The Lucky Strike Edition

Summary

Slate Money: The Lucky Strike Edition

Date: February 16, 2019
Host: Felix Salmon (Axios)
Panelists: Anna Shymansky, Emily Peck (Huffington Post)
Special Guest: Max Jacobs (Slate, in bonus segment)

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Overview

This episode of Slate Money is titled “The Lucky Strike Edition” and features a lively roundup of major business and finance stories from mid-February 2019. The panel dives into the psychological quirks of tax refunds under new U.S. tax law, explores the implications of Finland's closely-watched universal basic income (UBI) experiment, and examines the recent resurgence of labor activism and strikes in the U.S. Each of these topics is tackled with sharp debate, clear explanations, and playful skepticism. The podcast’s tone is conversational, smart, and sometimes irreverent, with the hosts poking fun at one another and themselves.

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Main Topics and Key Insights

1. Tax Refunds & Withholding Changes

(Starts ~01:32)

• Background:
  Most Americans expect annual tax refunds, a feature of the U.S. tax system that also acts as forced savings. This year, due to changes in tax law and withholding tables under the Trump administration, many people are getting smaller refunds, or even owing money unexpectedly.

• Key Insights:

  • Withholding tables were adjusted to give Americans more take-home pay throughout the year, but this led to smaller refunds at tax time.
  • Although the goal was to let people “feel” the tax cut sooner, psychological research shows people don’t notice small increases in paychecks but do notice big refunds.
  • Fewer Americans are receiving refunds, and more are owing money:

    “One estimate I saw so far was 4 million fewer filers are getting refunds and 4 million more are owing money to the IRS.” — Emily Peck (03:36)

  • The cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions disproportionately affects residents of high-tax states.
  • The psychological value of receiving a lump sum is significant, even if the total benefit is smaller than incremental gains.

    “Your paycheck going up by $25 a week versus a $2,000 bump at the end of the year ... you could have made more money ... but it just does not matter because then you’re not getting that check that you’ve been waiting for all year.” — Emily Peck (10:17)

• Notable Quote:

  “If you have a teeny tiny increase in your check, you’re much less likely [to notice].” — Anna Shymansky (06:41)

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2. Finland’s Universal Basic Income Experiment

(Starts ~10:52)

• Background:
  Finland initiated a closely-observed trial giving 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals a monthly stipend of €560, exploring whether UBI can encourage employment and wellbeing compared to traditional unemployment benefits.

• Key Insights:

  • The trial wasn’t extended or expanded, but wasn’t "cut short" either.
  • Participants reported increased happiness, health, trust in government, and life satisfaction—but not an increase in employment.

    “The real difference was the people who were getting this money were. This is so basic, guys. But they were happier. They had better well-being, they had better health, they had more trust in the government, which was really interesting.” — Emily Peck (13:07)

  • The experiment targeted only unemployed people, so its relevance for true UBI is limited.
  • The psychological pain of losing the benefit was significant:

    “We all react much worse to losing €500 a month than we react to gaining €500 a month.” — Felix Salmon (12:12)

  • Discussion of similar experiments in Kenya and the U.S. clarified that UBI’s benefits are context-dependent and often more pronounced for the poorest.
  • The primary societal benefit in Finland seemed to be increased well-being and trust in government rather than labor force participation.

• Memorable Moment:

  “If you give people more money, are they more likely to work or are they not more likely to work? Because it wasn’t that long ago that if you talked about giving people money, everyone would say, well, if you give people money, they’re going to be less likely to work ... that whole hypothesis has been completely rejected at this point.” — Felix Salmon (17:38)

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3. The Resurgence of Labor Activism and Strikes

(Starts ~20:41)

• Background:
  The U.S. saw a significant uptick in work stoppages and strikes in 2018, led by teacher strikes and walkouts at large corporations like Marriott. The hosts analyze what’s behind this labor revival.

• Key Insights:

  • Work stoppages tracked by the Department of Labor nearly tripled in 2018, largely due to a series of major teachers’ strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and California.
  • Factors include tight labor markets (7 million open jobs), lingering economic inequality despite positive macro indicators, and the influence of social media and post-2016 protest culture.

    “If you look at, like, the share of national income that goes to labor, the share that goes to capital, it has been going more to capital. But when we’ve seen it narrow has been when the economy is doing better, there’s less slack in the market.” — Anna Shymansky (23:01)

  • Social media has enabled new forms of labor organization, especially in sectors traditionally hard to unionize, like retail and tech.
  • Union membership is ticking up slightly after decades of decline.
  • The episode contrasts the U.S. system of enterprise-level unions with industry-wide unionism in Europe (the “Ghent system”).

    “If we have some organized way of telling you what we want and what’s gonna make us happy, that’s gonna be better for both of us.” — Felix Salmon (25:53)

  • Host Emily Peck shares a personal story comparing union vs. non-union outcomes during layoffs at HuffPost and BuzzFeed (26:21).

• Notable Quotes:

  “This was one of the first stories ... where social media was kind of the good guy, that it was allowing people to organize actually in different ways.” — Anna Shymansky (24:47)
  “I feel like this is part of a bigger trend ... people feeling a little bit fed up with not getting what they need to just go to work and like, live their lives.” — Emily Peck (31:01)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Tax Refunds as Nudge Economics:

  “It’s an interesting psychological kind of case study in how money works. Like your paycheck going up by $25 a week versus a $2,000 bump at the end of the year. ... It just does not matter because then you’re not getting that check that you’ve been waiting for all year.”
  — Emily Peck (10:16)

• On Universal Basic Income’s Societal Effect:

  “If you realize if you’re on Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid and you’re receiving substantial amounts of money from the government, you generally like those programs and you like the people who are giving them to you.”
  — Felix Salmon (19:09)

• On the Evolution of Labor Movement:

  “People are finding many different ways to push for what they feel they deserve.”
  — Anna Shymansky (24:47)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |------------------------------|-----------------| | Tax Refunds & Withholding | 01:32–10:52 | | Finland’s UBI Experiment | 10:52–20:41 | | Labor Strikes & Activism | 20:41–31:15 | | Numbers Round | 31:48–38:50 |

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Numbers Round (31:48–38:50)

The hosts each share a number of interest from the week:

• Emily:
  • $450,696 (31:49): The average household income in Atherton, CA, highlighting Silicon Valley’s extreme wealth and housing challenges.
• Felix:
  • 0 (33:02): The number of letters published by the New England Journal of Medicine calling out its failure to adhere to scientific reproducibility guidelines.
• Anna:
  • 1888 (37:03): The year invoked by Trump at a rally to support tariffs; Anna debunks the historical accuracy of his claims.

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Overall Tone and Style

Smart, witty, and informed, the discussion is loaded with quips, gentle mockery, skepticism toward political narratives, and a deep concern for how economic policies affect individuals’ lives. The hosts skillfully balance technical explanations with accessible analogies (e.g., comparing tax refunds to Wall Street bonuses), and the panel dynamics are lighthearted yet substantive.

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Final Thoughts

Listeners will come away understanding how technical shifts in tax policy ripple through personal finances and national politics, why basic income experiments are harder to interpret than headlines suggest, and how labor’s resurgence is both traditional (through strikes) and modern (through social media). Whether you’re an economics novice or a seasoned policy observer, this “Lucky Strike” edition offers depth, clarity, and plenty of moments worth pondering.

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For the bonus content on baseball labor economics, see Slate Plus.

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Lucky Strike edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. Anna Shymansky is here from Finland or, or thereabouts. Yes, Michigan, some northern Michigan, Finland.

[B]

They're all the same.

[A]

Emily Peck is here from the Huffington Post. Hello. Max Jacobs is in the studio to talk about sportsball. Hi, Max. Hello. Max Jacobs is normally on the other side of the glass, but he is going to join us later for a deep dive into the economics of baseball and whether the market is clearing and what's happening with all of these valuable players who don't seem to be able to get a job. That is kind coming up on Slate plus, but before we get there, we have a jam packed show full of labor fights. We have people going on strike, especially teachers and people who work for Marriott and people like that. We're going to talk about why that is happening. We are going to talk about Finland because Finland is fascinating and they kind of did. It's not exactly a universal basic incoming experiment, but it's kind of treated like that. We're going to see how that went and we're going to answer the all eternal question of is it a good thing when people give you money for free? Tough question.

[C]

Spoiler alert.

[A]

Spoiler alert. It's actually a good thing. We are going to start, however, with your tax refund because there's a very good chance that you are trying to or hoping to get a tax refund right now and maybe it's not as big as you might have received in the past. So all of that is coming up on sleet money. So let's start with taxes because it turns out that most Americans get tax refunds. It's this amazing thing that is built into the US Tax system which people don't really talk very much about, which is that it's not just a way of paying your taxes as you go, which is a sensible thing to do because otherwise you don't have the money to pay your taxes when they're due. But it's also a kind of hidden enforced savings mechanism that if you pay a little bit too much in withholding every paycheck, that's a great way of saving up a little money over the course of the year. And then around this time of year when you file your taxes, you get a refund. You're like, oh, free money. And it's your own money that you earned and you overpaid in taxes. But it feels like a lovely surprise and it's actually a way for people to feel better about the whole filing their taxes and paying their taxes thing is because paying your taxes and filing your taxes is associated with receiving a check, and that makes it feel great and it encourages people to pay taxes. And Emily, I guess it's not really working out that way so much this year.

[C]

Well, yeah, I mean, this year there's, there's essentially there's two things going on. First, there was a government shutdown, and that really affected the irs, which is slower to get into tax season this year because of the timing. And, and then of course, this is the first year under the new. With the new tax law in effect. So what's happening is the IRS is a little slower getting the refunds out and processing your refund. And some people are getting surprise tax bills. And it's not clear yet how many people. One estimate I saw so far was 4 million fewer filers are getting refunds and 4 million more are owing money to the IRS. And I, and go ahead.

[B]

I just. And I think it's important to note that it's not necessarily that people are paying higher taxes, it's that you have some people getting smaller refunds. And it really has to do with the changing of the withholding tables.

[C]

Right, that's what I was gonna say. It's actually Trump. I think it's a Trump self own because people's taxes were lower, but the withholding was changed. So your paycheck might have gone up a little bit, you might not have even noticed. But then what you do notice is that your refund went down. And so it feels like you made less money or paid more taxes when you didn't.

[A]

So this is the thing which I don't understand.

[C]

It's a total mess up by this guy.

[A]

So the unbelievable, right, the big question here really is why were the withholding tables changed like this to make people, you know, feel worse about tax season? It's not an obvious thing to do, unless if you want to be a conspiracy theorist about it, unless what you actually wanted from the tax cut was a big boost to business. And as we know, the overwhelming majority of the tax cut was a corporate tax cut, not an individual tax cut. And if you wanted to help corporations, one way you help them is by cutting corporate taxes. But another way you help them is by giving people invisible pay rises that they don't even realize and they just wind up spending they're slightly higher paychecks and all of that money that they spend winds up going to corporations and Corporations wind up with higher revenues and the corporations actually prefer it if you are paid that extra money rather than if it's hidden away in withholding.

[C]

That's a wild conspiracy theory from Felix.

[B]

Yeah, I mean like, I like it. I mean historically the IRS has liked to essentially they want you to get a bigger tax refund mainly because it is far easier to issue a refund check than it is to go after people who haven't paid their taxes.

[A]

And it's interest free money for them. You're, you're basically lending the money, the government money, interest free for the period that they're holding it for you.

[B]

I think there was also the intention to make the system a little bit more effective and they had an like online system where you could better figure out what your withholding should be based on. Like it was more personalized, essentially. The problem is absolutely nobody used it.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So it wasn't, I don't necessarily think it was a kind of grand scheme.

[A]

You're not, you're not buying into the.

[B]

Appreciate that. I appreciate the effort there, but I really do think that it's possible there was the intention to make people feel the tax cut more quickly. So maybe the idea was like, well, I don't want people to wait until tax season to realize that the tax cut potentially or you know, help them. I want them to feel it almost immediately. Of course, the problem with that is that if you have a teeny tiny increase in your check, you're much less likely.

[A]

And I think, yeah, to be honest, I don't really believe my own conspiracy theory, but I do believe the cock up theory, which is exactly this, which is someone in the White House. And you know, I'm going to go on the assumption here that people in the White House are not always terribly smart. Obviously someone in the White House basically said what we should do is make sure that people feel the effects of the tax cuts immediately. So it would be a good idea to reduce the withholding because then you'll see the money in your paycheck immediately, which has a certain intuitive appeal to it. The problem is we know that doesn't work because anyone with a decade long memory, which I'm assuming is no one in the White House will remember that we did this in 2009.

[C]

The payroll tax.

[A]

The payroll tax. And everyone stopped paying payroll taxes in 2009. Everyone basically got that 7.5% extra in their paycheck and it was this huge boost to the economy and it really worked as a fiscal stimulus. And absolutely no one noticed It, Yeah.

[C]

The numbers are just too small. Like if your paycheck also, there's always weird fluctuations in your paycheck because of various, for various reasons. You just, you don't notice that people.

[B]

Don'T make that much money, especially because almost everyone has direct deposit. You're not even looking at your paycheck.

[C]

That's also a good point. And one other thing I would say for the, the refunds going down in areas like where I live in Westchester, they capped the deduction on state and local taxes. And that is a huge, I mean, not a problem because it's all kind of wealthy, ish, upper income people that are hit by this. But it did really lower refunds for a lot of people. And in some cases they capped the.

[A]

Deduction or they just increased the standard deduction.

[C]

They. No, they did two things. Yeah, they capped the deduction for state and local income taxes, I believe to $10,000. That's it. So that's state income plus any property and property taxes, which where I live.

[A]

In Westchester can easily be over $10,000. Right now.

[B]

50.

[C]

I mean, that's crazy. And, and then they also doubled the standard deduction to $24,000. But most of the people who are paying a big state and local tax bill are also paying a lot of mortgage interest on their homes. So they're going to, they're going to go over the 24,000. Even though it's been doubled, they're still going to need to itemize because they're right over the, the interest deduction plus the property tax.

[B]

Yes. I mean, I think that part of this, and I think a big part of this is the withholding table issue, but a part of it is also changes in the tax code where now people who have children, especially lower income people who have children may see a bit more of a bump.

[C]

Yeah, they increase the, the. I'm sorry, Anna, you're about to just say this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, they significantly increased the child tax credit, which I think we can all agree is a good thing. They also increased, I believe, the level at which you get hit with the alternative minimum tax. So that could also, you know, benefit.

[A]

I mean, as we, as we know, as we knew when we were talking about this whole tax deal, number one, it was a corporate tax cut. Let's never forget that. And number two, that in terms of, insofar as it made changes to individuals, it was very hard to predict who would actually wind up paying more, who would wind up paying less, what the effects were. And that is now playing out like, people are slow. People are discovering now, you know, whether they're paying more or less. But also because of this whole withholding issue, they don't actually care whether they're paying more or less in taxes than they did last last year, because what they actually care about is, do I get my $2,000 refund or not?

[B]

It's a.

[C]

It's a really. It's an interesting psychological kind of case study in how money works. Like your paycheck going up by $25 a week versus a $2,000 bump at the end of the year. You could have made more money getting this tax break, but it just does not matter because then you're not getting that check that you've been waiting for all year that you used to go on vacation or, you know.

[A]

Yeah. What I love about this as well is that tax refunds arrive at exactly the same time as Wall street bonuses. They kind of have the same psychological effect, except for they're just much smaller.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So now we can talk about the government sending checks to people in the mail, just like the tax refunds, only you do it regularly, and the government is Finland, and you only do it for 2,000 people. And this is. If you guys remember the universal basic income discussion we had with Annie Lowry a few months back, this is an actual universal basic income trial in Finland, which was cut short. And we, you know, because basically it was costing a lot of money. And now we are beginning to get the preliminary results.

[B]

It wasn't actually cut short.

[A]

It wasn't cut short?

[B]

Yeah. No, I think, like, there. There was, like, a question thing I went to where they said it wasn't actually cut short, it just wasn't extended.

[C]

Yeah, it was.

[B]

There's still another year that it's going. Yeah.

[A]

So it is. Is it still going on?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Okay, so it's still. Because I thought it would be crazy.

[C]

Wait, I thought it was 2017. 2018. Done.

[B]

I'm not 100% sure about that, but I know they didn't cut it short.

[A]

But in any case.

[B]

But they're not extending it.

[A]

They're not extending it. And one of the things that came out of the preliminary results, we're not going to see the final results for a while. And the preliminary results are preliminary, and they are. They are based on survey responses that only a third of the recipients actually bothered to respond. And, you know, there's a bunch of asterisks here, but one of the things you really notice is that when the trial ended, the recipients were like, oh, shit. I'm getting €500amonth less than I was. That's a massive pay cut. This is really hard. And that we all. It's just basic human nature. We all react much worse to losing €500amonth than we react to gaining €500amonth. If you give someone an extra €500amonth for a couple of years, like they did, and then take that €500amonth away from them, they're like, shit. I was actually getting used to that. I was relying on that. And now my life is much worse.

[C]

I wanted to back up a second and talk about the preliminary results that the Finnish government released this week, which were really interesting. And it just looked at the first year they were doing the experiment where they were giving people about €560amonth. And they compared people who were getting that money and, you know, people who weren't. And I guess the point of the experiment was to see if getting this money, no strings, was better than getting unemployment insurance, which you lose if you get any kind of work, basically. So the idea is to get more people working, like we discussed with Annie Lowery, and to just get more people working, basically. And so the preliminary results really didn't show much of a difference in terms of the number of people who were able to work because they would get the stipend. The real difference was the people who were getting this money were. This is so basic, guys. But they were happier. They had better well being, they had better health, they had more trust in the government, which was really interesting. They had more confidence in their future. Just having the stability of the money coming in is really, really beneficial.

[A]

And what's more, it's worth noting that this was done in a kind of interesting way that they just threw darts at a map of poor people in Finland, basically, and through 2000 darts, and then 2000 lucky people managed to get this and then compared it to like 5,000 people who weren't hit by a dud. And one of the things that that does is it means that the people who got this were surrounded by people who weren't getting it. And one. And so what you don't measure in this trial is one of the things that UBI proponents really talk about quite a lot is the sort of mass effects of a universal basic income. When an entire village or an entire city or an entire country is all everyone is getting the universal basic income, a social effect. And that's. And that you don't see in this kind of a trial.

[B]

Well, also, this was not UBI in the sense that it was just targeted towards unemployed people.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which is another issue.

[A]

You needed to be poor, basically.

[B]

Yeah. And I do think, although I think there are some definitely good things that came out of this in the sense of realizing, which I think makes some intuitive sense, that if you're giving people benefits or you're giving people cash, one they have a lot more control over. So it makes sense that they would feel better about their lives because this is something that they have more control over. Now, I sometimes push back on some of the UBI zealots when they act like, oh, well, look what happened in Kenya. We can replicate that in a very, very different country. And that's why I kind of imagine that shifting towards more of a UBI structure probably would have some of these, these benefits we're seeing in terms of people's quality of life. Do I think they would have the real, like, revolutionary benefits that we're seeing in poor? Well, I'm not so sure.

[A]

Let's be clear about this. The results of the Kenya UBI trial are not in yet. We literally do not know what we're seeing in Kenya because it hasn't been going on very long and the trial is happening right now, but no results have come out.

[C]

I mean, I think that that makes sense. Forgive me if I butcher this, but there's an economic theory called marginal utility, right. It's like a dollar is more valuable to a poor person than it is to, like, Warren Buffett. So of course, like, UBI would be a miracle in some place like Kenya and like less of a miracle.

[A]

Although it depends how much. Like, you know, the people receiving money in Kenya are not receiving €500amonth.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But they don't need that to change their lives.

[A]

But what we do have a little bit of evidence on from Kenya is what happens if you just drop a huge amount of money from a helicopter on top of people and just give them a single big check of like over $2,000, something like that. We know that has short term significant positive effects. We are beginning to learn that there's a certain amount of mean reversion and those positive effects kind of dissipate a little bit over time. What's interesting also when we're just beginning to see this is there's interesting spillover effects into, like, neighboring villages. And anyway, there's the whole. We can talk about Kenya, but like, the Finland question is a slightly different one, which is what happens when you just take a relatively small number of distributed poor people in Finland and give them extra €500. And I think that, Emily, you're right. The headline result here is it's good. They are happier, they are healthier.

[B]

Yeah, right. It's not necessarily getting them to work, though. And I, and I do think that was the initial point of the study. And while it's still very early, so it is entirely possible that this could change as we move forward. I guess this is where I wonder if you are going to get the benefit that we have seen a little bit in poorer countries where you see more business development and people. This actually does kind of spur people on in terms of job growth, which I definitely. We haven't seen that. And I wonder if that will actually be the case.

[A]

I want to jump in and just say, I am so happy that this is the frame of the discussion. That the frame of the discussion is if you give me, if you give people more money, are they more likely to work or are they not more likely to work? Because it wasn't that long ago that if you talked about giving people money, everyone will say, well, if you give people money, they're going to be less likely to work because they'll be like, why do I need to work if I'm getting this free money? And no one is saying that. And no one is even like, that whole hypothesis has been, has been completely rejected at this point.

[B]

Right. I mean, I do think it's important just to note a little bit that in the 70s in the US when we did have a little bit of like the kind of negative income tax, there was an effect on employment, especially. No, no, no, no. There was a reduced. No, there was definitely, was definitely negative. That was why they stopped it. Now, I don't. I ultimately agree with you. I do think that more and more data we're seeing now, it suggests that if you give people money, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to reduce labor force participation. But I just want to clarify that.

[C]

The other thing I was going to say is in addition to the benefit of better health and happiness, there was this. There were these other interesting results about trust in government and civic society. And I feel like this is a very, very positive result, considering right now we're in sort of this democratic crisis where people don't trust the government and there's populist uprisings and, you know, real threats to democracy. It's interesting that this social. There's a social benefit that the government could do that would make people more attached.

[A]

And I think this is true about cash transfers from the Government in general is that if you realize if you're on Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid and you're, you know, receiving substantial amounts of money from the government, you generally like those programs and you like the people who are giving them to you. And, you know, there are weird sort of take your government hands off my Medicare types, but like those. Those people, you know, notwithstanding, I think that you do find. You're absolutely right, that insofar as the government is performing a redistributed function and is giving money to people who need money, that makes people like government more.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, the only thing I would say is that Scandinavia has notoriously high satisfaction with government. So I do wonder how much we can extrapolate there. But it's possible. And I do agree with you that I think when government programs work well, people like them.

[C]

I mean, one of the reasons, I guess they're scaling back in Finland is because they already have great benefits already. Free college.

[B]

It was a change in government.

[C]

Free health care.

[B]

They went from a. They went from a more liberal to a more conservative government.

[C]

But still, again, free college, free health care.

[B]

Well, it's not free. They're paying.

[C]

Yes, they pay taxes, but I pay a lot of taxes, too, and I don't get, again, free college, free health care. You don't have to save for it.

[A]

You know, and that's like, free money. I'm like, I'm telling you, free money is always a vote winner.

[C]

Yeah, bribes.

[A]

Emily, we're all on strike. Or for the first time in living memory, or at least since the sort of 1990s, there has been a significant number of industrial actions and work stoppages and this kind of thing. In the grand fight between labor and capital, it looks like labor is out marching on the war path. What's going on?

[C]

Yay, labor. So the number of work stoppages that the Department of Labor tracks almost tripled to 20 in 2018, mainly because of all the teacher strikes. There are teacher strikes in Virginia, a bunch of places. And there was a strike. Marriott workers went on strike. Oh, the teacher strikes were in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky and Arizona. So a lot of people went on strike.

[A]

And it continued into this year in West Virginia.

[C]

Yeah, it doesn't look like it's stopping. LA just had a big strike, and West Virginia teachers are expected to go on strike pretty soon. And the piece we're talking about ran in Bloomberg. It was written by my friend Janet Paskin, and she also talked about sort of, like, unconventional things that workers did this year to get their companies to cut out the bullshit. Like the workers at Market Basket protesting to get their CEO rehired, or Starbucks employees trying to get better needle disposal mechanisms because they were tired of picking up, like, old heroin needles and Google workers going, forcing the company to stop doing certain government contracts and forcing the company to get rid of arbitration like we've talked about. So 2018 was kind of a surprisingly good year for labor.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think that obviously overall capital's still doing a lot better than labor. Yeah, no, no, I wasn't saying that as a good thing. I was just saying that the fact. But I do think it's interesting because I've heard different kind of theories posited. And one is that, like, post Trump, there's been this kind of protest culture that has been created and even encouraged by some companies, and that now people are saying, okay, well, now we're going to protest these things that are actually happening at the companies, which. Which I think is a good thing. And I also think you can't completely divorce it from what's happening in the overall economy. That historically, when you have a better economy, workers have a little bit more power. And actually, if you look at, like, the share of national income that goes to labor, the share that goes to capital, it has been going more to capital. But when we've seen it narrow has been when the economy is doing better, there's less slack in the market.

[A]

So the headline number is 7 million, which is the number of unfilled job openings in America, which has been up there. This is an unprecedentedly enormous number of unfilled job openings. And we are back above 7 million. And when there are that many open jobs and you're a miserable public school teacher making not very much money and having to, you know, pay your, you know, buy pencils to your own kids and all of that kind of stuff, you're like, look, you know, there really, I can just quit. I can go and get a better job somewhere else. And that gives you the kind of incentive to say, this is really stupid. I think we should get together and we should demand better working conditions, better pay, whatever it is that we need in order to just say, let's make sure that jobs in general are improving in line with the demand for labor.

[C]

And I think also as. I think there's kind of like the pendulum swung a little too far in capital's direction. And you hear about the economy being great, you hear about the unemployment rate being really low, and then you go to work and you haven't gotten a raise in, you know, 10 years or something. Your salary is barely budged and your outrage is already amped up maybe because of 2016, because of the activism you're seeing there. And it's just sort of like that spark gets lit somehow. You know, people were ready to say something. Oh, and plus the Internet, well, that.

[B]

Was the thing that I actually thought was kind of interesting because I feel like this was one of the first stories in a while I've heard where social media was kind of the good guy, that it was allowing people to organize actually in different ways. And this, this was one of the things that they pointed out in the article that it wasn't just through traditional unions that not to say that that's a good or a bad thing, but that people are finding many different ways to push for what they feel they deserve.

[C]

And especially in the retail space where, I mean there's this barrier to unionizing because they're all spread out in different locations. The Internet really helps retail workers kind of come together and take action that we haven't seen before.

[A]

And unionization is going up as well. I mean, we are seeing, this is another thing. After decades and decades of long term secular decline, there are, there is a small but noticeable uptick in, in new in workforces unionizing, which again I think makes people happier. I think that what you have found, what I certainly experienced when I moved here in the 90s, is this idea that management is in charge of sort of keeping their employees happy and they feel like they know best how to do that. And at some point the employees go, well, actually you don't necessarily know best how to do that. And the mechanisms that you think that you have in place for knowing what we want are not actually proving effective. And if we have some organized way of telling you what we want and what's gonna make us happy, that's gonna be better for both of us.

[C]

I thought about that as it relates to myto me personally recently because at HuffPost, I'm in a union, the reporters are in a union. And at buzzfeed, until very recently, they just announced they were unionizing this week. They didn't have a union. And we both experienced layoffs a few weeks ago. And at HuffPost like as layoffs were coming and we knew it, the union emailed all of us and said, here's what it says in the contract, here's what your severance is going to be. So you peace of mind that at least if you were gonna get laid off, you knew what you were getting at BuzzFeed. They didn't have that. They got laid off. And whereas our workers had like a two month severance at a minimum, they had to take to social media and fight because they weren't gonna get paid out their vacation days. And I think they did wind up winning that fight, but they had to wage a social media unconventional, un unionized kind of campaign to do it. So it just kind of shows.

[A]

Which is itself another form of what you were just talking about, which is like semi formal ways of employees getting together and demanding changes which don't necessarily involve a union.

[B]

Yeah. And also to push unions to be better. I mean, I know that was in one of the teacher strikes. They actually didn't like the agreement that the unions had come to, so they kind of went around that. And I think that it's a good thing if you have people who are pushing unions to actually do things that are in the best interest of workers at that company and also potentially people who want to work at that company. I mean, I think it's interesting to kind of look at the way that unions work in the United States versus how they work in some other countries, because we have more like enterprise level as opposed to the kind of secular unionization that you see in other countries.

[C]

And can you explain that more?

[B]

So it's basically just in other countries, it's sometimes called like the Ghent system that you have in a number of northern European countries where entire industries essentially have a union that represents them. And they also tend to give out actually like unemployment insurance. And so they also tend to discipline people and they work closely with the management as well. So it's, it's not as an antagonistic relationship as we have in the United States, whereas in the United States it. Although this is not a hundred percent because there are some industry, but mostly it tends to be kind of company by company. And that can then put companies that aren't unionized, they're going to then potentially have an advantage over people who are unionized. So I, I just think when we think about how the, the labor movement can move forward, it's interesting to think about how it could change and not necessarily have to be exactly what it was in the past.

[C]

Right. And I think that's what we're seeing and what this piece really showed. And you could see it too in like, for example, $15 an hour minimum wage. That was really sort of.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That's, that's a classic example of like a secular thing which benefits everyone rather than just the existing employees. Of the company. And I think that, to Anna's point, you know, the unhelpful forms of unionization are the ones where you have an existing workforce who's protecting itself, often at the expense of people who aren't employed at the company. And that, you know, often winds up with weird, like, contractor style situations.

[B]

I mean, that's actually a lot of the history of the unions in the United States. I mean, just to be clear like that, that has always been an issue, right?

[A]

And that's. And that's an issue. And that's, you know, and that's how you wind up with, you know, the people moving the pianos at Carnegie hall, making $450,000 a year and that kind of thing. And that's not the top of the list of awesome things that unions do. But if you can use a whole bunch of different mechanisms, including increasingly social media pressure to get entire industries to start moving and states to implement minimum wages and bring a focus to issues that often the workforce cares much more about, the management does, that's going to help improve communications between labor and management. And that's ultimately one of the main demands that virtually all workforces have, that virtually all employees have. It's like, why aren't management listening to us?

[C]

One thing I would say a headwind here, which Janet mentions in the piece, is the Supreme Court, which is kind of anti labor right now. I mean, it's a conservative court. There were two rulings that went not labor's way last year, which was what made this news from the Labor Department all the more sort of surprising, I guess, or encouraging for people who were discouraged by the rulings last year. And the other thing I would say is I feel like this is part of a bigger trend in the country where a lot of these things, $15 an hour, minimum wage paid, leave, stuff like that is all getting, is all extremely popular, you know, among workers and Americans. And I feel like it's all a piece of people feeling a little bit fed up with not getting what they need to just go to work and like, live their lives.

[A]

So I think, I think we're going to continue to talk about labor versus capital and Slate Plus. I feel like we're going to bring Max Jacobs in and he is going to explain the fight between some poor underpaid workers known as baseball players and their beleaguered managers who, who are billionaires owning baseball teams. This is a kind of interesting thing. We will talk about that in Slate Plus. But before we get to Slate plus, let's have a Numbers round. Emily, do you have a number?

[C]

I have a number.

[A]

What's your number?

[C]

My number is $450,696. That is the average household income in 2017 in Atherton, California, which is in Silicon Valley.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Yeah. And it's the most expensive, the richest place on Bloomberg's Richest Place Index. Sheryl Sandberg lives there, and Eric Schmidt also lives there because it's close to Google and Facebook and Stanford. And also this week was another piece on just how wildly expensive it is to live in Silicon Valley right now and how at first you're like, oh, who cares if Sheryl Sandberg's property taxes go up? But it's not about, you know, it's about, like, the police and the teachers who have to live there, too. And it's increasingly a really unaffordable, unpleasant place to live, even though it's sunny and it's California.

[A]

This is a perennial, perennial story about getting worse about Palo Alto and the environs. But, yeah, it does just only ever seem to get worse.

[C]

I mean, the chart that cnet, you know, made up was. It was. The line was just. I'm gesturing with my hands. I'm sorry, but the line was just going straight up and, like, commute times three hours worse in the nation, and long commutes are very distressing.

[A]

My number is zero. There's a fascinating new paper that came out by Ben Goldacre, who's the guy in England who's really big on, like, reproducibility of scientific papers and trying to make sure they conform to generally accepted scientific principles and these kind of things. And so what he did is he took some of the biggest and most important medicine scientific journals in the world, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet and others, and went through everything that they published and tried to work out when the studies that they published complied with consort, which is this rule of principles, which basically says you say what you're going to measure before you do the trial, and then you report what you said you were going to report. And, like, 58 of these of these papers did not do that. They wound up either not reporting what they said they were going to report, or they did report something which they didn't say they were going to report, or something like that. Very, very bad, like, scientific method. And every single time they did something like that, he would write them a letter and say, excuse me, but you say that you have signed up to this statement of principles, and you clearly haven't. And then what he did because this is an actual scientific thing. He did that 58 times and he measured, like, what was the response? And the Lancet actually turned out to be pretty good. They published most of the letters that he sent them. The New England Journal of Medicine published zero of the letters and just refused to engage and would like, send him weird, rude, nasty grams and say, go away, you gnat.

[C]

And they're the most prestigious medical journal, right?

[A]

They're pretty damn prestigious, yeah. So. And what happens is, in public, they will say, oh, yes, we completely sign up to consort and it's very important to us. But in fact, when they are called out on, like, well, if you say that you sign up to this, you know, clearly you've just published a paper that doesn't comply, they get super defensive.

[C]

And the reason you don't do consort is because you don't want to have a boring study, Right? You want to be able to say something cool happened. You don't want to have to say, like, we looked for this and it wasn't there.

[A]

Right. Or people do say that people publish those papers the whole time. It's just they never get published in the New England Journal. Right?

[C]

Yeah. They want to publish things that are like, we found that if you eat six cookies, you.

[A]

Well, I mean, you know, those papers you often find on, you know, in, like, weird places. But the fact is, ultimately, NEJM and places like that just don't publish negative results. It's just they're not interesting. Science scientists aren't that interested in negative results. And scientists also, they want to discover something. What they don't want to do is try and replicate something which someone's already done. And then they're like, oh, we didn't manage to replicate it. That's a really important but kind of very unsexy part of science that the prestigious journals just aren't interested in.

[C]

But then it results as like a. As a journalist, I so relate to this, right? Because, like, you don't want to do something someone else already did, and you don't want to write a story about, like, something incredibly boring.

[B]

Right? But then I think the unfortunate result is that you end up within these studies and people citing studies, and then it turns out you can't replicate any of this stuff. So it wasn't a real thing to begin with.

[A]

Exactly. And journalism has its own version of this, which is you get like some unbelievably flawed and stupid study saying, if you eat six cookies and you'll live forever and they will send out. They will send out A press release to a thousand journalists. And 900 of those journalists take one look at it and go, this is complete garbage. And throw it in the bin. But 100 of the journalists are like, oh, this is cheap, free content. And then just like, copy and paste and do and put some, like, clickbait headline on it. And then that's the only place that the study is reported. And the only place that the study is reported is the place which is credulous and doesn't say that it's complete. It's. It's bad in journalism, it's bad in scientific journals. It's bad everywhere.

[B]

So My number is 1888.

[A]

Is that a year?

[B]

It is a year. So at this rally, I don't talk about Donald Trump that often, but I was like, there was a rally, and he was this one in El Paso, I think so. And he was basically saying, you know, journalists out there, I want you to look at the tariff battle of 1888, because the economy was booming and we had tariffs. Look it up. Okay, so just to be clear, go ask.

[A]

He's a historian about it.

[B]

Yes, he is. Yeah. So, yes, it is true that this was a period of time where we actually had a tremendous amount of debt from the Civil War. And so as one of the ways, in order to pay that off and for also to protect domestic producers, there were tariffs. Now, there was a debate about how to reduce the government surplus, but the idea that the tariffs themselves were in some ways closely correlated with the economic growth just makes absolutely no sense. Because if you look at what was happening at the time you had, this is the time of rapid expansion of the United States post war, this is when all of these kind of developments you'd had kind of pre war were really coming to fruition. Also, most importantly, which clearly he didn't mention, it was a time when you had tremendous amounts of immigration coming to the United States. And also, it wasn't the terrorists, Donald.

[A]

Trump, it was the immigration. If you really want to grow the economy, you should open the borders.

[B]

Exactly. And it was also because, yes, because we were producing, because overall trade was booming, because we were producing a lot, that we were sending raw goods to the, to the kind of industrializing Europe. So point of this is that, not surprisingly, he's wrong, but.

[C]

That was like the one thing I didn't see fact checked in his. In from his speech. So I think you've just done an immense service.

[A]

Thank you, Anna, for breaking the news that Donald Trump might have got something wrong in one of his speeches. So I think that's it for the main part of the show. We are going to continue on. If you are a Slate plus member, by talking to our resident baseball expert, Max Jacobs, about sportsball. He's going to explain things to me, which I am very openly happy to admit I know absolutely nothing about. And do not be alarmed if you see another episode of Slate Money on Tuesday. I know that Slate Money comes out on Saturdays, but there's gonna be something, a little treat for you on Tuesday. We have a thing called Slate Money Travel, which we're trying out, and I think you might enjoy because it will be someone you remember. So in any case, keep the emails coming. Slatemoneylate.com Many thanks to Max for not only knowing about baseball, but also producing this entire show. And we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.