``1) Yay! It's great to see Lebergott back in play. If nothing else, he was willing to look at the economy from the point of view of the rare 95+% of Americans who have to work to make a living rather than the handful of people involved in finance. Sure, his methodology may have had flaws, but his point of view has been sorely neglected by economists. I haven't seen his name in print since the 70s. It's high time for a revival.
2) As for transportation, the New Deal was focused on labor, not industry.... The New Deal was aimed at helping people, not industries. With a reduced economy, the problem wasn't the lack of transportation infrastructure, but of commercial uses for it..''
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/11/eric-rauchway-v.html
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The above really got me thinking today... always the sign of a long and rambling post.. Anybody know or have read Lebergott? Comments?
The economy is were Obama gets tested first and will focus the most. His economic team looks terrible. I am almost certain their policy solutions will fail and deteriorating events will drive them to change. They will have to be dragged kicking and screaming off center and out of their preconceptions.
The above quote made me think, yes let's start looking at the economy from the point of view of that rare 95+% who work. (Which doesn't include me anymore, thank FDR for social security. My first US Treasury bail out check is still on my desk. I don't want to cash it yet. Like to frame it, but can't afford that..)
The whole way the current meltdown has been framed, since it started, has been attention to finance. I've convinced myself the whole mess could have been avoid with good labor law, and good economic policy to improve the standard of living for the bottom half. Belatedly, industry is getting attention, and state and city governments will be soon too as they start to crash. This is already begun its early phase in California as the governor is slashing state budgets.
What has gotten almost no attention is labor, that is the people who work. What attention labor has gotten is in its reframed name, consumers and homeowners. The magic of looking at people as consumers, instead of labor, is that consumers lead economic policy talk back to answering problems in finance and industry. In effect, labor and government are left out of view. Another nice feature of the word consumer, is that of course the credit system they depend on to make believe we still have a middle class, has to be saved, so it in can continue to be capital's favorite method to impoverish labor.
My creeping dread is Obama's economic group will do exactly that: substitute any talk of labor and government, for finance, mostly credit, industry, and consumers.
The only thing I can see to make O and his government attend to labor, will be when the unemployment rate starts to rise faster, and then faster again. Their policies will be to save small business and industry, saving jobs and promoting growth. This was the answer when they were in, under Clinton.
I very strongly suspect none of that will work this time.
Why? Because when I think back, how those policies worked, they seem a very mixed bag, and mostly not good. For example policy promoted growth by fabricating new areas of the political economy to exploit, through laws that promoted development in IT (mixed good), and the Dot Com bubble (bad). The same policies and similar legal structures created newer and fancier credit instruments to open new ground in the existing housing market and commerical development. The latter all seem like bad ways to keep the economy going and most complete ignored labor, especially the labor force at the bottom third or working class. As far as I remember there was little job growth in existing areas of the political economy like my favorites, heavy industry, manufacturing, and infrastructure.
I wonder how much construction (labor) during the Clinton era was devoted to the exurban development (often non-union labor), and how much activity was inside urban areas in housing, gentrification, and commerical highrise? Commerical construction is union made because local building codes require various levels of certification. (A lot of non-union work, is not quality work.) In turn, companies with union labor can pass the inspections and certifications.
Here is a short union news article that illustrates:
http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2008/04/bechtel-nukes-non-union-construction.html
Unfortunately, that infrastructure example is a nuclear power plant (memories of me running the Co-60 room). On the other hand, nuclear power plants require heavy building regulations. A lot of public infrastructure is heavily regulated, and union labor is very often the only way to meet those regulations. This is one of the main reasons to promote public infrastructure works over just public work programs. The argument that public works is a faster solution, doesn't hold, since trade union apprenticeship programs can be ramped up. Go down to the hall, fill out a form and get a job in a week.
The other reason to promote infrastructure is after the job is finished, theoretically we are all supposed to enjoy the benefits (as long as we can keep the privatizers and fee for use dogs at bay)
I am pretty sure, little construction during the Clinton era was government funded public infrastructure. There is an interesting relationship between many bigger city urban buidling codes and trade union labor. A similar and interesting relationship is also found in bigger urban areas and their local health and safety city codes.
State and local government can lock in unions by law through their building, health, and safety regulations. At the federal funding level, appropriate regulations can be written to require such changes in codes, in order to meet federal standards in building, health and safety.
I want to see fed funding go to areas of the local economies that require union workers as a matter of course. This puts unions in the back door without much labor law reform at the top.
There is another angle to consider. Public funded, public infrastructure construction can drive domestic heavy industry through the production of building materials. But that production system has to be domestic, and made that way by federal regulation. Currently, the cheapest materials are almost all produced outside the US. Take wood products for example. The timber is grown here, but made into wood produces elsewhere (to avoid labor, safety, and enviornmental regulation). The same is true of steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, gypsum, ceramics, and other products.
One in-road to pressuring the Obama adminstration to start thinking in terms of the labor side rather than consumer side is to push the Obama rhetoric about Made in America into Union Made. Obviously the latter is Made in America, so hopefully we get the equation America equals Union started. In turn, that takes the flag-pin patriotism away from the Right---another reframing job long over due.
Isn't the Bureau of Engraving, the place where they print the money, isn't that a union shop? I think so.
Therefore, my last policy idea is to start putting the union bug on all that new money they're printing to bail out Wall Street. Let the rich bastards know where their money comes from, Government and Labor.
You know the guys downstairs running the presses are not going to run out work, so let's give them a hand. Keep that Do Re Mi coming!
(Please don't tell me none of this is going to happen under Obama. I am trying to think out loud how it should be done, in order to figure how to get it done...)
CG