We continue to see a steady drumbeat of news stories and opinion pieces about the problem of men, and especially less-educated men, in the modern economy. The pieces always start with the fact that large numbers of prime-age men (ages 25–54) have dropped out of the labor force. The latest entry is a NYT column by Susan Chira that highlighted recent research showing that a large percentage of men who are not in the labor force are in poor health and frequent users of pain medication.
While this is interesting and useful research, it is unlikely that it explains the decline in employment among prime-age men. The reason, as I (along with Jared Bernstein) continually point out, is that there has been a similar drop in the employment rates of prime-age women since 2000.
The issue here should be straightforward. If we see drops in employment rates for both prime-age men and women, then it is not likely that they will be explained by problems that are unique to men. More likely, the problems stem from the overall state of the economy. In other words, the problem is with the people who design policy, not with the men who have dropped out of the workforce.
This doesn’t mean that non-employed men are not facing real problems. Undoubtedly many are, although the extent to which these problems are the result of their unemployment or a cause will often not be clear. Nonetheless, steps that can improve public health will be a good thing, but the better place to look to solve the problem of unemployment is Washington.
We continue to see a steady drumbeat of news stories and opinion pieces about the problem of men, and especially less-educated men, in the modern economy. The pieces always start with the fact that large numbers of prime-age men (ages 25–54) have dropped out of the labor force. The latest entry is a NYT column by Susan Chira that highlighted recent research showing that a large percentage of men who are not in the labor force are in poor health and frequent users of pain medication.
While this is interesting and useful research, it is unlikely that it explains the decline in employment among prime-age men. The reason, as I (along with Jared Bernstein) continually point out, is that there has been a similar drop in the employment rates of prime-age women since 2000.
The issue here should be straightforward. If we see drops in employment rates for both prime-age men and women, then it is not likely that they will be explained by problems that are unique to men. More likely, the problems stem from the overall state of the economy. In other words, the problem is with the people who design policy, not with the men who have dropped out of the workforce.
This doesn’t mean that non-employed men are not facing real problems. Undoubtedly many are, although the extent to which these problems are the result of their unemployment or a cause will often not be clear. Nonetheless, steps that can improve public health will be a good thing, but the better place to look to solve the problem of unemployment is Washington.
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By Lara Merling and Dean Baker
The Peter Peterson-Washington Post deficit hawk gang keep trying to scare us in cutting Social Security and Medicare. If we don’t cut these programs now, then at some point in the future we might have to cut these program or RAISE TAXES.
There are many good reasons not to take the advice of the deficit hawks, but the most immediate one is that our economy is suffering from a deficit that is too small, not too large. The point is straight forward, the economy needs more demand, which we could get from larger budget deficits. More demand would lead to more output and employment. It would also cause firms to invest more, which would make us richer in the future.
The flip side in this story is that because we have not been investing as much as we would in a fully employed economy, our potential level of output is lower today than if we had remained near full employment since the downturn in 2008. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that potential GDP in 2016 is down by 10.5 percent (almost $2.0 trillion) from the level it had projected for 2016 back in 2008, before the downturn.
This is real money, over $6,200 per person. But if we want to have a little fun, we can use a tactic developed by the deficit hawks. We can calculate the cost of austerity over the infinite horizon. This is a simple story. We just assume that we will never get back the potential GDP lost as a result of the weak growth of the last eight years. Carrying this the lost 10.5 percent of GDP out to the infinite future and using a 2.9 percent real discount rate gives us $172.94 trillion in lost output. This is the size of the austerity tax for all future time. It comes to more than $500,000 for every person in the country.
By comparison, we can look at the projected Social Security shortfall for the infinite horizon. According to the most recent Social Security Trustees Report, this comes to $32.1 trillion. (Almost two thirds of this occurs after the 75-year projection period.) Undoubtedly, many deficit hawks hope that people would be scared by this number. But compared to the austerity tax imposed by the deficit hawks, it doesn’t look like a big deal.
Source: Social Security Trustees Report and Author’s Calculations.
By Lara Merling and Dean Baker
The Peter Peterson-Washington Post deficit hawk gang keep trying to scare us in cutting Social Security and Medicare. If we don’t cut these programs now, then at some point in the future we might have to cut these program or RAISE TAXES.
There are many good reasons not to take the advice of the deficit hawks, but the most immediate one is that our economy is suffering from a deficit that is too small, not too large. The point is straight forward, the economy needs more demand, which we could get from larger budget deficits. More demand would lead to more output and employment. It would also cause firms to invest more, which would make us richer in the future.
The flip side in this story is that because we have not been investing as much as we would in a fully employed economy, our potential level of output is lower today than if we had remained near full employment since the downturn in 2008. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that potential GDP in 2016 is down by 10.5 percent (almost $2.0 trillion) from the level it had projected for 2016 back in 2008, before the downturn.
This is real money, over $6,200 per person. But if we want to have a little fun, we can use a tactic developed by the deficit hawks. We can calculate the cost of austerity over the infinite horizon. This is a simple story. We just assume that we will never get back the potential GDP lost as a result of the weak growth of the last eight years. Carrying this the lost 10.5 percent of GDP out to the infinite future and using a 2.9 percent real discount rate gives us $172.94 trillion in lost output. This is the size of the austerity tax for all future time. It comes to more than $500,000 for every person in the country.
By comparison, we can look at the projected Social Security shortfall for the infinite horizon. According to the most recent Social Security Trustees Report, this comes to $32.1 trillion. (Almost two thirds of this occurs after the 75-year projection period.) Undoubtedly, many deficit hawks hope that people would be scared by this number. But compared to the austerity tax imposed by the deficit hawks, it doesn’t look like a big deal.
Source: Social Security Trustees Report and Author’s Calculations.
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The Washington Post had an interesting piece about Iclusig, a cancer drug that now sells for almost $200,000 a year. The piece discussed the pricing pattern for cancer drugs. It noted that the pricing of Iclusig did not follow the normal pattern, with the price soaring as its range of approved uses was limited by the Food and Drug Administration.
While it presented this as evidence of this not being a normal market, the piece never made the obvious point: the drug market is certainly not normal because the government grants patent monopolies and other forms of protection. Without these government granted monopolies almost all drugs would be cheap. Certainly none would sell for anything close to $200,000. While it is necessary to pay for research, they are other mechanisms that would almost certainly be more efficient and less prone to corruption than patent monopolies.
The Washington Post had an interesting piece about Iclusig, a cancer drug that now sells for almost $200,000 a year. The piece discussed the pricing pattern for cancer drugs. It noted that the pricing of Iclusig did not follow the normal pattern, with the price soaring as its range of approved uses was limited by the Food and Drug Administration.
While it presented this as evidence of this not being a normal market, the piece never made the obvious point: the drug market is certainly not normal because the government grants patent monopolies and other forms of protection. Without these government granted monopolies almost all drugs would be cheap. Certainly none would sell for anything close to $200,000. While it is necessary to pay for research, they are other mechanisms that would almost certainly be more efficient and less prone to corruption than patent monopolies.
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At the debate last night, moderator Chris Wallace challenged both candidates on the question of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The implication is that the country is threatened by the prospect of out of control government deficits. The question was misguided on several grounds.
First, as a matter of law the Social Security program can only spend money that is in the trust fund. This means that, unless Congress changes the law, the program can never be a cause of runaway deficits.
Second, it is important to note that the size of the projected shortfall in the Medicare Part A program (the portion funded by its own tax) has fallen sharply in the Obama years. The shortfall for the 75-year planning horizon was projected at 3.53 percentage points of payroll in 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency. It has now fallen by 80 percent to just 0.73 percent of payroll. This reduction is due to a sharp slowdown in the projected growth of health care costs. Some of this predates the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but some of the slowdown is undoubtedly attributable to the impact of the ACA.
Anyhow, the implication of Wallace’s question, that these programs are somehow out of control and require some near term fix, is not supported by the data. We will have to make changes to maintain full funding for Social Security, but there is no urgency to this issue.
On the more general point of deficits, the country’s problem since the crash in 2008 has been deficits that are too small, not too large. The main factor holding back the economy has been a lack of demand, not a lack of supply. Deficits create more demand, either directly through government spending or indirectly through increased consumption. If we had larger deficits in recent years we would have seen more GDP, more jobs, and, due to a tighter labor market, higher wages.
The problem of too small deficits is not just a short-term issue. A smaller economy means less investment in new plant and equipment and research. This reduces the economy’s capacity in the future. In the same vein, high rates of unemployment cause people to permanently drop out of the labor force, reducing our future labor supply if these people become unemployable. (Having unemployed parents is also very bad news for the kids who will have worse life prospects.)
The Congressional Budget Office now puts potential GDP at about 10 percent lower for 2016 than its projection from 2008, before the recession. Much of this drop is due the decision to run smaller deficits and prevent the economy from reaching its potential level of output. We can think of this loss of potential output as a “austerity tax.” It currently is at close to $2 trillion a year or more than $6,000 for every person in the country.
It is unfortunate that Wallace chose to devote valuable debate time to a non-problem while ignoring the huge problem of needless unemployment and lost output due to government deficits that are too small.
At the debate last night, moderator Chris Wallace challenged both candidates on the question of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The implication is that the country is threatened by the prospect of out of control government deficits. The question was misguided on several grounds.
First, as a matter of law the Social Security program can only spend money that is in the trust fund. This means that, unless Congress changes the law, the program can never be a cause of runaway deficits.
Second, it is important to note that the size of the projected shortfall in the Medicare Part A program (the portion funded by its own tax) has fallen sharply in the Obama years. The shortfall for the 75-year planning horizon was projected at 3.53 percentage points of payroll in 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency. It has now fallen by 80 percent to just 0.73 percent of payroll. This reduction is due to a sharp slowdown in the projected growth of health care costs. Some of this predates the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but some of the slowdown is undoubtedly attributable to the impact of the ACA.
Anyhow, the implication of Wallace’s question, that these programs are somehow out of control and require some near term fix, is not supported by the data. We will have to make changes to maintain full funding for Social Security, but there is no urgency to this issue.
On the more general point of deficits, the country’s problem since the crash in 2008 has been deficits that are too small, not too large. The main factor holding back the economy has been a lack of demand, not a lack of supply. Deficits create more demand, either directly through government spending or indirectly through increased consumption. If we had larger deficits in recent years we would have seen more GDP, more jobs, and, due to a tighter labor market, higher wages.
The problem of too small deficits is not just a short-term issue. A smaller economy means less investment in new plant and equipment and research. This reduces the economy’s capacity in the future. In the same vein, high rates of unemployment cause people to permanently drop out of the labor force, reducing our future labor supply if these people become unemployable. (Having unemployed parents is also very bad news for the kids who will have worse life prospects.)
The Congressional Budget Office now puts potential GDP at about 10 percent lower for 2016 than its projection from 2008, before the recession. Much of this drop is due the decision to run smaller deficits and prevent the economy from reaching its potential level of output. We can think of this loss of potential output as a “austerity tax.” It currently is at close to $2 trillion a year or more than $6,000 for every person in the country.
It is unfortunate that Wallace chose to devote valuable debate time to a non-problem while ignoring the huge problem of needless unemployment and lost output due to government deficits that are too small.
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The Washington Post keeps pushing the “hard to get good help” line, this time in reference to China. It told readers how the country is ending its one-child policy, but that many families are likely to still decide not to have more than one kid. The piece then told readers:
“That’s a problem for China. The people born in Mao’s era are growing old, and there will be far fewer people of working age to bear the economic burden.”
Actually, the declining ratio of workers to retirees is likely to have relatively little impact on China’s economy since the impact of even modest rates of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics as third grade arithmetic students everywhere know.
It is striking to see the fears of running out of workers co-exist with the regular stories in the media about robots taking all the jobs. This shows the unbelievable bankruptcy of economic debate in the United States that these two directly opposing concerns exist side by side among people who consider themselves knowledgeable about economic policy.
Note: correction made, thanks heropass.
The Washington Post keeps pushing the “hard to get good help” line, this time in reference to China. It told readers how the country is ending its one-child policy, but that many families are likely to still decide not to have more than one kid. The piece then told readers:
“That’s a problem for China. The people born in Mao’s era are growing old, and there will be far fewer people of working age to bear the economic burden.”
Actually, the declining ratio of workers to retirees is likely to have relatively little impact on China’s economy since the impact of even modest rates of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics as third grade arithmetic students everywhere know.
It is striking to see the fears of running out of workers co-exist with the regular stories in the media about robots taking all the jobs. This shows the unbelievable bankruptcy of economic debate in the United States that these two directly opposing concerns exist side by side among people who consider themselves knowledgeable about economic policy.
Note: correction made, thanks heropass.
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Binyamin Appelbaum had an interesting interview in the NYT with Boston Fed bank president Eric Rosengren. In the interview he argued that it was important to keep the unemployment rate from falling too low. In a response to Appelbaum saying “low unemployment sounds like a good thing,” Rosengren said:
“During periods when the unemployment rate has gotten to the low 4s, we haven’t stayed there for a real long time. And that’s because we do start seeing wages picking up, and we do see prices start picking up, and we do see asset prices picking up. In that environment we start to tighten and when we tighten we’re not so good at getting it exactly right.
“The problem is the dynamics of how firms and individuals start thinking about the tightening process. Those dynamics make it very hard to calibrate the monetary policy process. People understand tightening. But convincing them of how much you’re going to tighten and that you’re going to hit it exactly right — particularly given that you haven’t hit it exactly right in the past, it’s pretty tough to convince people of that. Not surprisingly, they start worrying about: “Well, they’re starting to tighten, they may tighten too much. What do I do? I start pulling in in terms of my own spending.” Firms start pulling in, saying, “We want to be prepared in case they don’t get this quite right.” Those kinds of actions — which are very hard to predict, and individually everyone behaves a little differently — in aggregate, cause a problem where we sometimes slow down the economy more than we intend.
“So you don’t see instances where we go from 4.2 percent to 4.7 or 5 percent and level off. What you actually see is when we start tightening we end up with a recession.”
Actually, we have very little experience of the unemployment rate falling to the low fours in the last 45 years. The one time it did fall that low was in the late 1990s. In that period, the unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in April of 1998. The economy experienced almost three years subsequent years of solid growth, with almost no uptick in inflation, until the collapse of the stock bubble threw it into recession in March of 2001.
The unemployment rate was in the mid-fours in 2007, hitting 4.4 percent in March and May of that year. There was little increase in the inflation rate, but a collapse of the housing bubble did throw the economy into a recession at the end of the year.
In short, there is little evidence of wage price inflation associated with low unemployment rates that Rosengren mentions. There is an issue of asset price inflation (i.e. bubbles) but this has little direct relationship with the unemployment rate. In the case of the housing bubble, prices peaked in the summer of 2006 and were already falling rapidly by the spring of 2007 when unemployment hit its low. The bubble began to form as early was 1996 and with prices rising rapidly in 2002 and 2003, when the unemployment rate was at its recession peak and the economy was still shedding jobs.
Binyamin Appelbaum had an interesting interview in the NYT with Boston Fed bank president Eric Rosengren. In the interview he argued that it was important to keep the unemployment rate from falling too low. In a response to Appelbaum saying “low unemployment sounds like a good thing,” Rosengren said:
“During periods when the unemployment rate has gotten to the low 4s, we haven’t stayed there for a real long time. And that’s because we do start seeing wages picking up, and we do see prices start picking up, and we do see asset prices picking up. In that environment we start to tighten and when we tighten we’re not so good at getting it exactly right.
“The problem is the dynamics of how firms and individuals start thinking about the tightening process. Those dynamics make it very hard to calibrate the monetary policy process. People understand tightening. But convincing them of how much you’re going to tighten and that you’re going to hit it exactly right — particularly given that you haven’t hit it exactly right in the past, it’s pretty tough to convince people of that. Not surprisingly, they start worrying about: “Well, they’re starting to tighten, they may tighten too much. What do I do? I start pulling in in terms of my own spending.” Firms start pulling in, saying, “We want to be prepared in case they don’t get this quite right.” Those kinds of actions — which are very hard to predict, and individually everyone behaves a little differently — in aggregate, cause a problem where we sometimes slow down the economy more than we intend.
“So you don’t see instances where we go from 4.2 percent to 4.7 or 5 percent and level off. What you actually see is when we start tightening we end up with a recession.”
Actually, we have very little experience of the unemployment rate falling to the low fours in the last 45 years. The one time it did fall that low was in the late 1990s. In that period, the unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in April of 1998. The economy experienced almost three years subsequent years of solid growth, with almost no uptick in inflation, until the collapse of the stock bubble threw it into recession in March of 2001.
The unemployment rate was in the mid-fours in 2007, hitting 4.4 percent in March and May of that year. There was little increase in the inflation rate, but a collapse of the housing bubble did throw the economy into a recession at the end of the year.
In short, there is little evidence of wage price inflation associated with low unemployment rates that Rosengren mentions. There is an issue of asset price inflation (i.e. bubbles) but this has little direct relationship with the unemployment rate. In the case of the housing bubble, prices peaked in the summer of 2006 and were already falling rapidly by the spring of 2007 when unemployment hit its low. The bubble began to form as early was 1996 and with prices rising rapidly in 2002 and 2003, when the unemployment rate was at its recession peak and the economy was still shedding jobs.
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The NYT had an editorial highlighting new work by Alan Krueger that examined prime-age men (ages 25–54) who are not working or looking for work. The work shows that 40 percent of the men who have dropped out of the labor force report feeling pain that keeps them from taking jobs. It reports that 44 percent report taking pain medication the previous day. Both Krueger and the editorial make it clear that the causation could go in both directions.
While this is interesting work, implying that the problem of people dropping out of the labor force is a story about men is seriously misleading. Both prime-age men and women have been increasingly dropping out of the labor force in the last 15 years. The falloff since the peak year of 2000 is somewhat sharper for men than women, but it is important to note that labor force participation rates had been rising for women prior to 2000 and were almost universally projected to continue to rise. The employment rate for prime-age men fell by 4.1 percentage points from 2000 to 2015, while the employment rate for prime-age women fell by 3.2 percentage points. (Employment rates are a cleaner measure, since the decision to look for work, and therefore stay in the labor force, is affected by eligibility for unemployment benefits.)
The reason this matters is that clearly the employment rate is dropping for reasons not related to any behavior or conditions unique to men since the drop has occurred for women as well. The more obvious source of the problem lies with the people (disproportionately men) designing economic policy.
The NYT had an editorial highlighting new work by Alan Krueger that examined prime-age men (ages 25–54) who are not working or looking for work. The work shows that 40 percent of the men who have dropped out of the labor force report feeling pain that keeps them from taking jobs. It reports that 44 percent report taking pain medication the previous day. Both Krueger and the editorial make it clear that the causation could go in both directions.
While this is interesting work, implying that the problem of people dropping out of the labor force is a story about men is seriously misleading. Both prime-age men and women have been increasingly dropping out of the labor force in the last 15 years. The falloff since the peak year of 2000 is somewhat sharper for men than women, but it is important to note that labor force participation rates had been rising for women prior to 2000 and were almost universally projected to continue to rise. The employment rate for prime-age men fell by 4.1 percentage points from 2000 to 2015, while the employment rate for prime-age women fell by 3.2 percentage points. (Employment rates are a cleaner measure, since the decision to look for work, and therefore stay in the labor force, is affected by eligibility for unemployment benefits.)
The reason this matters is that clearly the employment rate is dropping for reasons not related to any behavior or conditions unique to men since the drop has occurred for women as well. The more obvious source of the problem lies with the people (disproportionately men) designing economic policy.
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