Newman!:
" . . . Wow, progressive struggles are irrelevant. An amazing writeoff of billions of dollars of organizing by unions, civil rights and womens organizations. . . . "
mbs: Aarrghhh. And you wonder why you are irritating. You said one could attribute the economic boom in some presumably non-trivial part to a bunch of things that I say are either tiny or whose size we have no idea of. And you say I said "progressive struggles are irrelevant."
I'm glad you were't prosecuting at Stalin's trials. They might have been oppressive.
"And while I can't quantify it - and thus for economists it doesn't exist - I actually think unionizing has mattered tremendously in a lot of sectors."
mbs: That you can't quantify something does not mean it doesn't exist. It does mean that you have no basis for saying stuff like this is one reason why we had an economic boom.
Now wages increases can be quantified, and they have been significant. But the extent to which these can be attributed to unionization as opposed to seven other things is another difficult thing to quantify, even if they "probably" helped. Somewhat.
thalmus