You wrote:
> Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element.
> General knowledge. I've worked in some union-heavy industries. And no - generally my opinions are fairly stable over any given 24 hour period. :)
So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
> Where have I said they're wrong? I've been saying the opposite. They're correct. I don't think you've understood what they said; you're misinterpreting the paper if you think they've said something controversial.
Well, you see, the position they take is actually in their paper... it's from the abstract.
"we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s."
Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
> So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
No. It seems very unlikely that it'd do anything to inequality. Inequality isn't really driven the wages paid to workers. If you note the context of that sentence, I was talking about the wage premium for union households. I don't think that paper provides particularly strong evidence for it - but the better argument is that even if there is strong evidence, that isn't a good thing. I don't want a premium, I want my job to exist and be well paid. The great successes of the manufacturing unions resulted in amazing manufacturing growth on ... completely different continents. I want to live in and work in an industrial cluster (think Silicon Valley, although I don't live anywhere near SV). Unions are likely to push the cluster somewhere else and everyone gets poorer (think Detroit) - albeit that the union jobs are somewhat better off than the people who just lose.
> Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
Yeah, obviously. The consistent evidence is a correlation - which is interesting but doesn't establish causation. The 1940s->1970s is a particularly famous period for US economic data and the paper contains extremely weak evidence that the unions were causative of the remarkable trends over that period.
The issue is "consistent evidence" is academic language. People saying that Zeus' anger causes lightening would be consistent evidence that Zeus is responsible for lightening. That isn't true, the evidence for Zeus-motivated lightening is about as strong as tissue paper, but there can be consistent evidence for it. This paper has stronger evidence than the Zeus theory, but is much more on that end of the spectrum than something like better education pushing productivity up. They've basically found an interesting correlation in a period riddled with interesting correlations. That doesn't mean much; correlations aren't causation.
Sorry, but that's a lot of nonsense.