Dominic Pino refutes Sohrab Ahmari’s dystopian characterization of the American economy and the state of the American worker

See Our Supposed Dystopia. From Cafe Hayek.

"There are two groups of people who would dispute Ahmari’s dystopian characterization of the American economy. The first are people who study the American economy, and the second are people who work in it.

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Ahmari pooh-poohs this pairing in U.S. labor relations, writing of the “downright depraved way it equates the employee’s ‘power’ to quit with the boss’s right to dismiss him.” But according to a July 2022 report from the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of U.S. job-quitters in the previous year saw real wage gains when they found a new job. And the U.S. job market has plenty of turnover, with 2.5 percent of workers changing employers, on average, every single month. Millions of workers regularly use the power to quit as an effective way to raise their compensation.

The U.S. labor market’s greater flexibility compared with more social-democratic European labor markets is a source of national strength. Only petrostates and tax havens have higher average incomes than the U.S., the U.S. takes less of that income from its citizens as taxes, and the U.S. has higher average income growth than Europe. Economist Niklas Engbom found in a January 2022 paper that countries with more fluid labor markets see higher life-cycle wage growth for workers. That’s because a more flexible labor market makes it easier for a worker to find the employer that most highly values his skill set. Since workers know this, they have more incentive to develop valuable skills. That virtuous cycle results in the United States’ having higher life-cycle wage growth than nearly every other country in the OECD, Engbom found.

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While Ahmari shakes his fist at the system from his nice house in Florida, most working Americans seem oblivious of the tyranny that he sees in everyday employment. Perhaps it’s false consciousness among the proletariat — or maybe Americans know their economic situations better than Ahmari does."