David Autor Quotes
Labor is getting a shrinking slice of a pie that's not growing very much.
Autor, David. Interview by Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics Radio, 2017.
The last 5 years of the 1990s were the last of the Clinton administration where he was the principle architect of economic policies for that period. While this statement was somewhat self serving, the economic and fiscal performance of the Clinton years were astoundingly superior to those before and after.
The reason the age rave grows faster than the median is that there are some earners at the top who increase by huge amounts while the rest of the population did not grow by much. This is the same phenomenon in England that occurred in the United States in the same period, only the United States differential was even greater.
Under the economic stewardship of the George W. Bush administration, the rate of inflation was modest. However, while the wages of the highest executives had increase markedly, the wages of average workers actually had decreased for much of the administration.
Answering a question about the environmental Super Fund
One important observation of this quotation is the pejorative language Mises used to describe “Union Bosses” as opposed to “Union Leaders.” There were indeed a few Union “Bosses” but most unions had popularly elected leaders. It is similar to the left wing critic who refers to Corporate Executives as “Greedy Monopolists.” A few are but most are not. Historically, in the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the conservatives tended to be much better at pejorative language and used it more frequently and uniformly than the liberals who tended to be better in the last part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
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Nor did they have much inclination. Organized labor was one of the most sexist institutions in society. Working class men have been major beneficiaries of the “inferiority” of women. At the low end of the hierarchy at work, the working man had only one place where he was at the top of the hierarchy: In his home as the master of his wife and children. And labor organizations evolved from conceptually thinking they were representing the workers of the world in a struggle with the managements to where they were protecting and working for their existing membership against all others and women were outsiders trying to get in and compete with the men. Some men were so macho that the did not want to face the fact that a “lowly woman” could possible do their job That diminished their skill level and self-image.
David H. Autor (born c. 1967) is an American economist and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also acts as co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. Although Autor has contributed to a variety of fields in economics his research generally focuses on topics from labor economics.
