Krugman: Elizabeth Warren Lays Out the Reasons Democrats Should Keep Fighting

Paul Krugman reviews This is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, By Elizabeth Warren, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company:

Elizabeth Warren Lays Out the Reasons Democrats Should Keep Fighting: …Elizabeth Warren … brings an edge to her advocacy that many Democrats have shied away from… Even the Obama administration, while doing much more to fight inequality than many realize, balked at making inequality reduction an explicit goal.

Furthermore, Warren comes down forcefully on the left side of an ongoing debate over both the causes of inequality and the ways it can be reduced.

One view, which was dominant even among Democratic-leaning economists in the 1990s, saw rising inequality mainly as a result of ineluctable market forces. Technology, in particular… Given this view, even liberals generally favored free-market policies. …

The alternative view, which Warren clearly endorses, is all for taxing the rich and strengthening the safety net, but it also argues that public policy can do a lot to increase workers’ bargaining power — and that inequality has soared in large part because policy has, in fact, gone the other way.

This view has gained much more prominence over the past couple of decades, mainly because it’s now backed by a lot of evidence…

But why has actual policy gone the other way? …

Consider … West Virginia, where Obamacare cut the number of uninsured by about 60 percent, where minimum wage hikes and revived unions could do wonders for workers in health care and social services, the state’s largest industry. That is, it’s a perfect example of a state that would benefit hugely from an enlightened-populist agenda.

But last November West Virginia went almost three-to-one for a very unenlightened populist…

But maybe it’s a matter of time, and what Democrats need right now is a reason to keep fighting. And that’s something Warren’s muscular, unapologetic book definitely offers. It’s an important contribution, even if it isn’t the last word.