ABSTRACT
Wage-push plays the central role in the accounts of the postwar inflation advanced by most sociologists and political scientists. The "sociological" explanation of inflation stands or falls with wage-push mechanisms. This chapter argues that the evidence for a wage-push account of the postwar inflation is much weaker than its proponents typically allow. There are two sorts of evidence that might be mobilized to demonstrate the presence and the importance of a wage-push as a source of inflation. The chapter deals with the evidence on wage inflexibility, the evidence directly bearing on the existence of a wage-push, and third, the evidence bearing on productivity changes and their likely effects on inflation. The notion that underlies all wage-push processes is that there is an increase in the relative power of workers in general, or of a large group of workers, that has macroeconomically significant effects.
