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Comment by MilnerRoute | Hacker News Reader

I thought it pinpointed at least a few specific causes for the differences...

"The share of Americans in unions has plummeted from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to about 10 percent today. The rate is even lower — about 6.2 percent — for private-sector workers. The decline has happened largely because employers have become more aggressive about keeping out unions and government policy has made it easier for them to do so. The decline in unionization is one reason that the share of total national income flowing to corporate profits has risen — and the share going to worker pay has declined. The trend is starker in the U.S. than in Europe."

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There are so many things that have changed from the 1950's until now and coincided with wealth inequality -- obviously, not all of them are causal, and many of them are only partially so, so they need to do a better job of describing cause and effect mechanisms. That isn't to say that pointing out correlations is useless.

For example, my pet theory on wealth inequality is that it is largely attributable to the rise of the "investor class" after Bretton Woods was invalidated and your average mom and pop could no longer grow, or even maintain their wealth by simply saving cash [0][1].

[0] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

That conclusion the article makes is not supported by the data - it's just speculation.

In my opinion, the decline in worker unions has been largely due to the relocation of factories abroad.

A nation without its own manufacturing based and non-existant import protections will of course lose union jobs.

Europe has high import tariffs that protect their own agriculture and manufacturing base (as well as raise the cost of goods). ...but that's the trade off.

Blaming some sort of corporate culture seems agenda-driven speculation.

>Europe has high import tariffs

The EU has a weighted import tariff of 1.79% vs 1.66% in the US. For comparison, China is at 3.83% and Japan at 2.51%. Canada, New Zealand and Australia are all lower than the US, at 1.52%, 1.18%, and 1.27% respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...

This is mostly 2017 data, which means the recent US-China tariff war could very well have resulted in the US having a higher weighted import tariff than the EU by now.

Kudos for looking up real data - but it's hard to say how much of these numbers are for manufacturing.

Europe does not protect its export manufacturing industries with tariffs, it protects them with housing policy. They build abundant housing, keeping prices low, which keeps wages low. Industrial workers in Europe are not highly paid, but they enjoy low costs of living.

Unions were also a source of funding for the Democratic party. As it lost funding from unions, the party became increasingly dependent on the wealthy and corporate benefactors. This caused it to side with policies that further hurt blue collar workers. Wither the New Deal coalition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_D...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/whats-w...

That’s more an assumption. Some fields over that time have seen a sharp increase in wages.

Another thought on unions is that it doesn’t look at qualitative differences between US and E.U. unions. For example US unions tend to protect drunk members from punishment. EU unions don’t (at least not on the same scale as the US). Did unions decline due to power struggles or because they were worthless and workers though they’d fair better on their own. All the article says is “here’s a graph” and “trust me”.

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