" . . . 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.
And you wonder why I find the LBO denigration of the progressive movements so irritating.
Folks here systematically for their own ideological reasons attribute progressive gains in the last eight years to everything possible other than the struggles of the people who set out to achieve those results.
"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.
Folks can't quantify Greenspan's role in the boom versus those other things either, yet they go on about how Fed policy is this all powerful force that dominates every other aspect of macroeconomic policy.
I didn't say that unionization and other issues were single-handedly responsible for the boom; just that progressives who say that Greenspan deserves all the credit for the boom were missing other possibilities that might give Clinton's domestic policy more credit.
-- Nathan Newman