Writing in the National Review recently, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claims that Social Security will be insolvent by the time he retires. He goes on to make a few suggestions to fix the program. Each of these ‘fixes’ is problematic. The flaws with the Rubio fixes have been and will be repeated many times (for example, raising the retirement age can be problematic for workers in physically demanding jobs). But before getting to the fixes, there should be a full stop after the paragraph:

Last week the Wall Street Journal had a front page article on the net worth of Argentina’s first family since 2003, the year Néstor Kirchner was elected president. Based on financial disclosures with Argentina’s Anti-Corruption Office, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “the couple's net worth rose from $2.5 million to $17.7 million” between 2003 and 2010. Implying that such returns must involve some sort of corruption, the Journal writes, a “lot of people in Argentina want to know where that money came from.”

But there is a serious problem with the way the data are presented here. The Journal is reporting the Kirchners’ net worth in dollars, without adjusting for local inflation. This makes the increase look much bigger than it is, since Argentina had cumulative inflation of nearly 200 percent during these years, according to private estimates.



If the Wall Street Journal had taken inflation into account then the Kirchner’s net worth would have looked quite different. From $2.5 million in 2003, the Kirchners’ real net worth increased to around $6.1 million in 2010.

Simply adjusting for inflation takes away more than three-quarters of the Kirchners’ gain. Should the Journal have known this and adjusted for inflation? The question answers itself. We won’t speculate about anyone’s motives.

In a series of recent blogposts, we updated a methodology used by Goldman Sachs to evaluate the impact of minimum-wage increases in 13 states at the beginning of this year. A number of publications, including USA Today and The New York Times, cited these blog posts in pieces on the minimum wage.

As we noted at the time, the Goldman Sachs’ methodology is not ideal for a number of reasons. Now, economists Saul Hoffman and Wai-Kit (Ricky) Shum from the University of Delaware have done a more formal analysis of these 13 states and found qualitatively similar results to the pieces using the Goldman Sachs method. Specifically, all of the analyses have found no evidence of negative employment impacts. If anything, the results have indicated that minimum wage increases are associated with more rapid employment growth, although this relationship is not statistically significant.

In the NYT Upshot section Neil Irwin had an interesting piece assessing which sectors are most responsible for the weakness of the economy. His culprits (in order) were residential invesment (housing), state and local government, durable goods consumption, business equipment investment, and federal spending. Irwin's methodology was to take the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of potential GDP (roughly 5 percent higher than the current level) and then assume that each component has the same share of this potential as its average of GDP over the two decades from 1993 to 2013. The difference between this hypothetical level of demand from a component and the actual level of demand from that component in the second quarter of 2014 is the basis for determining the shortfall.

I decided to do a similar exercise with a couple of minor differences. The table below shows the difference between each component's average share of GDP in the period from 1990-2013 (this was an accident -- misread Irwin's start point) and the average for the first two quarters of 2014. The two quarters are taken together because for many components a strong second quarter offset a weak first quarter. I have also lumped components together (e.g. the categories of consumption are all together). The categories in bold are the major components that together add to GDP.

	Percentage Point Change
	Average 1990-2013
	Minus 2014
Consumption expenditures	-2.3
Durable goods	0.7
Nondurable goods	-0.1
Services	-2.9
Nonresidential investment	0.0
Structures	0.0
Equipment	0.4
Intellectual property products	-0.4
Residential	1.1
Change in inventories	-0.1
Net exports	0.3
Exports	-2.7
Imports	-3.0
Government	1.1
Federal	0.5
State and local	0.5

 Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 1.1.5.

 

There are a few points that can be made from this table. First, the items that have fallen substantially as a share of GDP are government spending, which had roughly equal dropoffs at the federal and state and local levels, and residential construction. Net exports are also down as the import share had grown more than the export share. Non-residential investment is at its average level for the 1990-2013 period. The big gainer in shares is consumption, which had a 2.3 percentage points larger share of GDP in 2014 than its average in the prior period.

Dean Baker
Truthout, August 4, 2014

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, August, 4, 2014

I see that Gary Hufbauer and Cathleen Cimino have responded to my earlier post criticizing their colleague Adam Posen's Financial Times column touting the wonders of trade. They cover a lot of ground in their response, but I will just address two main points:

1) The pattern of trade that we have put in place over the last three decades has been a major factor reducing the wages of most of the work force (the 70 percent that lack college degrees).

2) The large trade deficit that we have at present is costing the country millions of jobs. If we eliminated the deficit, the direct and indirect effect would lead to roughly 6 million additional jobs, enough to bring the economy back to full employment.

On the first point, Hufbauer and Cimino (HC) focus largely on the impact of NAFTA. Certainly the impact of NAFTA would be considerably less than trade more generally since Mexico only accounts for about 8 percent of our imports and only about 60 percent as much as we import from China. In my column I was referring to the impact of trade more generally on wages, following Posen's piece which was a diatribe about progressives and trade.

While HC are dismissive of the idea that trade can have much negative impact on wages, it is not necessary to look far to find evidence of this effect. Lindsey Oldenski's, whose work is cited by both Posen and by HC, recently wrote a paper which has the following in the abstract:

"I fi nd that o ffshoring by U.S. firms has contributed to relative gains for the
most highly skilled works and relative losses for middle skilled workers. An increase
in off shoring in an industry is associated with an increase in the wage gap between
workers at the 75th percentile and workers with median earnings in that industry,
and with a decrease in the gap between workers earning the median wages and those
at the 25th percentile. This pattern can be explained by the tasks performed by
workers. Off shoring is associated with a decrease in wages for occupations that rely
heavily on routine tasks and an increase in wages if the occupation is nonroutine and
communication task intensive."

I referred to work by David Autor, which also finds a substantial negative impact of trade on the wages of less educated workers as well as a recent analysis by Paul Krugman that suggested the expansion of imports from China likely has a large negative impact on the wages of less-educated workers. At this point, the fact that trade has had a negative impact on the wages of a large segment of the U.S. workforce really should not be controversial. The question is the size.

Eileen AppelbaumThe New York Times, August 1, 2014

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Economic Policy Institute

What Is Manufacturing and Where Does it happen?  The U.S. Should Reconsider Plans to mask Trade Deficit by Reclassifying Factoryless Production and Contract Manufacturing
Robert E. Scott