Dani Rodrik: Has Global Finance Reformed Itself More Than It Appears? [feedly]

Has Global Finance Reformed Itself More Than It Appears?
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2018/01/has-global-finance-reformed-itself-more-than-it-appears.html

The answer is yes, according to Ilene Grabel in her fascinating new book When Things Don't Fall Apart. I wrote a preface for the book, which is reproduced below. It explains why I liked the book so much.

It happens only rarely and is all the more pleasurable because of it. You pick up a manuscript that fundamentally changes the way you look at certain things. This is one such book. Ilene Grabel has produced a daring and delightful reinterpretation of developments in global finance since the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998.

The book addresses, and resolves, a long-standing puzzle: Why has our present model of financial globalization been so resilient, despite an abysmal track record that includes the most severe global financial crisis since the Great Depression, recurrent sovereign debt crises (in Latin America, East Asia, Russia, and Turkey), and many other disappointments (such as capital flowing "uphill" from poorer to richer nations)? How is it that we have not jettisoned this model for something that is more sensible and works better?

Professor Grabel's insight is that those of us who were looking for signs of change have had the wrong idea about how real reform often happens. We have been mistaken in searching for evidence of wholesale, programmatic reconsideration of the rules of global finance. Systems of governance rarely change through established blueprints, a master plan, or radical reforms. And besides, such a reform path would suffer from the same kind of hubris that the neoliberal playbook produced.

Instead, she suggests, it is the cracks in the consensus, the local heresies, and the small departures and innovations that matter and lead us in an altogether novel direction. Inconsistency, ambiguity, and incoherence are useful and productive—they are a feature, not a bug.

Thus, Professor Grabel builds a case for a gradual, evolutionary change in the global financial system and argues that there is at least as much evidence for this alternative thesis as there is for the regime-continuity thesis. The Asian financial crisis may have given the IMF new powers, but it also set in motion defensive moves on the part of developing countries, such as self-insurance through reserve accumulation and mutual swap arrangements. The G-20 and Financial Stability Board may have been largely ineffective to date, but there are signs they can evolve into experimental, networked forms of global financial governance accommodating greater developing-country influence. The IMF itself has not been overhauled, but it has changed: it no longer treats capital controls as taboo, has distanced itself from austerity, and pays increasing attention to social safety nets. And look at the new institutions that have been created—regional reserve pooling arrangements, development and infrastructure banks—and the forum-shopping benefits they confer to client states.

Put all of this together and we have what Professor Grabel calls a move toward "a more complex, fragmented, and pluripolar direction" in international financial governance, "driven in large part by initiatives from below rather than from above." The evolving system is one that provides greater policy space, enables "unscripted innovations," and makes "pragmatic adjustments not dictated by an overarching scheme of economic organization."

The book's deeper argument about how regimes really change is as interesting as the specific details of the case of international finance. Here looms the large figure of Albert Hirschman. As Professor Grabel is happy to remind us at every turn, her argument is very much a Hirschmanian one. Hirschmanian motifs—the advantages of improvisation, surprise, incrementalism, and pragmatism—are all over the book.

But to say that the book owes a debt to Hirschman is to undersell it. The Hirschmanian perspective has rarely been deployed so well and to such great effect. The reason Hirschman never developed a school of thought, as he himself well recognized, is that his thinking did not lend itself to emulation and replication. The flashes of brilliance, the unexpected turn of argument, and the relish of paradox that characterized his style spawned admirers but not followers.  But we have all of those in this book. Professor Grabel has produced not only an extensively researched book but also one that is tremendously fun to read.

My colleague Roberto Mangabeira Unger likes to say that universal orthodoxy cannot be defeated solely by local heresies; overcoming it requires a universalizable heresy. Professor Grabel disagrees, as would Albert Hirschman. She would be the first to acknowledge that the incremental innovations she discusses in the book do not, in her words, "come close to displacing neoliberalism from top to bottom." But the neoliberal consensus is gone, the institutions that uphold it have become more agnostic and flexible, and new arrangements have sprung up. We do not yet know where the international financial system will end up. Professor Grabel says this is as it should be: enjoy the Hirschmanian moment, and keep your fingers crossed that sanity and common sense will prevail.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker: State Employer-Side Payroll Taxes and Loser Liberalism [feedly]

Dean derives considerable pleasure from inciting food fights between factions of the rich....

State Employer-Side Payroll Taxes and Loser Liberalism
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/state-employer-side-payroll-taxes-and-loser-liberalism

State Employer-Side Payroll Taxes and Loser Liberalism

Dean Baker
Truthout, January 15, 2018

See article on original site

There's an old line that the definition of a liberal is someone who won't take their own side in an argument. The line certainly describes the response of many liberals to the new Republican tax scheme. By capping the deduction for state and local taxes, the Republican tax bill raises taxes on higher-income people in liberal states. Many liberals seem to think this is just fine.

The basic logic of the "this is just fine" gang is that higher-income people have been the winners in the economy over the last four decades. Insofar as we need more revenue for the government, they should be the ones to provide it. Therefore we should not be upset about a provision in the Republican tax plan that means higher taxes for people with money.

But this provision is not raising taxes for all wealthy people; it is raising taxes for a subgroup of higher-income people. That is a very different story. Presumably, we would not think it's ok if the bill just raised taxes on higher-income people of Polish or Italian ancestry, even though as high-income people they may be able to afford a larger tax burden.

In this case, the subgroup of high-income people are those who live in relatively liberal states that provide better services to their population. The reason that states like California and New York have higher taxes is that they have relatively good education and Medicaid systems, and try to provide some income support to their poor.

The Republican plan is to make higher-income people pay a higher price for living in liberal states. In many cases, this relatively powerful group will put pressure on state and local governments to reduce their tax burden, which will force cutbacks in services. The rich will certainly object to any efforts to raise their state and local tax burden further to meet new needs going forward.

There are several routes that have been proposed to circumvent the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes. One being seriously considered in California is to set up state-run charities to which people can contribute and get a 100 percent credit against their state taxes. Since charitable contributions are still fully deductible under the new law, this would effectively preserve the deductibility of state income taxes.

There is a debate among tax experts as to whether this sort of set up would be legal, but it does maintain a certain symmetry in how tax law treats different types of contributions. Under the new law, a high-income person can give to the charity of their choosing and effectively get the government to kick in 37 cents of every dollar.

This means that if a rich person gives $1 million to the "Religious School for the Education of White Nationalists," the taxpayers will chip in $370,000 for the cause. In that situation, it certainly seems reasonable that a $100,000 payment by a high-income person to support Los Angeles public schools should at least get the same 37 percent subsidy.

If that route doesn't pass legal muster, there is an alternative route that is not legally suspect. This involves substituting an employer-side payroll tax for a portion of the state income tax.

To take a simple case, suppose that a state has an income tax of 5 percent. The state could get rid of the income tax and replace it with an employer-side payroll tax of five percent.

The conventional view among economists is that an employer-side payroll tax comes out of wages, which means that employers will eventually reduce workers' pay by the amount of the tax. So a lawyer who had been getting $200,000 a year will see her wages lowered $10,000 as a result of the five percent tax.

This leaves the worker with the same amount of money as she would have had after paying her state taxes, but instead of paying federal income taxes on $200,000 in wages, she would only pay it on $190,000 in wages. This effectively preserves the deductibility of her state income taxes.

An additional benefit of going this route is that the tax is deductible on income taxes for people who don't itemize. That would be a pure gain for people in states like California and New York. We can also leave a portion of the income tax in place for very higher-earners and have a lower cutoff under which the tax is not collected to preserve progressivity.

There will be complicating factors in making this switch, but no tax system, including the current one, is perfect. The key point is that liberal states have the weapons they need to fight back against this pernicious Republican tax plan. The question is whether they will try or just accept yet another massive defeat without a battle.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

DACA Relief Can’t Wait Until March 5 [feedly]

DACA Relief Can't Wait Until March 5
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/daca-relief-cant-wait-until-march-5

There's a widespread misunderstanding about when President Trump's withdrawal of DACA status for young immigrants will put them at risk of deportation. Even some key policymakers assume that nothing bad will happen until March 5, and, thus, there's no pressing need for policymakers to act before then. But that's not the case, and policymakers should act expeditiously to protect these young immigrants.

As Vox's Dara Lind explained in a highly informative article ("Thousands of immigrants are losing their DACA protections already"), substantial numbers of young immigrants protected under DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) have already been affected, and more may be affected with each passing week.

As Lind explained, President Trump's September 5 Executive Order gave people whose DACA status would come up for renewal before March 5 — DACA renewals run for two years at a time — only until October 5 to submit their renewal applications. Moreover, the Administration did not notify immigrants of the October 5 deadline and, as a result, not all of the affected DACA holders applied before the artificial deadline. While 132,000 of the 154,000 affected individuals submitted their renewal applications by October 5, the other 22,000 did not. With each passing week, more of these young 22,000 individuals have been seeing their DACA protections end because their existing two-year DACA status expired without being renewed.

Moreover, some of these 22,000 people did, in fact, submit renewal applications by October 5, but their applications weren't received by then due to Postal Service delays. Lind documents the case of a renewal application that was mailed in mid-September but wasn't delivered to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) until October 6, a day late. CIS said at first that it wouldn't consider such applications. It then said that it would, but only for those who could submit proof that they submitted their applications before the deadline, leaving a number of these individuals unprotected.

Finally, while a federal court has issued a ruling to block the President's order and enable young immigrants with DACA status to once again file renewal applications, that could end quickly. The Administration has vowed to appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the lower court's ruling.

In short, policymakers don't have until March 5 to act. The President and lawmakers of both parties say they want to avoid the dire effects of a DACA cut-off, and a large majority of the public agrees, according to polling. When DACA holders lose DACA protections, the impact is harsh – they lose their protection from deportation, their authorization to work legally, and more. For all these reasons, the time for policymakers to act is now.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dani Rodrik: Telling interests and ideas apart [feedly]

Moderator: I find even Rodriks notes very interesting -- in addition to being very open and engaging as an  economist, he demonstrates great flexibility in seeking the truth of the multifaceted conflicts and ideologies in international relations and economics.

Telling interests and ideas apart
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2018/01/telling-interests-and-ideas-apart.html

A long standing debate in the social sciences is whether behavior is driven by "interests" or "ideas." The debate is central in political science, where it plays out as an argument between realists and constructivists. It is less well articulated in economics, to the discipline's detriment. (See here for my thoughts on what economists would gain by taking the role of ideas seriously.)

As constructivists like to point out, interests are "congealed ideas." Or to put it differently, we don't have interests; we have ideas about what our interests are. Perhaps it's all about interests in the short run and it's all about ideas in the long-run.     

But if so, is there an analytically meaningful distinction between ideas and interests? And could we ever distinguish empirically between cases where outcomes are driven by interests as opposed to ideas?

I have never seen a good treatment of these questions. The two sides of the debate tend to talk across each other. In particular, both realists and constructivists tend to associate the interest-based perspective with rational-choice modeling, which is neither correct nor helpful.

A couple of years ago, I taught a seminar at HKS where the students and I discussed these questions in different domains – civil conflict, international trade, finance, human rights, and many others. It was a useful experience which helped my thinking along, though it also showed how tough it is to sort out the issues involved.

I plan to return to teaching and writing on this topic, but in the meantime here are a few ideas.

Let me begin my interest-based theories. Such theories are characterized by:

·        a parsimonious specification of agents' characteristics

o   based on economic (industry, occupation, etc.), social (class), or personal (dominant ethnic/identity marker) status;

·        a mapping from these characteristics to behavior through a payoff function;

·        usually, though not always, a game in which agents interact. 

Therefore we can say outcomes are "interest-based" when they are the direct result of agents' ex ante characteristics. More specifically,

·        these characteristics must be salient ex ante

·        there must be a tight mapping from these characteristics to perceived payoffs

·        the setting must not admit plausible alternative "causal models"

An important note: the payoffs need not be exclusively material/economic. Saying that behavior is driven by interests does not imply that individuals care exclusively or mostly about their incomes/consumption. These interests could also be defined in terms of cultural values or identities. A Catholic group that is lobbying against abortion is acting in its own interest. Yes, this is a result of some strongly held ideas (interests are indeed "congealed interests"). But individuals or groups favoring their material interest do so also because they think (they have the "idea" that) this is what they should be striving for.     

When are outcomes driven by ideas instead? When behavior cannot be directly predicted by interests as defined above, and when we can trace the impact of prevailing discourses/narratives on changing how interests are perceived. In particular,  

·        we must show ideas have independent traction, by delineating causal chain from ideas to how

o   they shape worldviews,

o   render salient identities, or

o   expand strategy (policy) space

·        importantly, we must also show influence of those ideas cannot be predicted from ex ante salient characteristics/markers of agents.

This way of thinking provides us with a way to testing interest-based arguments. We ask:

·        Are the individual characteristics that define preferences (and produce behavior in question) ex ante salient?

o   such as social, ethnic, or class identity, occupation, sector, weights on material versus other goals, etc. 

·        Is the strategy space ex ante determinate?

·        Are all the relevant options already on the table?

·        Is there unique, plausible model of the world?

o   or are there alternative models that could be plausibly considered?

Applying the framework

I provide two brief applications to show how this works. In the first case, the Reagan income tax cut of 1981, evidence suggests it was ideas that was dominant. In the second case, German support for austerity policies in the euro zone, I argue it was interest.

Reagan tax cut of 1981

This is typically viewed as the result of big business interest in low taxes. And it is true that business eventually became a supporter of low taxes on personal incomes. But as Monica Prasad among others has shown, business opposed those tax cuts in 1980. They were more concerned about cutting the deficit than about the provision of supply-side incentives. In Prasad's (2012) words, "the record could not be clearer that business groups opposed Kemp-Roth."

Ideas appear to have played a crucial role in changing perceptions of interests; it was all about selling a new model of how the world works. Here the policy entrepreneurship of Jack Kemp, Art Laffer, Jude Wanniski was particularly important. The Laffer curve may have been a gimmick, but it was effective in packaging, marketing and framing the tax cut proposal.

Most importantly, it convinced Reagan not only that personal tax cuts would improve incentives, but they would raise revenue. Business remained skeptical, and became a convert to the idea afterwards, once the tax cuts were passed. In other words, income tax cuts did become an interest for big business, but only eventually. It is difficult to attribute the actual reform to interests of big business or any other organized group. It was ideas that seem to have made the difference.  

German support of austerity policies in euro zone

This is typically presented as the result of peculiar German ideas on economics: "Americans are from Keynes; Germans are from Hayek." But one can present a counterargument that stresses the primacy of interests instead.

Note that Germany had strong ex ante salient characteristics that produced an "interest" in austerity:

•       Germany was structurally a strong country (with a current account surplus and full employment)

•        therefore was not in need of explicit stimulus unlike e other countries in the euro zone

•        in any case there were already strong counter-cyclical stabilizers in Germany, which did produce the intended fiscal expansion

•       euro-wide expansionary policies would mainly serve to help/bail out indebted countries

•       the hyperinflation experience had produced very high weight on inflation avoidance

•        yes, an idea, but one already embodied in ex ante preferences

•       Germany had no apparent desire for deepening political integration (which austerity policies would serve to undermine)

Therefore it was in Germany's interest to pursue austerity policies.

***

You can agree or disagree with the arguments in these specific cases. What I am more interested in is the analytical distinction between interest- and ideas-based outcomes. It seems to me that any meaningful, non-tautological distinction must rely on the empirical leverage provided by interest-based theories' reliance on a parsimonious set of attributes/characteristics of agents.

If we can predict outcomes based on these characteristics, by showing that they were salient ex ante and that they directly led to the behavior in question, we can argue that interests win the day. (Once again, these interests need not be material or selfish.) If we need to appeal instead to reconceptualization of objective functions or altered worldviews, and can show that specific ideas were responsible for that, then it is ideas that have the 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Paul Krugman: Know-Nothings for the 21st Century [feedly]

Paul Krugman: Know-Nothings for the 21st Century
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2018/01/paul-krugman-know-nothings-for-the-21st-century.html

"So will our modern know-nothings prevail?":

Know-Nothings for the 21st Century, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: These days calling someone a "know-nothing" could mean one of two things..., you might be comparing that person to a member of the Know Nothing party of the 1850s, a bigoted, xenophobic, anti-immigrant group that at its peak included more than a hundred members of Congress and eight governors. More likely, however, you're suggesting that said person is willfully ignorant, someone who rejects facts that might conflict with his or her prejudices.

The sad thing is that America is currently ruled by people who fit both definitions. ...

The parallels between anti-immigrant agitation in the mid-19th century and Trumpism are obvious. ...

After all, Ireland and Germany, the main sources of that era's immigration wave, were the shithole countries of the day. Half of Ireland's population emigrated in the face of famine, while Germans were fleeing both economic and political turmoil. Immigrants ... were portrayed as drunken criminals if not subhuman. They were also seen as subversives: Catholics whose first loyalty was to the pope. A few decades later..., immigration ... of Italians, Jews and many other peoples inspired similar prejudice.

And here we are again..., there are always new groups to hate.

But today's Republicans ... aren't just Know-Nothings, they're also know-nothings. The range of issues on which conservatives insist that the facts have a well-known liberal bias just keeps widening.

One result of this embrace of ignorance is a remarkable estrangement between modern conservatives and highly educated Americans... Remarkably, a clear majority of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on America. ...

Think of where we'd be as a nation if we hadn't experienced those great waves of immigrants driven by the dream of a better life. Think of where we'd be if we hadn't led the world, first in universal basic education, then in the creation of great institutions of higher education. Surely we'd be a shrunken, stagnant, second-rate society.

And that's what we'll become if modern know-nothingism prevails. ...

Trumpism is as an attempt to narrow regional disparities, not by bringing the lagging regions up, but by cutting the growing regions down. For that's what attacks on education and immigration, key drivers of the new economy's success stories, would do.

So will our modern know-nothings prevail? I have no idea. What's clear, however, is that if they do, they won't make America great again — they'll kill the very things that made it great.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Is your data really oil? [feedly]

Is your data really oil?
https://digitopoly.org/2018/01/17/is-your-data-really-oil/

[with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb, originally published in HBR Online under the title "Is your company's data actually valuable in the AI era?" , 17 Jan 2018. Their book, Prediction Machines, is coming out in April 2018].

AI is coming. That is what we heard throughout 2017 and will likely continue to hear throughout this year. For established businesses that are not Google or Facebook, a natural question to ask is: What have we got that is going to allow us to survive this transition?

In our experience, when business leaders ask this with respect to AI, the answer they are given is "data." This view is confirmed by the business press. There are hundreds of articles claiming that "data is the new oil" — by which they mean it is a fuel that will drive the AI economy.

If that is the case, then your company can consider itself lucky. You collected all this data, and then it turned out you were sitting on an oil reserve when AI happened to show up. But when you have that sort of luck, it is probably a good idea to ask "Are we really that lucky?"

The "data is oil" analogy does have some truth to it. Like internal combustion engines with oil, AI needs data to run. AI takes in raw data and converts it into something useful for decision making. Want to know the weather tomorrow? Let's use data on past weather. Want to know yogurt sales next week? Let's use data on past yogurt sales. AIs are prediction machines driven by data.

But does AI need your data? There is a tendency these days to see all data as potentially valuable for AI, but that isn't really the case. Yes, data, like oil, is used day-to-day to operate your prediction machine. But the data you are sitting on now is likely not that data. Instead, the data you have now, which your company accumulated over time, is the type of data used to build the prediction machine — not operate it.

The data you have now is training data. You use that data as input to train an algorithm. And you use that algorithm to generate predictions to inform actions.

So, yes, that does mean your data is valuable. But it does not mean your business can survive the storm. Once your data is used to train a prediction machine, it is devalued. It is not useful anymore for that sort of prediction. And there are only so many predictions your data will be useful for. To continue the oil analogy, data can be burned. It is somewhat lost after use. Scientists know this. They spend years collecting data, but once it has produced research findings, it sits unused in a file drawer or on back-up disk. Your business may be sitting on an oil well, but it's finite. It doesn't guarantee you more in the AI economy than perhaps a more favorable liquidation value.

Even to the extent that your data could be valuable, your ability to capture that value may be limited. How many other sources of comparable data exist? If you are one of many yogurt vendors, then your database containing the past 10 years of yogurt sales and related data (price, temperature, sales of related products like ice cream) will have less market value than if you are the only owner of that type of data. In other words, just as with oil, the greater the number of other suppliers of your type of data, the less value you can capture from your training data. The value of your training data is further influenced by the value generated through enhanced prediction accuracy. Your training data is more valuable if enhanced prediction accuracy can increase yogurt sales by $100 million rather than only $10 million.

Moreover, the ongoing value of data usually comes from the actions you take in your day-to-day business — the new data you accrue each day. New data allows you to operate your prediction machine after it is trained. It also enables you to improve your prediction machine through learning. While 10 years of data on past yogurt sales is valuable for training an AI model to predict future yogurt sales, the actual predictions used to manage the supply chain require operational data on an ongoing basis. And this is the important point for today's incumbent companies.

An AI startup that acquires a trove of data on past yogurt sales can train an AI model to predict future sales. It can't actually use its model to make decisions unless the startup obtains ongoing operational data to learn from. Unlike startups, large enterprises generate operational data every day. That's an asset. The more operations, the more data. Furthermore, the owner of the operation can actually make use of the prediction. It can use the prediction to enhance its future operation.

In the AI economy, the value of your accumulated data is limited to a one-time benefit from training your AI model. And the value of training data is, like oil or any other input, influenced by the overall supply — it's less valuable when more people have it. In contrast, the value of your ongoing operational data is not limited to a one-time benefit, but rather provides a perpetual benefit for operating and further enhancing your prediction machine. So, despite all the talk about data being the new oil, your accumulated historical data isn't the thing. However, it may be the thing that gets you to the thing. Its value for your future business prospects is low. But if you can find ways to generate a new, ongoing data stream that delivers a performance advantage in terms of your AI's predictive power, that will give you sustainable leverage when AI arrives.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Why a Successful Union Organizer Thinks Traditional Organizing is a Lost Cause

https://portside.org/node/16301

Why a Successful Union Organizer Thinks Traditional Organizing is a Lost Cause Rick Wartzman  January 16, 2018 Beyond Chron Instead of being sufficiently innovative, says Seattle SEIU Local 775 David Rolf, most labor leaders have been "reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s." The result: "Through decades . . . we've seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions." , David Rolf, president of Service Employees International Union Local 775 in Seattle, says the collective-bargaining system is outdated and worker advocates need to search for a new model of unionism.   If anyone has shown a keen understanding of how to unionize workers in America, it's David Rolf. In the 1990s, he was a key player in the Service Employees International Union winning the right to represent some 74,000 home care aides in Los Angeles—the largest union organizing campaign since the 1940s. In his present post, as president of SEIU Local 775 in Seattle, he has spearheaded growth from 1,600 to 45,000 members. In 2014, The American Prospect called Rolf "the most successful union organizer of the past 15 years." All of which makes Rolf's take on the collective-bargaining system—that it is a relic, and that those who truly care about workers should stop focusing their efforts on promoting it—particularly provocative. "I think we made a valiant . . . bet that if we put enough talent and enough resources behind traditional union organizing that we could somehow bring back the old model," Rolf told me on the latest episode of my podcast, The Bottom Line. "It wasn't the wrong theory to try necessarily. . . . But ultimately, when you try something over and over again and cannot achieve the results you want, it's time to try something new." Instead of being sufficiently innovative, Rolf adds, most labor leaders have been "reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s." The result: "Through decades . . . we've seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions." Today, less than 6.5% of the private-sector workforce in the United States is unionized, a steady drop from nearly 35% in 1955, 26% in 1975, and 10% in 1995. To move forward, Rolf has plenty of ideas, including promoting worker ownership and introducing "ethical workplace" certification and labeling programs designed to appeal to socially conscious consumers. Especially important, he believes, is to supplant firm-by-firm bargaining with a European-style paradigm in which representatives of the employees, employers, and the government set standards for wages and benefits throughout an entire industry or across a geographic area. "The more there's bargaining centralization," Rolf says, "the less anti-union the culture is, the more union coverage you have in the workplace, the lower inequality is within the overall society, the lower the level of gender wage inequality is, and the more time people get for social and leisure activity." Another part of Rolf's strategy has been to build advocacy organizations like the Fight for $15, which, in his words, has put forth a "bold and morally compelling demand" to elevate the pay of more than 20 million low-wage workers. Whether a critical mass of labor leaders will ever agree with Rolf and push hard to replace the status quo is far from certain. But nobody, he says, should interpret the organizing triumphs that he and a relatively small number of others around the country have enjoyed as a sign that 20th century trade unionism can survive the 21st. "Overall, the trend lines are not good," Rolf says, suggesting that the current system is simply "marking time until its eventual extinction." "It's not to say that you can't find a few dozen black rhinos left in the wild somewhere," he continues, "but that shouldn't make us think that they're suddenly going to take over the world." This story first appeared in Capital and Main