August 16, 2016 (Prices Byte)

Tomorrow, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release the newest data for the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most widely cited indicator of consumer inflation. One important measure to watch will be childcare and nursery school, whose costs have risen faster than overall inflation for the past quarter-century.

The figure below shows the annual rates of inflation for five different five-year periods from 1991 to present. Between 1991 and 2016, the costs of childcare and nursery school rose 177 percent; by contrast, prices for the economy as a whole have risen just 77 percent. (The figure will be updated to include the latest data in tomorrow’s CEPR Prices Byte.)

Now, for many consumers, this isn’t a significant worry — childcare and nursery school are just 0.7 percent of current consumer spending. However, this 0.7 percent figure represents an average across all consumers, most of whom do not currently have young children.

Mark WeisbrotThe Hill, August 12, 2016

Dean Baker
Truthout, August 15, 2016

Robert Samuelson used his column this week to note my friend Josh Biven's piece on the reason for the weak recovery. Biven puts the blame on insufficient government spending, noting that government spending per capita has been much weaker in this recovery than in prior recoveries. Samuelson says Biven could be right but then argues that maybe there is another explanation.

Samuelson offers the possibility that higher government spending in past downturns may have been the result of more rapid economic growth rather than the cause. He notes that the stimulus failed to lead to sustained growth in this recovery, despite its large size. He then offers three possible explanations:

"Some economists see a broad slowdown in technological advances (despite the Internet) whose adverse effects were masked by easy credit. Another theory is that the costs of the welfare state and regulation have come home to roost; they allegedly discourage risk-taking, business investment and work. Another view is that the financial crisis and the Great Recession so scared consumers and businesses that they are reluctant to spend."

Let's deal with these issues in turn. First, Samuelson does have a reasonable point on the cause and effect story. State and local governments were seeing more rapid revenue growth in prior recoveries, so it would not be surprising that their spending grew more rapidly. Bivens is undoubtedly right that austerity at all levels of government slowed growth, but the issue is not quite as simple as it first appears.

On Samuelson's three points, he is right that many economists point to a broad slowdown in technological advances. While this is a very big issue, one point that should bother anyone taking it seriously is that the slowdown seems to have hit most of the world at the same time. Some countries, like the United States, were much further along in adopting the new technologies of the prior decade than countries like Greece. The fact that we all are experiencing a productivity slowdown at the same time nonetheless suggests that it is not the lack of technology that is the problem. 

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, August 14, 2016

Yes folks, this is yet another example of the which way is up problem in economics, which seems to badly afflict the Washington Post opinion pages. It's the old story of someone being told that its incredibly hot and humid outside and then rushing to put on hat, gloves, and an extra sweater.

The Labor Department released new data on productivity growth this week showing that in the second quarter of 2016 productivity actually fell for the third consecutive quarter. While this decline is likely an anomaly, and may even be reversed in revisions to the data, productivity growth has been extraordinarily slow the last six years, averaging less then 0.5 percent annually. This compares to rates of 3.0 percent annual growth in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and 2.9 percent in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973. Even the 1.4 percent rate of the slowdown years (1973 to 1995) looks great compared to the recent productivity performance.

Given this pattern of weak productivity growth, we would naturally expect to see David Ignatius on the Post's oped page warning us that rapid productivity growth is going to cost huge numbers of jobs, in a column titled, "the brave new world of robots and lost jobs." Ignatius notes job insecurity and concerns that people are losing jobs to trade.

He then tells readers:

"A look at the numbers suggests that the country is having the wrong economic debate this year. Employment security won’t come from renegotiating trade deals, as Donald Trump said in a speech Monday in Detroit, or rebuilding infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton argued in Warren, Mich., on Thursday. These are palliatives.

"The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and 'machine learning' systems."

Of course "a look at the numbers" tells us the opposite, as noted above. These new technologies are thus far having a minimal impact on reducing the demand for labor. That could of course change, which would be a great thing, it would open the door for higher wages and more rapid improvement in living standards.

One of the studies that he cites projects that automation could cost us as much as 47 percent of current jobs over the next two decades. While Ignatius calls this a "automation bomb," this rate of job loss translates into 3.1 percent annual productivity growth, roughly the same pace as during the long Golden Age. That was a period of low unemployment and rapidly rising real wages and living standards, which can also mean more leisure and shorter work years. Are you scared yet?

The July jobs report was mostly positive with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.9 percent and the economy adding 255,000 jobs. While these data points grabbed most of the headlines, other aspects of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report were notew

Mark WeisbrotViomundo, 10 de agosto, 2016

In February of last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled The Effect of Rising Inequality on Social Security. The report shows how the increase in economic inequality in the U.S. has led to deteriorating Social Security revenues, often to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. Earlier research by Dean Baker showed that the upward redistribution of wage income was responsible for 43.5 percent of the projected 75-year shortfall in Social Security funding as of 2013.

Social Security is funded through federal payroll taxes. These taxes are currently applied to the first $118,500 of a worker’s wages; this means that only a portion of high-wage workers’ earnings are subject to taxation. For example, a worker earning $237,000 a year will pay payroll taxes on just half his earnings in 2016; a worker earning a million dollars will pay payroll taxes on less than 12 percent of his earnings. By contrast, any worker making $118,500 or less will have all of his earnings held subject to taxation. This $118,500 “cap” rises in line with average wage growth every year.

One of the most striking aspects of the 2008–2009 recession was the rise in involuntary part-time employment. In 2007, involuntary part-time employment — the condition of working a part-time job while seeking a full-time one — was just 3.0 percent of total employment. The rate peaked at 6.7 percent in March 2010 and has averaged 4.0 percent through the first six months of 2016.

This is important for two reasons. First, it is a source of labor market weakness that results in a significant loss of income for many workers. Over 6 million people are working part-time involuntarily, and on average they work 23 hours per week. Because full-time workers are typically employed 42–43 hours per week, this is effectively a wage cut of almost 50 percent for the affected workers. When the labor market fully recovers from the recession, over 1.5 million involuntary part-time workers will be moved to full-time hours.

Second, today’s relatively high rate of involuntary part-time employment stands as evidence that the unemployment rate is overstating the strength of the economy. Currently the unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, just slightly above the pre-recession rate of 4.6 percent. This implies that the economy has almost fully recovered since unemployment peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2009. However, the unemployment rate falls when the unemployed stop searching for work, and given how many of the unemployed gave up on finding a job during the recession, it is clear that the unemployment rate is failing to pick up on a large number of jobless Americans who would like to work. The involuntary part-time employment rate, by contrast, is not subject to this bias.

To illustrate this point, Table 1 compares the rate of involuntary part-time employment for the year ending in May 2016 with two other periods with a similar unemployment rate. Between June 2015 and May 2016, the unemployment rate averaged 5.0 percent; between 2000 and the recession, there were two other periods with the same unemployment rate. (We start with the year 2000 because much of the demographic data on involuntary part-time employment only go back to 2000.) Those two periods were March 2001 to February 2002 and February 2005 to January 2006. If the unemployment rate were painting an accurate picture of the labor market, we’d expect the current involuntary part-time employment rate to be about the same as during the two previous periods.

Dean Baker
Expansión, 9 de agosto, 2016

Mark WeisbrotThe Hill, August 9, 2016