Category Archives: Political Economy

Government and the Slow Jobs “Recovery”

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Government finally starts to get out of the way of recovery. In an earlier post today on the good news of the January 2012 employment report, I observed that one of the major factors resulting in an improved (but not good enough) jobs report was that government employment numbers stopped dragging down the total.  I wanted to briefly expand on that idea here.

First, let’s make no mistake the “recovery” from this last recession has been very, very weak.  Private sector growth has been anemic at best. In employment, the recovery has largely been missing in action.  Today, 31 months after the supposed end of the recession, we have only recovered 1/3 of the jobs we lost during the 19 months of recession. As I’ve mentioned before, we are well on our way to a lost decade or more before we regain full employment.  A huge part of the weak recovery has been slow and at times negative growth in private sector employment.

But a bigger problem has been government.  Government has a three-fold impact on employment during a recovery.  Government spending by itself will create employment in the private sector.  For example, if the government chooses to react to a recession and high cyclical unemployment by increasing it’s spending it can create new private sector employment. This would be a classical stimulus program.  The government could embark on highway, bridge, or school construction.  The spending with construction contractors causes those contractors to hire employees. That’s direct private sector employment through government spending.  As long as there are significant unemployed resources (workers), such government spending will increase employment.  Arguments about crowding out do not apply when large unemployed resources exist.

The increased government spending then has a second effect, a “multiplier” effect.  The multiplier effect reflects the idea that workers who got jobs in the initial round of spending themselves spend their incomes and create more demand for more goods. This increased demand for goods results in even more employment.  In other words, the construction workers hired to build the new bridges or schools spend their paychecks.  The firms selling those workers goods then have to hire in order to produce the goods/services the construction workers want.  The exact size of the multiplier effect is uncertain and subject to dispute depending on the econometric methods used to measure it.  However, it’s clear that as long there were substantial unemployed resources to begin with, there is a positive multiplier effect on private employment from increased government spending.

But what I want to draw attention to today is direct employment effect of government.  One of the greatest reasons why we have had a very slow employment recovery is because government in the U.S. has been aggressively cutting jobs for the last 2-3 years. Conservative critics of government have been partially right. Government has been part of the problem – but not in the way they think.  Let’s look at total government employment in recent years:

The data series can be a bit tough to read because government employment has a very seasonal pattern to it.  That’s shows up by the regular up-and-down pattern each year.  Let’s focus on the trend, smoothing out the ups-and-downs. There’s four patterns. Government employment was essentially flat in 2002 and 2003.  Then a period of employment growth in government began running form 2004 through early 2008.  During the recession itself government employment was essentially flat.  Since 2009, though, government employment has been declining.  Cutting government employment is contractionary.  It directly reduces retail demand for goods and services by reducing the incomes of what were formerly government workers.

The pattern is a little clearer if we look at the data in a slightly different way.  The following graph, courtesy of Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser.com, shows the a smoothed trend.  It does this by plotting the 12-month change in government employment (000′s of jobs) by month.

While private employment continues to grow, government employment continues to fall; the decline is most pronounced at the state and local level (Wisconsin is a good example of the contractionary impact of such measures [1] [2]). However, civilian Federal government employment is also declining.

janempsit3.gif
Figure 3: Twelve month change in government local employment (blue), in state employment (red), and government employment ex.-temporary Census workers (geen), 000’s, seasonally adjusted. NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Source: BLS via FRED, NBER and 

One thing I particularly like about this graph is that it shows the relative contribution of federal, state, and local governments. What this graph shows is that before the recession (the grey zone), government was net hiring approximately 250,000 additional jobs per year. Of that, most was at the local level and some at the state. Very little was federal hiring.

Since the end of the recession in June 2009, government has been firing more workers than it hires.  It has been reducing employment.  The federal government, contrary to popular belief, began shrinking (in employment terms).  State governments were largely able to hold the line on employment until early 2011.  Then state governments began reducing employment in rapidly increasing numbers.  But the big impact again came from local governments.  For the last 30 months, they have been laying off large numbers of workers. The reductions have slowed in 2011, but they are still cutting workers at nearly the same rate that they added them in 2007 – hundreds of thousands of lost jobs each year.

There is a temptation among politicians and commenters to think of government employees as representing largely just some bureaucrats mindlessly pushing paper in large bland office buildings.  That is not true.  At the federal level, most federal government employees are either soldiers or part of some security forces (TSA, FBI, ICE, etc).  At the local level, the vast majority of local government employees are police, fire and emergency workers, and teachers. Reductions in local government employment directly translate into fewer services and less education for children.

Why are state and local governments cutting employment?  Simple.  It’s reduced taxes combined with balanced budget requirements.  State and local governments, unlike a sovereign national government, must balance their budgets.  They are budget constrained.  The recession and weak recovery have hit income and sales taxes hard.  Even more significant is that the collapse of home prices a few years ago has translated into lower property tax collections.  Either way, state and local governments have been pinched.  The response has been to reduce government employment – fire police, firefighters, and teachers.

Paul Krugman notes the how this reduction in state and local government revenue has translated into reduced spending, which in turn has translated into lower employment.  Despite the federal government embarking on a stimulus spending program in early 2009, a program which is over and done with now, it was not large enough to offset the reduction in state and local spending.

if you look at what’s being cut, it’s heavily focused on investment:

That is, we’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

What an utter disaster.

On this point, I have to agree with Paul.  Unless we reverse course and do it strongly, we are flirting with a long-term disaster.  We are under-investing in our future.

Why I Went Dark and Why It Matters

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As those readers who visited this blog earlier today on Jan 18 know, I took this site “dark” in solidarity with the anti-SOPA/anti-PIPA protests. Yes, I’m back now. But I’m angry. And you should be angry too.

I’m angry because the SOPA/PIPA bills in Congress are nothing more attempts by a privileged few large corporations who want to reap even greater profits at everybody else’s expense.  Rather than engage in the difficult and creative work of creating products and services that people want at prices that people want to pay, these corporations want to sit back and earn monopoly profits using monopolies granted by Congress. They make a big deal of the supposed “losses” to “piracy”.  But their numbers are totally bogus. Their numbers for losses are based on an assumption that demand curves for music, entertainment, movies, etc don’t slope downward.   I’ll comment on that and explain it more in a future post.  These publishers don’t even want to be bothered to engage in protecting their interests themselves.  A major portion of the SOPA/PIPA bills involve clauses that would require other people, y0u and me, to do the enforcement that has historically always been the responsibility of the copyright owner.  If these corporations/publishers don’t think you or I or Google or whoever is adequately protecting their profits, then they want the power to shut us down summarily without having to even prove anything in court.

I’m angry because if SOPA/PIPA succeed, even if in an altered form, I will at a minimum have to stop accepting comments on this blog.  I’ll have to live the likelihood that should I write anything to which one of these corporations takes offense, then they can and very likely will be able to shut down this site permanently.  No recourse in court. They won’t even have to prove they own any copyright they allege is infringed. Most likely I will have change my teaching also. My online teaching may become untenable.  It’s not because I infringe on anybody’s copyrights.  It’s because these powers in SOPA/PIPA will be abused.

I’m angry because the major publishers of textbooks (McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Pearson, Macmillan, some others) have all publicly supported these bills. They’ve funded the lobbying that created these anti-free speech bills.  Why? Because they want a monopoly on the distribution of knowledge in higher education.  These two bills would grant the power to these publishers to shut down open education resources, shut down professors that want to share material the professors have written, and shut down any collaborative learning site if they take offense to it.  The result will be higher costs for students, less knowledge shared, and less learning. But it will mean these same publishers will be able to continue to make profits without having to adapt to new technology or having to actually improve their products or re-invent their business models.

I’m angry because in the subject I teach, I regularly get sales reps from these big publishers pushing “solutions” (read textbooks w/ software that mean the book can’t be resold) that cost easily $200 or more.  That’s almost as much as the tuition for the course itself.  A couple of these big publishers have even adopted a page from the pharmaceutical industry.  I’ve been offered (and refused) all-expense paid trips to 5-star resort hotels in Texas, South Carolina, and California for “conferences” on teaching – just like doctors who get bribed into prescribing expensive medicines the patient doesn’t need (happened to me 10 years ago).  these SOPA/PIPA bills are just an attempt to perpetuate the same corrupt ways of doing business.  In economics, we have a term for it. It’s called rent-seeking.  It’s the opposite of doing productive activity.  I have now instituted a policy of refusing to talk with these reps.  From henceforth, reps from any firm who publicly supports SOPA/PIPA is not welcome in my office.  I will not spec any book for any class from them. I call on all other professors in higher education to do so also.  We either stand on the side of learning, sharing knowledge, and or students, or we stand with monopolists interested only in profits and closing minds.

I’m angry because the politicians, mostly Republicans, who claim to be all about stopping “job-killing regulations” are supporting and co-sponsoring these bills in large numbers.  Yet these two bills, SOPA/PIPA are draconian measures to regulate the Internet, the World Wide Web, and public communications and these two bills will kill jobs.  By the tens of thousands in the technology industry.  Jobs that the entertainment industry won’t replace.

I’m angry because freedom of speech, the freedom to converse, share ideas, to learn, to innovate, will end under these two bills.  If these bills become law, then make mistake, you and I will only be free to speak so long as some unnamed, unseen corporation decides to tolerate what we say.  The firms than enable us to talk without being face-to-face, the Googles, the Wikipedias, the Facebooks, the WordPresses, etc, will have inspect and limit what we say lest they find themselves banned and their funds cut off.  That’s not what the U.S. was supposed to be about.

I affirm they stand with the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, whose words are inscribed on the dome of his memorial in Washington, D.C.:

“…I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800

 

Student Debt + Stagnant Real Wages = Colleges Need to Focus On Student Success

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Today’s post is an excerpt of something I wrote for another site.  This year, in addition to my teaching duties at the college, I’m leading a project to update our college strategic plan.  As part of that project I’m writing and editing a series of “briefing papers” (long blog posts, actually) about issues of strategic importance to the college’s future.  When those papers cover a topic that I think might be of interest to econproph readers I’ll cross-post them. Last week I wrote the following about the student debt explosion in the U.S., the stagnation in hourly wages for those for with less than college degrees/credentials, and the implications for those of us who work in higher education.  The full original post is here.

America has a student debt problem.

And it’s growing. According to the statistics assembled by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, theU.S. Dept. of Education, and other sources, total student loan debt outstanding is nearing $1 trillion, easily exceeding the $791 billion in total credit card debt.  As disturbing as the total might seem, the growth rate of student debt is even more distressing.  This graph, first published by The Atlantic last summer from NY Federal Reserve Bank statistics shows the relative growth  (not amounts) of outstanding student debt since 1999 compared to total household debt including mortgages. FromThe Atlantic:

The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period.

crazy student loans 2011-q2.png

This chart looks like a mistake, but it’s correct. Student loan debt has grown by 511% over this period. In the first quarter of 1999, just $90 billion in student loans were outstanding. As of the second quarter of 2011, that balance had ballooned to $550 billion.

The chart  is striking for another reason. See that blue line for all other debt but student loans? This wasn’t just any average period in history for household debt. This period included the inflation of a housing bubble so gigantic that it caused the financial sector to collapse and led to the worst recession since the Great Depression. But that other debt growth? It’s dwarfed by student loan growth.

Roots of the Problem

The student loan debt problem has many roots, most of which [colleges] cannot change or directly affect.  Causes of the explosion in student debt include:

  • A long-term shift in U.S. political opinion away from thinking of higher education as a public good with direct funding support from government toward thinking that students should pay for their own educations with loans guaranteed by the government.
  • Tuition and fee increases in higher education (particularly at 4 year schools and especially at private schools) have outpaced inflation for at least 3 decades, driven by cost increases, stagnant productivity, and reduced government direct funding.
  • Middle class real incomes have been largely stagnant or only modestly increasing for those same 3 decades, limiting the ability of families to pay dependent students’ tuitions.
  • The collapse of the housing price and mortgage bubble in 2006-07 which limited the ability of many middle- and working-class families to finance college education through home equity loans.
  • High unemployment rates since 2008 have limited the ability of students to work while in college and have also sent increased numbers of unemployed back to college.

… most community colleges can be a partial solution to the nation’s growing student loan burden.  After all, [community colleges are] one of the most cost-effective providers of the first 2 years of a college education.  Indeed, students can graduate with a bachelors’ degree with less total indebtedness if they take their first two years at community college and then transfer.

But the growing student loan problem when combined with another trend has even more significant implications the community college mission.

The Long Term Trend on Real Incomes – A Closing Middle Class

Long term trends in incomes in the U.S. including increasing income inequality have become a news headline topic in recent months.  …  Cumulative Growth in Hourly Wages, 1979-2009, by Level of EducationAs this graph from  the Congressional Budget Office (via Paul Krugman) shows, over the past 30 years the clear trend in hourly wages for workers with less than high school or only high school education has been negative. A high school graduate now earns 10% less per hour in inflation-adjusted dollars than they did 30 years ago.  Even workers who only have some college but haven’t completed a formal degree or credential are either negative or at best, even with 30 years ago.  The data in the graph is from 2009 and labor market conditions have not improved since then.  Indeed, most labor market economists, myself included, expect little to no improvement in wages or employment rates for many years to come.

So what does this mean?  It’s clear that for young and middle-aged people, the route to a rising income and participation in the middle class requires either a college credential or advanced degree.  Yes, anecdotal exceptions are always possible such as the stellar young person who becomes a big success in sports or entertainment. But the numbers are clear – for virtually all, membership in the middle class in the future requires succeeding at college not just attempting college.

Implications for LCC and It’s Mission

The mission of LCC and community colleges in general since they were created has been to provide access.  The great post-World War II expansion of community colleges in the U.S., of which LCC was a part, was based on the idea that broad, democratic access to higher education was important.  Community colleges provided access to college for millions who otherwise couldn’t attend, either because of costs, lack of family support, family/work obligations, location, lack of preparation, grades, or other circumstances.  Over time community colleges have expanded programs to help  increase access to even more individuals.  Indeed, this open-door, democratic access mission is a large part of the motivation for many who work at LCC.  Providing access is something we could feel good about.

But let’s consider how access has traditionally worked.  LCC, like most community colleges, has focused on providing the same basic instruction and learning that was available at 4 year institutions.  The difference was we had an open-door. We provided access.  We provided a chance at college and greater income and success in life. But it was always considered up to the student to succeed. The historical model is the college provides the student a chance at success. If they didn’t succeed that was their problem.  We measured our success by our enrolments as an indicator of the number of people to whom we had provided access.  Thirty years ago, if a student attempted college and didn’t succeed it didn’t carry the consequences it does today.  Thirty and forty years ago, a student who failed at college or simply didn’t complete could always get a job in a factory or a trade. They could still make a middle-class life despite not succeeding at college.

Now the trends tell a different outcome.  If a student doesn’t attempt college at all, they are likely not going to stay in the middle class at all and will likely experience declining real incomes.  The big change is if the student does attempt college but simply doesn’t succeed or complete, today their prospects for staying in the middle class are slim.  Successful completion of a college degree or credential has become a requirement now for a middle class future. It’s necessary for young people in particular to attempt and succeed at college now.

But now let’s add the student loan issue.  Suppose a person attempts college today but doesn’t succeed. Not only are they faced with the prospect of flat to declining real income, they have a significant burden – their student debt. Under current law there are really only two ways to discharge student debt – either pay it or die. Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. There’s no asset to sell or foreclose. So today’s student is facing a higher risk environment than their predecessors did in previous generations.  Instead of access to college being a chance at a better life, it’s now a high-risk necessity.  So it’s not just access; it’s success that matters.

…The governments, both state and federal, are paying increasing attention to success rates.  As mentioned in the first briefing paper, state governments, including Michigan, are increasingly looking at funding for higher education in terms of how many successful credentials or degrees does it produce, not just how many seats in classes were offered.

Beyond what the government is requiring, the success issues pose a challenge to our understanding of our core mission and how we measure our institutional success. In today’s environment, providing access to large numbers of students without regard for their success is playing a cruel joke on them.  It’s teasing them with dreams of a future many of them won’t achieve and then punishing them with a burden of debt.  For those of us in the institution, that’s not the motivator that the original access mission was. We need to adjust our sense of the mission.  Yes, access is important, but it needs to be successful access.  Successful access as a mission changes many things.

It changes our most basic metric of institutional success. Instead of simply enrollment growth showing institutional success at providing access, we now need to consider whether that access was successful. …But measuring success and access are one thing. Improving them is another. The shift to successful access calls for many changes in the organization, it’s processes, systems, the curriculum, teaching methods, support services, and attitudes. It is not easy or simple. It is very challenging.


Rick Snyder Advocates Government Planning to Fix the Labor Market

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In recent posts here, here, and here, I’ve been discussing structural vs. cyclical unemployment.  In particular I’ve observed how those who are opposed to government stimulus efforts, either broad-based tax cuts or spending, are desperate to assert that our unemployment is a structural problem and not cyclical.  Yesterday’s post about a story in the Wall Street Journal was one example.  But here in my home state of Michigan, our Governor Rick Snyder has been saying much the same thing.  Since Governor Snyder’s previous claims that the magic jobs genie would create jobs from budget cuts have not worked, he really wants to join the “it’s all structural” brigade.  So last week Snyder announced:

Michigan needs to do better training people for in-demand jobs, and matching skilled workers with potential employers, Gov. Rick Snyder said…

“Today, too few workers have the skills needed to meet the demands of employers in the new economy,” Snyder said, according to an advance copy of his message. “Despite an unemployment rate of 10.6 percent, thousands of jobs remain unfilled in Michigan.”

Snyder said state companies say there is a “talent disconnect,” with baby boomer retirements leading to a loss of skilled workers and increasingly technology-driven economy requires advanced skills that many of our workers do not have.

“Today, talent has surpassed other resources as the driver of economic growth,” he said. “Times have been tough in Michigan. We have failed to think strategically about the relationship between economic development and talent. Job creators are finding it challenging to grow and develop without the right talent and job seekers are struggling to connect with the right opportunities that leverage their skills.”

Among the proposals is a new website, Pure Michigan Talent Connect – MiTalent.org – will feature tools for job-seekers and employers to identify labor trends and help people assess their skills, look for the training they need and connect with mentors.

The site is being launched in phases through June 2012. The first phase, features the “Career Matchmaker” and the “Career Investment Calculator.”

Partnering with public colleges and universities to provide a post-secondary education that is marketable and transferable. Snyder noted that the Center for Michigan concluded that colleges graduated 20 percent too few computer and math professionals, 14 percent too few health care professionals, and 3 percent too few engineers in 2009-2010.

“We need to stop overproducing in areas where there is little or no occupational demand and encourage students and educational institutions to invest in programs where the market is demanding a greater investment in talent,” Snyder said. “The current imbalance creates a population of young talent that cannot find work in Michigan, is saddled with debt and is ultimately forced to leave the state. This is an outcome we cannot afford.”…

“The simple truth is that tomorrow’s opportunities cannot be realized with yesterday’s skills,” he said. “The challenge we face is to align the aptitudes and career passions of job seekers with the current and evolving needs of employers. The solution is to reinvent the way in which we prepare our children for successful, fulfilling careers; reshape the manner in which Michiganders look for work; and redesign the way in which employers obtain the skills they need.”

Basically, Snyder is now asserting that Michigan’s high unemployment rate is primarily structural – it has nothing to do with Snyder’s jobs cuts and spending cuts in the state or with the present contractionary federal fiscal policy.  Instead he blames the unemployed – they have the wrong skills and the wrong education.  What’s particularly interesting here is that normally Snyder, like most Republican governors, is very pro “free market” and “private sector”.  But apparently the free market and the private sector haven’t performed well in the labor market according to Snyder.  Snyder seems to be saying we need government planning and direction to tell people what skills and education to get.  Apparently Snyder also doesn’t think private employment agencies or employers do a very good job of identifying trends or make connections.

I think the problem is not that Michiganders don’t know the right way to look for work.  There simply aren’t enough jobs at reasonable wages when they look.  It seems strange to hear calls for such fancy government economic planning coming from a so-called advocate of free markets and the private sector.  But when you’re desperate to justify spending cuts instead of stimulus, I guess that’s what you say.

Fixes for Unemployment Depend on Whether It’s Cyclical (It Is) or Structural (It Isn’t)

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Yesterday I recapped the November employment report. The employment picture remains grim.  The workers depression continues.

As my favorite graph from Calculated Risk shows here, regardless of what happens to the unemployment rate, our recovery from the jobs lost in the recession is incredibly slow.  At the pace we have been on for the last 2-3 years, we won’t recover the jobs lost in the recession until around 2018 – a full lost decade.

Thanks partly to the #OccupyWallStreet movement, these 14 million unemployed aren’t so invisible as they seemed last summer when the policy debates were all about debt and deficits.  Since denial of a problem has failed, folks who argue against any attempts by the government to stimulate the economy need a different pitch.

That revised pitch is that the unemployment problem is “structural”, not “cyclical”.  Now before I move on to show the problem is not structural, let me explain the difference. I’ve looked at structural vs. cyclical before here and here, but I’ll summarize.  In economist-talk, “unemployed” means you are part of the labor force but you don’t have a job.  To be part of the labor force, you must be actively looking (“willing and able”) to work.  Those numbers come from government surveys. Economists unofficially classify those unemployed workers according to why they don’t have a  job.  There’s four possibilities:

  1. Frictional – there’s a job for them, they simply haven’t been matched with it yet.
  2. Seasonal – the job will exist again next year when the season is right (think downhill ski instructors in July)
  3. Structural – empty jobs exist but the unemployed workers either don’t have the right skills or aren’t in the right location.  Train the workers or move them and unemployment disappears.
  4. Cyclical – there simply aren’t enough empty jobs for the number of unemployed workers.  If the GDP were larger and spending greater, then jobs would be created and the people put back to work.

For policy reasons we aren’t concerned with frictional or seasonal. Time cures those individual unemployment situations. But if we only had frictional or seasonal unemployment, our unemployment rate would be much, much lower – 4% or even lower.  Clearly we have either have a lot of structural or cyclical or both.

Which we have matters for policy reasons. If unemployment is structural, then we can effectively blame the unemployed for their fate.  They didn’t get the right skills. They chose to live in the wrong place. From a policy standpoint, the government might adopt policies that support re-training but that’s about it.   If, however, unemployment is cyclical, then government has plenty of room to reduce unemployment through stimulus programs, either effective tax cuts and/or increased government direct spending.

Brad Delong points us to David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal who tells us how and why today’s high unemployment is not structural. In other words, we could bring down the unemployment very dramatically and very quickly if we chose to.  Politicians in Washington simply choose not to do so. (bold emphases are mine)

DW:

Untangling Long-Term Unemployment: Herman Cain, the Republican presidential candidate, avoids carefully calibrated talking points. “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself,” he said in a Wall Street Journal interview.

Beneath Mr. Cain’s blunt words lurks an economic hypothesis: that there’s nothing much government policy can do to bring unemployment down from today’s 9.1% rate…. [I]f the unemployed aren’t willing or able to fill jobs that muscular stimulus might produce then there’s little wisdom in borrowing more money or chancing inflation. We just have to suck it up.

But according to Fed governor Daniel Tarullo, a veteran of the Clinton White House and Obama presidential campaign who has spent the past few months consulting with Fed and other labor economists for a speech on the job market he is to deliver Thursday at Columbia University, there is little evidence that the bulk of today’s unemployed would still be unemployed if the economy were growing faster or that the bulk of today’s unemployment is, in the jargon of economists, “structural.”…

The Labor Department counts 14 million unemployed and 3.1 million job openings, or 4.6 jobless workers per job opening. Before the recession, the ratio was 1.5. If every opening were filled instantly, there would still be many unemployed.

Wages aren’t rising. “We don’t see rapid wage growth almost anywhere, which is what you would expect if firms were bidding up the wages of qualified workers and were unable to find qualified workers among the unemployed,” said Harvard University’s Lawrence Katz.

Unemployment is up across ages, occupations, industries and years of schooling. “We had a fast-advancing economic decline with layoffs and hiring freezes in a broad range of sectors of the economy. That is not consistent with an increase in structural unemployment being the big explanation,” Mr. Tarullo said…

 

Is The Fed Corrupt or Captured?

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Yesterday I responded to a reader who asked if “The Fed is out of control”.  In short, I said no, not in the sense that critics have charged them with “out of control printing of money” that could produce inflation.  But I left the post with an acknowledgement that the secrecy of The Fed carries some risks.  I said:

…it is unseemly for The Fed to be able to make large loans on favorable terms to banks, loans that save those banks’ managers from failure, without any sunshine or transparency.  It makes fertile ground for corruption.

Today I want to look at the question of whether The Fed, as it is currently constituted, is corrupt.  The Fed has generated a lot of populist anger.  A quick Google search for “end the fed” turns up over 8 and 1/2 million results.  A lot of people seem to feel there’s something wrong here with The Fed, even if they can’t pinpoint what it is.  Typically the charge has been that The Fed has been guilty of creating (“printing”) money too fast and producing inflation.  We’ve seen that’s not true.  Inflation is not our problem and hasn’t been for 20-30 years. Nevertheless, many people feel there must be something wrong.

I tend to agree. First, let’s define corrupt.  From Webster’s online, we see two possible meanings for corrupt:

1…   b : characterized by improper conduct (as bribery or the selling of favors) <corrupt judges>…

3.  : adulterated or debased by change from an original or correct condition <a corrupt version of the text>

Going by this definition, The Fed is corrupt.  It’s characterized by improper conduct and it’s debased from a correct condition (although the original condition wasn’t much better).  Let’s take a closer look to understand problems better.

I’m not accusing The Fed or Fed officials of outright petty bribery.  I don’t think anybody has directly paid off Fed officials or promised personal gains in return for Fed decisions.  It’s more complex than that.  The Fed has become the subject of regulatory capture.  Regulatory capture occurs when an agency of the government is initially established to regulate or control the excessive behavior of some industry.  But then, over time, the industry captures the hearts, minds, and ideologies of the regulators.  The regulators come to function as the protectors and servants of the industry they were supposed to regulate.  Regulatory capture is common anytime the industry involved is complex and technical.  Experts have to be hired as regulators but the best source of experts on the industry is the industry itself.  The problem is made worse when the regulated industry is able to pay much higher salaries than the regulatory agency.  Wikipedia tells of a few examples from The Fed:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed)

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the most influential of the Federal Reserve Banking System. Part of the New York Fed’s responsibilities is the regulation of Wall Street, but its president is selected by and reports to a board dominated by the chief executives of some of the banks it oversees.[39] While the New York Fed has always had a closer relationship with Wall Street, during the years that Timothy Geithner was president, he became unusually close with the scions of Wall Street banks,[39] a time when banks and hedge funds were pursuing investment strategies that caused the 2008 financial crisis, which the Fed failed to stop.

In the wake of the financial meltdown, Geithner became the “bailout king” of a recovery plan that benefited Wall Street banks at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.[39] Geithner engineered the New York Fed’s purchase of $30 billion of credit default swaps from American International Group (AIG), which it had sold to Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale. By purchasing these contracts, the banks received a “back-door bailout” of 100 cents on the dollar for the contracts.[40] Had the New York Fed allowed AIG to fail, the contracts would have been worth much less, resulting in much lower costs for any taxpayer-funded bailout.[40] Geithner defended his use[40] of unprecedented amounts of taxpayer funds to save the banks from their own mistakes,[39] saying the financial system would have been threatened. At the January 2010 congressional hearing into the AIG bailout, the New York Fed initially refused to identify the counterparties that benefited from AIG’s bailout, claiming the information would harm AIG.[40] When it became apparent this information would become public, a legal staffer at the New York Fed e-mailed colleagues to warn them, lamenting the difficulty of continuing to keep Congress in the dark.[40] Jim Rickards calls the bailout a crime and says “the regulatory system has become captive to the banks and the non-banks”.[41]

Regulatory capture isn’t limited to only the possibility that a regulators’ decisions might be influenced by their personal future employment prospects.  It also involves ideology and group think.  The regulators spend their time, both professional and personal, mixing with the regulated.  They come to think alike.  Professor Steven Davidoff writes at Deal Book:

Instead, we have ideological and social capture of the top regulators. This is an issue that trumps what can be a model regulator at the bottom where the line people are quite competent, able and uncaptured, but the message from the top skews their effectiveness….

For an example of social capture at the top, one need only look at the publicly available calendars of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and his predecessor, Henry M. Paulson Jr. The people regulating the financial industry largely come from that industry or look to that industry for their social interactions. They play squash with them and dine with them, and these are the peers they look to when they have issues to discuss. Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times documented this ably in their April 2009article on Mr. Geithner’s social interactions during his time as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Lawrence H. Summers may not be as social, but even he worked at a hedge fund in the year leading up to his current position in the White House.

Among these people, there is no evil or nefarious plot to regulate in favor of the banks. These men and women may believe they are doing their best, but their worldview is affected by the people they interact with. This is a problem that can be exacerbated by a revolving door between finance and regulators.

This social influence can be affected by an additional factor: ideological capture also at the top. This occurs when regulators are appointed who share the same beliefs and ideas as their industry. A prime example of this is Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who was a devotee of Ayn Rand and objectivism and a fierce devotee of free markets. He no doubt was acting in good faith and true belief; the financial industry benefited from the fact that he shared their ideology

James Kwak and Simon Johnson, the authors of the book 13 Bankers, have written extensively about the regulatory capture of The Fed and the resulting improper conduct and debased condition of the world’s largest central bank. The book is worth checking out, as is their blog The Baseline Scenario.  Bill Moyers interviewed them for PBS on these topics. You can watch the video or read the transcript here.

The evidence is extensive that The Fed has become captured by the very banks it is supposed to regulate.  The Fed now sees it’s mission as first and foremost as protecting Wall Street, the banks, and the financial system.  The audit of The Fed in July 2011 confirmed that problems existed with conflicts of interest:

The audit also found that the Fed mostly outsourced its lending operations to the very financial institutions which sparked the crisis to begin with, and that they delegated contracts largely on a no-bid basis. The GAO report recommends new policies that would eliminate such conflicts of interest, and suggests that in the future the Fed should keep better records of their emergency decision-making process.

It was evident before that.  I March 2010 I recounted how Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz accused The Fed of being corrupt and said if a developing nation had a central bank like The Fed, we’d pressure them to change.  So, yes, The Fed is corrupt because it has been captured.

 

Is The Fed Corrupt or Out of Control?

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The Federal Reserve System is an extremely controversial and largely misunderstood institution. Senators on both the right (Ron Paul) and the left (Bernie Sanders) are highly critical of The Fed.   I’ve shied away from commenting on The Fed because it’s  a pretty complex subject. Every time I think there’s a point to be made, I find it requires explaining some other point, which leads to yet another, and on and on.  It’s always seemed too daunting.  I could never figure out where to start.  But a reader asked last week for my thoughts about The Fed audit, so I’ll make an effort:

What’s the meaning of the audit of the Federal Reserve Bank that has just been completed? I am hearing from friends that the revelation of loans made to banks by the Fed is evidence that they “are out of control” and doing something corrupt or dishonest. I find that hard to believe.

At the risk that I’ll have a few “I’ll explain this later” points in this post, let’s talk about The Fed and whether it’s corrupt.  Let’s start with the results of the audit of The Fed which were released in July 2011 in response to a Congressional bill requiring a one-time public audit of The Fed..  The Raw Story summarizes the report for us and also has an embedded copy of the audit results for those interested:

The U.S. Federal Reserve gave out $16.1 trillion in emergency loans to U.S. and foreign financial institutions between Dec. 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010, according to figures produced by the government’s first-ever audit of the central bank.

Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was $14.5 trillion.

Of the $16.1 trillion loaned out, $3.08 trillion went to financial institutions in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) analysis shows.

Additionally, asset swap arrangements were opened with banks in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Mexico, Singapore and Switzerland. Twelve of those arrangements are still ongoing, having been extended through August 2012.

Out of all borrowers, Citigroup received the most financial assistance from the Fed, at $2.5 trillion. Morgan Stanley came in second with $2.04 trillion, followed by Merrill Lynch at $1.9 trillion and Bank of America at $1.3 trillion.

The audit also found that the Fed mostly outsourced its lending operations to the very financial institutions which sparked the crisis to begin with, and that they delegated contracts largely on a no-bid basis. The GAO report recommends new policies that would eliminate such conflicts of interest, and suggests that in the future the Fed should keep better records of their emergency decision-making process.

The Fed agreed to “strongly consider” the recommendations, but as it is not a government-run institution it cannot be forced to do so by lawmakers. The seven-member board of governors and the Fed chairman are, however, appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate.

The audit was conducted on a one-time basis, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed last year. Fed officials had strongly discouraged lawmakers from ordering the audit, claiming it may serve to undermine confidence in the monetary system.

The big news, judging by both Ron Paul’s and Bernie Sanders’ reactions is the three-fold fact that The Fed provided loans (or their equivalent in asset swaps) to large banks and governments to the tune of $14.5 trillion “in secret”.  The first concern is the size of the actions. The second concern seems to be that some of these banks and governments were foreign. And the third is that the loans were secret. I think the conflicts of interest and poor decision making processes are bigger issues uncovered by the audit. But I’ll get to that later in this post.

Before we can conclude The Fed is “out of control” or corrupt we need to look at what The Fed is supposed to do.  The Fed, being the central bank for the U.S., is responsible for:

  • maintaining the health of the U.S. banking and financial system and institutions.  It does this by regulation of those institutions and by being lender of last resort in a crisis.
  • conducting monetary policy. Legally, The Fed has a “dual mandate” on monetary policy. It is supposed to:
  1. maintain price stability (in other words, avoid inflation or deflation)
  2. maintain full employment

The critics from the right tend to be followers of Austrian economics (Ron Paul) or far-conservative and libertarian. These are the ones most likely to claim The Fed is “out of control”.  What they generally mean (a typical example is here) is they think The Fed has created too much money and is debasing the currency.  There’s very little The Fed can do that would satisfy most of these people other than to shut down and ask the government to return to a gold standard.  Their concerns about the $14 trillion in loans being inflationary and “newly printed money” reveal deep misunderstandings about the nature of money (a post yet to be written), the functioning of the financial system, and even the nature of inflation.  They make a big deal of the size of the loans by comparing them to real GDP.  That’s apples to oranges.  To figure out if the $14 trillion in loans was large, it should be compared to the total balance sheet of the banking system, not GDP.   Yes, the loans The Fed made were of record amount, but so was the crisis. The Fed has a duty to act as lender of last resort in a financial crisis.  It did that. And it largely avoided the scale of disaster that occurred in 1929-1933 when The Fed failed to act as lender of last resort and was complicit in creating The Great Depression, snuffing out thousands of banks in the U.S. and depositors’ savings with it.  So if “out of control” means The Fed is wildly “printing money”, creating inflation, and debasing the currency, then, no, The Fed is not out of control.

A second charge that both the right and left have leveled is that The Fed shouldn’t have made loans to foreign banks and governments.  In a pure-thought fantasy world of theoretical political economy, I suppose The Fed would be a nationalist institution.  Certainly we expect the central bank of any other nation to be dominated by solely by protecting their own nation’s interests. (in the case of the Eurozone, it would be a great improvement if the ECB gave a hoot about even it’s own).  But reality has to intrude.  The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency. We wanted it that way. More than half of all U.S. money is outside the U.S.  The world’s trading and financial systems depend on the dollar. Given the scale and scope of the crisis in 2008, The Fed had little practical alternative to making loans to some large foreign banks and even some nations.  Nobody else could do it.  The alternatives were too nasty.  Should it be regular practice? No. Should it be encouraged? No. Should we second guess the middle of the crisis when nobody else was stepping up?  Probably not.  Should we think about how to handle it better in the future so we don’t have to rely on The Fed?  Yes.  Have we thought about it and changed? No.  So the second charge of being “out of control” as evidenced by making foreign loans doesn’t really hold up.

The third charge, the question of “secrecy” in the loans is more difficult.  On the one side, it is unseemly for The Fed to be able to make large loans on favorable terms to banks, loans that save those banks’ managers from failure, without any sunshine or transparency.  It makes fertile ground for corruption.  On the other hand, banking is a confidence game. Publicizing loans to banks, even when part of the normal course of affairs, can be misinterpreted by the public, fund managers, or other banks.  It alone could spark a run on a bank. The run then creates the very crisis the loan was intended to avert, turning temporary liquidity crisis into permanent bank failure.

Some fear of the secrecy of these loans is driven by a misunderstanding of what The Fed loans and where it comes from.  Again, this arises from common misunderstandings of what money really is or where it comes from.  Many fear the “money” The Fed lends is money that had to come from somewhere (they suspect taxpayers) or diverted from some other useful purpose.  Not so.  The Fed doesn’t actually lend “money” in the sense that you and I have “money” to spend.  The Fed creates new bank reserves out of thin air.  It’s not spending money and it’s not scarce. The Fed can as easily remove these reserves later in the future.

So, is The Fed “out of control”?  I don’t think so in the way that many critics make the accusation.  Just because I don’t think The Fed is some “out of control money printing machine” doesn’t mean I think The Fed is innocent or doesn’t need to be changed.  The audit revealed other issues regarding decision-making and transparency that I find much more troubling.  They reveal that The Fed has fallen into a kind of “group think” that doesn’t serve the nation well.  I think The Fed is both misguided and poorly structured.  But I’ll deal with that in tomorrow’s post.

The Fed is a Rorschach test.

The Top 0.1% Vs. Rest of Us Throughout the 20th Century

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Following up on yesterday’s post about the Global Top Incomes Database, I thought I’d give an example.  Here’s what I created:

So what are we looking at?  The blue line shows almost a century of the average income of the bottom 90% of American earners (in constant, real 2008 dollars – scale on right side).  This represents the typical American worker and the fate of the working/middle classes.  Basically it shows nine different trends or periods.

  • From 1917 until 1929, there was no improvement at all (actually a dip in the 1920-21 depression).  Despite all the talk about “roaring twenties”, it wasn’t for the average American worker.
  • 1929-1933, incomes really drop precipitously as the nation falls into the Great Depression.
  • 1933-1937, incomes begin to recover based on the government spending programs of the New Deal and correction of the banking/financial crises of 1932-33.  But the progress stumbles in 1938 as Roosevelt and Congress switch course and try to balance the budget before we’re back to full employment (are you listening Obama?).
  • 1938-1943 incomes really grow dramatically as the nation regains full employment and unions gain power.  The driver of the recovery is the near unlimited willingness to spend to arm for World War II and the demand for food and other items by warring allies.
  • 1944-1949, incomes stagnate again, partly as a result of demobilization of the war effort.
  • 1949-1973 brings the Golden Age. Real economic growth in the U.S. is the strongest it’s ever been and thanks to Keynesian government policies, a productivity-sharing social contract between managements and unions, and strong world demand, the workers get their share of it.  This is the period of fastest U.S. growth.
  • 1973-1993 brings twenty years of declining real incomes for most workers.  Part of it is driven by slower growth brought on by two oil price supply shocks.  Part is inflation (although only until the mid-80′s). Part is driven by a major political shift towards conservative free market policies (“Reaganomics”).  And part is driven by a weakening of unions and union membership.  The economy, while it grows, doesn’t grow near as fast as it did in the Golden Age.
  • 1994-2000 shows a slight recovery in incomes during the Clinton administration.
  • 2001 starts another decline and it’s been pretty much downhill ever since.  Note that the graph ends in 2008 (last available data), but other more recent data indicates the time series has continued to decline significantly.

So what can we conclude from the typical worker incomes, the blue line of average incomes for the bottom 90%,?  Well, yes, as some conservatives and libertarians have been pointing out, today’s incomes are historically high – around $32,000 per worker.  And consumption by household is even higher.  But consumption has risen despite incomes stagnating recently. It’s because many, many more households now depend on two workers for incomes.  Yes today’s incomes are dramatically higher compared to 76 years ago – roughly 6 times higher. But all of the increase happened in the first 38 years after 1932.  Today’s incomes per worker are actually lower than they were in 1973 – 38 years ago.

Now let’s consider the red line.  This shows the percentage share of the national income earned received by the top 0.1%, the top one tenth of one percent.  These are the really, really rich.  There are really only three periods here.  The period before the Great Depression.  Observe that it really was a roaring twenties for the really rich.  In the decade of 1920-1929 their share of national income rose from around 3.5% to over 6.5% – all while the average American worker stagnated. The game was rigged.  As the U.S. economy grew in total GDP terms in the 20′s and as productivity soared, the benefits of that improved productivity went to the rich, not to workers.  The rich lost ground in the Great Depression because the stock market crashed and the banking system imploded.

From 1936 until 1979, the share of income taken by the top 0.1% declines rather steadily and significantly.  Why?  A dominant factor is that income tax rates were rather progressive with high rates on the very high top end.  Now this simply means that the share declined – they took a slightly smaller slice of the pie each year.  But the pie was growing very, very fast, so in dollar terms their incomes were still rising too.  Do not take away the idea that the rich suffered income declines during this period.  On contrary, they did well in absolute terms.  They just didn’t do well at the expense of others.

But in 1979 the rich strike back.  Their share of income starts rising steadily until it reaches the same very high levels today that are reminiscent of the late 1920′s.  What happened?  Well the same forces that hurt the working/middle classes during the last 30+ years worked to the rich’s advantage.  But another important shift was changes in income tax policies.  Initially Carter, but then Reagan and Bush all cut tax rates for the top end.  Reagan did even more.  He eliminated several top end brackets.  This resulted in people in the top 0.1% (multi-millionaires) now paying the same rates as people making $250,000 per year.  That didn’t happen in the Golden Age.  Back then there were special brackets for the very, very rich top end.

So what can we conclude overall?  Well, for one thing, we should definitely bury any idea of “trickle-down” tax cuts helping average workers.  When the economy grew the fastest and typical workers did best was when tax rates on the rich were high.  When tax rates on the rich are lower, the economy grows more slowly and average worker incomes stagnate.  We might also conclude that the OccupyWallStreet movement (#OWS) has a point.  The system isn’t fair and it isn’t working for average workers.  This isn’t a call for socialism, it’s a call for the vibrant capitalism we had in the mid-20th century. That Golden Age of the middle of the 20th century is the only time when we really didn’t have “class warfare”.  We had a social contract that called for sharing the gains from improved productivity. But a little over 30 years ago the really rich declared war on the rest.  It’s class warfare and the middle class has been losing. 

Quickie – Some Graphs

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I’ll be talking tomorrow to a bunch of students about income distribution, student loans, and other things of interest to the #OWS crowd.  These are some graphs I’ve collected from other sources that I’ll use.  No time to write much analysis today. It’s mostly just the graphs.

From Paul Krugman:

The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

From CBO via Krugman again:

Inequality Trends In One Picture

Just an addendum on the role of the top 1 percent versus the college-noncollege differential. Here, from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).

It’s a tiny minority, not a broad class of well-educated Americans, who have been winning here.

Again from CBO via Krugman:

A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Lose

OK, I see that some people are doubling down on the claim that rising inequality is all about education — when what the CBO report drives home is that this is all wrong, the big increase has come from gains at the very top. I have to admit that I have a sneaking suspicion that this is in part driven by KDS (DS for derangement syndrome): some people will rush to take a position precisely because I have debunked it. But anyway, it’s really, really wrong.

Here’s the CBO result:

Notice that the 81-99 percentiles have seen only modest gains; it’s really the top 1 percent that drives the story.

For comparison, here’s some data on wages of men by education from EPI:

Again from CBO via Krugman:

Graduates Versus Oligarchs

Dean Baker raises an important point here: it’s really awfully late in the game to be saying that the important inequality issue is college graduates versus non-graduates. It’s not clear that this was ever true, and it certainly hasn’t been true for a while.

I wrote about this years ago, using Ben Bernanke’s maiden testimony as Fed chair as an entry point. As I said then, Bernanke — like many others — had made

a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

I think of Mr. Bernanke’s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It’s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don’t have these skills.

…

Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting. The notion that it’s all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it’s just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that’s the real story.

Let me illustrate this point with some CBO data. First, from the new report, here are the income shares of the top 1 percent and the rest of the top quintile:

There has been no rise in the share of the 81-99 group! It’s all about the top 1 percent.

Second, even within the top 1 percent the gains are going mainly to a small minority. An earlier CBO report, using slightly different methods, looked inside the top 1 percent up through 2005. Here’s some of that data:

The big gains have gone to the top 0.1 percent.

From Menzie Chinn:

CBO on Income Inequality, and Interpreting OWS

by Menzie Chinn

Tabulating Inequality Trends

The CBO released a report on income inequality earlier this week. This means that the “inequality deniers” are having a more difficult time arguing that widening spreads an wages, compensation, or overall income are merely statistical artifacts dreamt up by liberals (see e.g. here). What is of most interest is (i) real after-tax income of the top 1 percentile has risen about 275%, and (ii) the pre-transfers/pre-tax income share of the top 1% has increased most profoundly.

SummaryFigure1.png
Summary Figure 1, Growth in Real After-Tax Income from 1979 to 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011. SummaryFigure2.png
Summary Figure 2, Shares of Market Income, 1979 and 2007, from “Trends in Income Distribution,” CBO Director’s Blog, 25 October 2011.The CBO Director’s Blog observes:

The rapid growth in average real household market income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income was a major factor contributing to the growing dispersion of income. Average real household market income for the highest income group tripled over the period, whereas such income increased by about 19 percent for a household at the midpoint of the income distribution. As a result, the share of total market income received by the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, growing from about 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

The foregoing is completely consistent with the views laid out in Lost Decades (by me and Jeffry Frieden), Add-Figure 6-1 highlighted in this post, as well as this post.

Interpreting the OWS Protests

Against this backdrop, powerful forces have been deployed against raising tax rates at all on the top one percentile (and instead want to raise taxes on the lower quintiles).[1] [2]. The OWS protests can be interpreted in ths context. From TPM:

…Harvard Government Professor Jeffry Frieden said…

“Every debt crisis leads to major political conflicts over who will pay the price of dealing with the debt burden,” Frieden wrote. “One way or another, the accumulated debts will have to be addressed — either by writing some of them off, or by paying them off. Will the burden be borne by taxpayers? Government employees? Financial institutions? … I think that, in the context of our financial difficulties, OWS may reflect the fact that many Americans feel that too much sacrifice has been demanded of working people and the middle class, and too little of the financial community and the wealthy.”

Diane Lim Rogers, Chief Economist at the fiscally hawkish Concord Coalition, made similar points about the more reckless economic policies of the past decade: Much of the distaste with both Washington and Wall Street comes back to fact that DC is simply unwilling to change course.

“The difference is that during the Clinton years the rising tide was lifting all boats,” Lim Rogers said in an interview with TPM. “Low-income households were still doing better. Even then, the rich did really well, despite their taxes being raised.”

But what’s different now is that income inequality isn’t a political tenet of the left: it’s truly hurting people. Lim Rogers said the poverty rate is actually of more concern than the rich doing better given the circumstances.

“The outrage is not that the rich are richer,” she said. “It’s that the poor have gotten poorer — the inequality has become bipolar.”

Interestingly, Lost Decades, which makes many of these points, has been cited approvingly in at least one OWS document.

This is of course in contrast to views such as that of Econbrowser reader Brian who commented:

I honestly fail to see why some on the left are so concerned about how much money those at the top of the income distribution earn. Why not focus instead on why poor people are poor? And please, blaming that on the rich is a non-starter. People make bad choices in life. They get pregnant before they finish school and have a career started. They use drugs. They get tattoos and body piercings all over themselves and then wonder why no one will hire them for an entry-level job. They do not take school seriously. They have parents who never should have bred in the first place. I really, honestly and truly feel for the poor people and hope they can lift themselves out of poverty. But throwing more money at the problem, and taking it from the “rich”, is not the solution.

This worldview is apparently not rare; see this quote:

I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations (Occupy Together) are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! …

I think the defenders of the interests of the top income percentile will continue to harp on these arguments: The unemployed are deservedly unemployed; the poor are deservedly poor. This will help distract the electorate from the issue of whom will bear the burden of adjustment to the aftermath of the financial crisis(including stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio), and the response to secular trends in income inequality.See more on tax policyhere.

 

 

Brief History of Macroeconomics and The Origins of Freshwater vs. Saltwater Economics

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I and others, particularly Paul Krugman, occasionally make reference to “freshwater” vs. “saltwater” economics.  Here’s a little background to explain the terms and, I hope, shed a little light on current disputes in macroeconomic theory.

First, let’s go back in time.  The stuff that economists study, namely the economy, economic behavior, and markets, really emerged as it’s own discipline in the 1700′s with Adam Smith.  It had always been a topic for philosophers to discuss. Even Aristotle writes about the topics.  But it didn’t really emerge from “moral philosophy” into it’s own field of study until Smith.  Originally Smith and the subsequent economists such as Ricardo focused on markets and what we now  call microeconomics with a nod towards questions of political economy (public policy and the whole economic system).  The industrial revolution was in full swing.  The economic system wasn’t really “capitalist” because nobody knew what that was yet.  It wasn’t until the mid-1800′s that the word capitalism becomes commonly used.   Note:  Adam Smith was not a capitalist.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded usage of “capitalist” comes in 1792 in France, well after Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations.  

Then in the years just after the Napoleonic wars, England suffered some very severe financial crises and depressions involving the collapse of canal-building businesses.  At the time, Smith’s famous treatise was now 40-55 years old.  The authors now called economists argued about it’s causes and the policies needed to right the economy and restore full-employment.  The center of the debate revolved around questions of “whether there could ever be such a thing as a general glut of commodities”.  In other words, was it possible that the now industrialized economy with it’s newly enlarged banking sector and wide circulation of paper money could be too efficient?  Would such an economy always produce willing buyers for all the goods that sellers wanted to supply?

Two views emerged. One of them, later called “Classical” becomes the dominant thinking in economic circles.  The Classical view denies that long-term high unemployment is even possible as long as the government balances it’s budget and follows a laissez-faire policy of not interfering in markets.  A very mechanistic view of the economy as being constructed of self-adjusting markets that always return to equilibrium evolves.  The Classical view supports a very liberal (old sense) and anti-regulation view of government policy.

Critics existed but they failed to dominate the debate.  Karl Marx in the mid-1800′s writes some scathing critiques of Classical economics focusing on how the mechanism of market equilibrium cannot and does not work as described in labor markets.  Yet despite the critique, the Classical economists continue to dominate policy making and academic circles.  The debate, however, becomes more polarized with the Classicals of the late 1800′s and early 1900′s pushing even more extreme anti-government, pro-market policy positions and models than their Classical predecessors advocated. Many of the critics of capitalism and Classical economics move to the opposite end of the spectrum and embrace socialist, communist, or fascist/syndical economics, in effect taking a position that market capitalism is so fatally flawed that it must be completely replaced by a system of planning by the government.

Despite the dominance of the Classicals, there were always some economists laboring, researching, and writing about the cycles of business and the workings of money and banks.  They just didn’t get much attention or have a comprehensive framework to distinquish themselves from either the Classicals or the planned economy types.

Then came Keynes and the Great Depression.  Classical economics denied The Great Depression could happen – much like University of Chicago economists in 2010 who claimed that today’s high unemployment is the result of workers suddenly choosing to voluntarily have leisure instead of a job.  Keynes writes a powerful book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.  Macroeconomics is born.

Keynesian macro focuses on a total systems approach to the economy instead of just assuming that whatever works in a micro perspective in each market will make the total system work.  Keynes attempts to avoid the fallacy of composition. Keynes’s analysis shows that an industrialized, capitalist market economy with a financial/banking sector is inherently unstable.  It tends to have cycles – business cycles.  It’s beyond the intent of this post to explain the reasons, but the bottom-line was that Keynes identified a role for active government and central bank policy to maintain full employment  and stable prices.  Keynes rapidly gained converts in economics and soon the field was split into microeconomics and macroeconomics.

The success of Keynesian economists and Keynesian policies in the 1940′s, 1950′s and 1960′s led to dominance of Keynesian viewpoints.  But there were two subversive trends underway that would eventually reverse the Keynesian dominance and return the Classical viewpoint to dominance.  One was an attempt to build a comprehensive mathematics framework for all economics built on the math of Newton’s physics.  This effort, called the neo-classical synthesis, originally focused on microeconomics.  But eventually it turned it’s attention to putting Keynes’s ideas into the same optimizing-behavior mathematics.  Unfortunately, Keynes himself was long dead by now and unable to clarify what he “meant”.  Some ideas are forced onto him that weren’t necessarily there in the original (such as insisting on static equilibrium).  The second trend was a small group of economists who never agreed.  They were in effect Classicals in exile.  Led by Milton Friedman at University of Chicago and Friedrich Hayek, they launched a two-prong attack.  Hayek’s attack led to what we call Austrian economics today and is often embraced by extreme libertarians.  I won’t get into that here, there’s not enough time.

Friedman’s initial attack focused on re-writing our understand of The Great Depression.  Friedman works to show that monetary policy by the central bank was at fault for the Depression, implying that a laissez-faire government fiscal policy would be best.  Friedman’s disciples at Chicago and elsewhere expanded the attack by insisting on “micro-foundations” in all macro-economic theories and models.  By micro-foundations, they mean that the only acceptable basis for a macroeconomic model is one that is based only on the micro ideas of perfectly rational individuals acting on perfect information with perfectly rational expectations about the future and the nature of the economy.  By the mid-1970′s the Friedman posse was clearly winning the academic wars, in part because their position lent itself easily to using neo-classical synthesis  mathematics and because it was consistent with “micro-foundations”.

Friedman originally took a modified Classical position.  Classicals denied that either fiscal or monetary policy could affect or correct the performance of the whole economy.  Friedman pushed the idea that fiscal policy wouldn’t work but that monetary policy would.  Eventually the next generation of Friedman students and disciples went further and returned to the Classical position that neither fiscal nor monetary policy would work.

As it turns out, these newly re-ascendant Classicals, now being called New Classicals, inspired by Friedman, often taught at universities located inland near some kind of “freshwater”.  The remaining supporters of Keynesian viewpoints, now under severe attack, taught at schools nearer the ocean.  Then in 1976 R.E. Hall pens a paper called Notes on the Current State of Empirical Macroeconomics and identifies this split and associates freshwater and saltwater with the split.

As I see it, the major distinguishing feature of macroeconomics is its concern with fluctuations in real output and unemployment. The two burning questions of macroeconomics are: Why does the economy undergo recessions and booms? What effect does conscious government policy have in offsetting these fluctuations? These questions define the issues considered here. I will further restrict my attention to structural approaches, and will avoid discussion of the reduced-form approach, including its recent sophisticated manifestation (7).

As a gross oversimplification, current thought can be divided into two schools. The fresh water view holds that fluctuations are largely attributable to supply shifts and that the government is essentially incapable of affecting the level of economic activity. The salt water view holds shifts in demand responsible for fluctuations and thinks government policies (at least monetary policy) is capable of affecting demand. Needless to say, individual contributors vary across a spectrum of salinity). The old division between monetarists and Keynesians is no longer relevant, as an important element of fresh-water doctrine is the proposition that monetary policy has no real effect. What used to be the standard monetarist view is now middle-of-the-road, and is widely represented, for example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1To take a few examples, Sargent corresponds to distilled water, Lucas to Lake Michigan, Feldstein to the Charles River above the dam, Modigliani to the Charles below the dam, and Okun to the Salton Sea.