Scott Sumner on Smithianism

Scott writes

The new GDP figures offer a reminder that one can’t analyze movements in GDPby looking at components of GDP.  We saw huge increases in spending on cars (pushing consumer durables up by 15.3%) and houses (up 19.1%.)  And yet overall RGDP growth fell to only 2.2%.  Why didn’t the spending on cars and houses help?  Because in the short run it’s NGDP growth that drives RGDP.  And the Fed continued its tight money policy by allowing only 3.8% NGDP growth, same as the previous quarter.

If the Fed had a strict NGDP target and everyone knew what it was the Scott would be correct. However, if either the Fed doesn’t have a strict target or we don’t know what it is then Cars and Houses are causal or informative, respectively.

This is because Cars and Houses pull harder on NGDP more than most sectors of the economy. If we think of the Fed trying to influence NGDP indirectly – through the interest rate or some other mechanism – then this would imply that an exogenous negative shock to the purchase of cars and houses would tend to lower the demand side pressure on NGDP and so the Fed would need to loosen its indirect target to keep NGDP growth constant. Conversely and exogenous positive shock would raise demand side pressure on NGDP and the Fed would need to tighten its indirect target to keep NGDP growth constant.

Even if the Fed is targeting NGDP directly then we could still look to Cars and Houses to inform us about what they were doing. If in the absence of some non-Fed shock the construction of new homes begins to decline, then one can say “Ah this must mean the Fed is tightening NGDP”

Where Are We in the Economic Cycle

I see that a lot of folks are getting depressed about the incoming data. I think this is unfortunate because the general narrative from the later half of 2011 is continuing. The economy looks to be growing reasonably well against headwinds that are likely to turn into tailwinds. Residential investment is flat and government spending declining.

Yet, it is highly unlikely that these trends will continue. We have not yet seen the increase in multifamily construction I was looking for and we may never see it. However, as predicted rents are rising, and the supply of housing is tight. If the multifamily supply doesn’t increase then this will cause either young homeowner, investors, or move-up landlords to soak up the inventory of single family homes and lead to an increase in the building of new single family homes.

Given the way things are going the next big trend might be move-up landlords. What we are imagining here are folks who are financially stable, who notice they can rent their existing home for enough to cover the mortgage. So, they buy a new home. Because they are moving into the new home they get to enjoy Fannie-Freddie owner occupied rates on both mortgages. Yet, they are now landlords on the original home.

Government spending has been declining strongly and this has dampened economic growth, but seems not only unlikely to continue but likely to reverse. In any case even stopping the drain from government would make the economy look a lot stronger.

Here is quarterly final sales growth in the US economy.

Pretty spotty. However, here are final sales when we take out government.

looks more like what you would expect from a generally strengthening economy.

We get an even more dramatic difference if we allow for consideration of inventory accumulation. I tend to prefer this since inventories are in fact quite pro-cyclical.

With government

Without government

Abe the Slave

Bryan Caplan relates the following thought experiment

Suppose there are ten people on a desert island.  One, named Able Abel, is extremely able.  With a hard day’s work, Able can produce enough to feed all ten people on the island.  Eight islanders are marginally able.  With a hard day’s work, each can produce enough to feed one person.  The last person, Hapless Harry, is extremely unable.  Harry can’t produce any food at all.
Questions:

1. Do the bottom nine have a right to tax Abel’s surplus to support Harry?

2. Suppose Abel only produces enough food to support himself, and relaxes the rest of the day.  Do the bottom nine have a right to force Abel to work more to support Harry?

3. Do the bottom nine have a right to tax Abel’s surplus to raise everyone‘s standard of living above subsistence?

4. Suppose Abel only produces enough food to support himself, and relaxes the rest of the day.  Do the bottom nine have a right to force Abel to work more to raise everyone‘s standard of living above subsistence?

How would most people answer these questions?  It’s hard to say.  It’s easy to feel sorry for the bottom nine.  But #1 and #3 arguably turn Abel into a slave.  And #2 and #4 clearly turn Abel into a slave.  I suspect that plenty of non-libertarians would share these libertarian moral intuitions.  At minimum, many would be conflicted.

One of the reasons I brought up slavery in my earlier posts on secular morality is that slavery presents a particularly tricky moral problem.

Modern folks have extremely strong moral intuitions against slavery. Yet, an absolute injunction against slavery in the most abstract sense runs head long against huge numbers of other intuitions that folks have about society.

Usually this problem is addressed by some degree of contortionism; suggesting that chattel slavery of the type practiced in antebellum South stands apart from say taxation or compulsory education or the requirement that people wear shirts and shoes in the grocery store.

Yet, the justification for this distinction typically rest on what sound like consequentialist grounds. For example, “Come on, you can’t really tell me that forcing someone to put on shirt before entering a store is the same thing as forcing them to work the cotton fields or be whipped.”

But note that now the implication is that chattel slavery is not bad because it is slavery. It is bad because something about it – presumably the human suffering involved – is fundamentally different than having to put on shirt.

What makes this issue even thornier is the fact that there was a time when slavery was commonplace. So, what makes us think that our dogmatic rejection of slavery is somehow more sound than the its acceptance in years past?

Now, you might say that you don’t really care. This is your moral intuition and you are sticking to it. However, are you bothered at all by the possibility that you could be in the position of the slave owner, holding on to this dogmatic belief all the while committing horrible wrongs?

What if taxation, for example, really is horrible but you just don’t see it?

So these are the concerns raised by a philosophy of “be excellent to one another” or “as long as I am a pluralist why do I have to be bothered to justify my beliefs.”

NOTE:  Having to wear shirts in the grocery store is the law in many places not simply a stipulation of the owner of the store. It is a result of the coercive force of the state.

NOTE on NOTE: Apparently that it is the law is a myth. So, I would have to redo this example with another compulsive triviality.

What’s Happening to the UK, Ctd

Lots of people have responded on this. A couple of notes

1. Its quite clear how one could get into a bit of trouble if nominal wages declined relative to nominally sticky debt. You still have to say something about the other factors of production and the terms of international trade but its certainly conceivable that you can get stuck in a trap
2. This same argument is harder to see through with falling real wages driven by an increasing price level.
3. Key in this is what is happening to income shares at the margin. If real wages are falling against rising prices this suggest that income shares are shifting. Demanders are bidding up the price of goods yet the per unit revenue is not flowing through to labor. It must be flowing through to some other factor. The question then is why does this factor not increase in supply and thereby drive up the marginal product of labor.

If this is driven by say oil then the answer in most countries is (on first blush) obvious. One cannot simply increase the supply of oil as it depends on having access to geological deposits. Thus as the price of oil is bid up there is no immediate reaction to increase the supply of oil and thus increase the marginal product of labor.

However, suppose the answer is that the margin is going to factory owners. Now we have a quandary. Why do factory owners not respond by increasing output rather than simply letting demanders bid up the price?

Now, I do not really have a good sense for what is going on in the UK, but I am skeptical of the notion that there is a massive supply shock. It could be but I need more. Just asserting this feels empty. One should be able to see most supply shocks and so if the supply shock is not obvious a story should be in order.

My first, guess – and it is a almost a pure guess – is that what is happening is related to trade and finance. .

Here is one scenario:

There was huge borrowing by British households to finance a construction boom which was driven in turn by a land price bubble. The land price bubble collapsed which collapsed the construction boom. British households now have to repay their debts.

To do so they have to move from construction into something that their creditors want to buy. Say manufactured goods. If their creditors are overseas this will require that the British Pound decline rapidly in value.

However, suppose at the same time there is an enormous increase in international demand for British Sovereign debt as a result of instability in the Eurozone. This buying of British sovereign debt props up the Pound and keeps it from falling.

Now, British households have no way to repay foreigners. That gives us the sustained depression in the British economy. They need to repay debt, but they cannot repay it because the Pound will not adjust.

Yet, now we must ask where the inflation is coming from. I know people will be tempted to say “The Bank of England” but there is no immaculate inflation. It is not as if the Bank of England simply decides to print money and magically the Consumer Price Index rises.

The prices of individual goods and services must be rising. They must be responding to the microeconomic forces of supply and demand that they face. This implies that supply is falling or demand is rising for some set of goods. Which are these?

This will help tell us why it looks like there is some sort of supply side shock to the UK. If it is rents then it is possible that this really is a “supply shock” of sorts, as is happening in the US.

I am loath to use that term for what it connotes but if the growth of the housing stock is constrained by falling land prices then we have a Keynesian depression in capital markets that is leading to a supply shock in the final goods market.  The capital markets cannot clear because of sticky prices and collateral concerns and so there is a shortage of capital and so we can have rising prices (rents) at the same time as high unemployment.

Now, maybe it is rents in the UK or maybe it is something else. Maybe the UK economy is really oil dependent? I don’t know. However, to get at what is going on we need to know which prices are rising.

Housing and education debt

Jodie Beggs of Economists Do It With Models posed the following via twitter:

Question- how is it that ppl are advised against variable rate mortgages but pushed into variable rate student loans?

I never turn down the chance to lecture condescendingly to a Harvard trained economist, so let me see if I can clear this up for Jodie by arguing why it might make sense for an individual to have a fixed rate mortgage but variable rate student loans.

First note the similarities that lead one to ask this question: a college education and a home are sort of assets. Well, a home is literally an asset, and an education is kind of like an asset, but they both share the features of an asset that they are a long-lived investment that pays investment returns. In addition -and central to this issue- purchases of both are typically financed by debt. A third important similarity is that these are typically the large components of household debt, and two of the most important investments households make.

Given these similarities, it is natural to assume that it would be optimal for households to choose similar interest rates. But it is the nature of the returns these investments produce that explains why an individual might choose different interest rates. For a house, the investment return produed is a flow of housing services. Think of it as a factory that produces a months worth of housing each month, which the individual owning it consumes. Education, in contrast produces higher human capital which translates (usually) into higher value of output that their labor creates. The difference is that inviduals sell their labor output, whereas they consume the flow of housing services.

This matters because if inflation -and thus nominal interest rates- go up then the cost of debt service will go up for both housing and education debt if the interest is variable. In addition, inflation should also drive up the price of the output produced by the assets and the nominal value of the assets themselves: house prices and the value of the flow of housing services -equal, in theory, to rent- will increase, and so will wages. Because households are selling their labor, their income rises with their costs of debt. But households are consuming their housing services, their debt service goes up without an offsetting increase in income. For this reason, it is more risky to use variable rate interest on housing debt than on education debt.

What Is Happening to the UK

Richard Williamson wants an answer

Back in November, Karl Smith made the clearest statement I have ever read of the New Keynesian explanation of a recession:

I can’t hammer this home enough. A recession is not when something bad happens. A recession is not when people are poor.

A recession is when markets fail to clear. We have workers without factories and factories without workers. We have cars without drivers and drivers without cars. We have homes without families and families without their own home.

Prices clear markets. If there is a recession, something is wrong with prices.

Right now, unemployment remains at over 8% in the UK while real wages are lower than they were 7 years ago and are continuing to fall. Yes, you read that correctly. Which immediately leads one to ask: on this explanation of a recession as expounded by Karl, how much further do real wages have to fall to eliminate disequilibrium unemployment?

I am not a political person, I’m trying to ask an intellectual question here.

I don’t know. I say that with a heavy heart.

I don’t have immediate access to British data but the first question is: where are the margins going?

When an item is sold we can think of the revenue from that item as being broken up into pieces. Some of the revenue is paid to labor. Some is paid to capital in the most fundamental sense. Some is paid to natural resources or foreign inputs. Some is paid to residual claimants who are typically entrepreneurs or shareholders.

If prices are rising and wages are falling then one of these other group(s) must be getting more margin from the items being sold. If we know who this group is then that will help us attempt to untangle this puzzle.

“The Turn” Illustrated

This is year-over-year private sector real GDP growth over the last decade

GDP Numbers Not Too Bad

Real quick on this. Top line was 2.2%. Lets dig deeper.

Durable Goods Consumption: Added 1.13 pts. About in line with what I would have thought given the surge in cars, but cars was actually a little weak and other durables a little strong.

Non-Durable Goods Consumption: Added .35 pts. Surprisingly strong given the secular death of gasoline. Gasoline consumption has subtracted from GDP for the last 6 quarters and added nothing in the two before that. The US is de-gasolining and that has tended to make non-durables flat.

Consumer Services: Added .57 pts. Much weaker than I expected because I thought utilities would add big this quarter after subtracting big last quarter. But, no another major draw on utilities at –.23 pts. Yet, there is no serious way this is a trend. All of this will bounce back mechanically as we move into the Summer unless we have “The coolest summer on record” and electricity use dies.

Non-Residential Structures: Subtracted .35 pts. Larger subtraction than I would have expected. We know we are getting some subtraction as Natural Gas fracking in the Northeast cools down and Eagle Ford has yet to hit its stride but this is still a little bigger than I would have thought. Not quite sure what all is happening.

Equipment and Software: Added .13 pts. We knew this would be weak in January because of depreciation credits, however, this is a little weaker than census reports would have suggested given Feb and March. I am inclined to expect this will be revised up.

Inventories: Added 0.59 pts. I don’t have a good sense for what this means in a practical way or what to expect though I know petroleum product and natural gas storage is a big deal and went up.

Residential Construction: Added 0.40 pts. Slowly but surely as the starts data indicate. This should get bigger going into the year.

Net Exports: Subtracted 0.01pts. Not bad, though we should expect this to get worse as Europe does.

Federal Government: Subtracted 0.46 pts. SMACK. That is much bigger than expected and almost all comes from military drawdown. Two big quarters in a row of shrinking military expenditures.

State and Local: Subtracted 0.14. Surprisingly high and looks like its coming from lack of highway investment. What the political endgame on that is I don’t know.

 

All-in-all it looks decent. Government and utilities are not really driven by the underlying dynamics. Main area of concern is non-residential fixed investment where both structures and equipment and software are weaker than I would have supposed.

Also for those tracking GDI, personal income plus taxes on production grew by 140 Billion, adding 3.6 pts to GDI. A rough guess of 35 Billion in net corporate profit growth in the first quarter gives me 4.6% GDI growth est.

Stability is Not an Option

I think folks are grossly underestimating both the global demand for liquidity and the feedback action inherent in housing. We have an almost triple-witching of classic collateral concerns.

For a new home, the land has to serve as collateral for the building loan, then the building has to serve as collateral for the purchase loan, then purchase loan is bundled into a MBS where it serves as collateral in the repo market.

This makes for huge amplification effects in and of itself. Place on top of that the fact that the price of land is extremely sticky and housing suffers from time-to-build and you have the potential for a massive Yo-Yo.

I had hoped that a massive expansion in rental housing would buffer this, but alas that seems not to be going to pass. Instead this, from Bill McBride is:

Second mortgage purchase mortgage lending above 80% loan to value has begun to creep back into the market. Prudent Underwriting standards and deep risk analysis have convinced some private money to come back into the housing finance market of late. We’ve added an 80 / 10 / 10 product recently that has no Private Mortgage Insurance.

I will be highly shocked if it stops here. The products will start coming out of the woodwork. Loans will gush in.

Folks will say – have we learned nothing?

But, there is nothing that could have been learned, save for the fact that the US government needs to issue more debt and support that debt with greater immigration, but that is fantasy at this point.

The simple fact is there is not enough collateral in the world and the US government is not issuing enough debt. This will happen again and again and again. If not in housing, then in metals. If not in metals then in polysilicon. If not in polysilicon, well . . . you get it.

The core problem is that the world needs lots of young people under the rule of a democratic government. But it has old democracies and young basket case countries. This does not make for a world where safe sovereign debt can be issued.

We could attempt to reform the basket case countries but the easier solution is to youngify the democracies. Europe is beyond help in this regard. The US, Canada, and Australia are the world’s only hope. More immigrants. More young immigrants and more sovereign debt.

If not, this will never stop.

Hope for Housing

This is something that is hard to convey when people see how anemic housing is and how many problems there are in the market. However, measured by the absolute growth of housing permits issued, growth is now back to where it was during the boom.

That seems crazy?

However, first permits are going to be a little more steady than starts and of course lead starts. This is because when you break ground might depend on lots of different temporary factors. Also, while the seasonal flux in permits is strong its not quite as bad as starts.

Second, and more important, the contribution to growth comes from the absolute change. So, going from nothing to really crappy can be a strong contributor to growth. Just as going from a boom to normal can be a strong drag on growth.

Notes on Initial Claims

Two quick things

One, is that – actually amazingly – the absolute change year-over-year in initial claims is following steady channel. You usually see the pace of decline, itself decline over time but that is not happening.

This to me suggests that nothing special has happened in the labor market since the summer of 2011 and that its essentially steady as she goes.

As stated before, I have expected to see the economy “kick” by March or April of this year but as things look it will be late. The pressures do still seem to be building, as I’ll talk about in another post.

The other quick note, is that while Initial Claims tells us a whole lot about the labor market what they don’t actually tell us that much about are layoffs, which people sometimes mistake. You can file an initial claim if you are laid off but whether or not you do so, is dependent on the state of the job market. That’s why initial claims are actually a better indicator than layoffs themselves which are back down to the lows of the previous recovery.

Asteroid Mining

Obviously this idea sounds ridiculous to many economists as there is no particular reason to think it makes sense to go through such lengths to get natural resources. After all we live on a pretty darn big spacerock.

To the extent natural resources are expensive on earth it is because they are difficult to get at, not because we are running out. There is of course some possibility that they would be actually easier to get at in space. The problem is that doing so is a major project that only makes sense if you can bring back a lot of resouces.

However, the very reason that hard to get at resources on earth are expensive is because the limited quantities cause consumers to bid up the price. If there were many more, then the bidding would be less furious. So, you face the problem that as soon as you bring a huge chunk of gold or what have you back to earth you cause the price the crash and cannot recoup the mission costs.

That said, there are two things.

One, is that in theory the company could sell some type of speculative contracts on the minerals it hopes to get. Basically you need a contract that says, of the first X amount of mineral that we bring back you will buy it at Y price. Then these contracts would have to be sold in series with the understanding that the total draw down from the mining operation will be uncertain both in terms of beginning time, quantity and duration.

So they can try this, though I am guessing the price for such contract will not be that high.

Second, this actual strikes me as more like Craig Venter’s stent at Celera Genomics where a private company was used to do basic scientific research and the investors bought in, in part because they wanted to be a part of something great and in part because the scientists more or less conned them.

Though as wealth dispersion increases and people get richer I think this “Invest for Prestige/Get Conned” model will be big for science.

Bernanke’s Totem

Paul Krugman thinks Bernanke has been assimilated

Ben Bernanke responds to my magazine piece; as I see it, in effect he declared that he has been assimilated by the Fed Borg:

But, I think it’s a bit different. He’s in a dream inside of dream, suffering from Monetary Inception.

I mean this only half-jokingly. The Fed’s policies will have effects on the real world. However, the Fed can never see the real world. It can’t see the past and it certainly can’t see the present. It only has a vague a haze about what reality might be.

In that situation, the constructed reality presented by the Fed staff is powerful. Its grounded. There is some sense that you know what you are doing. And, not only does this constructed reality shape what you think the situation is today, it shapes what you think the response to your actions has been. It shapes your interpretation of the causal nature of the world itself.

What Bernanke needs is a totem. An object to tell him that he is in a dream. That this isn’t real and on the outside there are real people. This is what screaming into the economic blogosphere and economic journalism world does.

Its an echo that they can faintly hear inside the Eccles Building. Tyler Cowen and perhaps Greg Ip think we are being too hard on the Chairman, but when he is in a dream inside of a dream you have to scream loudly in hopes that he’ll hear a whisper.

Should people who want higher taxes donate to the government?

Let me summarize a debate that is going on:

1. Matt Zwolinski repeats the popular argument that people like Warren Buffett who want higher taxes should donate money to the government like they do to charity.  But people largely don’t do this, as a mere $3.2 million was donated to the government compared to $300 billion to charities. This tells you people don’t really want higher taxes.

2. Will Wilkinson replies that this is incorrect because it can be rational for someone to not comply with a rule that: “(1) you support, but (2) will only have its desired effect if general compliance with the rule is high, and (3) you suspect general compliance will not be high.” He compares someone who thinks we should not eat meat but their not eating meat won’t result in any less animals being killed, since his not eating alone will have zero effect on market demand.

3. Bryan Caplan responds that the real question we should be asking is:  “Why is government’s share of the voluntary donations market so damn small?”  He argues that the prisoners’ dilemma can explain why a particular charity (or the government as a charity) has a low amount of donations, but it can’t explain why it has low donations relative to other charities, which also suffer from a prisoners’ dilemma.

This is going to be another one of those posts where I argue everyone kind of has a point. Overall, I think Will is correct that people legitimately do want higher taxes. But I think Matt and Bryan have a point that the lack of donations is indicative of something.

One point I want to make is that I think Bryan is incorrect that the prisoners’ dilemma can’t explain why the charitable donations to government are so small. Consider Bryan’s hypothetical that raises money for haircuts for hippies. Imagine that absent coercion people would voluntarily give $1,000 to hippy haircuts by themselves, but if they know that everyone else would also, they would be willing to give $3,000, making it the largest charity in the country. Now suppose the government taxes everyone $2,800 and gives it to the organization. In this circumstance it can be completely rational for everyone go give zero marginal dollars to hippy haircuts, despite the fact that without the government taxing them they would have donated $1,000. Likewise one could argue that people in this country would be willing to donate hundreds of billions each year to the U.S. government if they weren’t already paying taxes, and that we are still below the efficient level of contribution.

However, I also want to quibble with Will’s example of not eating meat. It makes sense for someone to believe they’re not going to have any effect on the consumption of meat since the tiny, tiny amount of lower demand may be a fraction of a rounding error that doesn’t even show up in the yearly spreadsheets upon which they base next year’s production numbers. Likewise the extra couple thousand dollars the typical U.S. household could donate to the government would amount to pennies per government program. But meat consumption is going to be relatively normally distributed, while income is going to be more log normally distributed. Consider everyone’s favorite example in this issue, Warren Buffett. I believe he makes in the neighborhood of $60 million a year, and total U.S. household income is around $7 trillion, meaning he accounts for 0.000857% of U.S. income. A rounding error? Maybe. But consider if Buffett consumed a proportional share of meat, as in Will’s example. U.S. households consume around 30 million cows a year, which means Buffett would personally be consuming around 250 heads of cattle. Would it be legitimate for a man consuming 250 cows a year to say that it wouldn’t matter if he became a vegetarian?

But this brings me to a section point related to Will’s meat eating metaphor. Part of the reason people who think eating meat is wrong shouldn’t eat meat is to be an example to others. Charitable acts are often purposefully visible signals meant to encourage others to do the same. Isn’t this why people do charity walks? Sure, a lot of this signaling is motivated by the desire to signal higher status, but this desire to signal can incentivize good behavior.

Like Bryan, I don’t find it hard to imagine us ending up at a different equilibrium where many people do donate to the government:

Could the U.S. government attract a lot more donations with better marketing?  What if the President spent less time raising money for his campaign and more time raising money for the Treasury?  What if Congress publicly acknowledge the ten biggest donors in an annual ceremony?  I can easily believe that donations to the U.S. government would rise a hundred-fold.  But even then, Uncle Sam’s share of national charity would be a mere .1%.

Rather than politicians appealing to people to donate to the government, I could imagine high profile people like Warren Buffett urging people to donate more and generating some movement on this. But I don’t think the lack of this sort of movement proves anything about how much people value government spending, I just think it’s a potential that hasn’t been realized yet.

Can’t We All Get Along: Haidt and Gray, Edition

Like Will Wilkinson I found John Gray’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s, The Righteous Mind, entertaining if not particularly enlightening.

This is not my main point but I can’t help to note that Gray seems to think little of Haidt’s philosophical sophistication, yet in that same review pens paragraphs such as this

In his diary recording the persecution he suffered in Nazi Germany, Victor Klemperer reports on tradesmen and neighbors occasionally slipping him and his wife food and chocolate. Against the background of pervasive hatred and cruelty that Klemperer experienced, these fitful expressions of kindness must qualify as moral behavior. But they are in no sense “groupish.” Quite the contrary: they show people setting aside group identities for the sake of human sympathy. Those who helped Klemperer and his wife were violating the group-centered racist morality of Nazism—along with the morality that had in the past sanctioned persecution of Jews—in order to show concern for individuals. In effect, they were choosing between good and bad moralities.

Taken as a whole, these eloquent words don’t quite fall to the level of nonsense, but its certainly far from clear what meaningful statement Gray is making here and it does of course smack of appeal to emotion.

The larger point, however, is that I don’t see any fundamental tension between the work that Haidt is doing and moral philosophy. Gray writes

IT IS RATHER LATE in his argument that Haidt offers anything like a definition of morality, but when he does it is avowedly functionalist: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” Haidt recognizes that this is an entirely descriptive definition. He acknowledges that, if it were applied normatively, “it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of social cooperation by creating a shared social order.”

That is an implication of Haidt’s analysis about which he should be seriously concerned. But Haidt seems not to grasp the depth of the difficulties that he faces. There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign. Freud tried to develop a view of human nature in terms of which morality could be better understood; but he accepted that much that comes naturally to humans—such as sexual predation and other types of violence—had to be repressed in the interests of a civilized life. Civilization sometimes requires the repression of natural human traits, including some that may be sanctioned by prevailing moral codes. The moralities that have emerged by natural selection have no overriding authority.

It is quite true that no description of the evolution of human morality tells us what we “ought” to do, but such descriptions in general and Haidt’s work in particular are incredibly useful to the moral philosopher.

For example, a significant chunk of moral philosophy could be understood as an attempt to divine what the following sentence is all about:

Sally said that eating meat is morally wrong, but I disagree.

Assuming that Sally did in fact utter the words “eating meat is morally wrong” what, if anything, am I disagreeing with?

Without diving too deep, let’s just say it is far from clear. However, Haidt is potentially offering us a clear first step.

According to Haidt I can understand that sentence as the following:

Sally said that eating meat violates either the principle of care, fairness, loyalty, respect, sanctity or liberty, but I disagree.

Importantly, if Haidt is right then my view of morality, projectivist anti-realism is seriously called into question. Indeed, taking Haidt seriously enough is grounds for accepting a full throated moral-realism.

So, I am deeply interested in the potential success of Haidt’s project.

Where I am confused by Haidt is his suggestion that of the six foundational values, conservatives see all six, libertarians see four and liberals only three.

Why should this be?

Are we suggesting that liberalism for example is a form of color-blindness; that liberals simply lack the cones to see three of the foundational moral values?

If this is the case are we to understand the growth of liberalism over time as the rapid spread of a genetic mutation? Is it the result of some sort of nutritional deficiency or environmental pollutant?

Moreover, it really seems like people are able to become more liberal or conservative as a result of primarily mental experiences. What is that all about?

Now I want to be clear that I am open to these possibilities. I am just not sure if that’s what Haidt means because he seems to suggest that through experience and intermingling liberals and conservatives can learn to put aside their differences.

However, doesn’t this suggest that liberals can in fact see all six foundational values?

The Two Dogmas of Foodies

Daniel Neman reviews Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Get’s Lunch

Don’t go into a restaurant with many beautiful women in it, says economist Tyler Cowen. Those places attract a lot of men, and although they may be popular for a few months the quality inevitably will soon diminish.

. . .

What these and other statements from the esteemed economist should teach us is that, in general, we shouldn’t listen to what economists have to say about restaurants. They don’t look at life the same way as you and I. And they certainly don’t consider situations that do not fit into their preconceived theories.

For instance, what if you are yourself a beautiful woman? What if you are a beautiful woman who wants to dine out with a number of your beautiful friends? According to Mr. Cowen, you shouldn’t go to whatever restaurant you happen to go to.

Perhaps what it teaches us is that we shouldn’t listen to esteemed Food Critics when it comes to deduction reasoning.

Having accompanied many such diners facing this apparent dilemma, the solution is obvious. Travel in small groups. Find a place first. Don’t tell anyone about it. And, if they do find out move on to another place while relentlessly bad mouthing the first place, until it losses it social status. Rinse and Repeat.

Daniel Kuehn on Secular Morality

Replying in part to me Daniel writes

It seems to me that secular ethics distinguishes itself by recognizing the fundamental pluralism of society, and that while these community-level constructions of the world are useful for getting along in the world, in a community – they don’t quite reach a standard of justification they claim for themselves. So we need a broader, more pluralist ethics and Douthat is right – that often consists of dismissing the justificationist, foundationalist project itself. Why? Because an ethics that you can get by writing a poetic book and waiting a couple centuries for it to gain mystical significance does not seem like a very laudable ethical code. You’ll get some gems from that approach, of course. We humans learn how to get along with each other, and that is going to be distilled in these various books. But it’s not a very strong justification. What much of the world has converged on is that since within-community justifications don’t work outside of the community, we need to come up with an ethical orientation that allows the coexistence of multiple potentially contradictory communities, justification and foundation be damned.

I don’t mean the following in any dismissive way but simply to articulate my understanding. Daniel seems to be making three statements to me

1. Secular Ethics is Pluralistic Cultural Politics
2. Hurrah for Pluralistic Cultural Politics!
3. I am not interested in playing ethics-game

I understand the pull of this approach. I find this unsatisfying because, like Daniel I assume, I see limits to coexistence. As a contemporary practical matter for example, are we willing to accept, acceptance of human trafficking as a within-community ethical standard that should be tolerated, without even protest or disapprobation?

And, if you do think that we should attempt to morally press a community which accepts human trafficking, not to do so, are you not at minimum initiating a neutron-bomb moral assault. Where in this case you hope to leave the actual human participants unharmed, but to obliterate the underlying ethical standard.

And, if you do then what calculus do you use to decide when such an assault is warranted? This, I think, leads us back to playing ethics-game.

Douthat on Secular Morality

Ross Douthat writes

. . . much of today’s liberalism expects me to respect its moral fervor even as it denies the revelation that once justified that fervor in the first place. It insists that it is a purely secular and scientific enterprise even as it grounds its politics in metaphysical claims. (You will not find the principle of absolute human equality in evolutionary theory, or universal human rights anywhere in physics.) It complains that Christian teachings on homosexuality do violence to gay people’s equal dignity—but if the world is just matter in motion, whence comes this dignity? What justifies and sustains it? Why should I grant it such intense, almost supernatural respect?

This seems largely correct to me. A coherent secular morality is a tricky problem in and of itself. One that makes absolute claims even more so, and one that makes absolute claims absolutely seems well beyond our grasp. And, I say this as a secularist who is very much concerned with ethics or what, to make the point, I have often been forced to call the-ethics-game.

For example, the claim that slavery is fundamentally wrong in all cases is not controversial among secularists but it is far from clear how one justifies this except by asserting it. And, then of course what is one to say to people who deny it?

Intending no disrespect to the underlying issue, the argument seems to devolve into “na-na na-na boo-boo.” Which is to say, simply refusing to accept the denial as valid.

There are various claims which amount to saying the human faculty of reason endows us with certain inalienables. Not only does this strike me as blatant post hoc speciesism, but it seems to suggest that there is some mental threshold below which a person could fall in which not only enslaving them would be fine but also violating any of the other rights which are asserted to stem from self-ownership. In short treating the person as an animal.

Attempts to reconcile this problem back people into corners such as asserting that the well-being of an adult pig is as important as the well-being of a newborn baby.

At least some of the confusion over this comes from the assumption that lacking the same ethical grounding as Christians, secularists either will not behave morally or cannot make moral demands.

The first I think just misunderstands how people behave and gives too much credit to critical reasoning and justification. For the most part secularists behave morally for the same reason just about everyone else does, because they would feel bad if they did not.

The second I am increasingly tempted to say conflates cultural politics with the ethics-game. If you ask on what grounds do I accuse rapists of having done wrong, then the authentic answer is that a world with rape displeases me and this is a tool I can use to get society to impose sanctions against it.

That in my mind is quite different than the ethics-game. The ethics-game is an attempt to answer the question, what moral stance “should” I adopt. It is in the ethics-game that we pay careful attention to metaphysical coherence, consistency and an attempt to tease out what we really believe.

What Douthat appears to be saying is that the ethics-game is hard for secularists, and that is correct.

What Are Health Care Costs, Ctd

Kevin Drum thinks I have gone overboard

Just for the record, then: when I say “high healthcare costs,” what I mean is “lots of money flowing to heathcare entities.” I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone else means too. I know that Karl likes to be contrarian, but calling this a mere large-scale accounting issue is surely a little bit too Olympian even for him, isn’t it?

Let me see if I can make my point more clearly.

There are lots of ways more money could flow to health care entities:

1. People could value health care services extremely highly and want to purchase more of them
2. Moral Hazard could lead people to purchase health care through insurance that they do not value very much
3. The regulatory system could cause people to purchase more health care than they would want
4. The regulatory system could cause health care to be produced inefficiently
5. Information asymmetries between patients and doctors could lead people to be misinformed about the value of health care and purchase more than they would want under perfect information
6. The desire to signal that we care could cause us to purchase the most advanced forms of health care available, leading to an arms race in the production of advanced care
7. Cartelization by health care providers could raises prices
8. Health care entities may rent seek for higher payments from the government
9. Health care entities may engage in outright fraud to increase payments from insurance carriers and consumers

While all of these things increase the amount of money flowing to health care entities they are very different issues, with different economic implications.

For example, I’m not sure if (1) is something anyone should be concerned about, nor would we even use the phrase high cost in other contexts. Lots more money is flowing to the makers of smartphones, but we don’t think usually think of high smartphone cost as something we are facing.

Indeed we commonly say that smartphone costs are falling. This is because the value proposition is increasing.

On the other hand (4) could just be a pure economic loss. If good treatments for example can’t pass FDA approval it might be the case that not a single person in America is better off and many people are worse off. As economists we might consider that pretty costly.

Lastly,  its not immediately clear that (9) involves any measurable economic loss at all. If it is extremely easy for some types of fraud to be committed and it doesn’t alter incentives then it could more or less a pure transfer from the victim to the perpetrator.

This may strike people are morally wrong but its not economically inefficient and indeed without saying more its not clear that a consequentialist would consider this a problem worth fixing.

That is what I mean by saying we should focus on what the actual problems are rather than getting wrapped up in the accounting issue of how much money is flowing to health care entities.

The future is not what you want

In response to an old post of mine, Eli Dourado has some skeptical thoughts on what you could call “brain mounted computers”. This is really a collection of technologies, but the gist of it is computers increasingly integrated with our minds. The screens float before you using augmented reality, and you control them using your thoughts, and probably before that with hand gestures in the air or some sort of projected input surface, like skinput:

Eli is skeptical though, but I think his skepticism is motivated by a common error people make when projecting what the future will look like: they think about what kind of future they would like, instead of what kind of future is probable. You can see this in the case Eli makes, which appeals quite a bit to his preferences:

…when I think about a world of increasing wealth, I don’t think of one where everyone is part computer. I basically think about vacations. What do I like to do when I’m on vacation? I like to eat good food, see and try new things, lay in the sun, be creative, have good conversations with friends, have plenty of sex, read books, and generally unwind….

…What do I not like to do when I am on vacation? Near the top of my list, at least if I am doing it right, is “be notified that I have email.” This is why I am skeptical of widespread adoption of permanent brain-computer interfaces with augmented reality capabilities. As we get wealthier, we will accept fewer interruptions in our lives. It’s also part of why I think Google’s Project Glass will be a failure….

Unfortunately for the world though, most people aren’t like Eli. I feel fairly confident in claiming that Eli is quite far from the median person in terms of preferences, and so imagining whether a future populated with Eli Dourados would adopt various technologies won’t make for accurate forecasts.

I can agree that one somewhat plausible future is one filled with a lot of leisure time, but how are we likely to spend our marginal leisure time? Eli imagines we’ll do what he likes to do on vacation, like relaxing, having conversations, and eating good foods, which he claims are “all things our distant ancestors enjoyed as well”. I think most people are more likely to spend their new marginal leisure doing similar things that they spend their marginal leisure time on now, which are connected things, like Facebook, and what you might call mindless things, like watching TV. My categories of things people do with leisure time on the margin suggest that people will desire using augmented reality and brain mounted computers in their newfound leisure time. Eli’s categories suggest they won’t. So who is correct?

Well we can get something of a look at this by seeing how people are choosing to spend their marginal leisure time now by at the extra leisure time resulting from the recession. Of course this sample of marginal leisure time will be biased away from fun things, since the people with extra time now are likely suffering an income shock, so you might imagine they would spend much of their time doing things that are more substitutes for work, like household production. But when it comes to the things Eli thinks people will want to do with more leisure -like lying around in the sun, having conversations with friends, and eating good food- none of these are necessarily more expensive than other cheap leisure options. Sure, good food with friends can be expensive, but as Tyler tells us in his new book, it needn’t be.

So what are people doing with their extra time? Watching TV and sleeping mostly. The Wall Street Journal reports:

What did people do with that extra time? Mainly they slept and watched TV. Time spent in front of the television rose by 12 minutes, to two hours, 49 minutes a day in the two years through 2009. Sleep was the next big gainer, increasing by six minutes to eight hours, 40 minutes a day.

The data also show what Americans aren’t doing with their extra time: There was virtually no change between 2007 and 2009 in the time devoted to volunteering, religious activities, exercise or education. In sum, time people might have used productively is instead being squandered, says University of Texas economist Daniel Hamermesh.

You could argue that sleep is sort of in Eli’s category, since it is certainly a primitive activity. But the extent to which sleep is going to fill up our future leisure time is pretty limited. TV on the other hand, can take up a whole day if you want it to. A more sophisticated analysis of American Time Use Survey results verifies where marginal leisure time during a recession goes:

…roughly two-thirds of the increase of leisure time associated with the decline in market work at the business cycle frequency are concentrated in television watching and sleeping. To the extent the individuals consider recessions to be a period of increased leisure, the bulk of the leisure increase shows up as an increase of time in these two categories. Given the large movements in the time allocated to these two categories, our results suggest that economists need to think hard about how individuals value the marginal time spent watching television or sleeping when computing the welfare costs of business cycles. We do not find that socializing (spending time with one’s spouse, extended family, and friends) increases significantly during recessions.

Perhaps the wealthier future word will filled with high-brow individuals like Eli who prefer primitive entertainment. I think that would be a more rewarding world in many ways, but I also think a wide swath of mindless, easy, entertainment and connectedness is here to stay, and Americans will continue choosing it for their leisure. Except in the future it will be more directly connected to our brains.

What Is It That Wall Street Thinks QE Does, Ctd

So both from private correspondent and comments on my last post I can tell that people read me as asking something different than what I mean to be asking. I am going to try to be more exact, at the price of being less readable.

 

So, financial commentators appear to be debating the merits of additional QE. Some are saying the effects would be good. Others are saying they would be bad.

I strongly suspect that they intend to be making assertions about the world. 

I do not believe that they intend to speak gibberish as one might do to an infant.  For example, saying “gaga-goo-goo.”

Nor, do I believe they intend to recite memorized lines from a script, like an actor.

Yet, if they are making assertions this suggests they have in their minds some relationship, presumably causal, between QE and the rest of the world.

I want to know what that relationship is, or if there are many different ones at least a few, perhaps more common, samples.

Even if some parts of that relationship are implicitly magical or nonsensical, that’s fine. I am not trying to evaluate it. I am trying to internalize it.

What Is It That Wall Street Thinks QE Does?

I have noticed that finance blogs, money managers and reports from Investment Banks place significant weight on QE. Some as being a way to save the stock market if not the economy. Some as a dangerous manipulation of markets.

What is not clear is what exactly they believe is happening here?

As economists we have thoughts and debates on this but I am not even clear on how to engage the financial community because I am not clear on what it is they are suggesting is happening.

Structural Recession and the States

So one reason to think that this recession is not structural, at least in the way that some people have argued is to look at state-by-state performance. That why you pick up not only the big industry effects but the multiplier effects from that industry.

Here is private sector employment in Michigan over the last 20 years or so

The thing to note is that what happened to Michigan happened in the late 1990s and has been trending ever since. If anything this recovery is a reversal of that. This is important because Michigan is an obvious manufacturing and “old” economy state.

You could actually make an argument that some of the structural problem is that the economy was realigning so that people were moving from Michigan to Nevada and then whoops Michigan recovered and so now who wants to live in Nevada. Thus Nevada is stuck in rut monetary policy can’t fix. Though I think that is not the strongest of stories.

Ohio shows a similar pattern

As does Indiana though less pronounced

Contrast this to the Sun States

Florida

or Nevada

or Arizona

Yet, can you really with a straight face tell me that millions of Baby Boomers are set to retire and so I should expect a structural drop in the demand for labor in Florida, Arizona and Nevada?

Now obviously these states had big housing booms and I have had people tell me there are too many homes in Nevada. Maybe, but here is non-wage personal income growth in Nevada

That’s income from Social Security, dividends, rent, small business ownership etc.

The hump is likely from construction contractors who are often small businesses, but the underlying trend is straight up. Income is still pouring into Nevada from other states at roughly the same rate.

Tourism is down for sure and that hurts, but the retirees by this measure look like they are doing alright.

The ebay Job Auction and Guaranteed Minimum Income Program

Over in the comments at Steve Waldman’s, Morgan Warstler has an interesting proposal for a replacement for the minimum wage and unemployment insurance:

Using a clone of Paypal and Ebay platforms, the US govt. should establish a Guaranteed Wage of $240 per week. Anyone who wants to work registers, receives a Debit Card,and each Friday has their GI deposited.

All recipients have their labor weeks auctioned online. Bidding begins at $40 per week ($1 per hour). Bid increases by .50 cents per hour ($20 increments).

Recipients keep 50% of the top bid, if they take it. If they opt for a lesser bid outside certain boundaries there are penalties (fraud measure).

Recipients cannot be made to work outside a radius of a couple miles.

Bidders must deposit money into system before they bid. They must accurately describe the job. Feedback will be given both ways. If you are familiar with Ebay, you understand what this accomplishes.

There are no taxes paid, there are basic workplace protection requirments. Umbrella insurance is sold on site for folks bringing labor into their home.

Expect 30M to register so approx $345B is our cost assuming 30M are auctioned at $1 (The govt. is picking up $5.50 and bidders are in for $1)

At an avg. bid of $4 per hour, avg. worker is making $8, and the govt. is spending $250B a year.

There is no more UI. There is no more minimum wage. That’s why there are 30M in program.

It is an intriguing proposal, and I see something like this as more likely if the fears of robot labor market dominance come true and many workers end up zero marginal product. But here are some problems I see with this program:

1. If weekly online ebay-like employment markets like this are efficient, then why don’t they exist yet? Is the extra $5.50 in marginal product really all that is stopping them? Here is one similar market for what are mostly errands. Perhaps we are already on a path towards the obsolescence of this complaint. Although maybe labor market regulations make this impossible to do on a significant scale.

2. Are workers required to put themselves up for auction or can they just receive the minimum guaranteed income and say “no thanks” to auctioning their labor? If it is the latter, then I think we will see many workers choose the $5.50 and do nothing. If you can receive $5.5 an hour from the government for doing nothing, or $6 for working 40 hours a week, then you’re exchanging 40 hours for an extra $20 a week. Not a very good deal.

On the other end of the low-paid spectrum, workers who are worth $10 an hour will receive $10.50 ($5.50 + 50% x $10), which means they can get $220 a week for doing nothing or $420 for working 40 hours. Some will probably choose to work, and some will choose not to. But I think many would find $220 plus some extra pay from black market labor (likely at more than a marginal $5.50 an hour) to be a pretty good deal. Those that don’t will be receiving a very small subsidy of $0.50 an hour.

Thus workers with labor worth $10 or more will have only a small subsidy from this, and those with labor worth less will find it pretty tempting to not work. Under either scenario I don’t see much work flowing through this market.

If the point is that everyone will be required to put themselves on auction and surely everyone will be bought at a minimum cost of $40, then I think this logic is incorrect. A review system will be in place, and any worker who does not wish to be hired again will find ways to make sure that doesn’t happen very quickly.

3. Do workers and laborers have the incentives to provide accurate rankings? If an employer finds a good worker and they elect to give them an accurate rating then they will have to pay more for them the next week. If they rank them poorly, perhaps accusing them of being negligent or criminal, then they should get them cheaper.  The reverse is true for a worker who finds a good employer.

4. How much does employee choice matter in this framework? The setup of employers purchasing employees at an auction ignores worker preferences over what work they do. Morgan says if job seekers “opt for a lesser bid outside certain boundaries there are penalties”, and it’s unclear to me how you do this without meaningfully ignoring job seeker preferences. This also provides a potential explanation for question #1: the predominant labor market arrangement for cheap labor is for employers to post a wage, job seekers to apply, and employers to choose among them. Aren’t there reasons we’ve evolved to this equilibrium?

Overall Morgan says with this program we can get rid of unemployment insurance and the minimum wage, but I see this more as lifetime unemployment insurance combined with a government funded minimum wage. Still, with the threat of hordes of ZMP workers looming in the future, things like this are worth thinking about and we need more ideas like Morgan’s.

H/T Pascal Gobry

Foreclosures and Deleveraging

I don’t have time to go into too much detail but just wanted to make a point inspired by a few pieces I have read lately.

That is the foreclosure process is deleveraging and a wealth transfer from the financial sector to homeowners. This may seem obvious or silly to various folks but let me give one quick thought experiment to see if I can hit on the importance of this.

Suppose there was a massive housing bubble and all the homes in America roughly doubled in price. Also suppose that many people either traded up homes or cashed out home equity so that in the aggregate homeowners had very little equity. Now suppose the bubble burst and home prices headed back down towards normal, further reducing total equity.

Perhaps this is a plausible scenario.

Now, suppose that while trying to set-up his ITunes playlist Chris Dodd accidently presses the Financial Armageddon Button. That button triggers immediate universal non-judicial non-recourse foreclosures for everyone with a mortgage, whether they are current on their payments or not.

What happens?

Well all of the mortgage debt goes away and the banking sector is left with a bunch of houses which it must sell. For the sake of argument lets assume that virtually no one can get credit.

So the prices of all of these will collapse until the inventory can be cleared even in a no credit world.

What does this mean for homeowners.

It means that they now have houses, but no mortgages.

They lost little because they had no equity. They gained a lot because they now have houses, but no debt. So they are much wealthier, at least in this part of the analysis

Where did the “wealth” come from? It was a transfer from the financial sector to homeowners.

Now of course there are a lot of other questions people will immediately ask about knock-on effects, financial collapse and who in the end owns the financial obligations, but this core dynamic is I think underappreciated.

Steve Waldman and Intellectual Honesty

Steve Randy Waldman has a characteristically excellent post where he argues that the monetary policy we observe in Japan, the Eurozone and to a lesser extent America, is simply the result of the preferences of the political influential class of savers.

I love this post for a lot of reasons but one is that it gives me a chance to say: I just don’t buy it.

Lots of time in intellectual discourse we don’t buy the arguments from others and feel compelled to give reasons. This results in a lot of – for lack of a better term – intellectual bullshit.

I don’t have a clear well defined reason for rejecting Steve’s contention. I am just not yet convinced. So rather than committing myself to a half hearted argument and muddying the conversation with junk talking points its better just to announce that I am not sold.

This has the tendency to lower my status as any good intellectual should be able to defend his position, but luckily with Steve this is not a concern.

I can feel comfortable simply saying, I like it but still no. At least not yet.

Among other things this makes it much easier to change my mind if he does convince me as my defensive arguments are likely to trick my subconscious into being more committed to the notion that he is wrong.

Should We Care About Inequality

Hopefully a short post. This idea doesn’t seem radical to me but given the conversation I suppose its different than what most people have in mind.

Its not immediately clear to me that we should care at all about inequality per se. Some folks have argued that income inequality leads to political inequality. Of course, that is not something I am likely to care about either.

What I am concerned with is the conditions that poor people face.

An argument that does have currency with me is that if we can successfully take access to resources from richer people and given them to poorer people then this is a good idea. Not because it reduces inequality, but because it simply increases the opportunity sets of poorer folks which I think is generally better than increasing the opportunity sets of richer folks.

However, ideally I would want this to have as little destruction of total opportunity sets as possible which might mean tolerating very high or increasing levels of inequality in general.

More concretely it could mean creating an economy where the rich got even richer but we could redistribute some of that wealth to poorer folks.

Some might argue that if the rich become super rich they will resist this. Maybe, but its not clear to me that this happens in practice.

Even if you think of the Reagan Revolution as have reduced the amount of redistribution that actually gets to the poor that happened at a time of lower inequality.

It is true that Welfare Reform happened during relatively prosperous times but I think that is a more complex issue. In the 90s, however, the earned income tax credit seemed to be very popular and of course as societies has become richer they tend to increase Social Security for the disabled and elderly.

I don’t mean this to attach to any particularly policy proposal (besides radically lowering immigration restrictions) but just as a general way of thinking about the issue. The question is what can we do to improve the lives of the least advantaged.

Whatever inequality winds up being under this strategy is fine by me.

Batteries, Smartphones and Driverless Cars

Matt Yglesias, among others points out that batteries are a stumbling block to full scale electric vehicles

This is bad news for the world. If you look at the mobile computing space, precisely the area in which you don’t see breathtaking innovation is this battery stuff. We’re just not getting better at the basic physics of storing electricity in a reasonably compact way. Battery life for things like smartphones and laptops has improved, but that’s all coming as improved efficiency of the chipsets. But here, too, the basic physics of translating engine power into forward automobile motion are not amenable to enormous improvements.

I actually think there is a lot more room to radically improve the economic here.

The way cars work now is that

1. People generally own the car that they use for transportation
2. Most cars are idle most of the time

 

These two things are massively inefficient and contribute to an enormous capital expense for driving. The reason we do this is two fold. One the operating expenses for cars are really high – both in terms of fuel and the drivers mental capacity -  so the capital expense is not as big of deal. Two, convince is a big deal.

Luckily we have the confluence of several techs that are potentially game changers here.

First, are driverless cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs) as I prefer to call them.  This radically cuts down on the amount of attention that someone has to devote to driving and so the operating expense goes down.

Second, is cheap electricity. Currently electricity is already pretty cheap compared to oil. It will probably get cheaper in America in the near term as a a result of the natural gas boom and a reduction in the cost of combined cycle generators. In theory you can make one small enough to fit your house, which means gains from mass production.

Over the long run Photovoltaics are the likely source of very cheap power. Lets leave the discussion of how the energy will be stored/distributed for later.

So, that’s a reduction in the fuel costs.

Third, smartphones would allow us to order a AV to our exact location, pay for it and have it drop us off. Further we can order exactly the AV we want. Many seats or few. Lots of storage or little. Fancy or basic. Consumer comfort or a rolling business office, etc.

Lots more convenience.

All of these factors together mean that there is now enormous pressure to get more out of the capital and luckily there is an easy way – battery swapping.

I imagine that most AVs might have a small internal battery for cruising around the home station, but in general the AV will pickup the battery it needs for the job that it has been tasked to do. This means that batteries will always either be charging or in use.

Even at night, when most humans are asleep the batteries can be swapped in to delivery vehicles. This means the battery is in constant use which means that its use is amortized over a much shorter period of time and the cost of capital is much less.

Getting from where we are today to this world is a challenge but it is one of the advantages of lots of rich countries. Someone – probably the South Koreans – will go for this system first. Then folks will look in awe and want it for themselves.

What Are Health Care Costs?

Kevin Drum writes

Today, Aaron Carroll tells us the story of TriCor, aka fenofibrate, a cholesterol drug licensed by Abbott Labs in 1998. Unfortunately, TriCor’s patent was due to run out in 2000 and a maker of generic drugs was all set to produce a generic version. So Abbott sued, which delayed the generic version by 30 months:

. . .

The cost to American consumers of not having access to a generic version of TriCor is on the order of $700 million per year, money that (presumably) accrues to Abbott Labs instead.

This is a part of a longer point but its important to note that its not clear that health care costs were raised as a part of this.

There may have been deadweight loss, though given widespread health insurance and government payment plans its not clear the deadweight loss is that great.

Mostly it seems that at worst money was transferred from consumers and taxpayers to TriCor. This is not an economic cost. It is simply redistribution.

So, one concrete problem that you might have with the US health care system is that it serves to redistribute income in ways that you do not like.

That’s a real thing. You could say, I would rather have the money than Abbot Labs and I understand what problem you face and we can talk about solutions.

However, as generally used the phrase “high health care costs” doesn’t refer to anything that makes any economic sense and so its not clear what the appropriate remedy is.

I would like to encourage people to be more explicit about the real problems that they perceive rather than extensive references to large scale accounting issues.

Obesity Again

I haven’t written about obesity in a while but this from Tyler Cowen prompts me

Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.

At the same time Scott Sumner provides with a rhetorical tool that might help me convey what is otherwise extremely difficult to convey. That is:

Never reason from a food choice

Just like price and markets, food choice seems like the most obvious aspect influencing nutritional outcomes. Its right there in front of us. However, once you realize you are dealing with an equilibrium system the most obvious candidate frequently becomes the least powerful one.

To start with the choice of what to eat and when is obviously extremely basic. All animals do it for sure. Maybe we can get into some debate over whether bacteria and protozoa do it, but we know for sure that all animals make choices about what to eat.

However, we don’t think that most animals actually make the same type of deliberate choices that we think of humans making. Some of them have such rudimentary brains that it seem strange to talk about the choosing at all or indeed being “aware” of what they have eaten. They live in the moment and operate on nearly pure instinct.

Yet, these animals balance their caloric intact. Together with reproduction that is the main thing that many animals do.

So, we know that there must be some mechanism that matches caloric intake and output. Where these two forces intersect the drive to eat is the result.

Now you observe an oddity. The body mass of human beings – and seemingly other animals but that is another story – is rising. Why?

Apparently a lot of people run to food choice and say, well people must be choosing the “wrong” foods. However, this is bad question. We are dealing with an equilibrium system. What exogenous force has caused food choice to settle at a different level.

We know food choice hasn’t simply gone off the rails because people do not increase body mass without bound. This is technically possible but almost never happens. Instead people increase a given amount of body mass and reach a new equilibrium.

This suggests something has happened to the feedback mechanism. But, what?

Maybe we say advertising or something else. But, then you study the mechanism closely and it is darn robust. For example, just to show extremes you can forcibly run a human being up to expending 8000 calories a day without worrying that the human will even slowly starve to death.

That means that it can take an at least 4 fold shock to its system and not miss its equilibrium values hardly at all. The misalignment associated with obesity is quite small compared to that.

This should make us think that its not a simple shock. Something more subtle has happened to the feedback mechanism itself.

In the modern world no one is going to let us cut open human beings willy-nilly and screw around with their endocrine and nervous system. If we could then we could solve this mystery in no time flat.

Given ethical limitations we are forced to make inferences on data that is far removed from the systems of interest. Nonetheless, we still know such systems exist and we should suspect that they have something to do with hormones and other peptides.

We know that when we go screwing around with people’s hormones their basic desires change. Food is a basic desire. We also know that body composition and food intake change hormones.

Thus our baseline should be that something weird is happening to the hormones.

And, that is really my message. Hormones ought to be the baseline here. Its of course possible that some other theory is correct but this should undoubtedly be the one we run to first.

As it turns out there is increasing evidence for the hormone theory and we think we may even know some of the ones that are involved ghrelin, peptide YY, etc. That’s great. But, its not the empirical evidence that should be swaying us here. Its is extremely preliminary.

What should be swaying us is basic reasoning about how dynamical systems operate.

Its All About Savings

Another sense I am gathering from the blogosphere is that understanding the macroecnomy in practice is about understanding savings.

That seems astoundingly obvious on one level as Keynesianism is all about savings; Moneterism is largerly about money and its dual role as a store of value; and Wicksellianism is all about the interest rate.

That’s all fine as a technical matter. However, what I think folks are missing are deep conceptual issues around savings.

At its heart I think it is because people have deep emotional issues attached to savings, so let me tell some personal stories that will help illustrate why I see the difference.

When I was a small kid, maybe five  or six – I can’t remember exactly – I was fascinated with savings. In particular, I was fascinated with compound interest because like many math oriented kids I loved the non-intuitive nature of geometric series.

I would sit I the bath calculating how long it would take to reach various levels of wealth given certain rates of savings. This was before common place calculators – at least for someone at my income level – and so I would develop lots of tricks that are now obvious to anyone with basic financial math, like doubling time and reverse amortization to go from a final wealth to a payment.

What ever quirk this is stayed with me the rest of my life so that as I have written before, I spent part of my youth providing financial services to folks who don’t have access to mainstream means.

My infamous – truly ask many of my old friends – miserliness was not limited to just accumulating compound interest. In the 90s when interest rates were low by my standards I did in fact keep thousands of dollars in cash in my sock drawer. No reason. I just did.

For most of my life I have hated material consumption, especially nondurables. I have personally owned one car in my life and that was a hand me down once I started working away from home in a town where I need transportation. Every other vehicle I have driven was someone else’s.

Besides computers, which I was bought once I left the free access of the university computer lab, I have rarely owned major devices. I have never bought a television or home appliance for myself. I once accepted a hand me down toaster oven. I have never bought a piece of furniture for myself.

In college I lived on a mattress on the floor a got from someone who was moving out and a couch a got in return for power washing a ladies basement. I never owned more than one plate, one pot, a pan and a few forks for myself.

The primary meat that I ate one my own was canned tuna and that was back before the health craze made it so damn expensive. At the time you could get them on sale for 25 cents a can.

As I mentioned before I have never had bought health insurance for myself with my own money and until I became much older I never paid for physician or hospital services with my own money. Though I did buy pharmaceuticals.

I say all of this to make it clear that the moral issue of trying to conserve was never a problem. My view has been that material things were a burden and in general even taking care of them took up more time and energy that they were worth.

As such I have never felt the guilt waiting to consume beyond my means and I think that gives me a different perspective on the world.

That is because the guilt seem to cloud the thinking of most people and lead them to conclude that forestalling consumption and worse reducing expenditure is an unmitigated good. To be clear I like to forestall consumption but out of pure selfishness. Not concern for anyone else or “doing the right thing.”

This I believe helps me think more clearly about savings and to understand the inherent difficulties associated with it. Far from being a utopian ideal to which we should all strive, savings is actually logistically difficult. Things rot. The wear out. The become obsolete.

You have to pay to save, and I know because it is a payment I have had to endure. You can loan your money to someone though outside of official channels getting it back is a non-trivial exercise.

People can and do loose your money.

This is actually more common than people stealing your money. Most people will lose your money out of stupidity. Its another story all together but people consistently think that their plans and ideas are good when almost all plans and ideas are shit.

In any case transporting resources into the future is a fundamentally hard proposition when you try to do it yourself. Then you might ask, why is it so easy for society to do it.

Well this was a puzzle for me, but if your interest is peaked by this then you will investigate and notice that it comes down to couple of things:

One, the court and credit system help you to enforce claims against other people: When you loan people money they will probably use it for some stupid idea for the sheer fact that most ideas are stupid. This will result in a loss. However, what you can do is get either the court or the credit system to entice them to give you some of their other stuff instead.

This is why going into debt seem like a bad idea for most people. There is nothing wrong with the debt per se. Its just that the debt empowers them to act on their ideas, which once again are fundamentally stupid.

Without debt they just sit around imagining all the goods things that could happen if they had access to resources but of course none of these good things will actually ever happen  no matter how many resources they have access to, so they are better off just living in fantasy land.

Two, buildings, buildings, buildings: Building are like magic for so many reasons. For one thing they deteriorate very slowly. That’s usually your problem with most savings. Things rot. Buildings of course “rot” but they do so very slowly especially if they are made out of concrete or set on a concrete foundation which is a huge freaking deal. Like really a game changer.

Second, is buildings allow for increasing productivity. Its not just that you build a building and then the folks in are more productive. You build a building and then the next building you build right next to it is more productive. Its like freaking magic.

This of course is the origin of urbanization, and it’s a huge deal. It allows your savings to work wonders.

 

The thing is these golden gooses do not work all the time. For one thing the loaning people money doesn’t work in the aggregate. Not everyone can save by loaning people money. Boom, right there half the ease of savings is gone. What is easy for a person is now hard for a nation or the world.

The second is that buildings run into problems. For one people want to move but moving buildings is hard. For two, people put up all sorts of zoning restrictions. For three congestion ultimately decreases the usefulness of buildings. For four, stupidity rears its head and sometime people build buildings in really unfortunate locations. For five, buildings work best when you can fill them with people and at least in the developed world we are running out of people.

All of this comes to the point that in an aging industrialized country that already really dense savings because really difficult. Nonetheless people are still programed that its an unmitigated good.

This makes it hard for them to accept  it when folks like me say, look you need to chill out on the savings. People think I am crazy. Then when their savings yield no return they get all upset like they have been screwed, when in fact this is just life.

This phenomenon is so pervasive that whole economies go into recession in part because people cannot wrap their minds around the concept that savings is logistically difficult and that if you do too much of it you will run into to trouble.

Those with money insist that the government hold steady or in some cases even reduce the quantity of money in circulation so that money becomes more scarce and it appears that they are becoming wealthier when in fact they are just taking an ever increasing portion of a shrinking pie.

The problem is just that savings is logistically difficult yet people cannot seem to accept this.

Are We All Market Monetarists Now

While I am completely sympathetic to all of the points Scott Sumner raises I have been reluctant to fully embrace the Market Monetarist School for a couple of reasons.

First, being a neo-Wicksellian/Woofordian I do in fact believe that interest rates and expectations of future interest rates, not money itself stear the nominal economy. I think monetary policy in a world without money works just fine.

While this is an interesting academic dispute its not clear that it matters much for real policy. Market Monetarists believe that long run expectations of monetary policy matter and as long as we agree on that there is no practical difference.

Second, I am becoming more sold on the need for a new policy regime. For one thing I am increasingly skeptical of the dual mandate. As my previous post suggests my concern is that the weighting of the elements of the mandate are regime dependent and that this introduces monetary uncertainty and policy error.

Third, in a deeply practical sense I think selling a higher and steady Nominal Spending target is easier than selling a high inflation target. Especially as we enter a world with unfortunately falling population growth this will be key.

I actually don’t think we will experience much in the way of a fall in TFP growth but I think population growth is actually more important because the particulars of capital accumulation with respect to TFP growth are more variable.

Put another way, given equal GDP growth there is more variance associated with the marginal return on various capital projects under high (frontier) TFP growth than under high population growth or catch up TFP growth.

I believe this means that the associated natural rate of interest is lower.

Is There Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound

Scott Sumner writes

What interests me most is that [Pianalto] talks as if the Fed is still steering the nominal economy, despite near zero interest rates.  Other people may not see it that way, but swing voters at the FOMC certainly talk like they are still “doing monetary policy.”   In one sense that’s reassuring—we’d hate to see those at the controls claiming that the steering mechanism for the economy was stuck.  On the other hand it’s also a bit dismaying, as the marginal crew member of USS Nominal GDP seems happy with the ship’s course; even as Obama, Romney, Bernanke, 14 million unemployed, and the US stock market think it’s obvious that aggregate demand is too low.

I’d like to encourage a shifting of the conversation. I think virtually all nominalists agree that there is monetary policy at the zero lower bound.

What we disagree about is whether the Fed’s reaction function changes significantly in the presence of the zero lower bound. Indeed, that might be an interesting paper.

This could take on several forms. One, as I suggest is that the reaction function could become asymmetric, so that the Fed attaches a very high loss weight what we might call “non-Keynesian easing” but “attaches a low loss weight to “Keynesian easing.”

In this case normalizing interest rates though expansionary fiscal policy in effect serves to soften the stance of monetary policy.

There are at least two other hypothesis worth exploring:

One is that the Fed’s inflation weighting simply rises as it hits the zero lower bound. I don’t have an immediate explanation for this apart from the hypothesis above, but we should consider that something odd simply happens in the minds of central bankers as they bump up against the zero lower bound. The evidence suggests this.

The second is what I am loosely calling hysteresis in policy making. This is essentially the hypothesis that policy makers become inured to their past mistakes. So in a regime that has had persistently high inflation, the loss weighting of inflation begins to drop.

In a regime that has persistently high unemployment the loss weighting on unemployment begins to drop. Policy makers themselves begin to accept the new normal.

All of these cases, have important policy implications.

One of course is a strongly growing level target that assures that the Fed never bumps up against “non-Keynesian easing” the other is that fiscal policy or more importantly automatic stabilizers could have an important role to play early in a recession.

This is very out of the box, but imagine a standing Civilian Corp that works like this. At any time anyone can sign up for 6 months of work at the Civilian Corp. You will be paid 70% of your previous average salary and will not loose unemployment eligibility. Though you can only do one round in the Corp every five years or so.

The Corp then outsources you out to non-profits to do charitable work.

The point of the Corp is this: When a large unexpected aggregate demand shock hits  many people will choose the Corp over running out their unemployment benefits.

The huge rise in Corp employment will serve as an obvious sign to policy makers that they have failed. Yet, the sting of true jobless will not have hit yet. This gives a buffer zone where it is undeniable that monetary policy is falling but the worst of joblessness has not yet come about.

The hope would be that policy makers would move to shift monetary expectations quickly so as to prevent the emergence of true joblessness.

Now, I am fully aware that in the ideal monetary regime we never even get to this point because the Central Bank is always targeting levels. However, in practice the regime is likely to make some sort of unforeseen error and need to change expectations quickly.

This at least give us a buffer.

I am of course not hanging my hat on this idea, just throwing it out.

My real concern is measuring policy makers loss functions under different regimes.

Phelps on Keynesianism

I am not even sure what to make of this, but in a note relating to the Keynes-Hayek debate Edmund Phelps writes

What now do we do? With some luck, the economy will
“recover” through a return of investment activity to sustainable
levels once some capital stocks, like houses, have been worked
down. But it will not recover to a strong level of business activity
unless something happens to boost innovation. The great question
is how best to get innovators humming again through the breadth
of the land. Hayek himself said little on innovation. But at least he
had an applicable theory of how a healthy economy works.

The Keynesians, sad to say, show no understanding of how
the economy works. They think they can lever employment up or
down by pushing buttons – as if the economy were hydraulic. They
show no grasp of the concepts that would be necessary to restore us
to prosperity and flourishing. In an old image that applies well to
the posturing of today’s self-styled Keynesians, “the Emperor has
no clothes.”

So obviously there is the general mincing of welfare and macroeconomic notions. Does anyone seriously doubt that the government can lever up down employment by pushing buttons? Suppose  that anyone found having a job was shot on sight. Show of hand for how many think this would lower employment.

Suppose I drafted all citizens between the ages of 16 and 65, do you think this would raise employment?

But, lets leave that aside since a lot of folks get confused over the difference between welfare and economic aggregates.

What is anyone to make of the statement that a

a strong level of business activity unless something happens to boost innovation

How can that possibly be anything other than a monetary statement, which Phelps rejects as a cause for the slump. Accept for concerns over monetary policy what at all would innovation have to do with business activity?

It is clear why you could not get economic growth without innovation but the vast majority of business activity over the course of human history have been in economies that were not growing.

Indeed, the vast majority of business activity that occurs from now until the end time will almost certainly be in economies that are not growing. Sustained per capita growth is an odd thing that just started recently and will likely end in fairly short span of time.

I hate to put it this way but I cannot read this without wondering, if this is what Edmund Phelps thinks, then what do most people think?

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Fiscal Futures Ed.

Tyler Cowen has some comments on the ObamaCare chatter

. . . the “war” is the joint view — extremely common in America — that a) tax revenues are on an acceptable track, and b) we should spend more and more on health care each year at high rates, including in per capita terms.

If you think that dual project is sustainable, you may be relatively interested in estimates relative to baseline.  If, like me, you think that project is like a failed and failing war, a success “relative to baseline” won’t much impress you.  In fact it may scare you all the more to hear about success relative to baseline, as that can be taken as a signal that there is no really good plan behind the scenes.  Here are a few factors which could radically upset current mainstream baselines:

Its not immediately clear to me what these two paragraphs mean exactly, but off the cuff I don’t know who the folks are who think that current tax revenues combined increasing health care spending is sustainable.

There are certainly people who don’t think about it much, that probably constitutes the bulk of society. Then there are people like me who think that sustainability is not an important consideration. Well, that’s probably just me, but I think I am slowly winning converts.

However, the mass of the chattering class is constantly talking about the need to reign in health care costs and/or reform the tax code, often with an eye towards more revenue.

Perhaps more interesting to me is this point by Tyler

Imagine people sitting around in Spain, in 2006, debating various scenarios relative to the “baseline budget.”  Maybe that’s America today, though we do not face the same particular problems or timing that Spain did.

This sounds like a point I would make. Doesn’t this reveal not only the asininity of this entire exercise but the deep foolishness in thinking that responsible and prudent action will save you from being royally screwed. After all, Spain had not only a low budget deficit but was running a strong surplus. They were a prime example of a good little European citizen. And, now here they are on the verge of destruction and being pressed into ever worse policies by the European elite.

My growing sense is that in their heart of hearts most people just can’t accept that the world is fundamentally unfair. They think there must have been something that could have been done to prevent this badness. If only . . .

If only nothing in many cases. You were just screwed. That is life.

If you want to get out with your head intact then the question is not how to be responsible but how to survive a crisis. When you are engulfed in flames – and you will be – what do you do?

This is why if there is any lesson from all of this it is to point out how fantastically awful the ECB’s management of the crisis has been. Will this stop policy makers from screwing up similarly in the future, of course not.

The hope is that we will know who to hang, and that we can proceed with the hangings in short order. That is the way out.

The Slow Rise of Multi-Family Housing

Part of my general thesis behind a robustly recovering US economy was that we would see a marked increase in the construction of multi-family housing units.

The press continues to note the general strength of this segment but relative to my view of the economy it has continued to disappoint.

Here are Multi-Family starts over the last two years.

That might look impressive until you compare it to what a real boom looks like

The “hopeful” argument is that while the absolute increase is much smaller this time around the pace is actually a bit faster, a four-fold increase rather than a 3-fold increase.

However, given the current conditions in housing I was looking for an even stronger snap back. This alone will not be enough to push the economy into a boom. We need a series step-up in the rate of growth.

What’s worse from a long run perspective is that the failure of multifamily to bounce back potentially sets up single family for a new bubble. With rents tight and likely to get tighter, buying becomes a better and better deal.

This has the potential to bring out both investors and first time buyers in droves. That in turn will lead to an extremely rapid draw down in inventory, which leads to a stabilization in prices, which leads to looser lending standards which leads to a boom in buying.

That kind of instability is difficult to manage. Economic stabilization going forward would be better if there was a larger stock of multifamily rental housing, yet that is looking increasingly unlikely.

Tax Cuts, Transfers and Balance Sheet Recessions

Felix Salmon writes

In this kind of a recession, monetary policy — reducing rates to zero — doesn’t work. And tax cuts don’t work either: they just increase household savings. You need government spending, at least until the economy has warmed up to the point at which companies and individuals start borrowing again. And the good news is that in a balance sheet recession, government spending is pretty much cost-free, since interest rates are at zero.

Except that rapid increases in household savings will cure the balance sheet recession. With all due respect to Felix I think this is part of the ideological blinders than lead to bad policy on all sides.

One can make an easy case that direct government spending would generate more immediate stimulus in general and especially during a balance sheet recession.

However, folks are weary of direct government spending. Rather than wasting a lot of time and energy arguing over that its better to simply choose policies that everyone can agree on and then go really huge on those polices.

My original suggestion from early 2008 was a complete suspension of the payroll tax combined with open ended loans to State and Local Governments. I still think that would have given us a much quicker repair than we saw.

Note we would be transferring at least $450 Billion a year into households pockets and potentially savings. Though likely the net effects would have been much larger as no payroll tax would have increased labor demand.

As it was households only reduced their total debt by about $700B over the course of the last few years. Meaning that they could either have accomplished this entire adjustment by sometime in 2009 or if they had continued to save the entire portion then by now they could have made an adjustment at least two and half times larger.

Further, even if you don’t buy the idea that the marginal effect of taxation would have mattered much in the recession the relaxation of cash flow constraints on businesses would have. That is, some businesses slowed down radically on hiring in part because they were unsure if they would be able to meet payroll. Lowering the cost of payroll would have lowered that.

However, we can take it even further. One of the goals of the Administration and Democratic Congress was clearly an expansion in health care.

Suppose at the apex of the crisis you have offered to Federalize Medicaid. That is to move the entire program to being funded by the Federal government. The logic being that this would remove a huge burden from the states at a time of crisis and give the states vastly increased flexibility.

In both cases what you are doing is moving liabilities off of state and private balance sheets and on to public balance sheets. This is exactly what you would want to do in a balance sheet recession and it could be done without authorizing any new spending.

Again my point here is not argue whether this would have been the best conceivable policy but whether or not it would have been a better policy than we got and less hamstrung by partisan differences.

Deirdre McCloskey on David Graeber’s “Debt”

I’m sorry to do this to you, but I don’t really have Deirdre McCloskey reviewing David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”. But did you feel how bad you wanted to read that when you saw that headline? Surely, one of our readers has the power to make this review happen.

In the meantime, here is McCloskey on Karl Polanyi, who instead of arguing that the economist’s view of pre-money barter is false, argued that the economist’s view of markets as existing throughout history is false:

…the mistake Polanyi and his school then make is to suppose without evidence that any regulation whatever obviates a market, quantitatively. An epsilon degree of social intrusion, they say, makes for No Market. The standard is again that of Arrow-Debreu -flawless markets or nothing. The presence of regulation -informal or legal- does change relative prices across markets. But it does not by itself eliminate market forces. In China at the height of the Cultural Revolution the women of the village secretly purchased produce from farmers and fishers before the watchmen started their day. Supply and demand popped up. How much? That remains for the economic scientist to determine.

Of course this is the mistake that all schools of economics make, believing they can prove the economy like proving a theorem in geometry. Proof in Math Department’s spirit -the existence of epsilon, no matter what its measure- is of no use for science, as may be seen in physics and chemistry. For the work of science one must measure (as Polanyi implies in appealing to a quantitative rhetoric). Polanyi is trying to prove capitalism false. But in such a matter not “proof”, only magnitude matters: how close to a perfect market economy does an actual economy have to be before the long-run considerations are to this or that degree admissible? How much of a self-regulating market needs to exist before we can assume approximately the functioning of market laws? It is not a metter of on/off, exist/not.

For those with more interest, here is a longer McCloskey article on Polanyi with Santhi Hejeebu. For what it’s worth, I think McCloskey is too dismissive of what economic proofs tell us. What good does it do, for example, to show how close an economy is to a perfect market economy if we cannot establish why and in what ways a perfect market economy is desirable? I agree with McCloskey that the work of science is to measure, but we must first know against what standard we are measuring.

In any case, I hope someone out there is spurred by this to hire McCloskey to write a review of Graeber.

Foreign Capital, Go Home!

There is approximately zero percent chance of the Federal Reserve staking out an official position like this, but would push for an interim statement like the following:

The Federal Reserve regards the deterioration in sovereign balance sheets within the Eurozone and the associated stresses within national banking systems as posing not only a risk to sustained growth in the United States, but as contributing to significant deflationary pressure around the world.

A large and unexpected fall in the dollar price of internationally traded goods and services raises the risk of deflationary expectations with United States and the committee will take all necessary action to prevent this dynamic from taking hold.

The clear message being that unless the ECB and the Bundesbank reverse course immediately they can expect the current Eurozone recession to be compounded by a rising Euro.

How The Economy Churns

I’ve been playing with the JOLTS data and I don’t have anything too too solid to report but I did want to reinforce some of my earlier points about how different the US economy as a whole is from the economy we have in our minds.

We usually think of a worker as a breadwinning head household in a career job. He or she has a steady life that may be rocked by recession. However, one of our most job heavy sectors is Leisure and Hospitality. Look at its basic dynamics

Its quite large at nearly 10% of all jobs. Its fast growing generally. Was one of the few sectors to show increased employment from when the recession ended and it recent months may be growing faster than at any time during the last recover.

In addition look how dominate it is in terms of overall job growth. Here are the12 month moving averages.

Currently the 12 month moving average of all job growth is around 150K, suggesting that nearly 1/5 net new jobs is Leisure and Hospitality.

Generally speaking this is a trend I would expect to continue as the End of Retail is combined with increasing income inequality. We should expect low skilled workers to become increasingly concentrated in direct service jobs like hot food and drinks.

Any one one of the points I wanted to make is that despite the huge job losses associated with the recession, there were not actually many layoffs or discharges in this sector. Here are the JOLTS data

If anything layoffs and discharges seemed to ease during the last downturn. I think what we are looking at is simply an incredibly dynamic sector of the economy in terms of workforce.

Rather than seeing a recession happen in terms of layoffs and sending people home. We simply see that job openings shut down.

This has potentially interesting consequences. If what we are seeing is that for some reason – maybe hardship, maybe life cycle – folks are passing through this sector, then when this sector shuts down on hiring its going to have some strange outside-insider implications.

We are not going to see lots of workers loosing their jobs, simply that the opportunity for new workers to gain jobs will collapse. This is somewhat different from how we commonly talk about job markets.

And, in general I think its important to point out that much of the US workforce is in areas that don’t have the office like dynamics that are common to folks who read and right blogs.

For example another sector where layoffs were not the norm but hiring collapsed was health care and education. That’s even larger in terms of employment.