March 15, 2016

15 Marzo 2016

Paul Krugman has agreed to use his blog this week as a jumping off point for great CEPR papers of the past (yes, I'm kidding), but he gives us a great segue into an old paper on unionization rates in Canada with his latest blogpost. In his post Krugman makes the simple point that if inevitable forces like globalization and technology were responsible for the decline in unionization rates in the United States then we should expect to see a comparable decline in Canada. After all, Canada's economy is even more exposed to trade than the United States and the country has all the same technologies that we enjoy south of the border. Yet, Canada has seen only a modest decline in its unionization rate over the last three decades. It is still close to 28 percent, compared to just 11 percent in the United States. The CEPR paper, by former research associate Kris Warner, explains that the difference is the result of differing institutional structures around the unionization process. In most Canadian provinces (labor law is set at provincial level in Canada, as opposed to the national level in the United States), workers can organize through a process of majority sign-up. This means that if a majority of workers in a bargaining unit sign cards indicating their desire to join a union, then the employer must recognize the union.

Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein Warns That If Bernie Sanders Is Elected Americans Will Have to Accept Higher Employment Rates

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 15, 2016

15 Marzo 2016

Actually that is not quite what Pearlstein said. The billionaire-owned Post, which has largely turned itself in recent weeks into a Bernie Sanders attack organ, apparently wanted yet another hit piece. Pearlstein in fact told readers that if the country elected Senator Sanders, and he was able to implement his policies to make the United States more like Scandinavia, then we would have to get used to a higher unemployment rate (twice).

While the unemployment rates in these countries are somewhat higher than in the United States, the employment rates are also higher. According to the OECD, the percentage of people between the ages of 15 and 64 who are working is 75.5 percent in Sweden, 74.4 percent in Norway, and 73.2 percent in Denmark compared to 68.9 percent in the United States. If the United States had the same share of its population working as Denmark employed, 10 million more people would have jobs. If we had the same employment rates as Sweden, 15 million more people would be working.

The reason that these countries can have both a higher employment rate and unemployment rate is that more people in these countries are in the labor market. This is in part because they have more family friendly policies, such as long periods of paid parental leave and good publicly supported child care. (The employment gap is much larger for women than men.) It is also because they have better education systems that ensure even people at the bottom have decent educations. And, they don’t incarcerate almost one percent of their population like the United States.

Pearlstein also cites a paper by Daron Acemoglu, Thierry Verdier, and James Robinson which argues that countries with strong welfare states like the Scandanavian countries don’t produce the same sort of innovation as countries like the United States. This paper relies far more on hand-waving than data to make its case. These countries have high rates of new business formation and innovation by most measures.

Pearlstein also cites an analysis by the Tax Policy Center which argues that a financial transactions tax can only raise $50 billion a year rather than the $75 billion a year assumed by Sanders campaign. (He proposes this tax to pay for free college for all.) It is worth noting that this difference is due to the fact that the Tax Policy Center assumes that trading of stocks and other assets is highly responsive to the tax. Under the Tax Policy Center’s assumptions, the decline in trading expenses would actually be larger than the revenue raised through the tax. This means that the entire burden of the tax would be borne from Wall Street in the form of less revenue from trading. (This assumes that less trading — falling back to 1990s levels — does not reduce the ability of firms to raise capital.)

It would be very impressive if a tax could raise $50 billion a year by eliminating wasteful trading on Wall Street. It would have been useful if Pearlstein had pointed out this implication of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis.

Anyhow, it is clear that the billionaire owned Post is prepared to do its part to undermine a candidate who wants to reduce the wealth and power of billionaires. It is also not surprising that it very much objects to a candidate who thinks billionaires should pay taxes.

Addendum:

For a fuller set of comparisons between the United States and the larger group of Nordic countries, see CEPR’s chartbook.

Actually that is not quite what Pearlstein said. The billionaire-owned Post, which has largely turned itself in recent weeks into a Bernie Sanders attack organ, apparently wanted yet another hit piece. Pearlstein in fact told readers that if the country elected Senator Sanders, and he was able to implement his policies to make the United States more like Scandinavia, then we would have to get used to a higher unemployment rate (twice).

While the unemployment rates in these countries are somewhat higher than in the United States, the employment rates are also higher. According to the OECD, the percentage of people between the ages of 15 and 64 who are working is 75.5 percent in Sweden, 74.4 percent in Norway, and 73.2 percent in Denmark compared to 68.9 percent in the United States. If the United States had the same share of its population working as Denmark employed, 10 million more people would have jobs. If we had the same employment rates as Sweden, 15 million more people would be working.

The reason that these countries can have both a higher employment rate and unemployment rate is that more people in these countries are in the labor market. This is in part because they have more family friendly policies, such as long periods of paid parental leave and good publicly supported child care. (The employment gap is much larger for women than men.) It is also because they have better education systems that ensure even people at the bottom have decent educations. And, they don’t incarcerate almost one percent of their population like the United States.

Pearlstein also cites a paper by Daron Acemoglu, Thierry Verdier, and James Robinson which argues that countries with strong welfare states like the Scandanavian countries don’t produce the same sort of innovation as countries like the United States. This paper relies far more on hand-waving than data to make its case. These countries have high rates of new business formation and innovation by most measures.

Pearlstein also cites an analysis by the Tax Policy Center which argues that a financial transactions tax can only raise $50 billion a year rather than the $75 billion a year assumed by Sanders campaign. (He proposes this tax to pay for free college for all.) It is worth noting that this difference is due to the fact that the Tax Policy Center assumes that trading of stocks and other assets is highly responsive to the tax. Under the Tax Policy Center’s assumptions, the decline in trading expenses would actually be larger than the revenue raised through the tax. This means that the entire burden of the tax would be borne from Wall Street in the form of less revenue from trading. (This assumes that less trading — falling back to 1990s levels — does not reduce the ability of firms to raise capital.)

It would be very impressive if a tax could raise $50 billion a year by eliminating wasteful trading on Wall Street. It would have been useful if Pearlstein had pointed out this implication of the Tax Policy Center’s analysis.

Anyhow, it is clear that the billionaire owned Post is prepared to do its part to undermine a candidate who wants to reduce the wealth and power of billionaires. It is also not surprising that it very much objects to a candidate who thinks billionaires should pay taxes.

Addendum:

For a fuller set of comparisons between the United States and the larger group of Nordic countries, see CEPR’s chartbook.

Bernie Sanders Health Care Plan Could Save the Country $20 Trillion

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 15, 2016

15 Marzo 2016

The Washington Post ran a major piece pointing out some of the difficulties involved in shifting over to a universal Medicare system as advocated by Senator Bernie Sanders. While the piece notes many of the problems, it never mentions that the United States pays hugely more per person for its health care with little obvious benefit in terms of outcomes. As a result, there would be enormous potential savings from switching to a universal Medicare-type system.

For example, according to the OECD, the UK spends less than half as much per person as the United States. This means that if the United States could get its costs down to UK levels, it would save more than $20 trillion (@ $60,000 per person) over the next decade. While accomplishing a transition to a more efficient system would be difficult, as the piece notes, but the potential gains are enormous.

The Washington Post ran a major piece pointing out some of the difficulties involved in shifting over to a universal Medicare system as advocated by Senator Bernie Sanders. While the piece notes many of the problems, it never mentions that the United States pays hugely more per person for its health care with little obvious benefit in terms of outcomes. As a result, there would be enormous potential savings from switching to a universal Medicare-type system.

For example, according to the OECD, the UK spends less than half as much per person as the United States. This means that if the United States could get its costs down to UK levels, it would save more than $20 trillion (@ $60,000 per person) over the next decade. While accomplishing a transition to a more efficient system would be difficult, as the piece notes, but the potential gains are enormous.

E.J Dionne Is Far Too Generous, “Moderate Progressives” Were Promoting Inequality

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 14, 2016

14 Marzo 2016

E.J. Dionne used his column to argue that it is not just the establishment Republicans who are facing a crisis because of the rise of Donald Trump. He argues that the establishment Democrats also face a crisis: “Its ideology was rooted in a belief that capitalism would deliver the economic goods and could be balanced by a ‘competent public sector, providing services of quality to the citizen and social protection for those who are vulnerable.’” This is far too generous an account. The Clinton Democrats were actively steering the economy in a direction to redistribute income upward. This was clear in a number of areas. First, their trade policy was quite explicitly designed to put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world, but maintaining or increasing protections for highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. The predicted and actual outcome of this policy is a redistribution from ordinary workers to those at the top. This effect of this policy was aggravated by the massive trade deficit that was the predictable result of the high dollar policy promoted by Robert Rubin. They also pushed for longer and stronger patent and copyright protection both domestically and internationally in trade pacts. This meant more money for the pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment industry at the expense of the rest of society. They pushed deregulation in the financial industry, which allowed for an explosion in the share of national income that went to the financial sector. Again, this upward redistribution came at the expense of the rest of society. And, they effectively supported the explosion of CEO pay. Clinton pushed a transparently absurd measure to cap CEO pay. (He pushed a measure that removed the tax deductibility for non-performance related pay in excess of $1 million a year. This green-lighted huge option based packages.) Clinton also promoted the outsourcing of government services (a.k.a. re-inventing government). This typically meant replacing relatively well-paid union workers with much lower paid contract workers. At the same time it often meant big profits for well-connected contractors, which meant that taxpayers received no benefit from the deal. The fact a Democratic president pushed this process at the national level encouraged many state and local governments to follow the same path.

Cheap Fun with World Bank, Paul Krugman, and NAFTA

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 14, 2016

14 Marzo 2016

Paul Krugman had a blogpost this morning that included a simple chart showing that Mexico’s per capita GDP has actually diverged from U.S. per capita GDP in the years since NAFTA. This is not supposed to happen, our econ textbooks tell us that poor countries are supposed to grow more rapidly than rich countries and this should have been especially true with Mexico post-NAFTA.

There should not be anything particularly controversial about Krugman’s post, after all it comes directly from World Bank data, but it is worth noting that the World Bank tried to tell an opposite story. Back in 2004, on the tenth anniversary of NAFTA, the World Bank published a study that purported to show a convergence of per capita GDP between Mexico and the United States in the years since NAFTA was passed.

We tried to set them straight, since we knew the data did not support this claim. The World Bank refused to acknowledge the obvious error (it seems their study used exchange rate measures instead of purchasing power parity measures of GDP) and presumably continues to this day to treat their study as being valid. Perhaps Krugman’s simple chart will force them to acknowledge the truth.

Paul Krugman had a blogpost this morning that included a simple chart showing that Mexico’s per capita GDP has actually diverged from U.S. per capita GDP in the years since NAFTA. This is not supposed to happen, our econ textbooks tell us that poor countries are supposed to grow more rapidly than rich countries and this should have been especially true with Mexico post-NAFTA.

There should not be anything particularly controversial about Krugman’s post, after all it comes directly from World Bank data, but it is worth noting that the World Bank tried to tell an opposite story. Back in 2004, on the tenth anniversary of NAFTA, the World Bank published a study that purported to show a convergence of per capita GDP between Mexico and the United States in the years since NAFTA was passed.

We tried to set them straight, since we knew the data did not support this claim. The World Bank refused to acknowledge the obvious error (it seems their study used exchange rate measures instead of purchasing power parity measures of GDP) and presumably continues to this day to treat their study as being valid. Perhaps Krugman’s simple chart will force them to acknowledge the truth.

Arthur Burns Can’t Get the Blame for the 1970s Inflation

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 13, 2016

13 Marzo 2016

A Washington Post piece on the Fed and the presidential elections told readers:

“A strong economy tends to boost the party currently in power, which is why President Nixon installed confidante Arthur Burns as head of the Fed in 1970, urging him to keep interest rates low to stoke the job market. The result was a decade of runaway inflation that was tamed only by a painful recession.”

This is a very strong and implausible claim. The inflation in the 1970s was fueled in large part by two huge rises in the price of oil. The first was associated with an OPEC oil embargo directed against the United States, which led to a quadrupling in the price of oil between 1973 and 1974. The second was associated with the Iranian revolution, which essentially stopped Iran’s oil exports. At the time, Iran was the world’s second largest oil exporter. There was also a sharp surge in food prices associated with massive sales of wheat to the Soviet Union in 1973.

In addition, there was a sharp slowdown in productivity growth beginning in 1973, which persisted until 1995. This slowdown was completely unexpected and to this day there still is no agreed upon explanation among economists. With workers expecting wage growth in line with the prior rate of productivity growth (2.5–3.0 percent annually), it is not surprising that slower productivity growth would be lead to higher inflation.

Furthermore, there was an error in the official measure of inflation, the consumer price index (CPI), which added approximately 6 percentage points to its measure of inflation over the course of the decade compared to the way the CPI is calculated today. This overstatement of inflation in the CPI likely lead to higher actual inflation since many contracts, most importantly wage contracts, were explicitly tied to the CPI. This means that if mis-measurement caused the CPI to show a higher rate of inflation it would lead to higher wages and prices in many sectors of the economy.

Finally, inflation rose sharply in the 1970s not only in the United States, but almost everywhere in the world. Arthur Burns’ policies could not in any obvious way lead to greater inflation in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.

A Washington Post piece on the Fed and the presidential elections told readers:

“A strong economy tends to boost the party currently in power, which is why President Nixon installed confidante Arthur Burns as head of the Fed in 1970, urging him to keep interest rates low to stoke the job market. The result was a decade of runaway inflation that was tamed only by a painful recession.”

This is a very strong and implausible claim. The inflation in the 1970s was fueled in large part by two huge rises in the price of oil. The first was associated with an OPEC oil embargo directed against the United States, which led to a quadrupling in the price of oil between 1973 and 1974. The second was associated with the Iranian revolution, which essentially stopped Iran’s oil exports. At the time, Iran was the world’s second largest oil exporter. There was also a sharp surge in food prices associated with massive sales of wheat to the Soviet Union in 1973.

In addition, there was a sharp slowdown in productivity growth beginning in 1973, which persisted until 1995. This slowdown was completely unexpected and to this day there still is no agreed upon explanation among economists. With workers expecting wage growth in line with the prior rate of productivity growth (2.5–3.0 percent annually), it is not surprising that slower productivity growth would be lead to higher inflation.

Furthermore, there was an error in the official measure of inflation, the consumer price index (CPI), which added approximately 6 percentage points to its measure of inflation over the course of the decade compared to the way the CPI is calculated today. This overstatement of inflation in the CPI likely lead to higher actual inflation since many contracts, most importantly wage contracts, were explicitly tied to the CPI. This means that if mis-measurement caused the CPI to show a higher rate of inflation it would lead to higher wages and prices in many sectors of the economy.

Finally, inflation rose sharply in the 1970s not only in the United States, but almost everywhere in the world. Arthur Burns’ policies could not in any obvious way lead to greater inflation in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.

Is Donald Trump’s Protectionism New?

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 11, 2016

11 Marzo 2016

That is what Binyamin Appelbaum argued in a Upshot column with the headline, “on trade, Donald Trump breaks with 200 years of economic orthodoxy.” The piece points to Trump’s rhetoric in which he claims that other countries are taking advantage of the United States because they are running large trade surpluses with us. It then turns to an old speech from Milton Friedman saying the opposite is true: “'Economists have spoken with almost one voice for some 200 years,’ the economist Milton Friedman said in a 1978 speech. ‘The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.’” This is in fact the classic economics argument for the merits of trade, but there is an important assumption in the argument which is not mentioned. The assumption is that the trade deficit has no effect on the level of aggregate demand and output in the United States. In the standard economic view, if our annual trade deficit increases by $200 billion we will simply make up this demand elsewhere in the economy. A combination of higher consumption, investment, and government spending will fully offset the $200 billion reduction in demand resulting from the rise in the trade deficit. This means that total demand in the economy will not change, nor will total employment. There could be some shift in employment, from the import competing industries to the industries that meet the new demand, but in the standard economics story of trade, overall unemployment is not a problem. This view of trade is less tenable in an economy that faces a chronic shortfall of demand, as is the case in the United States. Most economists now recognize that advanced economies like those in the United States, Japan, and the European Union can have prolonged periods of inadequate demand (a.k.a. “secular stagnation”) leading to unemployment and underemployment.

Educating the Washington Post on the Way Washington Works

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 11, 2016

11 Marzo 2016

In recent weeks the Washington Post has virtually transformed itself into a Bernie Sanders attack platform, filling both its news and opinion pages with critical pieces. For this reason it was not surprising to see its lead editorial today criticizing Senator Sanders for not supporting an auto bailout because it was attached to funding for the Wall Street bailout. First, it worth once again correcting its misstatements about the Wall Street bailout. The piece tells readers: "In September 2008, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders were both U.S. senators deciding whether to vote for a $700 billion fund to prop up the rapidly collapsing U.S. financial system. Ms. Clinton voted yes, on the sound view that the likely alternative to this admittedly undeserved rescue of Wall Street would have been global calamity. Mr. Sanders voted no, demanding that Wall Street pay for its own bailout. As it happens, the bailout fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), ended up costing far less than the initial headline figure suggested, and even made taxpayers some money; but, as was foreseeable at the time, that hasn’t stopped the country’s political purists, left and right, from second-guessing and making political hay." As I and others have pointed out, the "second Great Depression" story pushed by bailout supporters assumes that Washington does nothing even as the unemployment rate soars into the double digits. There is no historical support for anything like this. Even President George W. Bush supported a stimulus package when the unemployment rate was just 4.9 percent. Furthermore, the fact the bailout "made taxpayers some money" really has nothing to do with the time of day. The government lent billions of dollars (trillions of dollars counting the loans from the Fed) to some of the richest people in the country at rates that were far below what they would have been forced to pay in the market. This was an enormous transfer of wealth from the rest of us to Wall Street.

Tell Morning Edition: It's Not "Free Trade" Folks

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 10, 2016

10 Marzo 2016

Hey, can an experienced doctor from Germany show up and start practicing in New York next week? Since the answer is no, we can say that we don’t have free trade. It’s not an immigration issue, if the doctor wants to work in a restaurant kitchen, she would probably get away with it. We have protectionist measures that limit the number of foreign doctors in order to keep their pay high. These protectionist measures have actually been strengthened in the last two decades.

We also have strengthened patent and copyright protections, making drugs and other affected items far more expensive. These protections are also forms of protectionism.

This is why Morning Edition seriously misled its listeners in an interview with ice cream barons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield over their support of Senator Bernie Sanders. The interviewer repeatedly referred to “free trade” agreements and Sanders’ opposition to them. While these deals are all called “free trade” deals to make them sound more palatable (“selective protectionism to redistribute income upward” doesn’t sound very appealing), that doesn’t mean they are actually about free trade. Morning Edition should not have used the term employed by promoters to push their trade agenda.

Hey, can an experienced doctor from Germany show up and start practicing in New York next week? Since the answer is no, we can say that we don’t have free trade. It’s not an immigration issue, if the doctor wants to work in a restaurant kitchen, she would probably get away with it. We have protectionist measures that limit the number of foreign doctors in order to keep their pay high. These protectionist measures have actually been strengthened in the last two decades.

We also have strengthened patent and copyright protections, making drugs and other affected items far more expensive. These protections are also forms of protectionism.

This is why Morning Edition seriously misled its listeners in an interview with ice cream barons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield over their support of Senator Bernie Sanders. The interviewer repeatedly referred to “free trade” agreements and Sanders’ opposition to them. While these deals are all called “free trade” deals to make them sound more palatable (“selective protectionism to redistribute income upward” doesn’t sound very appealing), that doesn’t mean they are actually about free trade. Morning Edition should not have used the term employed by promoters to push their trade agenda.

Bankers’ Bailout: Quick Thoughts on the Tarp

By Dean BakerDean Baker

March 10, 2016

10 Marzo 2016

Since the TARP has come up repeatedly in the debates between Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, it is worth briefly correcting a couple of major misconceptions. The first one is that we would have had a second Great Depression without the bailout. This assertion requires rejecting everything we know about the first Great Depression. The first Great Depression was caused by a series of bank collapses as runs spread from bank to bank. The country was much better positioned to prevent the same sort of destruction of wealth and liquidity most importantly because of the existence of deposit insurance backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. More importantly, the downturn from the collapse persisted for over a decade because of the lack of an adequate fiscal response. In other words, if we had spent lots of money, we could have quickly ended the depression as we eventually did with the spending associated with World War II in 1941. There is no reason in principle that we could not have had this spending for peaceful purposes in 1931, which would have quickly brought the depression to an end. The claim that we risked a second Great Depression in 2008 (defined as a decade of double-digit unemployment) is not only a claim that we faced a Great Depression sized financial collapse but also that we would be too stupid to spend the money needed to get us out of the downturn for a decade. None of the second Great Depression myth promulgators has yet made that case.