December 14, 2013
In his Washington Post column this morning, Ezra Klein dismisses the problem of inequality and argues that progressives should instead focus on unemployment. While he will get no argument from me on the need to focus on unemployment, the idea that this is a separate issue from inequality is seriously misplaced.
Ezra gets to this spot by first dismissing the idea that inequality harms growth. He is certainly right that the evidence is less conclusive than we might like, but I would attribute that largely to the reluctance of the economic profession to even consider this possibility.
For example, Ezra notes my friend and co-author Jared Bernstein’s conclusion that it is difficult to find a link between rising inequality and weaker consumption in the data. This is true, but the obvious reason is that the decades of rising inequality have also been the decades of the stock market and housing market bubbles.
Standard economic theory predicts that these bubbles would increase consumption, a story that fits the data well. Consumption as a share of income hit highs (i.e. savings rates reached lows) at the peaks of both the stock and housing bubbles. Consumption fell sharply following the collapse of both bubbles.
If we just do some simple arithmetic we can get an idea of the size of the effect of the upward redistribution of 10 percentage points of disposable income from the bottom 80 percent to the top 1 percent. If we assume that the bottom 80 percent would have spent 95 percent of this income and the top 1 percent would only spend 75 percent, then the difference would be 20 percentage points or 2 percent of disposable income.
This would translate into a loss of demand of 1.6 percentage points of GDP. That is what would have to be made up by larger budget deficits, trade surpluses, or a flood of investment. We certainly had much larger budget deficits on average over the last three decades than we did in prior decades so that can make up the shortfall in demand, although we also had much larger trade deficits making the problem worse.
In any case, the fact that we didn’t have solid evidence on this issue should not be as surprising as Ezra suggests. While some of us have long warned of this scenario, leading economists like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have just recently begun to take seriously the possibility of secular stagnation. For decades the profession has treated it as an article of faith that there could not be sustained shortfalls in demand so inadequate consumption due to the upward redistribution of income could not possibly be a problem.
However the other side of the unemployment inequality issue is possibly more important. One of the main points of Jared and my new book is that unemployment is a main cause of inequality. This is because when more people get hired it disproportionately benefits those in the bottom half and especially the bottom fifth of the income distribution.
These are the people who are most likely to get jobs. And those with jobs will also have the opportunity to work longer hours. And, a tight labor market will create conditions in which workers at the bottom will have more bargaining power. Walmart and McDonalds will be paying workers $15 an hour if that is the only way that they can get people to work for them.
For this reason, the high unemployment policy that Congress is pursuing with its current budget policy is a key factor in the upward redistribution of income that we have seen in the last three decades. This means that people concerned about inequality should be very angry over budgets that don’t spend enough to bring the economy to full employment (also an over-valued dollar). So Ezra is absolutely right that progressives should be yelling about unemployment, but inequality is a very big part of that picture.
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