a middle class.


The whole thing is an accumulation of details, in fact. As I said, it's also
very complex and it's difficult to isolate what caused what. I'll stand
behind the point that unions can be shown to have increased the floor of
wages, however, because I was once exposed to it on a pretty detailed basis
and it would be possible to drag up enough evidence to make the point pretty
convincingly.

Not now, however. That's too much work. g

And I
certainly agree that Sparky is over the top. One can know what has
happened, but it is pretty much impossible to know how someones
character would have developed in diffferent circumstances.

Sure. That doesn't require economics. That just requires a little common
sense.

And a little common sense might also say that it is pretty much
impossible to determine how society would have developed in different
circumstances, say without unions.

--
Ed Huntress