Minimum Wage Hikes Tom Williams/Getty Images

The Wages of Wage Fear

"If all else fails, try the previously unthinkable," is not a bad principle for economic policy in the best of times. Today, it may be just what is needed: many Western countries – especially the US, Japan, and Germany – should pursue direct government intervention in wage bargaining.


LONDON – If all else fails, try the previously unthinkable. It is not a bad principle for economic policy in the best of times. Today, it may be just what is needed: many Western countries – certainly the United States, Japan, and Germany, probably the United Kingdom, and soon much of the rest of the eurozone – should pursue direct government intervention in wage bargaining, especially for the lowest earners.

Japan has spent the last 15 years struggling with slow growth, anemic household demand (especially among poorer families), and rising inequality and poverty. Similar conditions now prevail in the US as well; indeed, they helped Donald Trump to be elected president, by creating a sufficiently large group of what he quite reasonably called “forgotten Americans.” And before Trump’s victory, such conditions spurred the UK’s so-called “left behind” to vote for Brexit.

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