De zeci de ani, economiştii au acordat atenţie scăzută ideei de monopsoniu – o putere pe care angajatorii o pot avea pentru a suprema salariile. Acum o vală de cercetări sugerează că această fenomen este peste tot, iar o carte nouă argumentează că este cheia pentru înţelegerea inegalităţii de astăzi. Planet Money Podcast The Indicator Podcast Planet Money Newsletter Archive Planet Money Summer School Despre NPR App
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RSS link Get perks with [Podcast Title]+ Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed. This article first appeared in the Planet Money newsletter. You can sign up here. This is Part 2 of the Planet Money newsletter's series on "monopsony power." The first story centered on the labor economics of the classic sci-fi horror movie Alien as an introduction to an extreme version of the concept. Last week we began our monopsony story with Alien. This time we're starting with something even more exciting: an afternoon tea. It was the early 1930s in Britain. And a young economist named Joan Robinson and her husband were having tea at their home near Cambridge University. Chamomile? Oolong? We don't know. But we do know their guest was B.L. Hallward, a scholar of ancient Greece. That seemingly random detail becomes important to this story. In the years after this meeting, Robinson would go on to become an influential author, a rabble-rousing professor, and a celebrated member of the "The Cambridge Circus," an intellectual group closely associated with John Maynard Keynes during the Keynesian revolution. But when she sat down for tea with Hallward in the early 1930s, Robinson was far from achieving all of that. She wasn't yet a professor. She had no influential books or papers. And, like many women at the time, she was struggling to break into a male-dominated field that wasn't exactly rolling out the welcome mat. by Ramsey & Muspratt, bromide print, 1920s
National Portrait Gallery London/Wikimedia Commons
hide caption Robinson, however, was writing her first book, and it would help change everything for her. Probably because the book was so brilliant and audacious. With it, Robinson aimed to demolish an important pillar of old-school economics and replace it with something new. She would give this book the title The Economics of Imperfect Competition. For a long time, economists had focused on the opposite — the economics of perfect competition. It's still a staple in Econ 101. Think a bajillion businesses competing. Infinite consumer and worker choices. No one has real power. Intense competition acts as a check against a company's worst impulses. They can't jack up prices because competitors can just swoop in and undercut them at any time. And they can't underpay workers because rival firms will poach them away. It paints a sort of dream version of the free market where there is no power, no exploitation, no shenanigans — and outcomes almost always serve the public interest. The problem? Economists knew the real world often didn't look like the fantasyland that they sketched on their blackboards. They weren't naive. They knew markets could be uncompetitive. Since at least the 16th century, for example, scholars had used the term "monopoly" to refer to situations where a single seller dominates a market. But Robinson, as she was writing her book, noticed something was missing: there was no word for when a single buyer dominates a market. It's a concept that's especially important for the labor market — because employers buy our labor. What would it mean for workers and society if there was something like monopoly power on the buyer side? Calling a company "a monopoly buyer" was kinda awkward. Because monopoly is a Frankenstein word stitched together using roots from ancient Greek — and it means one seller. So "a monopoly buyer" would translate to "one seller buyer"? It didn't make any sense. This is why that random detail that Robinson was having tea with that scholar of the classical world, B.L. Hallward, is important. Because Hallward was familiar with ancient Greek. Robinson told Hallward that she wanted to coin a similar word to "monopoly," but one that centered on buying instead of selling. They played around with Greek words, and they settled on "monopsony." Monopsony is a cool word for an important idea, especially in labor markets: when employers face limited competition for workers, they gain power to pay them less and treat them worse than they otherwise could. While Robinson and other scholars believed monopsony power could be a significant force in the economy, for a long time mainstream economists treated monopsonies as a kind of unicorn — found only in rare circumstances, like small towns with a single dominant employer or companies that employ highly specialized kinds of workers who don't have other job options. But in a new book, The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It, the economist Arindrajit Dube offers a theory — drawing on a growing body of peer-reviewed research — that monopsony power is much more widespread throughout the economy than previously thought, even in markets that at first blush seem rather competitive. And that matters because monopsony power could be used to suppress wages. "The truth is employers have a lot of real power over setting wages, and when that power goes unchecked, paychecks stay smaller than they should be," Dube says. Without fierce competition checking how employers treat and pay workers, companies may need something else to check their power. Dube argues one important reason why income inequality has exploded in America since the 1980s is due to a systematic erosion of countervailing forces to monopsony power. Think like a federal minimum wage that's barely budged, laxer antitrust enforcement, declining labor unions, and a vibe shift in corporate boardrooms away from concerns about pay fairness. But Dube offers some optimism in The Wage Standard.
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