Fox Butterfield, Professor of Economics?

Largely thanks to James Taranto of the WSJ's Best of the Web blog, multitudes are aware of and understand the Butterfield Effect.

The New York Times’s Fox Butterfield is famous for repeatedly reporting with astonishment that crime rates went down as the prison population went up without giving much heed to the possibility that the two trends might be correlated rather than (as the paper’s house ideology insists) contradictory. 

 Of course, the Butterfield Effect is not limited to criminology, it can easily extend to other realms.  All that is required is a blinding false ideology and/or ignorance of actual cause/effect relationships.  The Washington Post demonstrates the Butterfield Effect in the economy.

Last July was a good month for factory workers in Anderson, Ind., where a Honda parts supplier announced plans to build a new plant and create up to 325 jobs. But it was a grim month in the Cleveland suburbs, where an industrial plastics firm told the state of Ohio it was closing a plant and laying off 150 people.

Nearly all of the Ohio workers belonged to a labor union. Workers at the Indiana plant don’t. Their fates fit a post-recession pattern: American factories are hiring again, but they’re not hiring union members.

U.S. manufacturers have added a half-million new workers since the end of 2009, making the sector one of the few bright spots in an otherwise weak recovery. And yet there were 4 percent fewer union factory workers in 2012 than there were in 2010, according to federal survey data. On balance, all of the job gains in manufacturing have been non-union.

The trend underscores a central conundrum in the “manufacturing renaissance” that President Obama loves to tout as an economic accomplishment: The new manufacturing jobs are different from the ones that delivered millions of American workers a ticket to the middle class over the past half-century.

There is no conundrum.  The fading influence of unions is the cause of the resurgence in manufacturing.  Unions made firms uncompetitive, so they failed or left.  Now that they can come back and be free of unions, they are...wait for it...coming back.  Right to work states have been and are outpacing their forced-unionization competitors in economic development and growth.  Indiana, used in the example in the opening paragraph, is a right to work state.  Ohio, in contrast, beat back an attempt at passing right to work law.  Alas, this is a conundrum to the Butterfield Effected scribes at the WaPo.