Assorted links
1. From Washington Monthly: monetary policy, gargoyles, and the emotions. I say focus ruthlessly on substance and do your best to explore and present the limits and drawbacks of your own ideas and recommendations. Years down the road — or sooner — one will end up wiser and better informed. The reasoning in this article is an excuse to dismiss moderating or inconvenient ideas, or ideas which de-moralize a topic somewhat.
2. Wage stagnation isn’t due to a compositional shift.
3. Old Germans who die and leave their estates to Israel.
Short videos on business cycle theory
By me, here, with a mention of Scott Sumner in the Keynesian video, plus one on Austrian theory and one on real business cycle theory.
Very good quotations
“It’s not as if 50 people woke up one morning and said, ‘Today, instead of getting a real job, I’m going to go steal cardboard.’
And here is a bit on why cardboard theft has evolved into an organized business:
The city’s impound managers might want to phone China. That country, along with other developing nations like India, is driving the market by paying top dollar for used cardboard. The foreign recyclers then blend it down to remold into new products, such as containers for exports eventually shipped back to the United States.
Again, though the business may sound humdrum, it can be extremely profitable. In 2010, China’s richest woman was “cardboard queen” Zhang Yin, whose $5.6 billion recycling empire made her wealthier than Oprah.
The article is here, and for the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.
The economics of Olympic success
Here is my new Grantland piece with Kevin Grier. Excerpt:
Predictions
1. Medal totals will become more diversified over time. The market share of the “top 10” countries will continue to fall (it was 81 percent in 1988) as economic and population growth slows in the rich world. The developing world has greater room for rapid economic growth, and most parts of the developing world also have higher population growth. The Olympic playing field will get more and more level.
2. Japan will continue to fade, mostly because of aging and population shrinkage.
3. Italy will follow Japan for similar demographic reasons, as well as because the Eurozone crisis will continue to cut into budgets, training and otherwise.
4. Since Rio is host to the next Olympics, Brazil should do better than expected due to the “pre-host” bump.
5. Many African nations will rise. Currently about half of the approximately 1 billion people in Africa have a cell phone, and the middle class is growing. The chance that an African star will be spotted and trained at the appropriate age is much higher than before. Africa also continues to grow in population, and that means lots of young people. Most of us still think of African nations as very poor, but infant mortality has been falling and per-capita income rising across Africa for the better part of a decade now.
6. China will level off and then decline as a medal powerhouse. In less than 15 years, the typical person living in China is likely to be older on average than the typical person living in the United States, in part due to the country’s one-child policy. As of 2009 the number of over-60s was 167 million, about an eighth of the population, but by 2050 it is expected to reach 480 million people older than 60, with the number of young Chinese falling. The country will become old before it is truly wealthy.
7. Bob Costas will make you cry.
Beijing notes
It is a gargantuan, imperial city, and while there is always a walking path the point of walking is not always clear. “The Middle Kingdom does Dubai.” There is no need to tell me about all the parts of the city which do not look like Dubai, I have seen many of them, and furthermore Dubai has such parts as well.
An iPad, plus Baidu access to Chinese characters, makes it easy to ask questions of strangers. Hardly anyone speaks even minimal English. It is less harried than I had expected. The sky rarely appears, at least in late July. The contemporary art district, 798, is worth more than one visit. I am not interested in seeing the Great Wall. My hotel, rather than having a “Medical Devices” conference, has a meeting on “Australian Property Holdings.”
The main problems here are the air pollution, and that no one, including taxi drivers, seems to know how to get anywhere. The rate of change is high and many people are from the provinces, so there is a real information gap.
The main upsides stem from what scale enables. Even if you have been to many places, Beijing will manage to astonish you.
Most of all, I am struck by how Taiwan is more Chinese than is China.
Assorted links
1. Ash and lightning above and Icelandic volcano, hat tip to Gordon.
2. More on the signaling of Iranian girls (good link).
3. Why are theater reviews embargoed?
4. Does cultural diversity limit trade?
5. Free new chapter from Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, the full book is here.
Have the French shown that water privatization is dead?
Some time ago, @ModeledBehavior has requested comment on this article. Excerpt:
Across the nation cash-strapped municipalities are considering the sale of their public-utility systems. These moves are intended to raise cash and rid the municipalities of expensive liabilities such as debt service and pension obligations. But officials considering this approach might do well to look to France and other nations that are rapidly moving in the opposite direction with a “remunicipalization” of their utility systems. In 2010, Paris, in the best known case of remunicipalization, ended contracts with the world’s two biggest water service companies, Suez and Veolia, bringing an end to their 100-year private duopoly. The reversal of a century-old practice in Paris was an acceleration of an international movement away from private control.
So what’s up? I see it this way. For advanced water systems, there is no cost advantage to having a privatized system. It is a regulated monopoly and over time it acquires skill in manipulating the political process, most of all its regulators. Why expect lower costs and prices? A wide variety of studies of this topic, including studies by “market-oriented” economists, find no cost advantage for the private sector in this setting.
For very poor countries, very often water privatization would in principle be a good idea, since the public sector is not supplying much piped water at all. Monopoly is better than carrying a bucket on your head, and you still can carry the bucket if you wish. Yet privatization also won’t get very far in many of these cases. One reason is that there is no way to make people — many of whom are non-registered and lacking in assets — pay their water bills, and not enough legal infrastructure to prevent them from cutting into the pipes or otherwise going rogue. You shouldn’t “blame” privatization here, but still it may not be a useful option.
Finally, there is a sweet spot in the middle, often for reforming or middle-income countries. In those cases water privatization can mobilize private capital rapidly and expand water coverage. It often brings higher quality water, higher quality connections, lower rates of unaccounted-for-water, and higher prices. Not all cities desire that trade-off, but it is there for the taking. Some of these privatizations are done fairly well, others are done very poorly, such as in Cochabamba, where the “privatization” gave the company property rights over previously privately held, decentralized water sources of the poor, such as collected rain.
As long as there are countries in this middle income range, water privatization is not dead nor should it be.
Yet again the tragedy of the commons, for Indian power generation
Surendra Rao, who was the chairman of the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission in 2001, when the nation’s last major blackout occurred, said that a fairly sophisticated system of circuit breakers should have prevented the failures on Monday and Tuesday. But, he said, the people manning the circuit breakers are bureaucrats beholden to state government officials, who are loath to have the power in their locality shut off — the usual prescription when power surges threaten the national grid.
Here is more, and for the link I thank Fred Smalkin.
“Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment”
That is a new post from the excellent Interfluidity. I read it as a version of Keynes’s chapter seventeen, where the demand to buy insurance (in various indirect forms) is the bottomless pit preventing full employment, rather than the demand to hold money. One question I have is why the funds spent on insurance are not in some useful manner recycled.
Here is one provocative paragraph:
Why did World War II, one of the most destructive events in the history of world, engender an era of near-full employment and broad-based prosperity, both in the US where capital and infrastructure were mostly preserved, and in Europe where resources were obliterated? People have lots of explanations, and I’m sure there’s truth in many of them. But I think an underrated factor is the degree to which the war “reset” the inequalities that had developed over prior decades. Suddenly nearly everyone was poor in much of Europe. In the US, income inequality declined during the war. Military pay and the GI Bill and rationing and war bonds helped shore up the broad public’s balance sheet, reducing indebtedness and overall wealth dispersion. World War II was so large an event, organized and motivated by concerns so far from economic calculation, that squabbles between rich and poor, creditor and debtor, were put aside. The financial effect of the war, in terms of the distribution of claims in the US, was not very different from what would occur under Keen’s jubilee.
Interesting throughout, as they say.
Assorted links
James Cameron moves to the culture that is New Zealand
The story is interesting throughout, I liked this bit:
Adrienne Staples, mayor of the South Wairarapa District Council, recalls that being her first reaction when told in early February that a supposedly famous filmmaker had bought farmland in her zone.
It was not a particularly easy day for Ms. Staples. An avid horsewoman, she was trying to impregnate a mare with semen being flown to Wellington from a Spanish stallion on the South Island. She drove across the Rimutaka Range, twice, to get the semen; juggled calls from the press; and offered to bake Mr. Cameron a cake, because, after all, this is rural New Zealand.
Who is right about China?
Here is one bit from a very good FT piece, “The caustic soda connection,” by Merryn Somerset Webb:
Huge credit growth and some whopping pumping up of the property bubble. By 2011 residential real estate made up nearly 10 per cent of GDP, 14 per cent of the workforce was in construction and China was using up more cement per capita than even Spain at the peak of its construction bubble. Prices were soaring: global investment management firm GMO’s Edward Chancellor points to a 2010 NBER study that showed house prices up 140 per cent in three years in the biggest Chinese cities. Everyone with any cash or any way of getting any cash owned houses: even on official estimates 18 per cent of households in Beijing owned two or more properties and 40 per cent of flats in the major cities were being bought not for use but for investment. They were often left vacant. Overall numbers from Eclectica Asset Management suggest that China has spent twice as much as the US on its property bubble, relative to the size of its economy. Not bad, given what has happened in the US since.
The boom has infected the entire economy. Chancellor reckons that around 35 per cent of bank loans are “directly or indirectly related to Chinese property”. Local governments have also taken out huge loans backed by land grants to finance their increasingly extreme-looking infrastructure projects, while on some estimates a good 50 per cent of China’s GDP is linked to the property market one way or another. That makes it pretty much the biggest emerging market property bubble ever.
From The Economist, here is a much more optimistic view.
Having just been in Beijing, I would say that a visit here probably will not change the views of most people, I mean even more than is usually the case,. Virtually everyone agrees there is a real estate bubble and considerable excess capacity in China. (In contrast, I see factual disagreement about how serious underlying provincial and trust-based debt problems are.) The question is what you think that means, given that the Chinese government, unlike say the ECB, will pull out all stops to try to keep things on track. Check back with me in a year or two…
The best argument for a more expansionary monetary policy?
It’s not very glorious or motivational, but here goes: the costs of inflation, within reasonable ranges, are not very high.
I am more agnostic about the gains from monetary expansion than are many of its advocates. I think we do not know where the point of “potential output” lies, I think sticky nominal wages (especially for new labor market entrants and the unemployed) are overrated as a problem, I doubt the ability of the Fed to make credible commitments at this point, and often I view “hiring” as more of an multi-dimensional investment and longer-term commitment, which requires various variables to be set at the right places, not just the short-run real wage in spot markets.
A bit more personally or perhaps psychologically, the contrarian in me gets nervous when I read the ongoing ritual excoriation of Ben Bernanke in the blogosphere, every time the Fed decides to take no further major action.
Still, at the end of the day if we try further monetary expansion and it fails to stimulate employment, I don’t see a huge social cost to having a three or four percent rather than a two percent inflation rate.
Addendum: Arnold Kling offers related thoughts. Ryan Avent also comments. Scott Sumner replies. Matt Yglesias comments.
Milton Friedman would have been 100 today
And he remains very much needed.
Germany fact of the day
Two-thirds of all patent claims in Europe are now filed in Germany, according to the Munich law firm Meissner Bolte, which does patent litigation. In a sense, Germany has become a destination for fast, effective one-stop patent challenges, much as Britain is for libel and the state of Delaware is for registration of American companies.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Alex T.