freediver wrote on Dec 2
nd, 2020 at 7:30am:
Quote:The entire argument of the article is that unions create greater equality across the board
Not the bit you quoted
newsflash FD - I didn't quote the entire article. Who knows, maybe one day you will read it and discover, when you are unable to use your willful ignorance and reliance on cherry picking as a debating tactic, that there really are actual economists who disagree with Friedman - despite your silly claim to the contrary.
As for "the bit" I quoted (or rather, my first quote, not the other two quotes that you conveniently ignore), it merely attests to the equalising effect of unions
per se, but gives no indication whatsoever that it also results in Friedman's idea of reduced level of employment in those union sectors, which in turn causes wages to fall in the non-union sectors. You wrongly conclude that it does - with no basis whatsoever. Logically, the existence of the relatively higher wage dispersion in non-union sectors need merely be attributed to the lack of an equalising union presence - as the rest of the article makes abundantly clear.
Perhaps to avoid confusion on your part I should have quoted more - eg:
Quote:Freeman (1993), using more recent longitudinal data from the 1987-88 CPS, confirmed that unionization reduces wage inequality. On the basis of his longitudinal estimates, he concluded that declining unionization accounted for about 20 percent of the increase in the standard deviation of male wages in the U.S. between 1978 and 1988
That is, looking at it the opposite way - declining unionization = increased inequality - and thats across the board, ie all "male wages in the US" not just within the union sector.
And the overall conclusion of the author the paper quoted:
Quote:In his landmark paper, Freeman (1980) concluded that, overall, unions tend to reduce wage inequality among men because the inequality-increasing “between-sector” effect is smaller than the dispersion-reducing “within-sector” effect.