The Return on Investment for Law, Business, and Medical School

My last post resulted from a search in which I was looking for general information about the cost of law, business and medical school, in response to what I found to be a dubious assertion from the AEI.

But it may surprise some readers to learn that the sizable rates of return for doctors appear to be less than for other professional degrees such as in business or law. Dentists and physician specialists have comparable rates of return, but primary care doctors have lower—albeit still impressive—rates of return. This is consistent with the general impression that primary care doctors are “underpaid” relative to specialists. Not surprisingly, there is a shortage of primary care doctors.

Frankly, given that the authors wrote a book on this subject, you would think that they would offer a bit more certitude than "appear to be" - the reason that readers would be surprised by the authors' assertion is that the authors "appear to be" wrong.

Upon re-examining the assertion and accompanying graph, and noting the lack of reference to sources or data beyond reference to the authors' recently published book, there didn't seen to be much of a point in tracking down the data. The authors reference "Hours-adjusted annualized internal rate of return on educational investment over a working lifetime", which I infer to mean that they divided cost of training by hours of training... although with medical school that raises the question of whether you should (or whether they did) include residency training along with medical school itself. The authors also speak of the rise in CEO pay, "rising from less than 60 times average U.S. worker compensation in 1940 to more than 100 times that average by 2004", making me wonder if the projections for the return on investment for law school are also predicated upon data that is now, to put it mildly, extremely dated and bearing little relevance to the present legal job market.

Here's the thing: when you break down the cost of getting a MBA (two years) or JD (three years) against a getting a MD (four years of medical school followed by a residency) to an hourly figure, you are intentionally distorting the cost-benefit analysis by pretending that the programs could be the same length. First, medical school is more expensive than business school or law school. Second, it's a longer program. Let's imagine an investment where you can contribute $X per year, with a rate of return that diminishes slightly with each additional year. You pick a fixed number of years, make your investment, and you're done. Your two year (business school) investment will provide a greater 'rate of return' than your four (or more) year (medical school) investment, but with a smaller contribution per year and a lower number of years of contribution, odds are you'll still look back in twenty or thirty years and think, "Wow, think how much better off I would be had I gone for that four+ year investment plan." A comparison of this type really only works if the cost of tuition is comparable and the length of the program is comparable: Once you have an MBA, you're done - you can't re-enroll for another two years in order to increase the size of your investment.

The authors' conclusions, although not atypical of the quality of AEI scholarship, verge on platitudinous:

It is well-known that much of the difference in healthcare spending between the United States and other nations can be attributed to the higher prices Americans pay for medical care. But the foregoing comparisons suggest that high prices for health labor in the United States might simply reflect higher returns to skilled labor across the board. After all, if we were “overpaying” doctors, we would expect to see a doctor surplus. Yet this is not what we observe. Paying doctors less would not benefit the country as a whole. That is, every dollar saved by consumers also would be one less dollar of income for doctors. Moreover, if doctors were paid much less, more people might get MBAs or law degrees instead. This would surely reduce health spending, but reasonable people might disagree on whether it would improve social welfare.

First the largest contributors to the cost of medical care are, from most costly to least costly, pharmaceutical costs, facilities costs and doctor salaries. If you are going to overlook the first two cost factors and suggest that we're simply looking at an American preference to give higher pay for skilled labor, you're not even trying to build a case. Physician salaries represent roughly 20% of medical costs. If we paid doctors nothing our nation's healthcare system would remain the most costly in the developed world. Medical schools routinely reject qualified applicants. We can easily expand our nation's pool of doctors by expanding medical schools, funding more residencies, and creating an easier path for foreign doctors to qualify to practice in the United States. The constraints we impose do lead to higher salaries for doctors, but through the distortion of the education and labor markets.

In terms of a "doctor surplus", there's in fact an artificial shortage of doctors in the U.S., driven in no small part by the AMA's successful obstruction of the expansion of medical schools, and also from immigration and accreditation policies that make the U.S. market unattractive to doctors in foreign nations who would otherwise be happy to practice in the U.S. Would lower salaries deter people from becoming doctors? Given that among nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), nations other than the U.S. have significantly more doctors per capita, that would not appear to be a valid concern.

The argument that "We don't get any real savings if we pay doctors less, because every dollar saved by a consumer 'would be one less dollar of income for doctors'" - why, then, are AEI's scholars in a constant tizzy about labor unions, taxes on the wealthy, teacher salaries, whether government workers are overpaid, the minimum wage... it all comes out in the wash, right? How about this: We can legislate market distortions and subsidies that increase lawyer salaries to the tune of $1 billion per year and, when people complain, respond, "Paying lawyers less would not benefit the country as a whole, because every dollar saved by consumers also would be one less dollar of income for lawyers." Sound good?

I'll go back to something I said a few weeks ago:

You want the public to subsidize medical schools and residencies, so that you graduate with a lower debt load and, after your initial medical education, have a more comfortable lifestyle? I'm listening - if we give you that, what are you offering in return? How about we reduce compensation for medical care to an amount more in line with the amounts paid by the rest of the world? Do we have a deal?

You know what else that proposal would do? Massively increase the "return on investment" for medical school under the model described above, even though doctor salaries would drop. Go figure.

Ross Douthat's Weak Take on Charles Murray

Does the AEI Throw Really Good Parties? I ask because, except for the guy we know doesn't get invited¹ to their shin digs, "moderate conservative" commentators seem to be lining up to a man to say, "Charles Murray wrote a great book with the wrong solutions, and liberals are idiots." Recall David Brooks, grafting his high school sociology onto Murray's notion of a "class divide" between high and low income whites. Now we have Ross Douthat lavishing praise on Murray for producing "a brilliant work", even though he thinks all of Murray's proposed solutions are dead wrong.

In a sense I should be grateful for the Times, and its pundits' tenth grade quality book reports - they read the book so I don't have to. I just wish they were more... capable when it comes to analysis.² By way of contrast, within a few paragraphs Frum pretty much shatters the notion that there's anything brilliant about Murray's book,

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees....

This trend toward inequality varies from country to country—more extreme in the United Kingdom, less extreme in Germany. The subsequent destabilization of working-class social life likewise varies from country to country. But if the trend is global, the cause must be global too. Yet that thought does not trouble Murray.

Frum also notes that Murray cherry-picked a starting date in order to support his conclusions, whereas other starting dates destroy his argument. I argued in response to Brooks' piece that Brooks (and by implication Murray) ignored prior history. Frum points out that they also ignore subsequent history.

Let me instance another example of the unwillingness. In the first long quoted passage from Coming Apart, I asterisked one of Murray's statistical claims, a claim stating that wages have stagnated for the bottom 50% of the white work force. That claim is true if you draw your line, as Murray does, beginning in 1960. But put your thumb on the left side of the chart, and start drawing the line beginning in 1970. Then you notice that median wages have stagnated for the whole bottom 75%—and that the median wage only begins to show significant improvement over time when you look at the top 5%.

That number points in a very different direction from the one in which Murray would like to lead his audience. And this kind of polemical use of data is one—but only one—of the things that discredits Coming Apart as an explanation of the social trouble of our times.

Douthat offers a knee-jerk reaction to Murray's proposal to reinvent the existing social safety net in the form of a "universal guaranteed income":

Murray argues that our leaders should embrace his own libertarian convictions, scrap all existing government programs (and the dependency and perverse incentives they create) and replace them with a universal guaranteed income. This is a fascinating idea; it’s also fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities. Which means that it’s divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis that Murray so vividly describes.

Particularly when you're talking about pushing massive reform bills through Congress, it's always difficult to change an entrenched status quo. But is that the end of Douthat's analysis? "It would never pass, so it will never work"? It's fair to suggest that Murray should have offered a few realistic proposals along with a Gingrichian, "We'll change everything to be the way I want and then everything will work!" But Douthat seems to be saying, "Change is hard, so unless you show me an easy path to implementing solutions I would just as soon do nothing."

Par for the course, Douthat goes right into a hollow man argument about liberals, fabricating an argument that few to none actually hold, but which he pretends is representative and, of course, is easy to bat down.

Murray’s critics accuse him of essentially blaming the victim: the social breakdown he described may be real enough, they allow, but it’s an inevitable consequence of an economic system that Republicans have rigged to benefit the rich. In the liberal view, there’s nothing wrong with America’s working class that can’t be solved by taxing the wealthy and using the revenue to weave a stronger safety net.³

That invites the usual challenge: Okay, Ross, name one liberal outside of the irrelevant fringe who actually takes that position. You can't? Then why are you pretending it's representative of liberal views.⁴ A dose of reality from the unapologetic liberal, Paul Krugman, a guy whose column can't be particularly difficult for Douthat to locate,

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

His position, of course, bears no resemblance to Douthat's fictional liberal. The problem Krugman identifies isn't that we're not taxing the rich - it's that the pool of jobs available at the blue collar end of the job market is drying up and the jobs that remain offer lower wages and fewer benefits. Economic stress.

Douthat's proposed solutions to the plight of lower wage workers are, well, insipid. After telling us that we cannot afford to sustain our present entitlements, even if taxes are increased on the rich, Douthat argues,

The current tax-and-transfer system imposes a tax on work — the payroll tax — that falls heavily on low-wage labor, and poor Americans face steep marginal tax rates because of how their benefits phase out as their wages increase. Both burdens can and should be lightened. There are ways to finance Social Security besides a regressive tax on work, and ways to structure benefits and tax credits that don’t reduce the incentives to take a better-paying job.

Okay, Ross, please describe exactly how we are going to fund Social Security if we reduce FICA taxes, and how will your plan do anything but add to the hysterical debate, driven by your political party, that Social Security is running out of money and must be slashed or abolished? And which benefits and tax credits do you imagine are keeping people out of higher wage jobs?

Is Douthat a child of privilege? It seems pretty clear that he has never worked a low-wage job - the type of job where a raise of twenty-five or thirty cents per hour is a big deal. Who does Douthat imagine is turning down pay raises because of the unidentified "benefits and tax credits" he imagines are a deterrent to seeking higher wages? I will grant that there's an uncomfortable period when you're earning well into the six figures, when you lose a great many tax credits and benefits available to lower wage earners, are hit by the alternative minimum tax, and pay an effective tax rate higher than people who earn vastly more than you do. But that's a problem for the top 10%, not the bottom 30%, and people who have worked their way to the top 10% don't appear to be giving up on work.

Douthat also argues that the best way to increase wages for the working poor is... to take more parents out of the workplace. Because nothing raises the living standard of a two-income family like having one parent lose a job.

Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young. There are left-wing approaches to this issue (European-style family-leave requirements) and right-wing approaches (a larger child tax credit). Neither is currently on the national agenda; both should be.

Did you get that? Right after telling us how horrible it is that we "structure benefits and tax credits" in a manner that reduces "the incentives to take a better-paying job", Douthat argues in favor of benefits (extended paid maternity and paternity leave) and tax credits ("a larger child tax credit") that are intended to temporarily or permanently remove one parent from the workforce. Did you also catch that this proposal crashes head-on into Douthat's criticism of Murray - the type of subsidy that would improve or even sustain the living standards of working class families while one or both parents took extended parental leave or one became stay-at-home are "entirely divorced from American political realities".

I know Douthat doesn't like to hear this, but another way that people at the bottom of the labor pool can position themselves to advance is by deferring parenthood while they get established, and having smaller families. Douthat appears to be the sort of man who is deeply disturbed⁴ by the idea that women might have active sex lives without becoming pregnant.

I'll agree that our nation has implemented a maze of policies, primarily relating to eligibility for public assistance or and taxes, that create a disincentive to marry. It's fair to argue that we should revisit some of those policies, even if it means that some marginal households receive additional benefits due to the continuation of benefits based upon individual earnings instead of reducing or eliminating benefits based on family earnings following marriage, but the balance isn't easy to find and even if you found it you would likely have Douthat arguing that the best solutions are "fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities".

Douthat next argues that the nation "shouldn't be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with" low-wage workers. He pretends that while society as a whole gets some benefits from immigration, "it can lower wages and disrupt communities" and that we're effectively "ask[ing] an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone." By this point I am not sure that Douthat understands anything about immigration, taxation or payment for public services. Douthat then endorses the strategy of "the leading Republican candidates" to "welcome more high-skilled immigrants" (I guess they don't compete for jobs?) and "mak[e] it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books" - something his party talks about from time to time, but generally obstructs.

Note also how Douthat sidesteps the issue of illegal immigration, as if there's a huge pool of legal immigrants fighting for minimum wage jobs as opposed to a huge pool of undocumented workers who are often willing to work for less than minimum wage. If we are talking about illegal immigration, Douthat needs to address the reality that people in his economic class or above (e.g., Mitt Romney or Walmart) utilize illegal immigrant labor on a routine basis, because it's cheap, they don't want to maintain their pools, lawns and tennis courts themselves - and it's not a problem as long as they maintain plausible deniability. When states have been effective in, say, keeping farmers from utilizing undocumented workers to harvest crops, we've had problems with crops rotting in the fields. I'm not sure what population of legal immigrants Douthat imagines are preventing citizens from getting near-minimum wage jobs.

Douthat's final argument is,

Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates. Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement....

Except the principal barriers to employment for an ex-offender are a lack of job skills and a criminal record. Reducing the number of people we incarcerate could offer other social benefits, but it's not going to transform a population of marginal workers into highly desirable, employable workers. In case Douthat didn't notice, crime rates tend to go up in communities that have higher unemployment rates and fewer government services. It's great to talk about "larger police forces", but given the budget crises that are particularly acute in high crime communities and how Douthat's own party demagogues on the subject of government employment, that doesn't seem particularly realistic. And recall, at least when other people's ideas are on the table, Douthat is quick to declare that if it's not politically easy "it's divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis".

The idea of prison being a "school for crime" is interesting, given that over the years I've represented a number of people who have been in prison. It wasn't my observation that they were becoming better criminals due to their periods of incarceration. It was more that the smarter criminals don't get caught (at least not as often), insulate themselves from the most visible aspects of their criminal enterprises (e.g., supplying cocaine to the street dealers as opposed to doing the actual dealing), or find "legal" ways to steal money. (Conrad Black, for example, continues to fume over his incarceration for what he and his lawyers contend was a perfectly legal looting of his corporation.)

If Douthat wants to get on board with the tiny but growing population of prominent conservatives who are finally taking note of the extreme cost and limited benefit of our 'prison nation', and join with the left to fashion, implement and fund community-based policing and penalties that should, over time, help maintain and even reduce our presently low crime rates and allow states to realize cost savings through the closing of prisons, great. But I won't hold my breath waiting for him to get started.

Fundamentally, Douthat makes the same mistake as Murray and Brooks, believing that the solution to wage stagnation and a loss of job opportunities is "to make it easier for working-class Americans⁶ to cultivate the virtues that foster resilience and self-sufficiency." Working class white Americans, that is. Krugman notes,

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, [sociologist William Julius] Wilson published 'When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,' in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

I guess it's easier for people like Murray, Brooks and Douthat to ignore history and to imagine that society's troubles come from a sudden transformation of human nature from what we saw in the decades and centuries preceding 1963, but no. Human nature hasn't changed. The opportunities and incentives available to low-wage earners have changed.

And speaking of incentives, I suspect that it's more than just AEI parties. If as a conservative pundit you don't pimp the right books, candidates and ideas - even when they're bad - you don't get the book contracts, speaking fees, invitations, and celebrity treatment that gilds your life. If you don't believe me, ask David Frum.
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1. Via mythago.

2. Or is it a question of honesty?

3. Douthat also argues, "It was globalization, not Republicans, that killed the private-sector union and reduced the returns to blue-collar work." It's fair to say that globalization was not exclusively a Republican idea or priority, but Douthat appears to believe that it happened in a vacuum, and appears to be ignorant of how nations like Germany took a different approach to globalization with a much different effect on its manufacturing base and wages.

4. Stupid or lying? Fool or fraud?

5. Per that article,

[Douthat] first gained attention for Privilege, a bittersweet 2005 memoir of his years at Harvard, where the drinking, partying, and hooking up left him feeling alienated. Of one alcohol-fueled fling, he wrote: "Whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered—'You know, I'm on the pill.'...On that night, in that dank basement bedroom, she spoke for all of us, the whole young American elite. Not I love you, not This is incredible, not Let's go all the way, but I'm on the pill."

It's more than reasonable to infer that Douthat didn't want to make a baby - but it completely ruined the mood when he found out that the girl expressing interest in him had taken precautions.

6. Douthat appears to be following Murray's thesis here, such that he actually means "white Americans." If he doesn't see this as a racial issue, he should distance himself from that aspect of Murray's thesis.

The Decline and Fall of Organized Labor

Once you get past his distorted, myopic history of the labor movement, Robert Samuelson makes some valid points about organized labor. Without rehashing the history of unions, I'll leave my response to his myopia at this:

It's hard for us to recall now how dominant unions were immediately after World War II. By the mid-1950s, unions represented 36 percent of private-sector workers. Most major industries were organized: railroads, coal, steel, autos, telephones, tires, airlines, trucking. Strikes in crucial industries constantly threatened to hobble the entire economy, though in practice, companies stockpiled steel and coal in advance of contract expirations, and Congress cut short railroad strikes.

Samuelson's argument undermines the common Republican prevarication that businesses won't open, expand or hire without absolute certainty as to the future state of the economy and tax rates, as if such certainty were possible. But more to the point, which would you choose? Samuelson's past in which businesses were theoretically at risk of having "" hobbled, yet the economy experienced dramatic growth and a vibrant middle class emerged, or the present era in which businesses see massive profits, the wealthiest Americans continue to gain in gross disproportion to the rest of society, while the economy stagnates? If Samuelson is trying to depict the present economic malaise as an improvement over the 1950's, he needs to re-check his facts.

I can respect the utopian argument that enlightened management policies through the same era might have brought about the same or better growth, and a similar emergence of a strong middle class, without the participation of organized labor, but... here I am, stuck in the real world in which that would not have happened.

Samuelson correctly observes that a large part of the reason unions have faltered is that they have failed to adapt to changes in the marketplace. He elides the fact that many of the changes were far outside of their control - and many were in fact the result of industry lobbying for legislation and trade policies that were intended to weaken unions - but it's nonetheless true. As companies exploited "right to work" laws and overseas factories in order to avoid unionizing, the unions didn't look toward the future - or even to a nation like Germany in which unions have remained strong in association with high-tech manufacturing. Instead they seemed intend upon preserving an unsustainable status quo. (It's my understanding that Germany's labor laws make it relatively easy for workers, dissatisfied with one union's representation, to switch to another - so I can't say I'm surprised that U.S. unions weren't eager to advocate for a similar model.)

To paraphrase a frequent visitor, CWD, labor agreements are negotiated between employers who would prefer to have employees do a lot of work for no wages, and unions who would prefer to have workers do no work for high wages, with the two sides entering into a labor agreement reflecting some sort of compromise between those two extremes. Occasionally a union leader has attempted to shift the relationship from purely adversarial toward mutually beneficial strategic planning, and occasionally large corporations have experimented with novel union contracts, but for the most part no effort is made to get outside of the adversarial status quo, and efforts to take a different approach seem to be rebuffed or quickly abandoned as "too hard".

Samuelson is also correct that both unions and the major industries that provided the bulk of unionized positions failed to see how a globalized economy would affect them. Even as the Big Three auto manufacturers were building plants in Mexico and developing overseas markets, they often stumbled both in terms of their product offerings and in terms of product quality. Meanwhile a different type of "union" arose - trade associations, such as NADA, that were incredibly successful at getting state legislatures to pass laws to protect the markets and profits of car dealerships.

To a significant degree, the lobbying efforts of major corporations helped create an advantage for foreign companies entering the U.S. market. As foreign car manufacturers entered the U.S. markets they were able to both exploit "right to work" laws so as to largely avoid unions, and to create smaller dealer networks rather than being trapped into an existing structure of dealerships created before states passed laws that would hamper their ending their relationships with unneeded or poor quality dealerships.

One thing that Samuelson's column highlights is the role of public relations in the decline of organized labor. When you read a screed against unions, you'll usually see a list of excesses offered as a justification for reducing or eliminating the rights of workers to organize. "There's a police officer in New York who retired with a huge pension, more than his final year's salary, so public workers in Wisconsin shouldn't be allowed to unionize," or "My daddy was a management negotiator back in the 1950's and due to vague union threats we had a police car parked outside of our house during a round of negotiations, so unions are uniformly evil." The fact that those arguments from anecdote aren't logically sound isn't the point. The fact is, most people have at least one similar "union story" they can share, so for people on the outside of unions it's pretty easy to succumb to the idea that unions are, on the whole, a negative force. I have a relative who worked in union jobs for her entire career, but openly detested every union except the one she happened to be in at the time - that one offered important job protections against unreasonable managers.

It's not that unions have been completely blind to the P.R. war, and the low number of strikes in recent decades stands as evidence that unions understand that, for the general public, their work stoppages translate into a perception of "How dare your union inconveniece me." But while every union contract involved a management negotiator, unions have failed to remind the public of that, or to create an effective counter-argument, when the media starts talking about the "rubber rooms" of New York Schools or the "jobs bank" at General Motors. They have not been good at creating a public perception that it's perfectly appropriate for the union to stand behind a member who is facing disciplinary proceedings and to make the employer prove its case that the worker should be fired - that protecting its members from inappropriate discipline is a core function of its job. That when management fails to follow proper disciplinary procedures, fails to properly document discipline, and otherwise fails to follow the rules it negotiated and accepted in the last round of union negotiations, such that a worker who deserves to be fired ends up being retained, that's management's fault.

Unions have also failed to recognize how the public perceives some of its actions. It's legitimate to protect workers' jobs and to attempt to have employers retain and retrain workers as new technologies emerge, but the general public will never smile on featherbedding. It's fine to require that employers respect the divisions between categories of worker, so as to not have a lower paid category of workers displace jobs in what should be a higher paid category, but things reach the point of absurdity when every job description has to describe as a job duty, "...and other tasks as assigned by your supervisor," lest the worker be able to protest, "My job description says I am to copy and collate documents, but it's not my job to staple them." The public does not appreciate the conception that it's management's job to ensure that workers do their jobs and care about quality, and that when the culture of workers trends toward laziness and inefficiency the union should bear no blame. Many people, in the past, have attempted to obtain union jobs only to find out that next to no one gets hired unless they're a friend or relative of a current worker. Yes, it's difficult to both be strong advocates for workers and to stay in front of a P.R. war that depicts every union success as a tragedy for society, but nobody ever said running a union would be easy.

For that matter, many unions seem to take for granted that their job should be easy. Organize a workplace, collect dues, attempt to impose a pretty standard contract on the employer, and not do a heck of a lot more until the next round of negotiations. "For only $50 per week in union dues, we'll get you an extra $60 per week in income (if your employer doesn't shut down to avoid having a union factory)." When the going gets tough, some unions seem far too quick to pit classes of employees against each other (existing workers get package X, new workers get package Y). If you create a culture in which workers don't like, don't trust, feel underserved by, or resent their own union, what sort of future do you think you're creating for the labor movement?

Organized labor has also done a poor job of demonstrating why it is still needed (see, e.g., anti-union comments to the effect of, "Now that we have OSHA, we don't need unions to ensure workplace safety") or why non-union workers should view them as a positive. Why should workers who don't enjoy the benefits and protections of union membership celebrate the fact that their unionized brothers and sisters have more job security, better benefits, and perhaps also better pay? Why haven't unions been able to communicate how their past efforts have contributed to the economic rise of workers across the job market, and that part of the reason that non-unionized workers are presently suffering is that organized labor is weak? As Samuelson observes, "If public-sector unions fail, Little Labor could become Mini Labor." So whatcha gonna do about it?

Straight From the Horse's... Other End

You gotta love it:

The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace is committed to reviewing proposals based on the merits, the soundness of the policy and the practical implications of each suggestion. We remain concerned that any offer for compromise under the guise of "reform" will morph into an anti-worker Trojan horse where the undemocratic card-check scheme and the job-killing binding interest arbitration provision are adopted as amendments.

The crocodile tears splash down like rain.... oh, the poor workers....

Is there a word of truth in there, other than their recitation of their name... which, of itself, is intentionally misleading? It would be so difficult to tell the truth here, that "The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace" is a coalition of businesses that would prefer not to have union workers, and opposes any measures that would make it more likely that their workers will unionize?

Somehow This Seems Wrong....

As a fashion statement? Shoes like Chinese factory workers wear - but improved (and priced) to the point that Chinese factory workers can't afford them.

Reaching Out to Bangladesh

For those with more money than time, Jeremy Seabrook has some thoughts on subcontracting your daily burdens.

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Wages Fall... For The Masses

In today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson observes:

Since July the average hourly wage increase for the 85 million Americans who work in non-supervisory jobs in offices and factories is a flat 3 cents. Wages are up just 2.1 percent since November 2002 -- the slowest wage growth we've experienced in 40 years. Economists at the Economic Policy Institute have been comparing recoveries of late, looking into the growth in corporate-sector income in each of the nine recoveries the United States has gone through since the end of World War II. In the preceding eight, the share of the corporate income growth going to profits averaged 26 percent, and never exceeded 32 percent. In the current recovery, however, profits come to 46 percent of the corporations' additional income.

Conversely, labor compensation averaged 61 percent of the total income growth in the preceding recoveries, and was never lower than 55 percent. In the Bush recovery, it's just 29 percent of the new income coming in to the corporations.

So who is doing extraordinarily well in this recession? As you might expect, corporate executives. Whether in the United States, Australia, or Britain, corporate executives behave pretty much like third world tyrants who treat their national treasuries like a personal cookie jar. (Which is, no doubt, why they are so much more deserving of tax relief than the working classes who have suffered terribly in this recession and continue to suffer in the jobless recovery.)

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