Friday, September 17, 2010

Follow the Money | Kevin Drum | Mother Jones

Tim Noah wraps up his series on income inequality:
  1. Race and gender are responsible for none of it, and single parenthood is responsible for virtually none of it.
  2. Immigration is responsible for 5 percent.
  3. The imagined uniqueness of computers as a transformative technology is responsible for none of it.
  4. Tax policy is responsible for 5 percent.
  5. The decline of labor is responsible for 20 percent.
  6. Trade is responsible for 10 percent.
  7. Wall Street and corporate boards' pampering of the Stinking Rich is responsible for 30 percent.
  8. Various failures in our education system are responsible for 30 percent.
Drum responds:
Labor unions have historically agitated for greater access to education, more labor-friendly trade policy, and higher wages for the middle class (which in turn means less for Noah's Stinking Rich). So in a world in which labor unions were as powerful a force as they were in the 50s and 60s, it's hard to believe that items 6, 7, and 8 would have evolved the way they have over the past three decades. If even a third of that evolution can be traced to the decline of organized labor as a counterweight to business interests, it means that the fading influence of unions is responsible not for 20% of the growth of inequality, but closer to half of it.