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Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class (largely anointed by luck and/or heritage) to a broad s
by tfourb 4y ago
Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class (largely anointed by luck and/or heritage) to a broad segment of society. This in turn enables broad segments of society to give their children a decent education, which is the pre-requisite for society-scale innovation and (technological and social) progress.
The U.S. has long profited from being able to leverage plentiful natural resources and a dominating international position into being attractive to well-educated people from around the world and thus never having to fully rely on its own broadly abysmal but narrowly elite education system and other social services.
That is probably something you see as a victory, but it is also the definition of unsustainability: at some point the stresses introduced by this approach will start to crack the social fabric. Arguably, it already has.
- qwytw 4y ago> Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class Wealth inequality is still huge in Scandinavia (especially Sweden which is even worse than the US in that regard), Germany and the Benelux (especially when compared to many other European countries which might not have very strong unions..). So unions didn't really help that much with that...
- tfourb 4y agoI can't speak for other countries because I never looked at the data but in Germany, increasing wealth inequality correlates with decreasing union membership in recent decades while the big and broadly distributed wealth gains of the post-war era correlated with historically high levels of union memberships. Intuitively it would make sense that rising income inequality is the result of too little unionization, not too much or it being irrelevant. Also, there is plenty of actual research that backs this up, i.e.: - https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-help-reduce-disparities-and-strengthen-our-democracy/ https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-help-reduce-dispariti...
- BowBun 4y agoData from the World Inequality Database refutes your statement - https://wid.world/world https://wid.world/world Every single socialist European nation (including the Scandinavian ones) has a better wealth distribution than the USA. > So unions didn't really help that much with that... Can you back your statement up with facts instead of hand-waving away paragraphs of meaningful discussion that came before this comment?
- qwytw 4y ago> refutes your statement Credit Suisse says otherwise when measured using Gini: https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2022.pdf https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... Of course they are possible not the most trustworthy source given the recent events.. To be fair I don't know how to explain the disparity, the report even says this: "For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated"