Economists on strike?
This is a guest post by Chris Brown, who is a lecturer at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship at Swinburne University. It was originally published at mises.org and Chris blogs at Austro-libertarian.
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A recent teachers’ union strike that included economists and other business faculty members at my university — ironically and yet unsurprisingly led by an economics lecturer — has motivated me to consider the intended consequences of these strike actions.
Economists are prone to call the consequences of many decisions “unintended,” and thus assume the actors are genuinely ignorant of these effects or would otherwise not choose the actions that cause them. However, I must give these economists qua economists credit for a minimum knowledge of the effects of unions and strikes, and assume they knew the likely outcomes of their actions. If they did not understand these consequences, they surely cannot be worthy of what some consider a noble title: economist.
In the union’s political self-interest, these economists are making nearly everyone else worse off by going on strike. They went on strike to request, inter alia, higher wages and more paid leave.
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