Pie Fight

Unions, by Ezra

Ezra Klein is putting up a lot of posts on unions of late, partly in response to dear old Tyler Cowen.

Who says working class kids don't swot?

More from the interview with Learning to Labour's Paul Willis. (Note how Willis isn't actually catching the interviewer out: the latter refers not to middle class kids in the school, but to the school's middle class culture):

Tillekens: In the book, there is some permanent clash going on between the middle-class culture of the school on the one hand and the working class culture of the "lads" on the other and you yourself, so it seems, take a partisan view in this struggle.

Willis: Yes, well I'm not sure if the ear'oles in any sense are middle class. For me this is another misunderstanding of the book. Both the lads and ear'oles represent working class culture. So, at school, there were two working class roots at that point and as the subsequent history of the lads and ear'oles shows, in time many of them did change places, depending on the accidents of the labour market.

Learning to labour

Below the fold, an idea for my diss. One of the books that might influence it is Paul willis's Learning to labour. In trying to ascertain why, as Willis asks, working class kids let middle class kids get away with taking all the good jobs, one key idea may be the cultural production of meaning in everyday life. As Evans says in her observations of estate life in Bermondsey, working class people are often very proud of many aspects of working class life, and will seek to reproduce those aspects - eg a sense of close kinship and community, the ability to have a laugh, not taking oneself too seriously, and not buckling in to authority. These are good values. The problem is that their reproduction often conflicts with doing well in school, which is of course the ticket into middle class jobs.

Along these lines, it sounds as if Willis's more recent work might be useful:

In my recent book, I'm saying that schooling is a kind of early modernist formation of cultural transmission and there's a huge question about what it means for the subordinate class.

 

The work/leisure tradeoff in Europe and America

Ezra Klein decides that since Europe (that monolithic entity) represents one side of the work hours/quality of life debate and the US represents the other side, the ideal compromise state lies in the middle. He's usually quite clever and evidence-based on this sort of thing, but today's analysis seems rather simplistic.

The Century Foundation engages the work/leisure tradeoff:

Between 1970 and 2000, GDP per person rose by 64% in the United States and by 60% in France. In America, this came about because productivity per worker rose by 38% and hours worked per worker rose by 26%. In France, it came about because productivity rose by 83% while hours worked fell by 23%.

I'm actually rather surprised by the paltry vacation time allotted to US workers. Were I a Democratic strategist, I'd make a guarantee of at least two weeks paid and two weeks unpaid vacation time a major policy plank. Given the rate of geographical dispersion, where I, say, live in DC, and my family in Southern California, simply keeping up family ties can easily consume two weeks of vacation a year. On top of that, it would be nice if people got actual, you know, vacations. 

As a more general commentary on all this, I think Europe and America both have it half right. Our focus on competition and tolerance of risk are critical to a healthy economy. Their comprehension of the need for security and the importance of leisure are key for a good society.

Unions

Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein argue about unions in the US and Germany.

Class power, class war, and rising inequality

It irritates me, how much time I spend reading American blogs. But the thing is, see, American blogs talk about wonky political issues and really dig down deep into them - in contrast to the British ones, which seem to focus almost exclusively on politics. My life is over here now, but I keep feeling like I learn so much more from reading American wonks. Where are the good British wonking bloggers, damn ye? If blogs had existed during the Thatcher revlution, would Brits have led the way in articulating and railing agains the mechanisms of class struggle? Perhaps so.

Anyway, here's Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein on what both say is a great Chait article on inequality. Ezra:

I can't recommend Jon Chait's new article on the failure of pro-growth economics highly enough. It's not merely the best, but possibly the only, primer on why the current economic moment seems so unsettled, the once-discredited labor-liberals so ascendant, and the Clinton crowd so quiet.

What Chait does is tell the economic history of the past 30 years. It's something a fair number of wonks could rattle off to you, but wouldn't actually be allowed to write for anyone -- too boring, with too little new information. The magazine industry is biased against context. Chait's genius was to peg it to the retreat of Clintonomics, thus giving it the sexy, and guaranteeing it a place in the feature well of The New Republic.

In short, here's the story: As you all know, in the late 70's, wages begin to stagnate. The ostensible reason for this is slow growth and plummeting productivity. During the post-war period, productivity averaged 2.5% a year. From 1973 to 1995, it was 1.5%. Since wages have always tracked productivity, smart lefties began focusing on how to reinvigorate productivity. They did that through Clintonomics: Fiscal responsibility combined with mild downward redistribution. The deficit reduction freed up money for the private sector to invest (when the government runs a high deficit, it pushes up the price of loans by sucking up so much money itself -- economists call this "crowding out"), and worked like a charm. Helped along by the tech boom, productivity shoots up, as does growth, and both metrics have remained healthy and robust ever since (well, till this quarter).

The hitch: Wages didn't track. Productivity and growth went up, but they weren't distributed across the economy. Wages increased somewhat throughout the mid-to-late 90s, but as the supercharged growth gave way to the robust numbers of the past few years, the rich began sucking up the gains (if you've been reading this blog, you already know that. For a refresher, go here). The left has tried to explain this away as a consequence of Bush's fiscal policy. Sadly, the trends show up in pretax income also. The right has tried to explain this accelerating inequality as an unstoppable structural feature of the new economy: It's the meritocracy, or computers, or benefits, or global trade. Unfortunately, those explanations are largely bullshit. Europe also has computers, and trade, and mobility, and benefits, and has easily avoided the widening chasm we've seen. So what makes us different?

In a word, power. Or the distribution of it. Europe has strong unions and active governments; countervailing powers that wrest a portion of the pie for their constituencies. We don't. This is a point I made in my riposte to Jacob Hacker this week, but it can't be said often enough. There is a tectonic shift in liberal thinking underway. We used to think the country's economic problems were about economics. At times, that's been true, It isn't now. Now, they're about power. And that's a conversation the Clintonites are very grudgingly, very awkwardly, coming to accept.

Getting better all the time

Via K-Dro, a very good graphic showing how gains in American GDP are not going to the middle class.

It ain't easy

THe IFS says that two of Labour's key goals - boosting incomes for the poor and getting more people into work - are doing battle with one another:

Means-tested benefits to help the neediest children had acted as a poverty trap by discouraging parents from working. "There is no easy solution to this trade-off," said IFS researcher Stuart Adam. "Governments need to decide how much they want to redistribute income to low-income families, and how much they mind if people work less as a result."

De minimus

Tidy little article on the minimum wage.

The Great Risk Shift

Via Drum, a book by Jacob Hacker arguing that a growing amount of risk is being shifted from corporations and government onto the backs of (American) workers.

Elizabeth's review:

Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring -- how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker's answer is that we're facing more risk than ever before, so even if we're doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

And the a very interesting follow-up post looking at that so-called Golden Age of limited risk, the 1950s. But was it?

Dave s commented that the rigid family structure of the 1950s was itself a form of risk for women, due to "the uncertainty and absolute dependence on men's behavior choices of women in the suburbs."