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1/Today's @bopinion post is about the death of unions in the U.S., and how we can bring them back quickly and effectively.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Private sector unions did a lot to help the middle class back in the day, but they've mostly disappeared.

nber.org/papers/w24587
3/"A Better Bargain", the new book by @MartyManley, helps explain why this happened.

Basically, it was because of the way our labor law was set up, back in 1935.

amazon.com/Better-Bargain…
4/Our labor law says that workplaces have to unionize independently of one another. That means that any company or establishment that unionizes will be at a competitive disadvantage.

But it doesn't have to be this way.
5/The solution is to shift to sectoral bargaining.

Sectoral bargaining means that all of the employers in a certain industry and a certain region would bargain together with all the workers in that industry in that region.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
6/Manley suggests allowing industry associations within an industry and sector.

He also suggests letting workers in each sector be proportionately represented by a wide variety of unions, co-ops, guilds, and advocacy groups.
7/In order for a system like this to work, workers who aren't in any union have to be covered by the same contracts that unions get. Collective bargaining has to apply to all workers in the sector, not just a subset.
8/Obviously this system is more suited to non-tradeable industries like retail or other local services.

You can't collectively bargain across national borders. GM workers in Michigan can't get the same contract as Volkswagen workers in Poland.
9/But a system like this might lend itself to a more cooperative, far-sighted relationship between labor and management. Workers in tradeable industries might accept wage restraint, as they did in Germany, in order to maintain American industrial competitiveness.
10/In any case, sectoral bargaining is the way to revive American unions, and would be a very important tool for bringing back the middle-class society.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
On the World Bank's new measure of harmonized test scores, the U.S. comes out looking really good. We're well ahead of China, and about equal to Sweden.

Hmm, maybe our education system isn't as bad as people say. ;-)

blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/harmo…
Note that China's rural numbers are extrapolated from income levels. But American kids as a whole actually do better than Chinese kids in Beijing+Shanghai+Jiangsu+Guangdong, which is impressive considering those are China's top cities.

documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/390…
Some other interesting comparisons:

Kenya > Argentina

Poland > Germany

U.S. > UK, France, Norway & New Zealand

Gabon = China

Japan & South Korea > every other country

Taiwan still doesn't officially exist

blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/harmo…
Read 3 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/OK it's time for a thread called "Blackpilling the Groypers".

(For those who have lives off of the internet, "groypers" are dorky internet Nazis and "blackpilling" means filling people with despair to the point of helplessness)
2/The groypers hoped that Trump would halt immigration in order to keep America's populace as white as possible.

But here is a picture of the number of lawful permanent residencies granted during Trump's first year.

Immigration is still going strong.

dhs.gov/sites/default/…
3/Meanwhile, public opinion is swinging against Trump and the groypers.

48% of REPUBLICANS think it's important to find a way for undocumented immigrants to stay here legally, and 58% of REPUBLICANS support taking in more refugees.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019…
Read 13 tweets
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Noah Smith 🐇
@Noahpinion
The correct answer is that labor productivity goes up by 20%.

Labor productivity = output/worker.

At first, output = 50 and workers = 1.

After automation, output = 60 and workers = 1.

So labor productivity goes up, even though the worker is now doing a low-productivity job.
This little math example illustrates that as long as automation produces as much output as the people it replaces, labor productivity goes up, even if humans now do lower-productivity jobs.

If you wear a hat that says "MATH", you should understand this math.
This example demonstrates why low labor productivity growth is a sign that mass automation is not happening.

And indeed, our labor productivity growth since the Great Recession has been low!
Read 6 tweets

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China yesterday made the sudden move to ban individual mainland tourists to Taiwan starting today. It cited "the current state of cross-strait relations."
People see this as a disaster for Taiwan's economy.
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bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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The_War_Economy
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MARK LEVIN: "Have you ever been approached in an unusual way?"
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Justin Fox
@foxjust
How do countries with really high tax revenues (relative to GDP) tax their citizens? Differently than the U.S. does, and much differently than @AOC and @SenWarren have proposed. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
One thing every affluent country taxes more heavily than the U.S. is consumption
U.S. wealth taxes (in the form of real estate taxes) are high by international standards
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David Fickling
@davidfickling
If you've not been reading @bopinion you may have missed the tsunami of peerless commentary on China's slowing economy in recent weeks.

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