> The biggest reason is that essentially Chicago and other cities around Illinois required the use of lead service lines all the way until 1986, long after it was recognized that lead was poisonous and other cities had stopped using it. A decade after other cities had stopped using it Chicago and other cities in Illinois were not only using it but requiring the use of lead long after everybody else.
[0] https://news.wttw.com/2021/03/24/chicago-has-more-lead-servi...
On the surface, finally after a decade-long fight, the plumber's union, despite objections by its union spokespeople, said in 1986 it would defer to the city council after the matter was decided at the federal level, but in that decade, long after other cities had banned lead pipes, lead pipes were still a required part of Chicago building code.
https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/09/11/911903152/here-s-ma...
Unions are constantly doing evil things, usually for the same greedy and power-hungry reasons as any corporate board, and to the same detriment of society at large, but because we think of unions as being on "our side" and latch onto this romanticized notion of the unions of the 1800s they get a pass.
The police and prison guard unions constantly do horrible things to increase incarceration rates, erode civil rights and remove accountability. Labor unions fight against improvements that would make their industries pollute less if it makes their jobs harder or would replace union-dues-paying members with technology or non-union jobs. And they constantly create artificial monopolies and cartels far worse than any of the corporate behavior, which create situations like the pilot unions where senior pilots get huge salaries and cushy routes while entry-level pilots are treated like slaves, or where you're not allowed to plug in your laptop charger to a wall outlet because only a union electrician can touch it.
I wish society was better at recognizing "this group is harming society for the benefit of themselves" can be applied everywhere- corporations, unions, branches of government, etc
In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Of course, unions can do awful, evil things - they are organizations of people and people are petty, self-centered, greedy, etc.
I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is). I'm not unaware that sometimes those workers can elect bad people.
I'm also in favor of electoral democracy, even if I wouldn't personally defend every single person who has been elected president since the start of time.
Remarkably few people seem to truly understand what "marginal propensity to consume" actually means.
Economically, money saved is money lost. Money invested is a promise of debt. Consumption is what drives the economy. That's why the poor and middle class are so important. Without them having enough money, the economics of scale... don't scale.
I do understand that the rich aren't gong to spend as much as the middle and lower classes, but I don't have a good answer for the predictable trickle-down rebuttal: the wealthy will invest rather than spend, and that investment funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor (but perhaps more so in the pockets of the rich?). You sort of touch on that: "consumption is what drives the economy", but I think the trickle-down economics folks would agree and argue that their job-creation-via-investment results in increased consumption? I have a headache.
It's probably more true now than during most of history, but it's not always true.
It probably was true in the Reagan era that trickle-down "worked", because there was a lot of opportunity for large scale capital investment to improve the economy and make things people wanted (and provide jobs in the process). That doesn't seem as true now. Investors already have an excess amount of capital they don't know what to do with (and so are just doing things like buying houses en masse).
It has the added benefit of bidding up the price of things poor people need, which yes is inflationary but also incentivizes more resources being provisioned to help provide the things that poor people need.
Maybe, but printing a dollar and giving it to a union worker causes worse inflation than printing a dollar and giving it to an owner.
To reiterate, I would support voters being able to decide military policy, even if the alternative was a peaceful oligarchy.
Your second paragraph adds nothing except detailing your reasoning which only serves to exemplify the behavior the comment you are replying to is complaining about. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people have a bad tendency to ignore groups doing evil things for their own gains if they otherwise align with these groups.
Whether it's the moron on one side of the isle screeching about "mUh UnIoNs" or the moron on the other side of the isle screeching about "mUh SmAlL bUsInEsSeS" is irrelevant. People, you very much included, need to refrain from giving groups on "their side" a blank check to engage in evil self serving behavior at everyone else's expense.
Of course the evil to good ratio is not the same for any two groups or groups of groups. His entire point was that that liking one group more than another is a worthless excuse for turning a blind eye to that group's evil. Just because you are able to write a second (or 3rd or 4th) paragraph expanding about why you feel one group deserves a blind eye more than another only serves to illustrate his point.
Your behavior is exactly what he is complaining about.
Nobody in this thread was "screeching" about anything, and I don't appreciate being not-so-subtly called a moron. I have done nothing of the same to you.
I am perfectly capable of criticizing bad actions by unions, 2020 has had a number of them.
But I will not use those critiques as an excuse to argue that the right to elect someone to negotiate on your behalf should be curtailed, because I believe the right to worker self-determination comes prior to those consequences - just as I don't support banning "bad" speech even if that speech has consequences.
I'm not going to keep responding because, honestly, you seem to be shadow-boxing a conversational opponent who only exists in your own mind.
> In terms of overall welfare
What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).
I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)
Who's “we”? I was under the impression that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure was accurate.
Employment is one of the most obvious, salient examples of market failure I can think of. Exploitative employers engineer situations where employees can't even use the job market, because they need a job and job-shopping (e.g. taking time off-call to do interviews) will lose them their job. Example: Arise Virtual Solutions[0].
If that's not a good enough example? See the gig economy. Companies taking over a service sector “with an app”, at a loss (using investor money), then squeezing the money back out of employees (e.g. by misclassifying them, not telling them how much each gig pays, programming virtual micromanagers to work them to the point of health problems in the name of “efficiency”). To use your words:
> If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#ari...
It's easy to find lump sum transfers that would be welfare enhancing over the pareto optimal outcome decided by the market.
> There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf.
Well yes, you are beholden to the results of the election - even if the side you voted for didn't win. That is what worker self-determination is all about.
> it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders
Then why don't employers bring in unions more often?
Be it through negotiating salaries or restricting the number of doctors or enforcing very difficult admission procedures for lawyers.
They tend to also effect other, non-zero-sum game advantages, or otherwise they would probably be outlawed, but this is the gist of it. You can still acknowledge that many were founded with good intentions, but people who do not see at least some downsides have a severe reasoning defect.
There is no argument that employees should have the right to form an association. The problems arise when such associations get "special privileges" that an average worker does not. Both L and R talk a lot about "equality of law" but happily shred that principle when it comes to their own voter groups.
Nearly all the evil (as you describe it) caused by unions is eventually due to the collective bargaining rights and other privileges.
In the words of Milton Friedman, unions do not protect workers. The competition protects workers. Market competition is the biggest rival to unions and hence unions will go to extreme lengths to prevent this sort of competition to keep themselves relevant. This does immense harm to workers as well as society in the long term. Folks like me who have seen extreme violence unleashed by workers unions end up despising very notion of unions for the same reason.
We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.
On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.
We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.
If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.
[1] https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=3739&...
I'd suggest that the Union that voted to keep the lead as a requirement pay. /evilgrin
As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.
This was my first thought as well, then I remembered Chicago.
Obviously there are confounders, but Kevin Drum’s decade old article positing that lead was a major contributor to the crime wave and subsequent reduction is pretty compelling. [1]
EDIT: aside, but maybe one of the most depressing things I’ve ever learned is the high levels of lead in the ink used to wrap various Mexican candy. [2] and this 2014 article [3] on lead levels in Mexican kids where the mean levels exceed the upper acceptable level in the US.
There are few things that cause me more distress than the failure to comprehensively tackle this issue worldwide.
[0] https://chicagohealthatlas.org/indicators/lead-poisoning
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
[2] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2004-05-14-04051...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25459328/
“Our results indicate that more than 15% of the population will experience a decrement of more than 5 IQ points from lead exposure. The analysis also leads us to believe that lead is responsible for 820,000 disability-adjusted life-years for lead-induced mild mental retardation for children aged 0 to 4 years.”
None of them suffer from this problem. Almost all of the charts aren't even density maps, and of the two that are, they are charting family income vs. soil lead level, which wouldn't suffer from the problem mentioned in the comic.
This makes the assumption that poorness and crime are correlated, which I recently learned is not a universal truth.
Two variables can be correlated, without being a universal truth.
https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.2754/
High concentration chlorine (and flouride, where used) were reactive to contaminants such that they were often chemically/ electrically attracted to the lead pipes (clay soil and other environmental factors played a role), and the pipes leeched contaminants from the water. Lower concentrations of chlorine and any concentration of most chlorine-alternatives not only allow water to leech from the lead pipes, but it also can reverse the previous process, such that decades of leeched chemicals and contaminants deposited in/on the lead (and other) pipes are released back into the water, at a much higher rate and concentration.
Washington DC went through this issue [0] in what was a huge public embarrassment, at least within the civil engineering community. It left the EPA with a black eye in what was supposed to be a landmark and example-setting project.
Now that it's known to happen, better precautions can be taken, but it's absolutely still an issue, especially in places like Detroit, where the surviving lead pipes were largely the service lines on the user side of the water meter. (Remediation and upgrades to water distribution systems often stops at the meter, including design considerations.)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Washingt...
I still have the 7" (18cm) section of pipe they removed -- it's an impressively heavy, several pounds at least. There is an absolutely seriously huge amount of lead in just about everyone's yards here in Chicago, in the form of pipes.
What's less clear is how much of that lead winds up in bodies, to what resulting health impact. People need help making judgements about relative risk -- sadly, the article is not helpful in that regard.