Democracy in America

OUR readers are evidently fascinated by American attitudes toward global warming and/or climate change. I say "and/or" because it turns out that opinion on the subject is sensitive to the language one uses to refer to the putative meteorological phenomenon. A new paper (ungated) in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly by Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sara H. Konrath, and Norbert Schwarz examined the websites of conservative and liberal think tanks and found that conservatives are more likely to speak of "global warming" whilst liberals are inclined to speak instead of "climate change". The elite conservative usage seems to be a cause or effect (probably both) of conservative public opinion.

Republicans were less likely to endorse that the phenomenon is real when it was referred to as “global warming” (44.0%) rather than “climate change” (60.2%), whereas Democrats were unaffected by question wording (86.9% vs. 86.4%). As a result, the partisan divide on the issue dropped from 42.9 percentage points under a “global warming” frame to 26.2 percentage points under a “climate change” frame.

What explains this? "Global warming", the authors note, directly elicits thought of rising temperatures, which encourages the anecdotal use of unusually cold or snowy weather as disconfirming evidence, whereas "climate change" puts the emphasis on the systemic transformation of weather patterns, which offers a broader context for the odd cold snap or snowmageddon. Additionally, the authors surmise, "global warming" connotes human causation and culpability somewhat more than "climate change".

But why isn't liberal opinion affected by the choice of semantic "frame"? Shuldt, Konrath, and Schwarz write:

First, Democrats tended to endorse high belief (Ms = 5.94 on a 7-point scale), raising the possibility of a ceiling effect. Second, Democrats’ beliefs about global climate change might be more crystallized and thus more protected from subtle manipulations, consistent with research showing that stronger attitudes are more resistant to change.

I take the upshot of the study to be that Americans are less polarised about climate change/global warming than they may appear. Disagreement under the "climate change" frame is really fairly mild. And the fact that conservative opinion is so susceptible to framing effects suggests a relatively low level of confidence about the issue.

I expect ideological disagreement over climate change will decline further as the debate over climate policy takes shape in the public imagination. In my experience, many libertarians and conservatives are motivated to deny global warming because they think admitting a problem amounts to handing government a blank check and a mandate to do whatever it wants to "fix" it. Once it becomes clearer that the best policy response to climate change is a tax on carbon, which can be entirely offset by cutting taxes elsewhere, those Americans wary of opening the door to enviro-fascism will begin to relax.

I WAS one of many Washington residents who was disappointed when Michelle Rhee resigned her post as schools chancellor following the defeat of her boss, Adrian Fenty, in last year's mayoral race. But there were many more Washingtonians who were happy to see her go, and over on Slate last week Richard Kahlenberg had a thoughtful essay admonishing fans of Ms Rhee for buying into her seductive and simplified message about education reform. His reproachful tone is often warranted, but I would take issue with one of Mr Kahlenberg's complaints: that Ms Rhee eschewed collaboration with the teachers unions. While there is no doubt Ms Rhee was an overly combative figure, the author's argument rests on the assumption that the DC teachers union was a willing collaborator. Mr Kahlenberg's broader prescriptions also take for granted that teachers unions are ready for reform. That is debatable, and the case of Ms Rhee is helpful in understanding the current fight over public-sector unions. 

To take one example from Ms Rhee's tenure, Mr Kahlenberg says the chancellor focused on firing teachers "in a fashion that unfairly demean[ed] large numbers of educators", while ignoring an alternative policy called peer review, a somewhat controversial evaluation procedure in which expert teachers critique their colleagues. Mr Kahlenberg notes that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation's second-largest union, supports peer review. But that invites the question of why it has been sparingly adopted across the country. And the answer is because reforming the evaluation system has not been a union priority. Much more effort has been expended fighting the use of value-added testing than promoting policies like peer review. More importantly, evaluation reform means little unless the process for firing bad teachers is streamlined, and there has been little movement on this front. Even in peer-review systems, the unions still go to bat for those deemed "ineffective". 

On another controversial issue, merit pay, Mr Kahlenberg says Ms Rhee's intentions were good, but any such programme needs to be structured in a way that encourages cooperation between teachers. Fair enough, but the unions have been more wary than Mr Kahlenberg of pay reform, and efforts to change the tenure system have been bitterly opposed. As the author himself admits, "Too often, union leaders protect incompetent teachers and make it difficult to pay outstanding educators more." In general, the unions always seem to give more thought to how certain reforms may not work, and less thought to how they could.

How does this relate to the larger debate about public-sector unions? Last week, my colleague noted that public-sector reforms, whether it be pension restructuring or allowing the firing of incompetent teachers, "will be unachievable if unions correctly understand that their opponents...are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions, and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions." But the opposite is also true. (The AFT spent as much as $1m trying to end Mr Fenty's administration.) And this is why people like Michelle Rhee and Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, play an important role in the reform process. 

It could be said that both Ms Rhee and Mr Walker dealt with large problems by arrogantly pushing over-the-top, sub-optimal solutions. But their excessive actions were useful in forcing unions to abandon their rigid positions and play a more constructive role in the proceedings. In Wisconsin, for example, the public-sector unions only agreed to accept many of the proposed cuts to their benefits once their collective-bargaining rights were threatened. In the case of teachers, only recently have some of the unions declared themselves open to change in the face of broad support for reform. You'd like to think that collaboration and compromise would be easier to come by. But sometimes it takes an overwhelming force to dislodge a seemingly immovable object from its fixed position.

In the case of Wisconsin, we will now see if that force (ie, the governor) can moderate itself. Perhaps not, and a compromise may prove unachievable in the short term. But in another op-ed this past weekend, even Mr Kahlenberg admits, albeit indirectly, the positive impact of people like Ms Rhee and Mr Walker. After criticising them for most of his piece, he writes, "Teachers should use this moment to articulate a powerful reform agenda." He then compliments the AFT for making a "good start" on that path. There is a reason they are acting now.

(Photo credit: Reuters/AP)

IN HIS Newsweek column, Ezra Klein tells us why he thinks we still need unions. Among other reasons, Mr Klein mentions this classic:

[U]nions are a powerful, sophisticated player concerned with more than just the next quarter’s profit reports—what economist John Kenneth Galbraith called a “countervailing power” in an economy dominated by large corporations. They participate in shareholder meetings, where they’re focused on things like job quality and resisting outsourcing. They push back on business models that they don’t consider sustainable for their workers or, increasingly, for the environment. In an economy with a tendency toward bigness—where big producers are negotiating with big retailers and big distributors—workers need a big advocate of their own. 

There's clearly something to this, but I don't think the matter is so clear. Unions are at least likely to amplify as contain the power of big business. Over at Economics by invitation, our debate forum for dismal scientists, Gilles Saint-Paul offers a powerful summary of what I take to be the standard economic critique of labour unions, including this rebuttal of the "countervailing power", argument:

Unions do not provide a countervailing force to the supposed power of big business. Whenever big business gets rents from monopoly power, unions often manage to share some of those rents (this explains why unions are more present in concentrated industries like automobiles, as opposed to, say, retail trade). This benefits the employees of big business, and it has indeed been shown that these employees enjoy higher wages and greater fringe benefits. But by raising labour costs it further adds to the harm done to consumers (and workers in the competitive sector) by the monopoly power of business. In addition to being too high because firms collude, the price is also too high because employees collude. Furthermore, the interests of the union and their employers are convergent whenever they deal with the outside world: both want to increase the revenue that the firm or the industry can extract through lobbying activities. To the extent that union leaders provide additional voices, unionisation adds to the lobbying power of an industry.

Private-sector unions and big business come to blows over a cutting-the-cake problem. But the interests of labour and capital are aligned when it comes to the size of the shared cake. Auto workers certainly did not act as a countervailing force when it came time for failing American car manufacturers to seek subsidies from taxpayers. And this is why my brow furrowed when Mr Klein said unions "push back" on business models that aren't environmentally sustainable. I think you'll find that unionised coal miners are as unenthusiastic as the coal companies they work for about regulations that would restrict the growth of mining operations or reduce demand for coal.

However, Mr Klein is surely correct that unions are antagonists to businesses that seek to enlarge the cake in ways unlikely to be shared by domestic union workers. When unions successfully resist outsourcing, they hurt consumers, foreign workers, and the competitiveness of their firm, which eventually leads to domestic layoffs or reduced domestic job-creation. This is not the sort of countervailing we're hoping for.

Continue reading "After unions" >>

THE range of ways in which people can talk past each other probably exceeds the range of ways in which they can understand and engage with each other. Last week Megan McArdle (commenting on Jim Manzi) picked up on one of the ways in which people discussing the union controversy in Wisconsin might be talking past each other, and it's pretty interesting.

You can argue, of course, that [the compressed income distribution typical of government wages] is an ideologically much more attractive income distribution.  Which highlights, I think, the core difference between the way people like Manzi and I look at this, and the way that progressives do.  I don't think of state employment as a way to create, in miniature, my ideal labor utopia.  I think of it as a way to procure services.  I define people as being "overpaid" not if they are paid more than someone with a similar level of education, but if they are paid more than I need to pay to attract adequate workers.

I have defined people as being "overpaid" in this fashion, too, when I was looking to hire someone to fill a job. This is "overpaid" defined from an employer's point of view. But defining "overpaid" this way excludes the possibility that everyone in a labour category might be underpaid. It makes it impossible to say "teachers are underpaid, and people who broker complex derivatives are overpaid". Teachers, as a class, can't be underpaid, because the salaries they earn were ipso facto adequate to attract them to do the job. You're defining the issue of the social value of the work out of the question. For instance, in December, as Planet Money reported, economist Eric Hanushek published a paper for the NBER finding that:

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes.

From society's point of view, one might conclude that teachers are seriously underpaid. Or one might conclude that better-than-average teachers are seriously underpaid, and we need to institute merit-based pay and fire bad teachers. But looking at things from an employer's point of view, it's not clear there's really a problem here. The school system is effectively getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in free value from each teacher who's one standard deviation above the mean. Why change that? Meanwhile, there are a whole lot of respectable economists who believe that most of the financial industry produces no value whatsoever. And yet, if you tried to recruit a hedge-fund analyst at a public-school teacher's salary, you'd have great difficulty filling the position. Does this mean hedge-fund analysts aren't overpaid?

Continue reading "The meaning of overpaid" >>

THE American Economic Review just turned 100. It turns out that the original issue in 1911 featured an article by Professor Katharine Coman of Wellesley College entitled  “Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation”, and in the anniversary issue, Robert Stavins (via Mark Thoma) cleverly decides to retrace what's happened since then with economic theory on "commons problems". Basically, he writes, Pigou and Coase and those who followed them have done yeoman work that's led to the institutionalisation of tools like cap-and-trade allowances for fishing permits and pollution permits, which are superior to command-and-control rules both from an environmental and economic perspective:

First, economic theory—by focusing on market failures linked with incomplete systems of property rights—has made major contributions to our understanding of commons problems and the development of prudent public policies. Second, as our understanding of the commons has become more complex, the design of economic policy instruments has become more sophisticated, enabling policy makers to address problems that are characterized by uncertainty, spatial and temporal heterogeneity, and long duration. Third, government policies that have not accounted for economic responses have been excessively costly, often ineffective, and sometimes counterproductive.

For example, he writes, the 1990 law establishing tradable permits to bring down sulfur dioxide emissions rather than using command-and-control regulations saves the economy $1 billion a year. And with what he calls the "ultimate problem of the commons", greenhouse gases, "there is widespread agreement among economists (and a diverse set of other policy analysts) that economy-wide carbon pricing will be an essential ingredient of any policy that can achieve meaningful reductions of CO2 emissions cost effectively, at least in the United States and other industrialized countries (Gilbert E. Metcalf 2009; Louis Kaplow 2010). The ubiquitous nature of energy generation and use and the diversity of CO2 sources in a modern economy mean that conventional technology and performance standards would be infeasible and—in any event—excessively costly (Newell and Stavins 2003)."

The problem with this picture is passed along by Dave Roberts at Grist. The public, according to a new poll, does want to cut CO2—and smog, and mercury. But they want to do it through EPA regulation, ie command-and-control, not tradeable permits or Pigovian taxes.

I've never seen a behavioural economics study on this, but I'm sure somebody's done it, because it seems pretty widespread: people generally prefer rules telling them something is not allowed, rather than charges making them pay for it, even if the latter are clearly more efficient at maximising social value. Mr Stavins does recognise this, observing that in terms of political appeal, aversion to the word "taxes" is probably one reason why cap-and-trade systems for carbon emission permits have already been instituted in Europe; but he also notes that "now that cap and trade has been demonized—in US politics, at least—as 'cap and tax,' this difference has surely diminished."

The darkly ironic side of all this, of course, is that administrative command-and-control solutions like detailed EPA emissions rules are definitely more expensive than cap-and-trade or carbon taxes would be. If anything, when the public votes for EPA regulation rather than cap-and-trade, that's when it's imposing a tax on itself. Fifty years after Coase and 90 after Pigou, the economists are pretty sure they've finally got the solution for fixing commons problems without diminishing social value, only to have the public reject it because they think that's the tax. If the tragedy of the commons is "Romeo and Juliet", the rejection of Coasian cap-and-trade solutions to commons problems is "Blood Simple": a hilariously bitter demonstration of the human capacity for selfish stupidity that ends with the only guy who's figured it all out getting shot through a door by the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

I'VE repeatedly argued that private- and public-sector unions operate in different institutional settings, raise fundamentally different moral and political questions, and that it is altogether reasonable to support private-sector unions while rejecting public-sector unions on account of the nature of their differences. A common response I've heard from the left is that I'm slyly seeking to sow discord by disingenuously arguing that the larger union movement is not in fact one, but is instead a coalition of fundamentally distinct organisations of unequal moral standing. A common response I've heard from the right is basically the same: "you don't really support private-sector unionism, do you"? 

Well, I do. Sort of. It's complicated because American labour law is complicated. 

The right of workers to band together to improve their bargaining position relative to employers is a straightforward implication of freedom of association, and the sort of voluntary association that results is the beating heart of the classical liberal vision of civil society. I unreservedly endorse what I'll call the "unionism of free association". My difficulty in coming out wholeheartedly for private-sector unions as they now exist is that they are, by and large, creatures of objectionable statutes which have badly warped the labour-capital power dynamic that would exist under the unionism of free association.

Progressives and libertarians generally part ways on the justifiability of legislation that boosts the bargaining power of unions. Progressives generally think, not implausibly, that government has already put a thumb on the scale in favour of employers through the legal definition of the character and powers of the corporation, such that it is manifestly unjust for government to fail to put an equalising thumb on the scale in favour of unions. For now I only want to say that I think there is indeed a plausible case for government stepping in to help strengthen workers' bargaining power when inequalities in such power (often created by law and legislation) lead to a systemically unfair division of the gains from productive cooperation. I don't think the same plausible case applies to public-sector unions for reasons I've recited ad nauseam.  

So, do circumstances merit a further statutory boost for private-sector unions? I don't know. Rather than become mired in largely intractable metaphysical disputes over fairness of the division of the cooperative surplus, which we would need to do in order to determine whether government should do more to augment union power, I believe it would be much more productive to focus on the ways in which the prevailing legal regime clearly handicaps labour relative to the power unions would have under conditions of free association. I heartily agree with Kevin Carson, a left-libertarian theorist and activist, when he argues that:

[T]he room for change lies mainly, not with adding further economic intervention to aid labor at the expense of capital, but rather with eliminating those policies which currently benefit capital at the expense of labor. The question is not what new laws would strengthen the bargaining power of labor, but which existing ones weaken it. ...

The most obvious forms of state intervention that hobble labor are legislation like:

1) The provisions of Taft-Hartley which criminalize sympathy and boycott strikes;

2) The Railway Labor Relations Act and the “cooling off” provisions of Taft-Hartley, which enable the government to prevent a strike from spreading to common carriers and thus becoming a general strike; and

3) “Right-to-Work” (sic) laws, which restrict the freedom of contract by forbidding employers to enter into union shop contracts with a bargaining agent.

Further, we should examine the extent to which even ostensibly pro-labor laws, like the Wagner Act, have served in practice to weaken the bargaining power of labor. Before Wagner, what is today regarded as the conventional strike—an announced walkout associated with a formal ultimatum—was only one tactic among many used by unions.

Mr Carson then goes on to enumerate some of those now-rare tactics, which, taken together, add up to a compelling case that a return to the unionism of free association would improve the bargaining position of labour relative to the status quo.  

It is in this light that I wish to join the Washington Examiner's Tim Carney in congratulating Mitch Daniels for his opposition to the "right-to-work" legislation proposed by Indiana Republicans. Presidential, indeed. 

MITCH DANIELS seems to be doing everything he can to ensure that he loses a Republican presidential primary. Last year he called for a truce on social issues, so that leaders could focus on more pressing matters. Conservatives are still having conniptions about this. Now he is chiding Hoosier Republicans for pushing a right-to-work bill, saying that the fight may derail other, more urgent legislative priorities. Such efforts will be fodder for conservative opponents in a primary. They also suggest that Mr Daniels would be a rather good president.

(Photo credit: AFP)

NEW eras tend to be declared too easily. Chicago’s election of Rahm Emanuel on February 22nd, though, was a turning point. True, the mayoral race did have an air of familiarity, if only because it honoured the city’s penchant for the bizarre. Mr Emanuel was almost disqualified by a legal fight over the meaning of the word “reside”. Carol Moseley Braun, a black contender, called a lesser opponent a crack addict. A blizzard prompted candidates to battle over their shovelling skills. On Twitter, an impostor posing as Mr Emanuel won 36,000 followers with tweets composed almost entirely of expletives.

Nevertheless, the election really did mark the end of an age. Richard Daley senior ruled Chicago from 1955 to 1976; his son has reigned over the city since 1989. Now a new powerbroker will take charge with no Daley in the offing. Mr Emanuel clobbered his opponents by winning 55% of the vote, well above the level needed to avoid a run-off. Mr Emanuel’s effect on the city, of course, has yet to be determined. But the election itself proved just how much Chicago has changed.

The mayoral race was unlike any in recent memory, and not simply because Mr Daley was absent. Chicago’s rules of racial politics have become tangled. Mr Emanuel, a Jewish former congressman and aide to Barack Obama, was one of four main candidates. The Latino community, in a sign of growing prominence, produced not one but two credible contenders: Gery Chico, once Mr Daley’s chief of staff, and Miguel Del Valle, the city clerk. After much debate the black community rallied behind Ms Braun, a former senator. “The early assumption,” says Juan Rangel, a Latino leader and supporter of Mr Emanuel, “was that the election would be all about race.” But it wasn’t. Mr Chico’s most vocal backers were union members. Ms Braun tried and failed to incite class warfare. Mr Emanuel won in part because of his success in wards with high concentrations of black voters.

Meanwhile the notorious Chicago machine is not what it was. Mr Daley’s machine was different than that of his father; his power base included Latinos and executives at global firms, for example. But in recent years the machine had grown rusty too. Federal investigations disrupted Chicago’s convenient system of rewarding political workers with city jobs and promotions. Mr Daley’s underlings were convicted in 2006 and 2009, but the boss himself was not implicated. The old patronage armies, says Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois at Chicago, have shrivelled.

Mr Emanuel is hardly an outsider to Chicago’s political establishment—he courted community leaders such as Mr Rangel aggressively. But his tactics were less old Chicago than new Washington. He followed the requirements of any modern campaign: raise cash and deliver a clear message. By January Mr Emanuel had raised $11.8m, compared with $2.4m for Mr Chico. In the old days a patronage army might have fanned out across an important neighbourhood. Mr Emanuel’s money let him accost voters through their television sets. He also campaigned diligently, visiting more than 100 train stops to greet befuddled commuters. He stuck to his message (strong schools, safe streets, stable finances) and kept his famous temper in check.

Winning the election, however, was the easy part. Mr Emanuel is more accustomed to being an aide than the chief. But on May 16th Mr Emanuel will become the executive of America’s third biggest city. A fiscal mess awaits him. Mr Daley closed recent budget gaps by using cash from asset sales; Mr Emanuel could not repeat this trick even if he wanted to. A brawl with local unions, who opposed him in the election, seems certain. He may also struggle with the city council. These challenges are formidable. Mr Emanuel’s temper, so controlled in the campaign, is sure to erupt. But if Mr Emanuel can survive the next few years, he may be the mayor for 20 more.

MY COLLEAGUE asks an excellent question: if stronger private-sector unions aren't in the cards in America, then what? What other force do progressives think might play the role unions played in the postwar era, providing greater negotiating power for the working and middle class, so that they can try to claw back some of the 52% of all US GDP growth from 1993-2008 captured by the top 1% of the income scale and organise politically for concerns like universal health insurance? (Or, my pet beef, more vacation time. Why on Earth do Americans settle for two weeks' vacation time per year? Have we no unemployed people? Have we no robots? Isn't the whole point of advancement in technology and efficiency to give us more leisure time? Ever notice what words make up the phrase "labour-saving devices"? Okay, I'm done.)

Kevin Drum poses precisely the same question in his new article in Mother Jones:

Unions, for better or worse, are history. Even union leaders don't believe they'll ever regain the power of their glory days. If private-sector union density increased from 7 percent to 10 percent, that would be considered a huge victory. But it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to restore the power of the working and middle classes.

And yet: The heart and soul of liberalism is economic egalitarianism. Without it, Wall Street will continue to extract ever vaster sums from the American economy, the middle class will continue to stagnate, and the left will continue to lack the powerful political and cultural energy necessary for a sustained period of liberal reform. For this to change, America needs a countervailing power as big, crude, and uncompromising as organized labor used to be.

But what?

Mr Drum doesn't have an answer, and at the moment, I'm pessimistic. I don't see a realistic alternative organisation that can enlist and mobilise manpower in the interest of middle-class and poor people's pocketbook concerns. A number of alternative models were created in the 1970s, including Ralph Nader's PIRGs and the poor people's participatory-democracy organisations that eventually became ACORN. They were never more than marginal players in power politics, and ACORN was ultimately destroyed essentially with a flick of the organised right's thumb. Organisations like the Campaign for Community Change sweat blood and tears to try to make poor people's voices heard in government, but the evidence is that government just doesn't listen to poor people. Progressive mass organisations formed along other identity-based or single-issue lines, such as the National Organisation for Women or the Sierra Club, are inevitably going to be dominated by well-off people with leisure time; even those folks are hampered by the fact that people in America have less and less leisure time (see above). Most important, there's really no way in the long term for organisations that depend on voluntary donations to take on organisations that have dedicated funding streams based on real profits. The Sierra Club will never be able to match the mission intensity or the funding consistency of the National Association of Manufacturers.

Continue reading "Now that's a really good question" >>

THE brouhaha around public workers in Wisconsin obscures a few things. First, states have big fiscal problems: pensions (in the long term) and structural deficits (oh, right about now). Health-care costs, not public workers, are the main driver of structural deficits. Second, most state pensions were faring reasonably well before the financial meltdown. As recently as 2008, pensions were 84% funded, according to the Centre for Retirement Research at Boston College. (Eighty percent is usually deemed an acceptable level.) Mismanagement has meant that some states, such as my adopted home of Illinois, are in dire trouble soon. Joshua Rauh of Northwestern expects the pension funds in Illinois will run out by 2018. However other states have more time to prepare for doom. Ohio’s pension funds are due to run dry in 2030, assuming an 8% annual return. Wisconsin’s won’t run out until 2038.

Benefits for public workers are a problem, no doubt, but I wonder whether the fight over bargaining rules is eclipsing an immediate crisis. The deadlock in Wisconsin may be replicated elsewhere. A bill in Ohio, to abolish collective bargaining for state employees, is just as aggressive as that in Wisconsin. Protesters descended on Indianapolis yesterday to oppose a few anti-union bills, including one that limits collective bargaining for teachers. Perhaps the attention on bargaining rules is a negotiating tactic—"agree to make concessions or you won’t be able to bargain at all." But the fight may become a dangerous distraction.

THE stalemate in Wisconsin has persisted partly because a group of Democratic senators have left Madison for Rockford, Illinois, where they apparently remain, laying low. Political theatre? Gross obstructionism? Regardless of where you stand on the budget bill, there's something to admire in that the Democrats cared enough to bolt. Something similar happened in Texas in 2003, when Republicans in the state legislature were pushing a redistricting plan that would have heavily favoured Republicans:

"In most cases, breaking a quorum has resulted in a temporary victory but a longer-term defeat," said Steve Bickerstaff, a University of Texas adjunct law professor and author of "Lines in the Sand," about an incident in which more than 50 Texas Democratic legislators fled temporarily to Oklahoma, New Mexico and even Mexico in 2003.

As Mr Bickerstaff suggests, the Republicans eventually got their plan through. And on the one hand, bolting is clearly a stunt: if one party has a huge majority in the legislature, they didn't get it by magic, and the appropriate thing for the minority party to do is to try to win back seats in the next election. The long-term value of the bolting, however, was as a visible and credible form of protest. It commanded attention, and it involves some real risk and inconvenience to legislators—the risks of annoying their constituents and of bobbling their legislative agenda for the week, and the inconvenience of physically removing themselves from the state. While the effort failed, the drama of the moment persisted. Even now, years on, it's often cited as an example of Texas Democrats being overrun by the Republican hegemon. It may, in fact, have been the biggest stand Texas Democrats took on anything in that entire decade. As for Wisconsin, the impasse seems to have softened the Republicans a bit; Dale Schultz, a moderate Republican senator, has offered a compromise proposal. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. But insofar as part of the reason we have legislatures is to give people a mediated space to air their grievances, the uproar in Wisconsin has had that benefit for the state.

ONE of the memes being thrown around over the past few years by advocates of reducing the power of public-sector unions has been the claim that public-sector workers are overpaid in comparison to their private-sector counterparts. I've always considered this an odd claim to hear, as I've been in the labour market for quite a long time and can't recall ever hearing anyone say they were going to work for a government bureaucracy because they wanted to make a lot of money. At crucial career-making junctures in life, people who want to get rich tend to enter corporate law rather than join the District Attorney's office, to work for internet companies rather than teach math in public high schools, and so forth.

All of this is coming up now because Wisconsin has become the showdown state for the public-sector union controversy, and Scott Walker, the governor, is claiming he needs to destroy the state's public-sector unions' ability to negotiate in order to deal with its budget shortfall. State workers, he says, are paid too much. But the Economic Policy Institute tells us that, in Wisconsin, public-sector workers are not in fact paid more than their private-sector counterparts. They're paid less. You can only make it appear that public-sector workers earn more by ignoring the fact that "both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts."

Nationally, 54% of full-time state and local public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 35% of full-time private sector workers. In Wisconsin, the difference is even greater: 59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers.

...Public employees receive substantially lower wages, but much better benefits than their private sector counterparts. Wisconsin state and local governments pay public employees 14.2% lower annual wages than comparable private sector employees. On an hourly basis, they earn 10.7% less in wages. College-educated employees earn on average 28% less in wages and 25% less in total compensation in the public sector than in the private sector.

The EPI study does find there's a class of public-sector workers who earn a bit more than their private-sector counterparts: those without high-school degrees. In other words, district attorneys earn less than corporate lawyers, but janitors at the district attorney's office may earn more than janitors at a corporate law office—provided the government hasn't outsourced its facilities staff to the same private company the law office uses, which it may have, since governments have been targeting low-skilled workers for outsourcing precisely because that's how they can save money.

For most people who work for the government, however, the expectation is that your year-to-year salary will be lower, but your benefits will be better, in particular your pension. It turns out, however, that state governments won't have the money to pay a lot of those pensions. They're likely to renege on their promises, and Republicans in Congress want to allow them to declare bankruptcy in order to do so. (Funnily enough, this may be the one area in which labour unions and Wall Street are in alliance: neither one wants states to be allowed to declare bankruptcy.) In other words, as Ezra Klein points out, the public-sector employees got rooked: they accepted lower pay in exchange for retirement benefits, and now the retirement benefits look unlikely to come through.

Now, how can we explain the fact that public-sector employees are paid less than private-sector employees? After all, public-sector employees are heavily unionised, while private-sector employees aren't. Shouldn't those unions be winning public-sector employees better wages? Well, I don't really know; perhaps the fact that the government is a monopoly employer with staggering market power has something to do with it. But try considering how employees' wage negotiations with the government might look if there were no public-sector unions. In most lines of work, individuals' power to negotiate higher wages with large organisations is very limited. In government employment, individuals' power to negotiate higher wages is utterly non-existent. An individual teacher who bargains with a private school for a higher wage than her peers is going to have a tough negotiation on her hands; an individual teacher who tries to bargain with the City of Milwaukee for a higher wage than her peers is going to be laughed out of the superintendent's office. In his initial post on this subject, my colleague ventured that civil servants would constitute a powerful bloc able to protect their wages even without unions. I'm not really sure what this means. Through what mechanism are civil servants supposed to bargain for wage increases if they don't have unions? Who's supposed to do the bargaining?