Just to clear up a couple of things from the previous post:
- No, I don’t think private sector unions are going to make a comeback. I’m not delusional.
- No, I don’t think the middle class wage stagnation of the past few decades is due solely to the demise of unions. I do, however, think that economists underrate this because they focus too much of their attention on the pure effect of unions on wages and too little on the broader influence of (a) unions on politics, (b) politics on economic and financial institutions, and (c) economic and financial institutions on the distribution of wages (and everything else, for that matter).
That is all.