Inclusive Growth?: PIIE Conference

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PIIE: Conference on Income Inequality and Inclusive Growth: “Keynote Speaker: Paul Krugman (Graduate Center, City University of New York)

November 17, 2016 8:30 AM to 2:00 PMADD TO

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) will cohost a conference on income inequality and inclusive growth on November 17, 2016. Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will conclude the conference with a keynote address, titled “After the Elephant Diagram,” at 12:15 pm.

The conference morning will consist of two panel discussions. The first panel (8:45–10:15 am) will focus on global inequality and begin with a presentation by MGI partner Anu Madgavkar on MGI’s new report, Poorer than their parents: A new perspective on income inequality. (link is external) Sandra Black, member of the US Council of Economic Advisers, will offer her remarks drawing on the CEA’s recent research on the topic. Paolo Mauro, assistant director of the African department at the International Monetary Fund, will share his insights from his PIIE Working Paper, The Future of Worldwide Income Distribution.

The second panel (10:30 am–12:00 pm) will focus on inclusive growth policy ideas for the next US administration. The panelists include Brad DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley; William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO; Jonathan Woetzel, McKinsey & Company senior partner and MGI director; and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, senior fellow at PIIE since September and previously director-general for economic policy at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

A Plea for Some Sympathy for Repentant Left Neoliberals…

1848

As always, when the extremely sharp Danny Rodrick stuffs a book-length argument into an 800-word op-ed column, phrases acti as gestures toward what are properly chapter-long arguments. So there is lots to talk about.

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: “This backlash was predictable…

…Hyper-globalization in trade and finance, intended to create seamlessly integrated world markets, tore domestic societies apart. The bigger surprise is the decidedly right-wing tilt the political reaction has taken. In Europe, it is predominantly nationalists and nativist populists that have risen to prominence, with the left advancing only in a few places such as Greece and Spain…. As an emerging new establishment consensus grudgingly concedes, globalization accentuates class divisions between those who have the skills and resources to take advantage of global markets and those who don’t. Income and class cleavages, in contrast to identity cleavages based on race, ethnicity, or religion, have traditionally strengthened the political left. So why has the left been unable to mount a significant political challenge to globalization?

I think that this paragraph above is largely wrong.

As the very sharp Patrick Iber tweeted somewhere, the usual response to economic distress in democracies with broad franchises is: “Throw the bastards out!” Consider the Great Depression: Labour collapses in Britain in 1931. The Republicans collapse in the U.S. in 1932. And in Germany… shudder. And it is now 1 2/3 centuries since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

Alexis de Tocqueville: Recollections: “I woke very early in the morning…

…I heard a sharp, metallic sound, which shook the window-panes and immediately died out amid the silence of Paris. ‘What is that?’ I asked. My wife replied, ‘It is the cannon; I have heard it for over an hour, but would not wake you, for I knew you would want your strength during the day.’ I dressed hurriedly….

Thousands of men were hastening to our aid from every part of France, and entering the city by all the roads not commanded by the insurgents. Thanks to the railroads, some had already come from fifty leagues’ distance, although the fighting had only begun the night before. On the next and the subsequent days, they came from distances of a hundred and two hundred leagues. These men belonged indiscriminately to every class of society; among them were many peasants, many shopkeepers, many landlords and nobles, all mingled together in the same ranks. They were armed in an irregular and insufficient manner, but they rushed into Paris with unequalled ardour: a spectacle as strange and unprecedented in our revolutionary annals as that offered by the insurrection itself. It was evident from that moment that we should end by gaining the day, for the insurgents received no reinforcements, whereas we had all France for reserves.

On the Place Louis XV, I met, surrounded by the armed inhabitants of his canton, my kinsman Lepelletier d’Aunay, who was Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies during the last days of the Monarchy. He wore neither uniform nor musket, but only a little silver-hilted sword which he had slung at his side over his coat by a narrow white linen bandolier. I was touched to tears on seeing this venerable white-haired man thus accoutred. ‘Won’t you come and dine with us this evening?’ ‘No, no,’ he replied; ‘what would these good folk who are with me, and who know that I have more to lose than they by the victory of the insurrection—what would they say if they saw me leaving them to take it easy? No, I will share their repast and sleep here at their bivouac. The only thing I would beg you is, if possible, to hurry the despatch of the provision of bread promised us, for we have had no food since morning’…

It was in June 1849 that the depression-driven insurrection of the urban craftworker proletariat of Paris was suppressed—bloodily suppressed—by a largely spontaneous mass mobilization of those of the Ile de France who thought that they had something to lose from further revolution. They might see what little property they had confiscated and redistributed to the unemployed slackers of the city—to the urban “dangerous classes”. They might be taxed to pay for the reopening of the National Workshops that were to provide a guarantee of employment for those who could not find other jobs. They might see worse—their friends arrested for insufficient enthusiasm for revolution, or their priests and their hope of heaven taken away. For all these reasons they shifted rightward, voted for a firm nationalist authoritarian hand on the government, and voted for Louis Bonaparte first as President of the Second French Republic and then as Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire.

The belief that economic distress leads democratic politics to shift left is, I think, in general wrong. It leads democratic politics to shift away from the establishment, whatever the establishment is. It can move left—as in FDR’s America and in France with Leon Blum and the Front Populaire. It can move right—as in France in 1849 and in the early stages of the Great Depression, as in Britain in 1931 and 2010, as in the U.S. in 2010, and as in, ahem, Germany…

Dani continues:

One answer is that immigration has overshadowed other globalization ‘shocks.’… Latin American democracies provide a telling contrast. These countries experienced globalization mostly as a trade and foreign-investment shock, rather than as an immigration shock. Globalization became synonymous with so-called Washington Consensus policies and financial opening. Immigration from the Middle East or Africa remained limited and had little political salience. So the populist backlash in Latin America—in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, most disastrously, Venezuela – took a left-wing form…

Well, no: as I said, a form that was primarily antiestablishment. In Latin America, the establishment had bought into the relatively center-right Washington Consensus. In Europe, the establishment had bought into the relatively center-left continent-wide social market. Only where, as Dani says, the European establishment comes to be perceived as centered around Berlin’s ordoliberalism rather than around Brussel’s social market is their space for distress to push politics left.

Then, I think, Dani firmly grasps the correct thread:

A greater weakness of the left [is] the absence of a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century…. The left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. Economists and technocrats on the left bear a large part of the blame. Instead of contributing to such a program, they abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism and bought in to its central tenets.

In retrospect, who can disagree? We misjudged the proper balance between state and market, between command-and-control and market-incentive roads to social democratic ends.

But then I must, again, dissent in part. Dani:

Worse still, [Economists and technocrats on the left] led the hyper-globalization movement at crucial junctures. The enthroning of free capital mobility—especially of the short-term kind—as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades. As Harvard Business School professor Rawi Abdelal has shown, this effort was spearheaded in the late 1980s and early 1990s not by free-market ideologues, but by French technocrats such as Jacques Delors (at the European Commission) and Henri Chavranski (at the OECD), who were closely associated with the Socialist Party in France. Similarly, in the US, it was technocrats associated with the more Keynesian Democratic Party, such as Lawrence Summers, who led the charge for financial deregulation. France’s Socialist technocrats appear to have concluded from the failed Mitterrand experiment with Keynesianism in the early 1980s that domestic economic management was no longer possible, and that there was no real alternative to financial globalization. The best that could be done was to enact Europe-wide and global rules, instead of allowing powerful countries like Germany or the US to impose their own.

And here I whimper.

Financial globalization was intended to take down barriers to capital inflows erected by rent-seekers in developing countries, and so speed growth in economies that had been starved of capital while also equalizing incomes. Financial deregulation was supposed to break up the cozy investment banking and other oligarchies of Wall Street and diminish their private-sector tax on the American economy. Financial deregulation was supposed to provide the poorer half of America with the access to fairly priced credit that it lacked and with the opportunity to invest in assets that would yield equity-class returns, which it also lacked. And, in a world in which central banks had the powers and the will to successfully stabilize aggregate demand, there seemed little downside to letting people who could not put together a 20% down payment buy a house, to forcing Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to deal with competition from Citigroup and Bank of America, and to allow entrepreneurs in Mexico to raise funds not just from a cozy oligarchy of Mexico City banks but on the global capital market.

And France’s socialist technocrats were right: in highly-open economies the task of managing aggregate demand has to be a global, or at least a North Atlantic-wide, or at least a continent-wide exercise. In a good world, large exchange rate changes should only take place in response to persistent fundamental disequilibria rather than being used as first-line tools for demand management.

It all did go horribly wrong. But the restriction of the ECB to an inflation-control mandate alone was never a policy plank of the left—and all on the left assumed that the technocrats of the ECB were not stupid enough to take the single mandate as more than cheap talk to reassure bond markets in good times. And the decision by money-center banks to use derivative markets not to diversify but to concentrate housing-price risk on their own balance sheets did not happen on our watch.

And then I must dissent again. Dani’s penultimate paragraph is, I think, much too optimistic:

The good news is that the intellectual vacuum on the left is being filled, and there is no longer any reason to believe in the tyranny of ‘no alternatives.’ Politicians on the left have less and less reason not to draw on ‘respectable’ academic firepower in economics…. Anat Admati and Simon Johnson have advocated radical banking reforms; Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson have proposed a rich menu of policies to deal with inequality at the national level; Mariana Mazzucato and Ha-Joon Chang have written insightfully on how to deploy the public sector to foster inclusive innovation; Joseph Stiglitz and José Antonio Ocampo have proposed global reforms; Brad DeLong, Jeffrey Sachs, and Lawrence Summers (the very same!) have argued for long-term public investment in infrastructure and the green economy. There are enough elements here for building a programmatic economic response from the left.

Here I agree, rather, with something Keynes wrote in 1933:

John Maynard Keynes (1933): On Trotsky: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal…

…All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists…. No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head…

The problem is that our current policy agenda is too much “do it again!”, where “it” is “Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state.” And I believe we need more I think Dani gets it right when he notes:

The right thrives on deepening divisions in society—‘us’ versus ‘them’—while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them…

But when he says:

Earlier waves of reforms from the left—Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state—both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous…

he is both right and wrong: the earlier waves did save capitalism from itself, but they only rendered themselves apparently superfluous during the Years of Global Convergence and the Years of the Great Moderation. They are not superfluous. We need them. And we need more. For Dani is right to close:

Absent such a response again, the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups, who will lead the world—as they always have—to deeper division and more frequent conflict.

Must-Read: Kevin O’Rourke: Markets and States are Complements

Must-Read: Kevin O’Rourke: Markets and States are Complements: “Globalisation produces both winners and losers… can lead to an anti-globalisation backlash… [in the] late 19th… the late 20th… [and] the early 21st century…

…What, if anything, [can] governments… do[?]… Dani Rodrik’s finding that more open states had bigger governments in the late 20th century comes in…. Markets expose workers to risk, and that government expenditure of various sorts can help protect them…. Michael Huberman showed that this correlation between states and markets was present before 1914 as well: countries with more liberal trade policies tended to have more advanced social protections of various sorts, and this helped maintain political support for openness…. If the Tories had really wanted to maintain support for the EU, investment in public services and public housing would have been the way to do it…. It wouldn’t have satisfied the xenophobes, but not all anti-immigrant voters are xenophobes…. If the English want continued Single Market access, they will have to swallow continued labor mobility. There are complementary domestic policies that could help in making that politically feasible. We will have to wait and see what the English decide. But there are also lessons for the 27 remaining EU states…

Must-Read: Duncan Black: Sometimes We Get Results

Must-Read: Duncan Black: Sometimes We Get Results: “Or, at least, play a part…

…Aside from yay team, it’s important to remember that this isn’t just some ideological thing, though it is that, too. It’s a recognition that the retirement crisis is here and it’s very real. I’d say there’s a broad enough consensus (does not include zombie-eyed granny starvers) that however we get to the goal, society should be structured in such a way that the vast majority of people hit retirement age with some economic stability. The current system has not done that, and whatever Exciting New Ideas we can come up with for the ideal retirement program (obviously I’m partial to plans which rhyme with brocial maturity), we have a crop of people in retirement or entering retirement soon who have no hope of coming up with that kind of post-retirement income stream. The only way to keep them off the streets, or for the lucky few working them until they die, is to provide non-trivial across the board benefit increases. And if you’re worried Donald Trump’s Social Security payment is too large (none of them are very large, so worrying about this is silly and the only people who claim to worry about such things are just using it as an excuse to not help anyone), you can just increase tax rates on rich people. That’s the easy way to means testing, and how a progressive tax system is supposed to work.


David Dayen: The Real Story Behind Obama’s Radical U-turn on Social Security: “The initial impulse from the Obama administration was to use Social Security cuts as a bargaining chip in a larger deal with Republicans…

…Grand bargain talks from 2011 to 2013 repeatedly invoked a different way to calculate the consumer price index (known as ‘chained CPI’), which would have resulted in $1,000 less a year for the average 85-year-old. Obama put chained CPI in his fiscal year 2014 budget. Contrary to some after-the-fact snickering, this was a very credible threat, and it allowed Republicans to point to a Democratic president favoring entitlement cuts. Only the Tea Party’s unwillingness to consider anything resembling a compromise saved retirees from cuts.

At first, liberal groups played defense on chained CPI, accustomed to mobilizing in opposition rather than staking out a bolder claim. But the expansion movement can really be traced back to one blogger: Duncan Black, popularly known as ‘Atrios,’ who waged an initially lonely crusade in a series of 2012 columns in USA Today, explaining why the retirement crisis was coming and how expanding Social Security represented the cleanest solution. Eventually, Black found adherents. The New America Foundation, in a groundbreaking proposal, called for an entirely new, $11,000-a-year universal benefit on top of Social Security. By mid-2013, most major liberal groups adopted an old bill from former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin to modestly expand Social Security with more generous cost-of-living increases that better reflect rising medical costs for seniors. By 2014, chained CPI was out of the president’s budget. The reason Social Security expansion was a wedge issue waiting to be wielded is that it’s massively popular….

Now President Obama, who started this all by embracing the opposite position years ago, has explicitly endorsed the expansion of Social Security. This victory is a great credit to Duncan Black and everyone who moved a minority opinion in the corridors of power in the Democratic Party into the mainstream. There are wildly varying ways to claim support for Social Security expansion, ones that are modest and ones that are disruptive. But before the question, even among Democrats, was how much to cut Social Security; now the question is how much to expand it…. Politically, Republicans know that Social Security cuts equal political death. The same was true of opposition to same-sex marriage, which is why most of the GOP caucus just stopped talking about it. The path to Social Security expansion can’t go through the courts the way marriage equality did, and it will take a lot more work. But the center-left, in Washington and in the country, is on board. And that is a testament to the power of taking a stand and not relenting. Eventually, the world might just swing your way.

Must-Read: Tierney Sneed: Inside Louisiana’s Blockbuster Medicaid Expansion Roll Out

Tierney Sneed: Inside Louisiana’s Blockbuster Medicaid Expansion Roll Out: “Louisiana’s Medicaid expansion marked a major breakthrough for Obamacare…

…Now that the program has been open for enrollment for two weeks, the dramatic success the state has had in bringing residents into the program has attracted national attention. Since June 1… more than 201,000 people have enrolled. The state is well on track to meet its 375,000-enrollee goal, which will save Louisiana an estimated $184 million in the next year. Those numbers are even more remarkable given the obstacles facing the Edwards administration, namely the refusal of the GOP legislature to fund even one new employee to ease the transition to the expanded program….

Without any additional funding for the roll out–meaning no new state employees, no eligibility workers, nor any other new administrative tool to ensure that Louisianans were taking advantage of the expanded coverage–the state had to depend on the infrastructure of existing social service programs, whose participants were eligible for the Medicaid expansion. The tactic had the dual advantage of saving the state money while creating an application process that was minimally burdensome…. That creative approach… helped Louisiana achieve the numbers that it did. ‘Louisiana, through doing this, is definitely being a leader in trying to use these available resources to streamline and make enrollment efficient,’ Samantha Artiga, a Medicaid expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told TPM….

To pull together the program, the state sought out the assistance of non-governmental organizations like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser and Milbank. ‘As a former Robert Woods Johnson clinical scholar and someone who had been in academia, my mindset has always been focused on, ‘How do I get grants?’ Gee said. Making matters more difficult, the state was seeking out outside support after the wave of initial grant money–much of it going to early adopter states–had dried up. ‘We missed out,’ Gee said, of the initial round of Center for Medicare & Medicaid innovation grants that went to states that expanded Medicaid right off the bat. ‘So here we are, needing it more than those places probably did without the ability to apply for those types of grants,’ she said. The state did find outside help, though mostly in the form of consulting and technical assistance…

Must-read: ProGrowthLiberal: “Social Security Replacement Rates as Reported by the CBO”

Must-Read: ProGrowthLiberal: Social Security Replacement Rates as Reported by the CBO: “Brian Faler warned us a year ago…

Republicans on Friday named Keith Hall head of the Congressional Budget Office, installing a conservative Bush administration economist atop an agency charged with determining how much lawmakers’ bills would cost…

Keith Hall just admitted:

After questions were raised by outside analysts, we identified some errors in one part of our report, CBO’s 2015 Long-Term Projections for Social Security: Additional Information, which was released on December 16, 2015. The errors occurred in CBO’s calculations of replacement rates—the ratio of Social Security recipients’ benefits to their past earnings.

Who were these outside analysts and what was this about? Alicia Munnell explains:

CBO suggests that Social Security is getting more generous every day. The stage is being set for cuts in Social Security, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has become a major player in this effort. The agency’s most recent report shows not only a huge increase in the 75-year deficit, but also an enormous increase in the generosity of the program as measured by replacement rates — benefits relative to pre-retirement earnings. None of the changes that increase the deficit — lower interest rates, higher incidence of disability, longer life expectancy, and a lower share of taxable earnings — should have any major effect on replacement rates. CBO has simply been revising its methodology each year in ways that produce higher numbers….

Putting out such a high number without any effort to reconcile it with the historical data is irresponsible. And those waiting for an opportunity to show that Social Security is excessively generous have pounced on the new CBO replacement rate number and publicized it in op-eds from coast-to-coast. Social Security is the backbone of the nation’s retirement system. Its finances need to be treated more thoughtfully.

Agreed. My only question is whether anyone in Congress can the courage to demand that Mr. Hall explain…

Must-read: Karen M. Tani: Introduction to “States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972”

Must-Read: I gotta get this book. I gotta read this book…

Karen M. Tani: Introduction to States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972: “States of Dependency provides a new account of welfare law and policy…

…in the twentieth-century United States, and through it, a revised portrait of modern American governance. The book begins amid the Great Depression, with the insertion of federal money and federal rules into what had been a highly decentralized system of poor relief. Reformers hoped to use federal funds to ‘modernize’ that system – to make it more bureaucratic, centralized, expert-driven, and uniform. Drawing on original archival research, States of Dependency traces the fate of these efforts. The book analyzes federal administrators’ encounters with traditions of localism, federalism, and hostility toward the ‘undeserving poor.’ It also links these encounters to particular tactics, such as the mobilization of rights language and the use of strategic litigation. The result, four decades later, was a more legalistic and federalized public welfare apparatus, as well an expanded definition of national citizenship, but also a system of governance that sanctioned and perpetuated vast inequalities.

Must-read: Avi Rabin-Havt: “Why Is the CBO Concocting a Phony Debt Crisis?”

Must-Read: Ari Rabin-Havt: Why Is the CBO Concocting a Phony Debt Crisis?: “The CBO assumes that Social Security and Medicare Part A will draw on the general fund of the US Treasury…

…to cover benefit shortfalls following the depletion of their trust funds, which at the current rate will occur in 2034. That would obviously lead to an exploding debt, but it’s a scenario prohibited by law. In the case of both programs, benefits must be paid either from revenue collected via payroll taxes or from accumulated savings in the programs’ trust funds. When those funds run out, full benefits will simply not be paid. ‘Because there is no borrowing authority, there is really a hard stop,’ said Goss.

Congress could pass a law saying that Social Security and Medicare Part A would begin drawing on the US Treasury general fund after 2034. Or, Congress could preemptively pass laws to avert the situation before the deadline; it could take the approach favored by progressives and increase revenue to the programs by lifting the payroll tax cap, or alternatively raise the retirement age and lower benefits. But the bottom line is the CBO projections disregard the actual law and assume a worst-case legislative scenario—and one that is politically unlikely, to boot…

Must-read: Isaac Shapiro et al.: “It Pays to Work: Work Incentives and the Safety Net”

Must-Read: Isaac Shapiro et al.: It Pays to Work: Work Incentives and the Safety Net: “Some critics of various low-income assistance programs argue that the safety net discourages work…

…In particular, they contend that people receiving assistance from these programs can receive more, or nearly as much, from not working — and receiving government aid — than from working.  Or they argue that low-paid workers have little incentive to work more hours or seek higher wages because losses in government aid will cancel out the earnings gains…. Such charges are largely incorrect…. Adults in poverty are significantly better off if they get a job, work more hours, or receive a wage hike….

There are really only two options to lowering marginal tax rates.  One is to phase out benefits more slowly as earnings rise; this reduces marginal tax rates for those currently in the phase-out range. But it also extends benefits farther up the income scale and increases costs considerably, a tradeoff that many policymakers may not want to make. 

The second option is to shrink (or even eliminate) benefits for people in poverty so they have less of a benefit to phase out, and thus lose less as benefits are phased down. This reduces marginal tax rates, but it pushes the poor families into — or deeper into — poverty…. The ‘solution’ that some who use marginal-tax-rate arguments to attack safety net programs advance — block grants with extensive state flexibility — doesn’t resolve these difficult tradeoffs.  Instead, it passes the buck in making these trade-offs from federal decision-makers to state decision-makers.