Tim Noah wraps up
his series on income inequality:
- Race and gender are responsible for none of it, and single parenthood is responsible for virtually none of it.
- Immigration is responsible for 5 percent.
- The imagined uniqueness of computers as a transformative technology is responsible for none of it.
- Tax policy is responsible for 5 percent.
- The decline of labor is responsible for 20 percent.
- Trade is responsible for 10 percent.
- Wall Street and corporate boards' pampering of the Stinking Rich is responsible for 30 percent.
- 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.