Economist Robert Barro has published this anti-union Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal today. Pretty predictably, he wants to blame the fiscal crisis in the states on unions. Is there actual empirical evidence that, as Barro puts it, " the structure of strong public-employee unions . . . helped to create the unsustainable fiscal situation."* It would be nice to see it. The reason why Barro presents none is that, as far as I know, there is none to present. Even an economist should be able to do better than that.
Barro does present some evidence that right-to-work laws promote economic development. There is no real surprise that right to work states attract more robust corporate activity than more union friendly states. Of course they do. Corporate investment go where they don't face any countervailing power. And what about relative wages and benefits in those states? I don't know the empirics in any detail, but I am wagering that there are pretty impressive distributive consequences of disallowing unions. (Have a look at this report from CNN for some initial warrant on that score.) Surely Dr. Barro wouldn't want to discount the massive inequalities that untrammeled corporate power (and markets are meant to be power free zones, no?) generate!
As a theoretical matter Barro presses the claim that "collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty." Of course that requires that we ignore the power asymmetries that exist in virtually any labor negotiation between an employer and individual employees. The historical corollary of this theoretical complaint is that Barro seems to want us to head directly back to the late 19th Century, to a time when the state imposed atomization on the labor market and thereby enhanced the power of employers. In other words, Barro doesn't like the way democratic politics has reshaped labor markets by sanctioning collective bargaining. After all, the Wagner Act (1935) cleared Congress and was signed by Roosevelt.
In this essay Barro displays a problem to which economists are quite susceptible: they too readily allow their ideology - usually some facile version of libertarianism - to impede their analysis. We know in general terms what markets (there is no such thing as "the market" except in the world of right leaning ideology) require to work effectively. We know too that allowing collective action can offset biases that prevent effective functioning of markets in atomized settings. There are lots and lots of efficient market outcomes. There is no reason why we ought to opt for the most asymmetrical and unequal of those on offer. At least nothing Barro says here suggests that we should.
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* Since he is preoccupied with Wisconsin, is there any evidence that the public employee pension system is in trouble there? Barro implies that it is, but offers not a shred of evidence.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Follow-Up on "Today, we are all Joan Miró" - On Art & Politics
Joan Miró. Plate 4 from the Black and Red Series, 1938.Image © 1998 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
A couple of days ago I posted some thoughts on this column at The Guardian by Jonathan Jones. In the piece Jones castigates "us" as being like Joan Miró who responded to the Spanish Civil War from afar rather than like George Orwell who went off to fight with the Republicans. Here are some more questions. Does art have to be activist to be political? The two are not the same, after all. Is "activist" even the best strategy? What would Jones make of the long series of paintings Robert Motherwell made over the course of decades, all entitled "Elegies for the Spanish Republic"?
Robert Motherwell. Elegy for the Spanish Republic, #126 (1965-75).Or what about another visual cut at fascism - Leon Golub's series of canvases on torture and interrogation? Are we even in a position to know - even post- Abu Ghraib - about, let alone intervene in, such practices? At least one can ask if we know enough detail to intervene in practices like those Golub depicts that we generally suspect are occurring.
Leon Golub. Interrogation II, (1980-81).More to the point, should we be criticizing artists like Golub, Motherwell, and Miró - holding them up for thinly disguised scorn - because they are not Orwell? After all, they "just" or "only" used their art to depict horrors and consequences. They didn't take up arms. And so ...?
And, of course, in an era where one's adversaries are likely enough to be mercenaries (ex-military paid, say, by Blackwater or its corporate offspring) or child soldiers (who are basically trained sociopaths) would taking up arms be anything other than more or less certain and largely pointless suicide? Jones would surely flinch at shooting down a twelve year old, even if the child were armed. And in that instant the boy would have shot Jones - to say nothing of you or I - for his trouble. The mercenary would've killed Jones before he had time to flinch. Nothing personal in this. But what is it that Jones expects of art?
Politics does not generally involve violence. And it cannot require intervention or action across time or space or absent some coordinated movement. Nor can it demand that essentially individual level activity like painting generate immediate, unambiguous action. That is the remit of the propagandist. The works I have lifted for this post are attempts to raise questions, provoke reflection, give voice to emotions and to do those things in response to violence and terror. It seems to me that we are in Miró's debt - and in Golub's and Motherwell's too. And it seems to me that Jones misses the point.
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