Steve Randy Waldman[new draft post] Why does wage compression underwhelm? https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/03/25/why-does-wage-compression-underwhelm/index.html
Kent Willard@interfluidity I think a lot of growth in the lower wage cohort is from those with higher job mobility. For example, those with lower wages who are older or in a small city or rural area won't change employers or industries. Their employers know it, so their raises are small.
Alon@kentwillard @interfluidity That's every wage increase, though. Growth doesn't mean everyone gets the same 2% real wage increase; it means more productive workers get more. The problem is when populists have latched onto the least productive workers (e.g. ones who won't move to opportunity) as the representatives of the real working class.
@Alon @kentwillard If we are concerned abt welfare, we are concerned abt the welfare of all the humans, not just those willing or able to move to opportunity under current circumstance, even if that wld increase their productivity. If we are concerned abt democratic politics, we are concerned about the humans in proportion to their numbers, and if the fraction willing or able to move to opportunity is modest, don't blame "populism" for the bankruptcy of a politics that slights the place-bound.
@Alon @kentwillard None of this prejudices the solution space. One way to address the disconnect is to make it easier for people to live the dynamism imagined of homo economicus. Another way is to reshape productivity, so that, for example, geographical dynamism is less necessary because remote work. Lots of possibilities!
@Alon @kentwillard But if most of the working class still live within 15 miles of their parents, any "populism" — any functional democracy — will put a great deal of weight on those people as "representatives of the real working class".
@interfluidity @kentwillard *All* reduction in inequality involved moving to opportunity, it was just once called urbanization and today it's called moving to a different city.
The idea that "most of the working class still live within 15 miles of their parents" is just wrong. It comes from a single survey of American women over the age of 50 asking them where their children lived; it's been publicized way past its statistical power precisely because it moralizes against migration.
@Alon @kentwillard Urbanization creates growth, not equality. On the contrary. cf China. We can quibble about surveys, but it remains true that there is a very, very large cohort of people who have and likely will always, absent very sharp changes in our circumstances, remain near family and childhood community, close to the place they were born. Trying to undo this is quite a radical project, utopian or dystopian. Ignoring this cohort is morally indefensible and politically catastrophic.
@interfluidity @kentwillard No, urbanization creates both growth and equality: China has high inequality with fast urbanization, India has even higher inequality with slow urbanization and repeated failed attempts at growth-in-place.
And the cohort that I'm ignoring is not "people who'd like to stay" but "people who'd like the children they abused to stay." It's okay not to give them money, same way it really is okay not to give farmers special welfare when they riot.
@interfluidity @kentwillard Usually democracies have higher taxes and lower inequality than autocracies, because of the median voter theorem (I presume you've seen the paper that made the rounds on this on Econ Twitter pre-Musk?). That India has a Gini of 0.5 (China: 0.41; US: 0.39 pre-corona) is an indictment of an entire strategy of trying to grow without urbanization or labor-intensive industry.
@Alon @kentwillard The relationship between urbanization and inequality is complex, like the relationship between growth and inequality is complex. It is not defensible to say that urbanization creates equality. It is also not defensible to say urbanization always creates inequality, although that is usually its very short-term effect. 1/
@Alon @kentwillard But trying to impose a preference for urbanism and geographic dynamism on the coat tails of egalitarian values is definitely not defensible. There have been more equal and less equal agrarian and urban societies. We don't know what the shape of the future is. Perhaps you have a very particular urbanistic, dynamic, egalitarian development path in mind, but mere "urbanization" is not necessarily, not remotely necessarily, egalitarian. /fin
Misuse Case@interfluidity @Alon @kentwillard Urbanization isn’t necessarily a driver of egalitarianism…but freedom to migrate, either towards a better situation or away from a bad situation, is *definitely* a driver of egalitarianism.
@MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard I don't think that's true in general. It might be true if everyone were equally situated to be able to move, so everyone would optimize towards equally good situations. But in real life, some people simply cannot move for a variety of reason, so freedom to migrate often exacerbates inequalities. Those who were already relatively well-situated move to even better circumstance. Those who were poorly situated are left-behind in places and circumstances now much worse.
Diego@interfluidity @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard In a high migration environment, the "left behind" are an increasingly irrelevant minority. That's how inequality is reduced, a smaller and smaller share of the population living in a persistently poor place.
And I don't think migrating away makes things worse for those left behind, if the process continues to its bitter end everyone left can have a productive job in farming (or services for the farmers).
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Like a lot of plans, you have an end state in mind where everything's hunkydory. If everyone's a migrant, there's no left-behind to trouble us. But how does the transition to that exalted stat work, when for now at least 30-40% will not for the foreseeable join the program? 1/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard You can tell a just-so story about migrants making life better for those who remain. The marginal product of workers decreases in quantity, so those who remain will have better, more productive jobs, so everyone will be better off! 2/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard At the same time, the migration destinations aren't underpopulated places, but huge cities. Here the just-so story is agglomeration effects mean that in fact the marginal product increases in the number of humans! 3/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard Empirically, just-so story 2 seems pretty definitively to win, under our current economic arrangements. Places that depopulate do poorly in aggregate, and the people who live there do poorly on average and at median. Place that populate, and the people who live there do well at least on income grounds, though high costs blunt the benefit. 4/
@DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @Alon @kentwillard That's not to say these things wouldn't work out differently with different economic and social arrangements. Place-based policy could make both just-so stories true in their respective places. Which is why I support it. /fin
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard The story of what happens should take into account class divisions within places and not just between them. So you should think of the interplay between potential migrants (who are workers) and the petite bourgeoisie classes of both rural and urban areas. Place-based policy has a tendency to empower the rural petite bourgeoisie, which is extremely reactionary.
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard (Sarah Taber writes a lot about it in the context of the rural US, especially the South.)
So these place-based subsidies tell people in rural and exurban areas that their ability to access services depends on intermediaries who comprise the rural petite bourgeoisie, which gains soft power as a result. (Likewise, empowerment of unions gives union leadership soft power over workers, which has the opposite political effect.)
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard That depends on the form of the subsidy. My favorite place-based policy is just a UBI, which disintermediates local elites. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6674.html
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Basic income is the exact opposite of place-based policy for this reason; in US advocacy at least, what is called place-based policy is building infrastructure to deindustrialized or any other not-rich-central-city areas, plus favoring local contractors. Social security is not a place-based policy, and makes low-productivity, low-wage employers (such as small businesses, especially outside cities) less competitive.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard I argue that we should think of UBI as place-based policy, because cost-of-living means a UBI equal in nominal terms is much more valuable in rural and exurban places. Like social security, it would leave places in some sense "less competitive" — less desperate people won't compete to wages as low — but I think that's a plus, not a minus, in welfare as well as social and political health.
@interfluidity @Alon @MisuseCase @kentwillard If that's what you mean by place-based policy, that's great. What's bad is giving massive subsidies for a steel mill to continue operating. Or worse, a coal mine!
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Basic income can be adjusted for living costs (and is in Sweden - the guaranteed minimum income is local rent plus a fixed amount). But even if it is, it's obviously much higher relative to local wages outside cities, which drives the local petite bourgeoisie out of business. This, relatedly, is why postwar Christian democrats turned so much against welfare - it disempowered local elites. It's an "I welcome their hate" strategy, not a buy-in.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard I favor UBI without regional adjustments. I'm interested in winning the support of broad publics, not local elites, which UBI does. Thinking about how programs politically survive the opposition of threatened elites is important, of course. It's also important to think about what's good in what is threatened and how one might preserve that. Maybe big-box chains aren't permitted to be drawn to compete for that now dispersed purchasing power.
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Big box stores are cheap groceries for the large majority of people who interact with them. There's a lot of populism in the US involved in support for pop-beats-mom stores, but then you can find New York City populists who complain that the city isn't letting Walmart in and then move to the Sunbelt.
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard (Evidently, the closest thing to a UBI in the world, the Swedish guaranteed minimum income, is adjusted for local rents. Sweden is generally rather developmentalist about these things.)
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Right. It's a debate in the UBI community. I'm sharply on the other side of it. "Basic" to me just means "base". To others it implies "covers basic costs where you live", which then implies adjustment. I support the former, pretty much oppose the latter.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Oh I know. It's a debate very much with two sides, and I am very, very familiar with both sides. If you think it's an easy question, the only easy answer is that you are wrong. But some localities may well choose to keep them out, and that's a perfectly legitimate choice, a navigation of trade-offs.
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Those localities are incredibly exclusive and don't have the power to do this anywhere with reasonable governance. It's a rather American debate - in German and French cities there are the same grocery chains as in rural areas, charging the same prices. It's not like in the US, where Walmart charges Carrefour and Aldi prices but then New York supermarkets charge 2-3 times what Parisian and Berlin supermarkets do.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard However a state organizes its governance, regulating the scale and provenance of market participants is within its legitimate purview. That might (perhaps US style) mean localities making choices, it might mean a national policy, it might mean a national policy of classifying places differently and applying different policies. All of those, and whatever choice are made, are legitimate (whether we think they are wise or unwise).
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard Localities have too much of a democratic deficit. They're run by the local notables, with negative results wherever they are empowered. Evidently, the sort of laws passed in left-wing US cities look nothing like what ideological social democrats do when in power - New York is not trying to provide citywide universal health care, and its business regulations always make sure to protect small non-union employers because what's the Meidner model.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard NYC did provide universal pre-K. In US red states, localities try to do locally popular progressive things, and state govts shut them down. In blue states, localities try to do NIMBY things + states are increasingly find it necessary to supervene. Whether that's a "democratic deficit" becomes a complicated argument over differential enfranchisement and the views of different groups. (Is it just "old rich white ppl"?) It's arguably a democratic surfeit.
@interfluidity @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard When decisions are made in an environment with extensive voter suppression, low voter turnout, no real way for citizens to know what they're even voting for, and no modern political parties, it's not a surfeit but a deficit.
And re universal pre-K in New York, calling it universal is charitable. It's only for a half-day and parents have to pay extra to extend it to a full day.
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard that is painting with way too broad a brush. electoral reform is my core political aspiration at the moment, but imperfectly democratic municipalities really are imperfectly democratic, more legitimately and reliably than people who unilaterally declare the imperfections deficits and substitute their own views for what a “true” democracy would yield. 1/
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @MisuseCase @kentwillard (there’s no such thing as a true democracy. every means of aggregating of public preferences, values, interests shapes the outcome of that aggregation. there are some obvious kinds of defects i hope we all agree are illegitimate. but in general we have to defer to the procedures that are to get procedures we think are better, and it’s not legitimate to let opinion polls or such supervene.) /fin