Yet because structures are well understood by the people within them, their existence lends coherence and legitimacy to the economic world. Indeed, a stable and accepted structure of wages is one thing that distinguishes a politically stable society from an unstable and disordered one. As the job structure replaces the labor market, the received wisdom about natural rates and barriers to full employment fades away and with it the excuse for ducking the basic task of reaching and holding full employment. Equally fundamentally, the issue of the appropriate differentials between groups returns to the political context. If these are not market questions, they are and must be political questions that should be faced squarely despite the immensely difficult ethical questions that they inevitably raise.
Political issues have to be resolved by political means.
Collective bargaining is one such means, income and wealth taxation is another, and minimum wages are a third. If these are not available, something else has to be devised. The Keynesian guidepost policies of the 1960s were an explicit effort to influence wage structures, and despite the oblivion into which they have since disappeared, it may be that they were a critical element in the huge comparative macroeconomic success of those years. A structural approach to relative wages also has implications for antiinflation policy, as long understood by the older generation of labor economists in the United States and by trade unions who established coordinated or solidaristic wage bargains in Japan and Europe in the postwar period. A key question concerns adjustment of the wage structure.