ABSTRACT
1. To assess the consequences of collective bargaining with certainty we should have to be able to compare what happens in its presence with what happens when some other method of regulating pay is used in societies otherwise the same. The actual course of events gives us little chance to do this. There are differences in plenty, it is true, between the ways in which pay has been regulated in different countries, periods or industries, but much else has been different at the same time. Nor can we very well make the needed comparison by way of what the physicist calls an "ideal experiment", and ask what we can see happening, in the mind's eye, when a given society changes its ways of regulating pay. The trouble is that these ways are an organic part of the society. Their working depends on attitudes and traditions which they in turn help to mould: even in imagination we cannot lift them out and install others in their place as we might change the carburettor in a car.
