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A review of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America by Michael Lind, 240 pages, Portfolio/Penguin Random House (May 2023).

Real wages in the United States have been stagnant for five decades. Since 2021, inflation has been outstripping real wage growth, driving down living standards for many American workers. But mainstream economists and political commentators on both the libertarian Right and much of the liberal Left treat low wages as an unfortunate but unassailable facet of the modern globalized economy. Low wages are the price we pay for free trade, efficient markets, and low prices. If liberals and libertarians diverge at all from this point of the neoliberal consensus, it is only in how to best respond to low wages. Liberals may support government welfare to supplement low wages while libertarians contend that redistribution disincentivizes workers from upskilling or moving laterally into industries and occupations in higher demand, but both accept low wages as the natural byproduct of technological progress (i.e., automation) and the global free markets of goods and labor that lower prices for everyone.

In his new book, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America, Michael Lind rejects this status quo. Enabling employers to pay low wages, he contends, is a political choice. Far from being natural or inevitable, low wages are the spoils of a successful war being prosecuted by employers against worker bargaining power.

Lind concedes that low wages translate into lower consumer pricesbut, as the title of the book suggests, the price Americans pay for low prices is far too high. He places low wages at the root of the biggest problems plaguing Western countries, especially the United States, where the assault on worker bargaining power has been most extreme. His contention is that low wages contribute not only to poverty but also declining marriage and birth rates, toxic identity politics, partisan polarization, moral panics, loneliness and social atomization, deaths of despair caused by depression and addiction, and more.

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