ABSTRACT
Though they are often wrong, few economists have been so spectacularly and publicly wrong as George E. Barnett in 1932. A labor economist at Johns Hopkins University, Barnett devoted his presidential address to the American Economic Association in December 1932 to the subject of his life’s research, the American labor movement. After over a decade of decline, America’s trade unions, he lamented, were on an inexorable road to oblivion. With fewer than 3 million members, unions had lost all the membership gains they had made since before World War I. “American trade unionism is slowly being limited in influence by changes which destroy the basis on which it is erected.” Projecting this dismal record forward, Barnett predicted only more decline. “I see no reason,” he concluded, “to believe that American trade unionism will so revolutionize itself within a short period as to become in the next decade a more potent social influence than it has been in the past decade” (Barnett 1933: 6).
