I would not typically defend Germany’s economic policies against Paul Krugman, but I will say a word in its favor this morning. Krugman trashes Germany for running large trade surpluses, telling us that Germany actually has a weak domestic economy. He concludes a short post by saying that Germany can’t be any sort of model, since we can’t all run large trade surpluses.
While there is much truth to Krugman’s comments, it is worth stepping back for a moment. First, the claim that Germany’s domestic economy is weak means that Germans don’t want to buy lots of stuff. While Germany does certainly have problems of poverty and inequality, they are nothing like what we see in the United States. It would be great for Germany to spend more to address these problems, both because of the direct benefit and also because of the demand it would provide to the world economy, but it is not necessarily a bad thing that a country doesn’t want to buy more stuff.
A really good way to deal with a problem of insufficient demand is to design policies that encourage less supply. Germany has done this to some extent with work sharing, long vacations, paid parental leave, and other policies that have the effect of dividing the available work more evenly among the population. The average work year in Germany is 20 percent shorter than in the United States. Germany can certainly do more to spread the work more evenly and hopefully the income goes with it, but weak domestic demand need not be a problem.
The other point is that, as a rich country with a declining population, we would expect Germany to be running trade surpluses. Capital can be more productively used in poor countries with rapidly growing labor forces. Therefore we should expect capital to flow from rich countries like Germany to developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Of course the size of Germany’s surplus is extraordinary. Furthermore, much of it is going to other European countries like Italy and Spain, which also have slow growing (or shrinking) labor forces. These imbalances are due to the fact that they are locked into the euro and therefore their currency can’t adjust to move them towards a trade balance with Germany.
Like Krugman, I have repeatedly trashed Germany for its role in enforcing contractionary policy on the rest of the euro zone by opposing more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. And, its obsession with inflation is proving to be an incredibly costly superstition for the region.
But these policies are the real problem. Even if Germany followed the path I would like to see, it would almost certainly still have substantial trade surpluses, albeit not quite as large as the ones it is now running.
I would not typically defend Germany’s economic policies against Paul Krugman, but I will say a word in its favor this morning. Krugman trashes Germany for running large trade surpluses, telling us that Germany actually has a weak domestic economy. He concludes a short post by saying that Germany can’t be any sort of model, since we can’t all run large trade surpluses.
While there is much truth to Krugman’s comments, it is worth stepping back for a moment. First, the claim that Germany’s domestic economy is weak means that Germans don’t want to buy lots of stuff. While Germany does certainly have problems of poverty and inequality, they are nothing like what we see in the United States. It would be great for Germany to spend more to address these problems, both because of the direct benefit and also because of the demand it would provide to the world economy, but it is not necessarily a bad thing that a country doesn’t want to buy more stuff.
A really good way to deal with a problem of insufficient demand is to design policies that encourage less supply. Germany has done this to some extent with work sharing, long vacations, paid parental leave, and other policies that have the effect of dividing the available work more evenly among the population. The average work year in Germany is 20 percent shorter than in the United States. Germany can certainly do more to spread the work more evenly and hopefully the income goes with it, but weak domestic demand need not be a problem.
The other point is that, as a rich country with a declining population, we would expect Germany to be running trade surpluses. Capital can be more productively used in poor countries with rapidly growing labor forces. Therefore we should expect capital to flow from rich countries like Germany to developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Of course the size of Germany’s surplus is extraordinary. Furthermore, much of it is going to other European countries like Italy and Spain, which also have slow growing (or shrinking) labor forces. These imbalances are due to the fact that they are locked into the euro and therefore their currency can’t adjust to move them towards a trade balance with Germany.
Like Krugman, I have repeatedly trashed Germany for its role in enforcing contractionary policy on the rest of the euro zone by opposing more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. And, its obsession with inflation is proving to be an incredibly costly superstition for the region.
But these policies are the real problem. Even if Germany followed the path I would like to see, it would almost certainly still have substantial trade surpluses, albeit not quite as large as the ones it is now running.
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Economists usually think it is a good to try to make spending countercyclical. This means that we want more spending when the economy is weak and less when the economy is strong.
Traditional defined benefit pensions in the United States at least partly fit this bill. They do sustain benefit levels in a downturn. In addition, their funding formulas average the impact of market swings so that they don’t have to have large increases in contributions if the economy goes into a downturn and their funds take a hit.
A NYT piece by Mary Williams Walsh told readers that pensions in the Netherlands work in the opposite way and that we should all follow their model. The piece tells readers that the Netherlands runs pensions the way they should be run. It celebrates the fact that its method would amplify the impact of cycles:
“After the financial collapse of 2008, workers and retirees in the Netherlands took the bitter medicine needed to rebuild their collective nest eggs quickly, with higher contributions from workers and benefit cuts for pensioners.”
This is a policy that had something for everyone. Not only did it reduce the money available to retirees to support themselves, it also took money away from firms to finance investment. It also had something for the young. By reducing demand in the economy, it put more of them out of work.
If someone wanted to do damage to the Netherlands economy it would be difficult to envision a more effective method short of war. Incredibly the economists in the Netherlands all agree that this is the best approach, at least according to the article. It quotes Theo Kocken, an economist who started a risk analysis firm:
““But all economists now agree. The expected-return approach [which requires this pro-cyclical spending and contribution pattern] is a huge economic offense, hurting younger generations.”
The pension policy promoted by Mr. Kocken, and apparently all of Netherlands’ economists, might help to explain why GDP in the Netherlands is still 2.0 percent below its 2008 level, as compared to 7.6 percent higher in the United States. It’s not clear how he would tell younger generations that shrinking the economy is good for them, but economists in the United States usually think that a larger economy is better — unless the shrinkage is due to voluntary leisure. (The U.S. accounting system leads to much less pro-cyclical funding patterns, although it can be improved.)
As a practical matter, there are many deficit cultists in Europe who have insisted on austerity as the best mechanism to get out of the recession. The result has been economic stagnation and ever falling inflation rates that may soon turn negative. Folks that believe in basing theories on evidence would view their policies as a disastrous failure. However, like creationists in the United States, many European economists apparently don’t let evidence affect their views of the economy. Most people would not consider that an approach to be emulated in the United States, but apparently the NYT is promoting creationist economics, at least when it comes to pensions.
Addendum:
For those interested in bringing the impact of the Netherlands’ austerity down to a more personal level, the loss in wages and other income due to its economy growing less rapidly than the U.S. economy comes to roughly $4,700 per person a year, or $18,800 a year for a family of four. This can be thought of the country’s “austerity tax.” But at least they don’t have to worry about underfunded pensions.
Economists usually think it is a good to try to make spending countercyclical. This means that we want more spending when the economy is weak and less when the economy is strong.
Traditional defined benefit pensions in the United States at least partly fit this bill. They do sustain benefit levels in a downturn. In addition, their funding formulas average the impact of market swings so that they don’t have to have large increases in contributions if the economy goes into a downturn and their funds take a hit.
A NYT piece by Mary Williams Walsh told readers that pensions in the Netherlands work in the opposite way and that we should all follow their model. The piece tells readers that the Netherlands runs pensions the way they should be run. It celebrates the fact that its method would amplify the impact of cycles:
“After the financial collapse of 2008, workers and retirees in the Netherlands took the bitter medicine needed to rebuild their collective nest eggs quickly, with higher contributions from workers and benefit cuts for pensioners.”
This is a policy that had something for everyone. Not only did it reduce the money available to retirees to support themselves, it also took money away from firms to finance investment. It also had something for the young. By reducing demand in the economy, it put more of them out of work.
If someone wanted to do damage to the Netherlands economy it would be difficult to envision a more effective method short of war. Incredibly the economists in the Netherlands all agree that this is the best approach, at least according to the article. It quotes Theo Kocken, an economist who started a risk analysis firm:
““But all economists now agree. The expected-return approach [which requires this pro-cyclical spending and contribution pattern] is a huge economic offense, hurting younger generations.”
The pension policy promoted by Mr. Kocken, and apparently all of Netherlands’ economists, might help to explain why GDP in the Netherlands is still 2.0 percent below its 2008 level, as compared to 7.6 percent higher in the United States. It’s not clear how he would tell younger generations that shrinking the economy is good for them, but economists in the United States usually think that a larger economy is better — unless the shrinkage is due to voluntary leisure. (The U.S. accounting system leads to much less pro-cyclical funding patterns, although it can be improved.)
As a practical matter, there are many deficit cultists in Europe who have insisted on austerity as the best mechanism to get out of the recession. The result has been economic stagnation and ever falling inflation rates that may soon turn negative. Folks that believe in basing theories on evidence would view their policies as a disastrous failure. However, like creationists in the United States, many European economists apparently don’t let evidence affect their views of the economy. Most people would not consider that an approach to be emulated in the United States, but apparently the NYT is promoting creationist economics, at least when it comes to pensions.
Addendum:
For those interested in bringing the impact of the Netherlands’ austerity down to a more personal level, the loss in wages and other income due to its economy growing less rapidly than the U.S. economy comes to roughly $4,700 per person a year, or $18,800 a year for a family of four. This can be thought of the country’s “austerity tax.” But at least they don’t have to worry about underfunded pensions.
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Sometimes a question can be really annoying. Try asking a homeless person why he doesn’t have a nice apartment or Al Gore why he lost the election in 2000. David Leonhardt got in the game of really annoying questions when he speculated as to why wages aren’t rising this week. Is it really necessary to ask?
The economy is still way below potential GDP. If Leonhardt ever looked at the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or read his own paper, he would know that the employment to population ratio is still close to 4.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level. Even if we restrict the question to prime age workers (people between the ages of 25-54), to eliminate the issue of retirement, the drop is still 3.0 percentage points. The share of the workforce involuntarily working part-time is still more than 50 percent above its pre-recession level. In other words, there is still a large amount of slack in the labor market.
When there is slack in the labor market most workers are not able to get wage gains because they lack bargaining power. That was true in the 1980s, it was true in the 1990s, and surprise surprise, it’s still true in this decade. That was the main point of my book with Jared Bernstein.
With the answer right in front of him, like the French colonel in Casablanca, Leonhardt rushes to round up the usual suspects, naturally seizing on education. Unfortunately, the data refuse to cooperate with him. The unemployment rate for college grads is still almost 50 percent higher than its pre-recession level. The wages for recent college grads has fallen sharply since 2000. Believers in supply and demand would know that more college grads should put even further downward pressure on the wages of college grads. How does this help the wage story?
The obvious issue is that we need more demand in the economy. That can be most easily accomplished with more government spending. We could also get the trade deficit down by lowering the value of the dollar, making our goods more competitive internationally. Alternatively, we could go the path of Germany and try to reduce labor supply with work sharing, paid family and parental leave, and paid vacations.
But the real story here is about as simple as it gets. (Yeah, it might be complicated for economists who couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble.) We can understand the need to create more jobs, but creating confusion about simple economic points is not a good make-work project.
Sometimes a question can be really annoying. Try asking a homeless person why he doesn’t have a nice apartment or Al Gore why he lost the election in 2000. David Leonhardt got in the game of really annoying questions when he speculated as to why wages aren’t rising this week. Is it really necessary to ask?
The economy is still way below potential GDP. If Leonhardt ever looked at the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or read his own paper, he would know that the employment to population ratio is still close to 4.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level. Even if we restrict the question to prime age workers (people between the ages of 25-54), to eliminate the issue of retirement, the drop is still 3.0 percentage points. The share of the workforce involuntarily working part-time is still more than 50 percent above its pre-recession level. In other words, there is still a large amount of slack in the labor market.
When there is slack in the labor market most workers are not able to get wage gains because they lack bargaining power. That was true in the 1980s, it was true in the 1990s, and surprise surprise, it’s still true in this decade. That was the main point of my book with Jared Bernstein.
With the answer right in front of him, like the French colonel in Casablanca, Leonhardt rushes to round up the usual suspects, naturally seizing on education. Unfortunately, the data refuse to cooperate with him. The unemployment rate for college grads is still almost 50 percent higher than its pre-recession level. The wages for recent college grads has fallen sharply since 2000. Believers in supply and demand would know that more college grads should put even further downward pressure on the wages of college grads. How does this help the wage story?
The obvious issue is that we need more demand in the economy. That can be most easily accomplished with more government spending. We could also get the trade deficit down by lowering the value of the dollar, making our goods more competitive internationally. Alternatively, we could go the path of Germany and try to reduce labor supply with work sharing, paid family and parental leave, and paid vacations.
But the real story here is about as simple as it gets. (Yeah, it might be complicated for economists who couldn’t see an $8 trillion housing bubble.) We can understand the need to create more jobs, but creating confusion about simple economic points is not a good make-work project.
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Yes folks, they pay people to ask such questions. Steven Mufson uses a Wonkblog piece to speculate on why it is that even though we have been in a recovery for more than five years people are still not happy about the economy. He tells us that President Obama has the same problem as President Bush (I), who got trashed on the economy even though revised data show it had been growing rapidly at the start of 1992.
While Mufson seeks out expert analysis to try to resolve this paradox, he might try looking at the data for a moment. No one sees the economy. They don’t what the rate of growth is unless they read about it in the newspaper. What they do know is whether they have a job, whether their job is secure, and their pay is rising.
If you ask about these questions the only mystery is why Mufson is wasting our time. In 1992 the employment to population ratio was still 1.5 percentage points below its pre-recession level. That would translate into roughly 3.2 million fewer people having jobs in today’s labor market. The current employment to population ratio is down by close to 4.0 percentage points from pre-recession levels, translating into more than 9.0 million fewer people with jobs. (Some of this is due to retirement of baby boomers.) Wages for most workers have been stagnant or declining in the last five years as was the case in 1992.
So the real question here is why any serious people would have any question about why the public is sour on the economy. People care about their living standards and security, they don’t care about GDP numbers produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Yes folks, they pay people to ask such questions. Steven Mufson uses a Wonkblog piece to speculate on why it is that even though we have been in a recovery for more than five years people are still not happy about the economy. He tells us that President Obama has the same problem as President Bush (I), who got trashed on the economy even though revised data show it had been growing rapidly at the start of 1992.
While Mufson seeks out expert analysis to try to resolve this paradox, he might try looking at the data for a moment. No one sees the economy. They don’t what the rate of growth is unless they read about it in the newspaper. What they do know is whether they have a job, whether their job is secure, and their pay is rising.
If you ask about these questions the only mystery is why Mufson is wasting our time. In 1992 the employment to population ratio was still 1.5 percentage points below its pre-recession level. That would translate into roughly 3.2 million fewer people having jobs in today’s labor market. The current employment to population ratio is down by close to 4.0 percentage points from pre-recession levels, translating into more than 9.0 million fewer people with jobs. (Some of this is due to retirement of baby boomers.) Wages for most workers have been stagnant or declining in the last five years as was the case in 1992.
So the real question here is why any serious people would have any question about why the public is sour on the economy. People care about their living standards and security, they don’t care about GDP numbers produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
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Neil Irwin has a piece today on the causes and consequences of the recent run-up in the dollar. He argues that the rise is largely due to the fact that the U.S. economy seems to be doing better in recent months than most other major economies, especially the euro zone and Japan. In those cases, the central banks are looking to ease up further in the foreseeable future, while the Fed is debating when to tighten.
This is certainly a plausible explanation for most of the rise (doesn’t work well for the British pound), but the consequences are not as benign as Irwin’s piece might lead readers to believe. The main consequence of a higher dollar is a larger trade deficit and therefore slower job growth and fewer jobs.
To get an idea of the magnitude of this effect, last month Goldman Sachs estimated that the 3.0 percent rise in the dollar we had seen by that point (it’s a bit more now) will shave 0.1 to 0.15 percentage points off GDP growth in each of the next two years (sorry, no link). That translates into lost jobs. If the economy is 0.25 percent smaller in 2016 due to the higher dollar that would imply a loss of roughly 350,000 jobs.
In considering whether this job loss is a big deal, remember that the country has less than 80,000 people employed in coal mining. There have been frequent news stories warning of the dire job impact of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would lead to substantial job loss in the coal industry. Just as a matter of arithmetic, if the coal industry were completely wiped out by environmental measures, the job loss in the coal industry would be less than one fourth as much as the job loss implied by Goldman’s estimate of the impact of the rise in the dollar.
In fairness to Irwin, he does note there will be winners and losers:
“If you frequently fill up your car with imported oil or drink French wine, it’s good news. If you are Boeing competing against Airbus, or General Electric competing against Siemens, or Cadillac competing with Mercedes-Benz, it is terrible news.”
We might add to his list of winners people who frequently take vacations in Europe or other foreign countries. A high percentage of the people involved in crafting economic policy (e.g. congressional and administration staffers, reporters, economists) fit into this category. It is probably also worth mentioning that the financial industry generally likes a stronger dollar since it means less risk of inflation and their money goes farther overseas. And, companies like Walmart that bet big on low cost imports are also happy with a higher dollar.
For these reasons, the high dollar may not be portrayed as a matter of concern in the media, even if the impact on jobs is far larger than other issues to which they have devoted considerable attention.
Neil Irwin has a piece today on the causes and consequences of the recent run-up in the dollar. He argues that the rise is largely due to the fact that the U.S. economy seems to be doing better in recent months than most other major economies, especially the euro zone and Japan. In those cases, the central banks are looking to ease up further in the foreseeable future, while the Fed is debating when to tighten.
This is certainly a plausible explanation for most of the rise (doesn’t work well for the British pound), but the consequences are not as benign as Irwin’s piece might lead readers to believe. The main consequence of a higher dollar is a larger trade deficit and therefore slower job growth and fewer jobs.
To get an idea of the magnitude of this effect, last month Goldman Sachs estimated that the 3.0 percent rise in the dollar we had seen by that point (it’s a bit more now) will shave 0.1 to 0.15 percentage points off GDP growth in each of the next two years (sorry, no link). That translates into lost jobs. If the economy is 0.25 percent smaller in 2016 due to the higher dollar that would imply a loss of roughly 350,000 jobs.
In considering whether this job loss is a big deal, remember that the country has less than 80,000 people employed in coal mining. There have been frequent news stories warning of the dire job impact of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would lead to substantial job loss in the coal industry. Just as a matter of arithmetic, if the coal industry were completely wiped out by environmental measures, the job loss in the coal industry would be less than one fourth as much as the job loss implied by Goldman’s estimate of the impact of the rise in the dollar.
In fairness to Irwin, he does note there will be winners and losers:
“If you frequently fill up your car with imported oil or drink French wine, it’s good news. If you are Boeing competing against Airbus, or General Electric competing against Siemens, or Cadillac competing with Mercedes-Benz, it is terrible news.”
We might add to his list of winners people who frequently take vacations in Europe or other foreign countries. A high percentage of the people involved in crafting economic policy (e.g. congressional and administration staffers, reporters, economists) fit into this category. It is probably also worth mentioning that the financial industry generally likes a stronger dollar since it means less risk of inflation and their money goes farther overseas. And, companies like Walmart that bet big on low cost imports are also happy with a higher dollar.
For these reasons, the high dollar may not be portrayed as a matter of concern in the media, even if the impact on jobs is far larger than other issues to which they have devoted considerable attention.
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At some point when we are growing up most of us discover that people don’t always tell the truth. Apparently, some folks at the NYT have not learned this lesson.
In an article reporting on Walmart’s decision to stop providing health insurance for 30,000 part-time workers, the NYT told readers:
“In scaling back coverage for part-time employees, Walmart joins retailers including Home Depot, Target and Trader Joe’s, which have dropped benefits in response to the Affordable Care Act, the health care overhaul enacted by the Obama administration.”
Actually, the NYT doesn’t know that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the reason these retailers cut their health care coverage. Retailers have been cutting health care coverage, along with wages and other benefits, for more than a quarter century. While the ACA may have been a factor in these recent benefit cuts, it is entirely possible that these stores would have cut health coverage even if the ACA had never passed. That would be the case even if the companies may have told the NYT that the ACA was the reason they were ending coverage.
Addendum:
I should mention that in standard economic theory, payments for health care are seen as coming out of wages. This means that if Walmart is cutting its health care because workers can now get access to insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges, we should expect to see a roughly equal increase in their wages. On the other hand, if Walmart is just cutting benefits with no increase in wages, this is in effect just a cut in pay. Since the piece makes no reference to any planned pay increases, it sounds like the latter.
At some point when we are growing up most of us discover that people don’t always tell the truth. Apparently, some folks at the NYT have not learned this lesson.
In an article reporting on Walmart’s decision to stop providing health insurance for 30,000 part-time workers, the NYT told readers:
“In scaling back coverage for part-time employees, Walmart joins retailers including Home Depot, Target and Trader Joe’s, which have dropped benefits in response to the Affordable Care Act, the health care overhaul enacted by the Obama administration.”
Actually, the NYT doesn’t know that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the reason these retailers cut their health care coverage. Retailers have been cutting health care coverage, along with wages and other benefits, for more than a quarter century. While the ACA may have been a factor in these recent benefit cuts, it is entirely possible that these stores would have cut health coverage even if the ACA had never passed. That would be the case even if the companies may have told the NYT that the ACA was the reason they were ending coverage.
Addendum:
I should mention that in standard economic theory, payments for health care are seen as coming out of wages. This means that if Walmart is cutting its health care because workers can now get access to insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges, we should expect to see a roughly equal increase in their wages. On the other hand, if Walmart is just cutting benefits with no increase in wages, this is in effect just a cut in pay. Since the piece makes no reference to any planned pay increases, it sounds like the latter.
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That’s the story that we may hear based on new data on job openings and hires. The data showed a rise in the number of job openings in August, coupled with a fall in the number of hires.
This might seem to fit the skills mismatch story that many folks are pushing. The idea is that the jobs are out there, but unemployed workers just don’t have the necessary skills to fill them. If that’s the case, then we apparently need more people with the skills to work as retail clerks and table servers.
The gap in retail between openings and hires increased by 123,000 last month, as hiring fell by 83,000, in spite of a 40,000 increase in job openings. Job openings in accommodation and food services increased by 73,000 while hiring fell by 5,000, adding 78,000 to the gap. (There was also a sharp fall in hiring in construction in August, but this just partially reversed an extraordinary rise reported in July.)
Anyhow, if you want to believe the skills mismatch story, you have to believe that the mismatch is most serious in sectors that we don’t typically think require many skills.
That’s the story that we may hear based on new data on job openings and hires. The data showed a rise in the number of job openings in August, coupled with a fall in the number of hires.
This might seem to fit the skills mismatch story that many folks are pushing. The idea is that the jobs are out there, but unemployed workers just don’t have the necessary skills to fill them. If that’s the case, then we apparently need more people with the skills to work as retail clerks and table servers.
The gap in retail between openings and hires increased by 123,000 last month, as hiring fell by 83,000, in spite of a 40,000 increase in job openings. Job openings in accommodation and food services increased by 73,000 while hiring fell by 5,000, adding 78,000 to the gap. (There was also a sharp fall in hiring in construction in August, but this just partially reversed an extraordinary rise reported in July.)
Anyhow, if you want to believe the skills mismatch story, you have to believe that the mismatch is most serious in sectors that we don’t typically think require many skills.
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