HOW PUBLIC UNIONS ENTHRALLED THE U.S.: Even labor-friendly Paris uses fewer workers than New York City, and for a fraction of the cost. American public unions pervert the process:

A new paper from Michael Lovenheim and Alexander Willen finds that “Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining law exposure leads to reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults, and these effects are larger for men.” In other words: If your teachers could collectively bargain, you got a worse education, and had worse life outcomes.

There are a number of mechanisms along which this could work. Unions might maximize wages at the expense of headcount, leading to too few teachers; they might bargain for work rules that eroded the quality of the teaching; they might protect ill-performing teachers; or they might inflate payrolls so much that other parts of the budget, such as textbooks, had to be cut back.

Of course, it’s only one study. But it is something we need to think about when we talk about the modern labor movement. The only thriving part of that movement right now is the government workforce. And they may be thriving at the expense of the rest of us.

May?