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For me, it all began with Alan Krueger. Alan, as many readers likely know, was perhaps the most influential and important labor economist in the history of economics. His career accelerated in 1994 with a seminal paper, coauthored with David Card, on the impacts of higher minimum wages on demand for labor. Alan would go on to author dozens of meaningful papers on the labor market, also serving in some of the most influential policy posts in the U.S. government—including chief economist at the Department of Labor and chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Alan passed away tragically in 2019, but his influence lives on in so many ways—including in this book.

Alan was a key participant in a 2015 meeting with then–Vice President Biden. At the time, I was serving as Biden’s chief economist in the Obama White House, and Biden had asked me to organize a roundtable with a diverse and prestigious group of economists to discuss why workers were not seeing stronger wage growth. As a trusted economic adviser to Biden, Alan was the first person on our invitation list.

During the meeting, when Biden asked Alan what he thought should be done to help raise wages, Alan held up a proposal he had just written addressing the issue of wage collusion by employers. Citing a 2006 class-action case in Detroit in which nurses sued several hospital systems for illegally conspiring to limit their annual raises, Alan said that he thought the problem of wage collusion was widespread and that federal agencies should devote increased firepower to studying it and rooting it out. He explained that wage collusion was something that could only happen in an uncompetitive labor market, noting that this was part of a much larger suite of problems.

The vice president was intrigued. The condition that Alan described contradicted Biden’s core value of a basic bargain—the notion that both employers and workers should share in the gains of their endeavor’s success. Alan’s suspicion that wage collusion could be widespread was another example of how the basic bargain wasn’t being honored.

Other participants in that roundtable sounded further alarm bells: one person argued that noncompete agreements were widely inhibiting workers’ ability to take a better job. The labor-affiliated economists in the room discussed the role of declining unions. The group discussed the overtime rule, higher minimum wages, and excessive executive compensation—all valuable points. But the most promising takeaway was Alan’s argument that the labor market was far from competitive, with wage collusion being an example of the harmful impacts of monopsony power.

Labor market competition would become central to Biden’s economic message—both as vice president and afterward. He had always been a union guy, backing pro-unionization laws and advocating for labor rights in the enforcement and regulatory arenas. But this was a new wrinkle. In 2018 he gave a speech at The Century Foundation that laid out his comprehensive labor market agenda. Unionization was a big part of it, but so were issues like wage transparency and forced arbitration, issues that were on few people’s radars.

For me, Alan’s argument was appealing because it seemed to complete the wage stagnation story so well. Globalization in general (and competition with China in particular) probably drove down wages for workers in select occupations, but nurses in the Detroit case weren’t competing with nurses in China. And the hallowing out of middle-wage jobs due to technological advances almost certainly explained many wage trends, but nursing was a middle-wage job in high demand. Nurses’ struggles to get a decent raise belied these explanations.

I was also drawn to the transparency angle in Alan’s argument. If nurses’ wages were public, the fact that they were all receiving identical raises would have been an immediate red flag. Indeed, information is oft-overlooked element in competitive markets—whether we’re talking about labor markets or consumer markets. In the textbook model, part of why a worker leaves an underpaying job is the knowledge that he is being underpaid. I suspect few workers actually have this knowledge.

One of my favorite examples of the power of wage transparency in the real world was in 2006 when the company LegiStorm mined all congressional staffers’ salaries and made them public. At the time, I was the senior economist for the House Budget Committee—blissfully unaware of what my colleagues earned. Then, in single moment, I went from not knowing what anyone earned to knowing exactly what everyone earned. Ten minutes later I marched into the chief of staff’s office and requested a raise—which I got. The data spoke volumes.

Wage transparency is just a thin thread of a much larger concern, one where the labor market has lost its balance and throws up too many barriers that prevent workers from getting the pay that matches their economic contribution. To be clear, I see this as one of the most important policy issues of our day—which is why I wanted to edit this book. If we think that wages are declining because returns to education are rising, then the answer is more education. If we think that wages are stagnant because of competition with China, then trade policy should be a central focus. But if we think it’s because of lack of competition, then the remedies fall into an array of other approaches—ranging from antitrust enforcement to regulation of labor policy to information shared by human resources departments. Put differently, it’s not that workers are becoming less valuable—it’s that they’re not getting paid the wages that match their economic worth.