Category: Equitablog

Barry Eichengreen: The ECB Tries Again: “In June the European Central Bank announced a series of new steps to counter deflation….

…Rather than bemoaning the failure of President Draghi & Co. to move earlier, it is more productive at this stage to ask: are the central bank’s measures now up to the task?… The ECB’s conventional measures, reducing its benchmark interest rate from 0.25 to 0.15 per cent and charging commercial banks 0.1 per cent on the money they deposit with the central bank, will make little difference…. Conventional monetary policy has run its course…. Thus, if policy is going to make a difference, policy will have to be unconventional. Here the ECB unveiled… one and a half… initiatives in June… ‘Targeted Long-Term Refinancing Operation’… €400 billion, or some US$550 billion, cumulatively over four months. Recall that the Federal Reserve, under QE3, had been injecting $85 billion a month into U.S. financial markets before starting to taper in December. This makes TLTRO look like a substantial commitment…. The additional ‘half an initiative’ announced in June was that the ECB would study the possibility of security purchases…. These cautions should not be taken as a council of despair. If ECB officials conclude that the impact of TLTRO and securities purchase will be marginal, they should not give up hope; rather, they should strive to do more…

Barry Ritholtz: Cognitive Dissonance: “Of all of the failings of human wetware…

…the one I find most intriguing is cognitive dissonance… [which] occurs in the mind of an individual when a theoretical belief system is confronted by factual evidence demonstrating outcomes contrary to what theories dictate should occur. Stated more plainly, when facts conflict with beliefs people find ways to ignore those facts, rationalizing them in a way that allows the disproven ideas to survive. John Kenneth Galbraith famously referenced cognitive dissonance before it was even called that, stating: ‘Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof’….

Examples are many and varied…. Radical deregulation resulting in bad outcomes rather than the free market nirvana its believers espoused; Austrian economists warning of imminent hyperinflation and the collapse of the fiat dollar that never arrives. Rather than question the theory, the person suffering from cognitive dissonance ignores the facts in front of their very eyes and instead devises rationales for why any specific expected outcome never occurred. The blame is laid elsewhere…. It wasn’t the wildly irresponsible behavior of non-bank lenders and junk mortgages securitized and rated AAA that caused the problems. Rather, it had to be something else, and if we can find a government entity to blame, so much the better…. There is a fine line between having confidence in your methodologies and living in your own private fantasy world. Like it or not, this is the human condition. Recognizing it at least gives us a chance to avoid getting caught in its pernicious grasp…

Matt Bruenig: How Reform Conservatives Like Reihan Salam and Paul Ryan Misunderstand Poverty: “Oh boy. Reihan Salam has a piece riddled with confusions…

…some conceptual, some technical, and some just downright strange…. Poverty measurement that also includes tax credits (like the EITC) and non-cash benefits (like SNAP) called the Supplemental Poverty Metric… the only thing that has reduced poverty since 1967 is non-market benefits. That’s it. Those advocating non-market benefits to cut poverty are not the crazy ones. Those thinking the market will do it are…. Let’s just make some things clear…. Market income is not distributed according to desert (i.e. each get what they produce). Nobody produces nature, yet its massive marginal productivity flows to random private owners…. The majority of the national output each year is attributable to inherited technology and knowledge (aka TFP) that nobody alive produced…. Nobody is economically independent from the government…. If you want to make people’s flow of material resources independent of the government, you must repeal property law first and foremost, the biggest government welfare program in history…. More disposable income doesn’t solve all of the problems in the society, but it does solve the problem of inadequate diposable income…

Washington Center for Equitable Growth Announces Inaugural Class of Grantees: “Equitable Growth will award $481,000 to 15 grantees…

…with additional funding for two of those grantees provided by the Russell Sage Foundation…. “Motivating academic economists to investigate whether and how structural changes in the U.S. economy, particularly those related to the distribution of wealth and the provision of opportunity, affect economic growth is exceedingly important,” says Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at Equitable Growth…. Philip Cohen… economic inequality [and] women’s employment patterns…. Ariel Kalil… inequality… parenting and the acquisition of skills…. Jesse Rothstein… school finance reforms [and] educational equity…. Michael Barr… how families manage different kinds of debt…. Will Dobbie… the impact of debt forgiveness on economic stability and recoveries…. Timothy Smeeding… how inequality in the distribution of income and wealth affect consumption… David Howell… cross-country trends in “good jobs”… William Lester… how regional variations in labor market regulation influence business decisions…. Joan Williams… workplace scheduling practices conflict with family care-giving needs…. Young scholar grantees… Pascal Noel… Shayak Sarkar and Ryan Sakoda… Stefanie Stancheva… Vanessa Williamson at Harvard… Danny Yagan… Owen Zidar…

As we often say around here, since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society discussions of equitable growth here in the United States have revolved around Arthur Okun’s metaphor of the “leaky bucket”: the market produces unequal distribution of income, and the government has a bucket that it can use to redistribute income from rich to poor, but the bucket leaks and so more is taken from the rich and is received by the poor. The efficiency-equity trade-off. Policies that would move toward more equity would also move toward slower economic growth.

But the question of whether our Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function has a higher value with a smaller pie more equally divided or a bigger pie with some slices much larger than others is only one of the ways that the question can be conceptualized.

A second way is to deny that the size of the pie has relevance because those who get the big slices are not “us” but “them”. That was how David Lloyd-George did his political economy and politics in Wales and in London’s East End back in 1909. To quote from George Dangerfield’s great The Strange Death of Liberal England:

Lloyd George… one July evening in 1909… went down to Limehouse… a packed and partisan audience of East End cockneys…. England has scarcely known a greater demagogue than this pre-war Lloyd-George…. Without the magic of face and voice to support them, his speeches are not likely to survive; and one can only imagine the effect of this, the most famous passage in that famous Limehouse speech:

I was telling you I went down a coal-mine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining–around us and above us–to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibers split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. In the very next colliery to the one I descended, just a few years ago three hundred people lost their lives that way.

And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them—-’Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something [Page 23] towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’—-they scowl at us and we say—’Only a ha’penny, just a copper.’ They say, ‘You thieves!’ And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning….

Lloyd George was having the time of his life. He kept his audience howling with alternate rage and laughter; moment by moment, sentence by sentence, he assaulted the landlords, and outraged the gentry, and invited the dispossessed, and cozened the dissatisfied; he shouted and implored and wheedled and mimicked. It was a great performance.

And yet this spirited voice was not quite the voice of revolution–though thus it sounded in the anxious imagination of the Conservative press…. It was also Liberalism’s extravagant last will and testament. All it really said was this–that the rich, who are beginning to get too much in their own hands, have got to pay… his revolutionary language [was] nothing more than the language of super-taxes and old age pensions.

But in the meantime, the speech had done its work. If their lordships had been violent about the Budget before, they were twice as violent now. Mr. Lloyd-George redoubled his efforts… and up and down the country certain noblemen emerged from the rustic obscurity to which history had consigned them and began to trade public insults with their persecutor…

My favorite passage from the Limehouse speech is different. Mine is Lloyd-George’s claim that:

a fully-equipped duke cost[s] as much to keep up as two [naval] dreadnought [battleships]… [but is] much less easy to scrap…

Lloyd-George lived in a mental universe in which the dukes had their ownership of broad acres and their claims on GDP not because they did anything useful and entrepreneurial but rather because their very distant ancestor had laid Anglo-Saxon England waste in 1066 with King William the Bastard, or their distant ancestor had slept with King Charles II Stuart, or their not-so-distant ancestor had bribed enough members of Parliament to get an Enclosure Bill.

That was class war!

Or was it?

As Dangerfield points out, while the Tory squires and the titled members of the House of Lords in 1909 heard David Lloyd-George and thought “REVOLUTION!!”, the policies of the so-called People’s Budget of 1909 involved less income-tax progressivity (“supertaxes”) and less social insurance (“old age pensions”) than even the old Paul Ryan budget. And now that Paul Ryan has begun talking about how he wants to expand the EITC and the Ryan budget wasn’t his budget but rather the House Republican Conference’s budget, David Lloyd-George appears very far to his right indeed in everything but rhetoric.

I think that we here at Equitable Growth want to conceptualize the issues in yet a third way. If Arthur Okun was right, and if the bucket is indeed leaky, then the sharp reduction in the progressivity of the income tax and the reduction in union power to extract quasi-rents should both have given a significant boost to economic growth since 1980 or so. Yet that has not been the case. Is it the other factors reduced the underlying growth rate, and that Reaganomics actually did considerable good for growth but its effects have been masked? Is it that our Second Gilded Age is not gilded enough, and that growth will accelerate if we make just one more push to further widen the income distribution? Or is it that the leaky budget paradigm is wrong, and that there are at least as many channels by which greater inequality erodes investments, especially investments in human capital, and slows growth as channels by which it boosts growth?

We would really like to know which of these three is true. For unless we know, it will be hard to have an even semi-rational policy debate even were we to find a critical mass of people who wanted to have one.

So: in this round, half a million dollars out to some very smart and energetic people looking for answers to pieces of this big question. I am very interested to see and very hopeful about what the recipients will come up with.

Should-Reads:

1. Aida Caldera Sánchez et al.: Improving Well-Being in the United States: “Life is quite good in the United States compared to other OECD countries, thanks to strong economic growth and technological progress having lifted average income to high levels. Nonetheless, there is evidence that the benefits from growth have not been sufficiently broad based. Self-reported happiness increases with income, an issue particularly resonant in a country with among the highest levels of income inequality in the OECD and a pattern of inequality that appears to be moving toward even more concentration at the very top at the expense of the middle class and the poor. Working hours that remain among the longest in the OECD are also creating challenges for work-life balances, child education, personal care and leisure. These pressures are contributing to higher job strain and work-related stress with unhealthy consequences, including for mental health, and a detrimental impact on employability and medical costs. While these trends cannot be easily reversed, a number of policy options are being usefully rolled out and other initiatives are being considered: federal-level policies improving access to health care and early-childhood education, state-level initiatives favouring workplace flexibility, firm-level investments in job quality and greater attention to the health consequences of job-stress. If successfully adopted, they would go a long way toward improving the well-being of American working families…”

2. Cory Doctorow: When all the jobs belong to robots, do we still need jobs?: “Where Tufekci’s analysis falls short is in her willingness to think outside the market box. She implies that the solution to this all is some kind of market reform, but doesn’t suggest that, perhaps, markets can’t efficiently organize abundant things–only scarce things. If we persist in the view that the dividends from robots’ increased productivity should accrue to robot owners, we’ll definitely come to a future where there aren’t enough owners of robots to buy all the things that robots make…. There’s a real scarcity of economists willing to think about the possibility that abundance makes markets obsolete altogether. Property rights may be a way of allocating resources when there aren’t enough of them to go around, but when automation replaces labor altogether and there’s lots of everything, do we still need it?…”

3. James Heckman (2010): I could tell you a story about… Milton Friedman. In the nineteen-seventies, we were sitting in the Ph.D. oral examination…. After he’d left, Friedman turned to me and said, ‘Look, I think it is a good idea, but these guys have taken it way too far.’ It became a kind of tautology that had enormously powerful policy implications, in theory. But the fact is, it didn’t have any empirical content. When Tom Sargent, Lard Hansen, and others tried to test it using cross equation restrictions, and so on, the data rejected the theories. There were a certain section of people that really got carried away. It became quite stifling…. The further down the food chain you go, the more the zealots take over…. We knew Keynesian theory was still alive in the banks and on Wall Street. Economists in those areas relied on Keynesian models to make short-run forecasts. It seemed strange to me that they would continue to do this if it had been theoretically proven that these models didn’t work…. The underlying ideas of the Chicago School are still very powerful. The basis of the rocket is still intact. It is what I see as the booster stage–the rational-expectation hypothesis and the vulgar versions of the efficient-markets hypothesis–that have run into trouble…. People got too far away from… confronting ideas with data…. When Friedman died… we had a symposium…. Lucas was talking about rational expectations…. One woman… said, ‘Look at the evidence on 401k plans and how people misuse them, or don’t use them. Are you really saying that people look ahead and plan ahead rationally?’ And Lucas said, ‘Yes, that’s what the theory of rational expectations says, and that’s part of Friedman’s legacy.’ I said, ‘No, it isn’t. He was much more empirically minded than that’…” Via Lars Syll

4. Jesse Rothstein: Is the EITC as Good as an NIT? Conditional Cash Transfers and Tax Incidence: “The EITC is intended to encourage work. But EITC-induced increases in labor supply may drive wages down. I simulate the economic incidence of the EITC. In each scenario that I consider, a large portion of low-income single mothers’ EITC payments is captured by employers through reduced wages. Workers who are EITC ineligible also see wage declines. By contrast, a traditional Negative Income Tax (NIT) discourages work, and so induces large transfers from employers to their workers. With my preferred parameters, $1 in EITC spending increases after-tax incomes by $0.73, while $1 spent on the NIT yields $1.39…” Via Owen Zidar

And:

• Claire Cain Miller: How Technology, Aided by Recession, Is Transforming the Work World
• Margot Sanger-Katz: Two Americas on Health Care, and Danger of Further Division

Should Be Aware of:

2. Thomas Ricks: Why Am I Moving Left?: “In my late 50s, at a time of life when most people are supposed to be drifting into a cautious conservatism, I am surprised to find myself moving steadily leftward…. During the time I was a newspaper reporter, I didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered. Mentally, I was a detached centrist…. But since leaving newspapers, I have again and again found myself shifting to the left… wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it…. Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the first big shocks…. Torture. I never expected my country to endorse torture…. How we fought. I never thought that an American government would employ mercenaries in a war. And yet we did this in Iraq by hiring thousands of armed ‘security contractors’ who in practice were subject neither to local law nor to the American military justice system, and so could and often did treat Iraqis badly…. Intelligence officials run amok…. Growing income inequality…. The middle class used at least to get lip service from the rich—’backbone of the country’ and such. Now it is often treated like a bunch of saps not aware enough to evade their taxes.”

Already-Noted Must-Reads:

1. Guido Matias Cortes et al.: The Micro and Macro of Disappearing Routine Jobs: A Flows Approach: “The U.S. labor market has become increasingly polarized since the 1980s, with the share of employment in middle-wage occupations shrinking over time. This job polarization process has been associated with the disappearance of per capita employment in occupations focused on routine tasks. We use matched individual-level data from the CPS to study labor market flows into and out of routine occupations and determine how this disappearance has played out at the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels. At the macro level, we determine which changes in transition rates account for the disappearance of routine employment since the 1980s. We find that changes in three transition rate categories are of primary importance: (i) that from unemployment to employment in routine occupations, (ii) that from labor force non-participation to routine employment, and (iii) that from routine employment to non-participation. At the micro level, we study how these transition rates have changed since job polarization, and the extent to which these changes are accounted for by changes in demographic composition or changes in the behavior of individuals with particular demographic characteristics. We find that the preponderance of changes is due to the propensity of individuals to make such transitions, and relatively little due to demographics. Moreover, we find that changes in the transition propensities of the young are of primary importance in accounting for the fall in routine employment…”

2. James Pethokoukis: The weird obsession that’s ruining the GOP: “Call it doomsday prepper economics. For more than five years, many Republicans and conservatives have warned that catastrophe is nigh. Washington’s deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s excessive money printing will lead to a financial crisis worse than the Great Recession, they prophesied. Inflation will skyrocket, the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will dump treasuries, they swore. As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: ‘More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We’re taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We’re going to see a real calamity’. Many GOP politicians have since echoed Paul’s prediction. But the Next Great Inflation never happened….
    
   “The inflation alarmism driving them is taking a weird turn…. Conservative author Amity Shlaes approvingly cites ShadowStats as supporting her thesis that ‘inflation is higher than what the official data suggest’. Others fans include conservative intellectual Niall Ferguson, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and a good chunk of the conservative blogosphere. ShadowStats’ popularity on the right is crazy…. If GOP inflationistas had their way, the weak U.S. recovery would almost surely be even weaker. Just look at Europe…. Why this GOP inflation obsession? Maybe it’s a legacy of how rapidly rising prices in the 1970s swept conservatives into power in both America and Great Britain. Maybe it’s how many conservative talk radio shows are sponsored by gold companies who stand to benefit from inflation hysteria. Maybe it’s a belief that every single economic metric must be a nightmare under President Obama. But whatever the reason, the GOP’s preoccupation with phantom price increases is distracting it from the actual problems afflicting the U.S. economy…”

3. Eric Chemi and Ariana Giorgi: For CEOs, Correlation Between Pay and Stock Performance Is Pretty Random: “With all the public chatter about exorbitant executive compensation and income inequality it’s useful to look at the relationship between chief executive officer pay and corporate performance. Typically, when the subject of their big pay packages arises, CEOs—usually through their spokespeople—say they are paid for performance. Does data back that up?… Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs. When compared to metrics such as revenue, profitability, and stock return, the scattering of data looks pretty random…. Check the comparison of the ranking of the 200 CEOs Equilar looked at to their company’s stock returns…. If ‘pay for performance’ was really a factor in compensating this group of CEOs, we’d see compensation and stock performance moving in tandem…. They certainly wouldn’t look like this…”

4. Brian Buetler: The Adler-Cannon Halbig v. Burwell Argument Is a Fraud–Just Ask Scott Brown: “It is now an article of faith on the right that Congress meant to condition the subsidies as an inducement to states, but overestimated the power of that inducement. I suspect many of the people advancing this claim realize that it is false, and are engaged in an elaborate gaslighting campaign. Others have probably convinced themselves that they are correct…. They need both an elaborate theory of legislative intent, and judges who are happy to treat the theory as plausible, even though it makes no sense. They’ve now found two such judges. Maybe their argument will carry in the Supreme Court, too. Or maybe the conservative justices will just say Congressional intent doesn’t matter and rule against the government anyhow. (I still tend to think that the government will prevail, assuming the case ever reaches the Supreme Court.)
    
   “But as far as… what Congress intended… there can be no debate. You can ask the people who wrote the bill. You can ask the reporters who chronicled the legislative process…. You can ask state officials, who were advised that federal Medicaid dollars were conditional upon the Medicaid expansion (as originally envisioned) but not that the subsidy dollars were conditional upon establishing an exchange…. You can ask Democratic legislators…. Or you can ask Scott Brown. When he was still a senator from Massachusetts, Brown sponsored legislation with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon to hasten the availability of Wyden’s State Innovation Waivers…. Neither the existence of the waiver program, nor the desire among members to hasten its implementation, are consistent with the idea that Congress intended to allow states to essentially waive out of these same requirements simply by doing nothing…”

5. Ezra Klein: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Plan: “P
   The most important idea in Paul Ryan’s poverty plan reverses the most important idea in Paul Ryan’s budgets. Those budgets… [made] deep cuts to spending on programs for the poor the cornerstone of Republican fiscal policy… cut spending on the programs that fight poverty. Ryan’s poverty plan is… a sharp break with his budgets… an attempt to change the Republican Party’s view–a view driven, in large part, by Paul Ryan and his budgets–of what to do with programs for the poor….
    
   “This was a bit like hearing the Kool-Aid Man say that he only ever drank Kool-Aid for the money, and in truth, he thinks kids should drink more tap water, instead. But… this is a return to Ryan’s roots. Though he’s made his name as the GOP’s chief crusader against deficits… Ryan’s actual record… included a series of votes that massively increased the deficit… to wrench policy… conservative… George W. Bush’s tax cuts… the war in Iraq… the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Prior to Barack Obama’s presidency, Ryan was best known for the Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act… $2.4 trillion in additional costs over the first 10 years… [that] the Bush administration ultimately dismissed… as ‘irresponsible’…”

Ezra Klein: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Plan: “P
The most important idea in Paul Ryan’s poverty plan…

…reverses the most important idea in Paul Ryan’s budgets. Those budgets… [made] deep cuts to spending on programs for the poor the cornerstone of Republican fiscal policy… cut spending on the programs that fight poverty. Ryan’s poverty plan is… a sharp break with his budgets… an attempt to change the Republican Party’s view–a view driven, in large part, by Paul Ryan and his budgets–of what to do with programs for the poor….

This was a bit like hearing the Kool-Aid Man say that he only ever drank Kool-Aid for the money, and in truth, he thinks kids should drink more tap water, instead. But… this is a return to Ryan’s roots. Though he’s made his name as the GOP’s chief crusader against deficits… Ryan’s actual record… included a series of votes that massively increased the deficit… to wrench policy… conservative… George W. Bush’s tax cuts… the war in Iraq… the unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Prior to Barack Obama’s presidency, Ryan was best known for the Social Security Personal Savings Guarantee and Prosperity Act… $2.4 trillion in additional costs over the first 10 years… [that] the Bush administration ultimately dismissed… as ‘irresponsible’…

Brian Buetler: The Adler-Cannon Halbig v. Burwell Argument Is a Fraud–Just Ask Scott Brown: “It is now an article of faith on the right that Congress meant to condition the subsidies…

…as an inducement to states, but overestimated the power of that inducement. I suspect many of the people advancing this claim realize that it is false, and are engaged in an elaborate gaslighting campaign. Others have probably convinced themselves that they are correct…. They need both an elaborate theory of legislative intent, and judges who are happy to treat the theory as plausible, even though it makes no sense. They’ve now found two such judges. Maybe their argument will carry in the Supreme Court, too. Or maybe the conservative justices will just say Congressional intent doesn’t matter and rule against the government anyhow. (I still tend to think that the government will prevail, assuming the case ever reaches the Supreme Court.)

But as far as… what Congress intended… there can be no debate. You can ask the people who wrote the bill. You can ask the reporters who chronicled the legislative process…. You can ask state officials, who were advised that federal Medicaid dollars were conditional upon the Medicaid expansion (as originally envisioned) but not that the subsidy dollars were conditional upon establishing an exchange…. You can ask Democratic legislators…. Or you can ask Scott Brown. When he was still a senator from Massachusetts, Brown sponsored legislation with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon to hasten the availability of Wyden’s State Innovation Waivers…. Neither the existence of the waiver program, nor the desire among members to hasten its implementation, are consistent with the idea that Congress intended to allow states to essentially waive out of these same requirements simply by doing nothing…