The New Deal and the Creative Economy

John Kenneth Galbraith was not sort of a theorist of the New Deal as in, here's what we do. But rather an observer of how the American tradition responded to the crises of competitive capitalism and earlier 20th century. He said that workers were not getting paid enough to be able to buy the things they themselves produce. And so how did you get to the creative economy in which workers could afford the things that they produced? That was by increasing union coverage and density from single digits up to nearly a third of the private economy labor force at its peak in 1945.