Unions Matter for Everyone

A report from the Economic Policy Institute concludes that pay for nonunion workers would be higher if unions had maintained the strength they had in the past.

Unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt. But this union boost to nonunion pay has weakened as the share of private-sector workers in a union has fallen from 1 in 3 in the 1950s to about 1 in 20 today.

For nonunion private-sector men, weekly wages would be an estimated 5 percent ($52) higher in 2013 if private-sector union density (the share of workers in similar industries and regions who are union members) remained at its 1979 level.

Warming Started Earlier

Research published in Nature concludes that anthropogenic climate change began about 180 years ago, well before modern weather records began. That implies we're a bit closer to the suggested 1.5 degree Celsius limit on temperature rise over pre-industrial levels.

Update (September 1):  Data from NASA show that the past 30 years have been quite unusual.

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year.

Trickle Down Threat

Nick Hanauer advocates for a $15 minimum wage and cites research that disputes the idea that wage increases cause higher unemployment. He argues that this idea amounts to an "intimidation tactic" and not real economics.

The two cornerstones of trickle-down economics are:
1. If wages for the poor go up, employment goes down; and
2. If taxes on the rich go up, employment goes down. 

But this isn’t a scientific theory or a law of nature that describes the world in any empirically verifiable way. This is a threat—a moral claim aimed at social control. As such, it is repeated again and again and again, not because it is true, or because the powerful believe it to be true (although some might—self-deception can be a soothing psychic balm). The rich and the powerful relentlessly repeat this claim because if they can persuade the poor and the weak to believe it, it will be very advantageous to the powerful and the rich.

State of the Climate

The annual report shows a number of milestones for 2015.

Update (August 21):  Dahr Jamail has a summary of climate news including the re-emergence of diseases as permafrost melts.