Alright, that is not entirely fair, but when the NYT told readers that Germany’s unemployment rate is 6.0 percent it seriously misled readers. The issue is that this figure refers to Germany’s unemployment rate as calculated by Germany’s government. This measure counts workers who are employed part-time, but want full-time jobs, as being unemployed. By contrast, the standard measure of the unemployment rate in the United States counts these workers as being employed.
This would be reasonable if the German government measure was the only one available, but it isn’t. The OECD calculates a harmonized unemployment rate that is essentially the same as the unemployment rate generally used for the United States. By this measure Germany’s unemployment rate is just 4.0 percent.
The NYT can be partially forgiven since this was a Reuters story that it made available on its web site. (I don’t know if it ran in the print edition.) Still, it would not be hard to add a sentence either explaining the difference or alternatively including the OECD measure.
In this same vein, and it’s a new year, let me also harp on the practice of printing other country’s growth rates as quarterly figures. While the rate of GDP growth is always expressed as an annual rate in the United States, most other countries express their growth as a quarterly rate. Typically this raises the U.S. growth rate by a factor of four. For example, a 0.5 percent quarterly growth rate translates into a 2.0 percent annual rate. (To be precise, the growth rate should be taken to the fourth power. For low growth rates this will typically be the same as multiplying by four.)
Anyhow, articles often appear in the NYT and elsewhere that just print the growth rate as a quarterly rate, frequently without even pointing out that it is a quarterly rate. This gives readers an inaccurate impression of the growth rate in other countries.
It really should not be too much to expect a newspaper to convert the growth rates to annualized rates. After all, the reporters are more likely to have the time to do this than the readers. And, this is supposed to be about providing information to readers, right?
Alright, that is not entirely fair, but when the NYT told readers that Germany’s unemployment rate is 6.0 percent it seriously misled readers. The issue is that this figure refers to Germany’s unemployment rate as calculated by Germany’s government. This measure counts workers who are employed part-time, but want full-time jobs, as being unemployed. By contrast, the standard measure of the unemployment rate in the United States counts these workers as being employed.
This would be reasonable if the German government measure was the only one available, but it isn’t. The OECD calculates a harmonized unemployment rate that is essentially the same as the unemployment rate generally used for the United States. By this measure Germany’s unemployment rate is just 4.0 percent.
The NYT can be partially forgiven since this was a Reuters story that it made available on its web site. (I don’t know if it ran in the print edition.) Still, it would not be hard to add a sentence either explaining the difference or alternatively including the OECD measure.
In this same vein, and it’s a new year, let me also harp on the practice of printing other country’s growth rates as quarterly figures. While the rate of GDP growth is always expressed as an annual rate in the United States, most other countries express their growth as a quarterly rate. Typically this raises the U.S. growth rate by a factor of four. For example, a 0.5 percent quarterly growth rate translates into a 2.0 percent annual rate. (To be precise, the growth rate should be taken to the fourth power. For low growth rates this will typically be the same as multiplying by four.)
Anyhow, articles often appear in the NYT and elsewhere that just print the growth rate as a quarterly rate, frequently without even pointing out that it is a quarterly rate. This gives readers an inaccurate impression of the growth rate in other countries.
It really should not be too much to expect a newspaper to convert the growth rates to annualized rates. After all, the reporters are more likely to have the time to do this than the readers. And, this is supposed to be about providing information to readers, right?
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The NYT had an editorial arguing that major corporations are helping Donald Trump lie about job creation in order to get favors from his administration. The main example is the Japanese investment firm Soft Bank, which allowed Trump to get away with taking credit for investment decisions which had been announced in October, before Donald Trump was elected. It argues that Soft Bank is hoping that Trump will allow a merger between its Sprint subsidiary and T-Mobile. This merger had been opposed by the Obama administration because it would reduce competition in the cell phone industry. It would likely also result in the loss of a substantial number of jobs.
It is worth noting that such phony claims of job creation can only be effective for Trump if the media allow it. If the headline of the news stories was something to the effect of “Trump again makes phony job claim,” with the article carefully explaining that Trump had nothing to with creating any jobs, it is likely that Trump would give up on the tactic. Of course this would require the media to engage in objective reporting even if it ends up being very critical of a particular politician.
The NYT had an editorial arguing that major corporations are helping Donald Trump lie about job creation in order to get favors from his administration. The main example is the Japanese investment firm Soft Bank, which allowed Trump to get away with taking credit for investment decisions which had been announced in October, before Donald Trump was elected. It argues that Soft Bank is hoping that Trump will allow a merger between its Sprint subsidiary and T-Mobile. This merger had been opposed by the Obama administration because it would reduce competition in the cell phone industry. It would likely also result in the loss of a substantial number of jobs.
It is worth noting that such phony claims of job creation can only be effective for Trump if the media allow it. If the headline of the news stories was something to the effect of “Trump again makes phony job claim,” with the article carefully explaining that Trump had nothing to with creating any jobs, it is likely that Trump would give up on the tactic. Of course this would require the media to engage in objective reporting even if it ends up being very critical of a particular politician.
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Breaking the taxi industry cartel’s and promoting Uber has been somewhat of a cause célèbre among economists in recent years. Any card carrying economist can give you the two minute tirade on the evils of the taxi cartel and the benefits of Uber. (I can too, but the argument should be for modernized regulation, not Uber gets to do whatever it wants because it’s Uber, see pieces here, here, and here.)
What is striking is that the enthusiasm for the virtues of competition seems to disappear when we switch the topic from the taxi cartel to the doctors’ cartel. Doctors actually have been far more effective than taxi companies in limiting competition. Doctors largely get to set standards of care, which not surprisingly requires twice as high a percentage of highly paid specialists as in other wealthy countries. They also restrict the number of doctors with a wonderfully protectionist rule that prohibits doctors from practicing in the United States unless they have completed a U.S. residency program. This means that even well-established doctors in places like Germany, France, and Canada would face arrest if they attempted to practice medicine in the United States.
As a result of this cartel, doctors in the U.S. earn on average more than $250,000 a year, putting the average doctor not far below the one percent threshold, even assuming no other family income. This is roughly twice the pay as the average doctor earns in other wealthy countries.
It is striking that the doctors’ cartel gets so much less attention from economists than the taxi cartel. After all, we spend close to $250 billion a year on doctors compared to $6 billion a year on taxis. I could suggest that the lack of interest is due to the fact that many economists have parents, siblings and/or children who are doctors, but I wouldn’t be that rude.
Anyhow, there are measures that can be taken at both the national and state level to break the cartel if economists ever take an interest in free trade. At the national level the obvious step would be to establish an international certification system so that doctors trained in other countries could establish their competency and then practice in the United States just like a doctor born and trained here. (Save the whine. We can establish a system whereby we repatriate money to developing countries for the doctors they train who then practice in the United States. As it stands, they get zero money for the doctors that leave the country, so this system would almost certainly be a net improvement for them. Yes, this is discussed in Rigged.)
Since protectionists dominate trade policy (I mean up until now, not just since the election of Donald Trump), we can also look to measures at the state level. It seems that several states are considering policies that would allow doctors who do not complete a residency program to practice under the supervision of another doctor. This is a great first step as is expanding the scope of practice for nurse practitioners and other less highly paid health care professionals.
Developments in technology should allow health care professionals with much less training than doctors to make diagnoses as accurately or more accurately than the best doctors. The same is true with robotics, which is likely to eventually outperform even the best surgeons. These technologies will offer both huge savings and better care, if we don’t allow the doctors’ cartel to maintain its lock on the practice of medicine.
Breaking the taxi industry cartel’s and promoting Uber has been somewhat of a cause célèbre among economists in recent years. Any card carrying economist can give you the two minute tirade on the evils of the taxi cartel and the benefits of Uber. (I can too, but the argument should be for modernized regulation, not Uber gets to do whatever it wants because it’s Uber, see pieces here, here, and here.)
What is striking is that the enthusiasm for the virtues of competition seems to disappear when we switch the topic from the taxi cartel to the doctors’ cartel. Doctors actually have been far more effective than taxi companies in limiting competition. Doctors largely get to set standards of care, which not surprisingly requires twice as high a percentage of highly paid specialists as in other wealthy countries. They also restrict the number of doctors with a wonderfully protectionist rule that prohibits doctors from practicing in the United States unless they have completed a U.S. residency program. This means that even well-established doctors in places like Germany, France, and Canada would face arrest if they attempted to practice medicine in the United States.
As a result of this cartel, doctors in the U.S. earn on average more than $250,000 a year, putting the average doctor not far below the one percent threshold, even assuming no other family income. This is roughly twice the pay as the average doctor earns in other wealthy countries.
It is striking that the doctors’ cartel gets so much less attention from economists than the taxi cartel. After all, we spend close to $250 billion a year on doctors compared to $6 billion a year on taxis. I could suggest that the lack of interest is due to the fact that many economists have parents, siblings and/or children who are doctors, but I wouldn’t be that rude.
Anyhow, there are measures that can be taken at both the national and state level to break the cartel if economists ever take an interest in free trade. At the national level the obvious step would be to establish an international certification system so that doctors trained in other countries could establish their competency and then practice in the United States just like a doctor born and trained here. (Save the whine. We can establish a system whereby we repatriate money to developing countries for the doctors they train who then practice in the United States. As it stands, they get zero money for the doctors that leave the country, so this system would almost certainly be a net improvement for them. Yes, this is discussed in Rigged.)
Since protectionists dominate trade policy (I mean up until now, not just since the election of Donald Trump), we can also look to measures at the state level. It seems that several states are considering policies that would allow doctors who do not complete a residency program to practice under the supervision of another doctor. This is a great first step as is expanding the scope of practice for nurse practitioners and other less highly paid health care professionals.
Developments in technology should allow health care professionals with much less training than doctors to make diagnoses as accurately or more accurately than the best doctors. The same is true with robotics, which is likely to eventually outperform even the best surgeons. These technologies will offer both huge savings and better care, if we don’t allow the doctors’ cartel to maintain its lock on the practice of medicine.
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Gretchen Morgenson had an interesting piece on the New York Teamsters pension fund, which appears likely to impose a substantial benefit cut on current and future retirees as a result of a large funding shortfall. While there are many causes for the shortfall, most importantly a declining number of active workers contributing to the fund, the situation has been made worse by the high fees paid to private equity companies.
It appears that the fund invested heavily in private equity in recent years in the hope of raising its returns. The investments have not generally paid off, with private equity funds doing no better than comparable market indexes. However, the pensions had to pay much more in fees to the private equity fund managers than they would have paid had they invested in a stock index. It is probably worth mentioning that many of the most highly paid people in the country are private equity fund managers.
Gretchen Morgenson had an interesting piece on the New York Teamsters pension fund, which appears likely to impose a substantial benefit cut on current and future retirees as a result of a large funding shortfall. While there are many causes for the shortfall, most importantly a declining number of active workers contributing to the fund, the situation has been made worse by the high fees paid to private equity companies.
It appears that the fund invested heavily in private equity in recent years in the hope of raising its returns. The investments have not generally paid off, with private equity funds doing no better than comparable market indexes. However, the pensions had to pay much more in fees to the private equity fund managers than they would have paid had they invested in a stock index. It is probably worth mentioning that many of the most highly paid people in the country are private equity fund managers.
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That is in fact what his NYT column said, even though he writes it as though the opposite is the case. The basic argument is that the core Democratic constituency is in places like Silicon Valley and other tech clusters which Edsall claims are thriving in the global economy based on free trade. By contrast, he argues that Democratic populists like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders are trying to rally those left behind with a protectionist agenda. Edsall warns that this would run both counter to the interests of the key Democratic constituencies and threaten the country’s economic future.
That is great as propaganda for the status quo, but flunks as serious analysis. The prosperity of the country’s Silicon Valleys depends front and center on patent and copyright protections. These forms of protectionism have been made longer and stronger over the past four decades as a matter of conscious policy. The result has been an ever sharper divergence between the protected prices and free market prices. This is seen most dramatically in the case of prescription drugs where the ratio of the protected price to the free market price is often more than 100 to 1. This is equivalent to a tariff of more than 10,000 percent for folks who care about numbers. (Yes, we have alternatives to patent monopolies for financing research.)
We have also imposed these protections on other countries in trade deals, often at the expense of manufacturing workers. After all, getting stronger protections of drugs and software, while getting cheaper clothes and steel, is a win-win for the Silicon Valley types.
Rigging the market to make the items produced in the country’s Silicon Valleys expensive, while pushing down the price of the manufactured goods produced in the rest of the country might be good for the Silicon Valley types, it is not free trade. It is very generous for people like Thomas Edsall to provide cover for such class biased policies, but the rest of us might prefer to focus on reality.
Yes, this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free download available here).
That is in fact what his NYT column said, even though he writes it as though the opposite is the case. The basic argument is that the core Democratic constituency is in places like Silicon Valley and other tech clusters which Edsall claims are thriving in the global economy based on free trade. By contrast, he argues that Democratic populists like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders are trying to rally those left behind with a protectionist agenda. Edsall warns that this would run both counter to the interests of the key Democratic constituencies and threaten the country’s economic future.
That is great as propaganda for the status quo, but flunks as serious analysis. The prosperity of the country’s Silicon Valleys depends front and center on patent and copyright protections. These forms of protectionism have been made longer and stronger over the past four decades as a matter of conscious policy. The result has been an ever sharper divergence between the protected prices and free market prices. This is seen most dramatically in the case of prescription drugs where the ratio of the protected price to the free market price is often more than 100 to 1. This is equivalent to a tariff of more than 10,000 percent for folks who care about numbers. (Yes, we have alternatives to patent monopolies for financing research.)
We have also imposed these protections on other countries in trade deals, often at the expense of manufacturing workers. After all, getting stronger protections of drugs and software, while getting cheaper clothes and steel, is a win-win for the Silicon Valley types.
Rigging the market to make the items produced in the country’s Silicon Valleys expensive, while pushing down the price of the manufactured goods produced in the rest of the country might be good for the Silicon Valley types, it is not free trade. It is very generous for people like Thomas Edsall to provide cover for such class biased policies, but the rest of us might prefer to focus on reality.
Yes, this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free download available here).
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There seems to be a great effort to convince people that the displacement due to the trade deficit over the last fifteen years didn’t really happen. The NYT contributed to this effort with a piece telling readers that over the long-run job loss has been primarily due to automation not trade.
While the impact of automation over a long enough period of time certainly swamps the impact of trade, over the last 20 years there is little doubt that the impact of the exploding trade deficit has had more of an impact on employment. To make this one as simple as possible, we currently have a trade deficit of roughly $460 billion (@ 2.6 percent of GDP). Suppose we had balanced trade instead, making up this gap with increased manufacturing output.
Does the NYT want to tell us that we could increase our output of manufactured goods by $460 billion, or just under 30 percent, without employing more workers in manufacturing? That would be pretty impressive. We currently employ more than 12 million workers in manufacturing, if moving to balanced trade increase employment by just 15 percent we would be talking about 1.8 million jobs. That is not trivial.
But this is not the only part of the story that is strange. We are getting hyped up fears over automation even at a time when productivity growth (i.e. automation) has slowed to a crawl, averaging just 1.0 percent annually over the last decade. The NYT tells readers:
“Over time, automation has generally had a happy ending: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts are beginning to worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers — particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor — have not recovered.”
Hmmm, this time could be different? How so? The average hourly wage of men with just a high school degree was 13 percent less in 2000 than in 1973. For workers with some college it was down by more than 2.0 percent. In fact, stagnating wages for men without college degrees is not something new and different, it has been going on for more than forty years. Hasn’t this news gotten to the NYT yet?
There seems to be a great effort to convince people that the displacement due to the trade deficit over the last fifteen years didn’t really happen. The NYT contributed to this effort with a piece telling readers that over the long-run job loss has been primarily due to automation not trade.
While the impact of automation over a long enough period of time certainly swamps the impact of trade, over the last 20 years there is little doubt that the impact of the exploding trade deficit has had more of an impact on employment. To make this one as simple as possible, we currently have a trade deficit of roughly $460 billion (@ 2.6 percent of GDP). Suppose we had balanced trade instead, making up this gap with increased manufacturing output.
Does the NYT want to tell us that we could increase our output of manufactured goods by $460 billion, or just under 30 percent, without employing more workers in manufacturing? That would be pretty impressive. We currently employ more than 12 million workers in manufacturing, if moving to balanced trade increase employment by just 15 percent we would be talking about 1.8 million jobs. That is not trivial.
But this is not the only part of the story that is strange. We are getting hyped up fears over automation even at a time when productivity growth (i.e. automation) has slowed to a crawl, averaging just 1.0 percent annually over the last decade. The NYT tells readers:
“Over time, automation has generally had a happy ending: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts are beginning to worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers — particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor — have not recovered.”
Hmmm, this time could be different? How so? The average hourly wage of men with just a high school degree was 13 percent less in 2000 than in 1973. For workers with some college it was down by more than 2.0 percent. In fact, stagnating wages for men without college degrees is not something new and different, it has been going on for more than forty years. Hasn’t this news gotten to the NYT yet?
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The NYT had an interesting piece discussing the National Institutes of Health collaboration with private companies in the development of new cancer drugs. As the piece points out, this collaboration has proven very profitable for the drug companies, but leads to drugs that are very expensive because the drug companies are allowed to have patent monopolies, with no restriction on the price they charge.
It also suggests an alternative path. It shows, contrary to conventional wisdom in right-wing circles, everything the government funds is not worthless garbage. If the tables were turned, and all the funding came from the government (rather than relying on government-imposed patent monopolies), then the new drugs could be sold at generic prices since everyone already would have been paid for their research.
In many cases, the generic price would be less than one percent of the patent protected price. New cancer drugs that might sell for $100,000 for a year’s treatment, might sell for hundreds of dollars. Policy types who don’t work for the pharmaceutical industry should be looking into more efficient alternatives for financing drug research.
The NYT had an interesting piece discussing the National Institutes of Health collaboration with private companies in the development of new cancer drugs. As the piece points out, this collaboration has proven very profitable for the drug companies, but leads to drugs that are very expensive because the drug companies are allowed to have patent monopolies, with no restriction on the price they charge.
It also suggests an alternative path. It shows, contrary to conventional wisdom in right-wing circles, everything the government funds is not worthless garbage. If the tables were turned, and all the funding came from the government (rather than relying on government-imposed patent monopolies), then the new drugs could be sold at generic prices since everyone already would have been paid for their research.
In many cases, the generic price would be less than one percent of the patent protected price. New cancer drugs that might sell for $100,000 for a year’s treatment, might sell for hundreds of dollars. Policy types who don’t work for the pharmaceutical industry should be looking into more efficient alternatives for financing drug research.
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