Fresh audio product: the lesser, meaner generation of neolibs
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 17, 2025 Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards, talks about the IQ- and race-obsessed goldbugs of second generation neoliberalism
Fresh audio product: financiers on university boards; the politics of climate
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 10, 2025 Charlie Eaton and Alina Gibadulina on the increasing prominence of hedge fund and private equity titans on elite university boards (paper here) • Malcolm Harris, author of What’s Left, on a trio of political approaches to the climate crisis
Fresh audio product: the tariffs
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
April 3, 2025 Jason Wade of the UAW explains the union’s endorsement of Trump’s auto tariffs • Sam Gindin, author of this article and former long-time adviser to what used to be known as the Canadian Autoworkers Union, on what issues the tariff controversy obscures
Fresh audio product: Trump & the courts, class & elections, hipster nihilists
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
March 27, 2025 Samuel Moyn on Trump and the courts • Chris Maisano, author of this article, on class and politics • Evgenia Kovda on hipster nihilism (article here)
Fresh audio product: professional-class liberalism (and the PMC)
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
March 20, 2025 Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer, editors of Mastery and Drift, on professional class liberalism • a brief reprise of a 2019 interview with Gabriel Winant on the PMC
Fresh audio product: Marx’s ethics, and the effects of the BLM demos on police budgets
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
March 13, 2025 Vanessa Wills, author of Marx’s Ethical Vision, on the morality behind Marxian “science” • Mathis Ebbinghaus on the effects of the summer 2020 anti-cop protests on police budgets (paper here)
Fresh audio product: Silicon Valley politics, neofeudalism
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
March 6, 2025 Ben Tarnoff on tech worker militancy, the bosses’ crackdown and hard turn to the right • Jodi Dean, author of Capital’s Grave, on neofeudalism
NYC murder count revisiting old lows
Donald Trump and his loyal army of right-wing blowhards like to scream, as he did back in 2023, that “MURDERS & VIOLENT CRIME HIT UNIMAGINABLE RECORDS!” in New York City. Of course he had a particular interest in making that claim—he was being prosecuted by both state and city back then, and he thought false claims about violent crimes would me him look innocent and prosecutors look unfairly obsessed. But despite being fictitious, this sort of bloviating did have broader unfortunate effects, scaring suburbanites and winning votes for right-wing politicians in and around the city.
Actual statistics from the NYPD tell a different story: the pandemic surgelette has largely been reversed, and the murder rate in particular is revisiting old lows. Here’s the story in a picture:
Connoisseurs of crime stats recommend looking at the murder rate as the best measure of serious offenses. Victim reports of other kinds of crime can vary with time, as can police classification of those reports. Murders are generally very well reported and there’s much less room for classification errors: a corpse has an evidentiary status that a missing wallet lacks.
As the graph shows, 2024’s body count of 382 was the lowest since 2019’s 319, and is well below 2012’s 419. And it’s down 83% from 1990’s peak of 2,262. Recent numbers are far from “UNIMAGINABLE”—one can imagine nearly anything—but they’re certainly nowhere near a RECORD!
We’re only a couple of months into 2025, but the stats so far this year are looking even better: murders are down 25% from the same period last year (ending March 2, to be precise). If this trend holds for the rest of the year—a big if, for sure—there will be 288 murders, which would be the lowest annual death toll since 1951.
Let’s see if this enters The Discourse™.
Fresh audio product: worker-led organizing, the German election
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
February 27, 2025 Eric Blanc, author of We Are the Union, on worker-led organizing (Amazon, Starbucks, etc.) • Molly O’Neal, Quincy Institute fellow, on the German election
Fresh audio product: Trump and empire, is King Donald a neoliberal?
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
February 20, 2025 Anatol Lieven looks at the global dimensions of Trumpism • Quinn Slobodian muses on whether Trump is a neoliberal, and examines the three major strands of DOGE-ism (NYRB article here)
No, federal spending and employment are not “out of control”
Among the leading fantasies of the moment are that federal employment and spending are “out of control,” so drastic action is needed to put things back in order. These are lies. Some people who utter these lies probably know better and some don’t, but they’re still lies.
First, let’s look at federal expenditures and revenues as a percent of GDP. (These come from table 3.2 in the national income accounts, by the way.) People who want to deceive will often cite raw dollar amounts to amplify the gee-whiz factor, but the only honest way to render these quantities over time is by comparing them to total economic output. You could, if you had deceptive intentions, say, “Federal spending is up by $2.3 trillion over the last five years.” Which is true, but GDP is up by $7.8 trillion.
Aside from surges around recessions (mid-1970s, early 1980s, 2008–2010) and the covid pandemic, the expenditures line has been essentially flat for the last 40 years. A serious problem, if you’re concerned about debt and deficits—I’ll address that some other time—is that, aside from the late 1990s, revenues haven’t kept up with spending since around 1970. They took hits from George W. Bush’s tax cuts after 2001 and from Trump’s after 2017, but the revenue line has also been essentially flat for decades, just at a level well below spending. Funnily, the people most concerned about debts and deficits—rich people and those who shill for them—are the ones most opposed to paying taxes.
And now federal employment, graphed below as a share of total employment and the population.
Both are in downtrends. In 1950, back when America was Great, federal employment was 4.4% of total employment and 1.3% of the population. In 2024, it was 1.9% of employment and 0.9% of the population. Both are exactly the same as when Trump took office—there was no surge under Biden. Both are well below where they were when Reagan took office.
Not that this will have any effect on the Discourse™. But hope dies last.
Fresh audio product: untangling DEI, the history of “choice”
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
February 13, 2025 Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò picks apart the contradictory strands of the DEI obsession • Sophia Rosenfeld, author of The Age of Choice, explores this history of that concept over the last few centuries
Fresh audio product: Christian nationalism, Trump’s sovereigntists
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
February 6, 2025 Kristin Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, on Christian nationalism • Jennifer Middlestadt, author of this article, on “sovereigntism,” the foreign policy of Trump et al.
Fresh audio product: broligarchs and their scribes, the New York intellectuals
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):
January 30, 2025 Eoin Higgins, author of Owned, on tech moguls and the journalists, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who work for them • Ronnie Grinberg, author of Write Like a Man, on the mostly male, mostly Jewish New York intellectuals
More on union density: who and where
A follow-up to yesterday’s post about historical trends in union density. Today, a look at demographics and geography.
Once upon a time, the stereotypical union member was a factory worker. That hasn’t been the case for a long time. In 2024, manufacturing accounted for 10% employment and only 8% of union membership. In 1983, the numbers were very different: 22% of employment and 30% of union membership. Last year, not quite 8% of manufacturing workers were unionized—higher than private services, where it’s under 6%—but that’s down hard from 28% in 1983.
demographics
That modal union member of the mind was also typically male. No longer. Last year, 10.2% of male workers were unionized, not much higher than the 9.5% among women. And notional modal member was often white too. As the graph below shows, union density is higher among black Americans than any other racial/ethnic group.
Unions also narrow pay gaps among disfavored groups (graph below). The union premium is higher for women than men, for Hispanics/Latinos and for black workers than for whites (see the column on the right for details). Unions narrow the black/white weekly wage gap by 4 percentage points and the Hispanic–Latino/white gap by 6 (not graphed, sorry). Sadly, that advantage has been narrowing over time as unions weaken, but it’s still significant.
geography
Union density rates vary widely by state, from North Carolina’s 2.4% to Hawaii’s 26.5%. Details are mapped below.
High-density states are concentrated in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, the West, and offshore. The South is low-union land: of the ten states with a density under 5%, seven are in the South. As I noted yesterday, union density in the states of the former Confederacy averaged 4.3% last year. It averaged 10.9% outside the Confederacy—well over twice as much. W.E.B. Du Bois’s descriptions of the Southern labor market in Black Reconstruction sound quite familiar today.
coda
I usually end these density writeups with a homily. The union premium may be declining, but any premium >0% will inspire bosses to hate unions and want to destroy them—and not just for the higher pay. Unions are a constraint on bosses’ behavior; they can force them to be less racist, less abusive, and less able to fire. But clearly they’ve lost a lot of their bite over time.
And now my standard conclusion:
There are a lot of things wrong with American unions. Most organize poorly, if at all. Politically they function mainly as ATMs and free labor pools for the Democratic party without getting much in return. But there’s no way to end the 40-year war on the US working class without getting union membership up….
It’s still true, though I’ve got to up that count to 45 years or more.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 