Category: Current Affairs

*Too Big To Fail*

That's the new book by Andrew Ross Sorkin and the subtitle is The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves.  Last night I read through to p.132.  So far it seems to be the single best narrative of the crash and its aftermath.  I haven't seen anything theoretical or on root causes, etc.  I chuckled at reading this sentence, which starts with Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers picking up the phone:

"I know this call may be a little unusual," [Treasury Secretary] Paulson began.  "You and I have been trying to kill each other for years."

I'll let you know if my judgment changes, but so far this falls into the "recommended" category, noting again that it is narrative not theory.

Addendum: Here is Yves Smith on the book, very good post.  See also Felix Salmon.

Insurance company update

Pelosi said the House may adopt a Senate provision that would assess a
flat fee on insurance companies that is expected to generate about $40
billion over 10 years, as a way to pay for its reform bill.

Here is more.  The WP reports:

The blunt admonition echoed a round of harsh statements Wednesday from
senior Senate Democrats, and came in response to the insurance's
lobby's aggressive campaign to block reform legislation from advancing.

Vernon Smith on Elinor Ostrom

Vernon, of course, knows Ostrom's work well:

Relentlessly, Ostrom has pursued answers to two questions:

(1) Since "everybody's property is nobody's property," how is it that there are so many cases where collectives of ordinary people with no education and with none of the economists' knowledge of "the tragedy of the commons," in fact discover ingenious rules (institutions) for taking the "tragedy" out of a productive resource they hold in common? If you read her book you will find among the diversity of examples a Swiss village whose people have private property in the plots they plant and harvest, but also have a communal summer meadow for grazing their cows. One rule, still enforced, dating back to 1517 states that "no citizen could send more cows to the alp than he could feed during the winter." Wintering a cow is costly, and this rule rations access to the commons by tying it to private property rights….

(2) As a distinguished political-economic scientist she will be the first to tell you that there are also plenty of commons problems that represent institutional failures and fragilities; she has asked why, and what makes the difference between success and failure? The fragilities include inshore fisheries and groundwater basins with continuing commons problems; failures include salt water fisheries and irrigation systems hamstrung by the complexity of the rules.

Success is associated with clarity in the definition of and bounds on individual rights (and opportunities) to take action, and the geography of the commons; details for monitoring, operations, sanctions and mechanisms for conflict resolution emerge from within the collective and out of motivated people's direct experience with environmental context and each other. When too many of these problem-solving elements fail, the governance systems fail or require continuing attention to their fragility characteristics. A fatal source of disintegration is the inappropriate application of uninformed external authority, including intervention to prevent application of efficacious rules to political favorites. Also detrimental to good solutions is the OPM (other people's money) problem.

…Ostrom brings a distinct style in applying her skill in different methodologies. She blends field and laboratory empirical methods, economic and game theory, the really important ingredient of scientific common sense, and she constantly challenges her own understanding by looking at new potentially contrary evidence and designing new experiments to challenge her understanding of the emergent historical rules and the theory used to explicate them.

Oliver Williamson and the pin factory

In Adam Smith there is the pin factory and the market and from that beginning we trace the long literature in economics focused on the twin questions, What price to set?  How much to produce?  Following Coase, Williamson asks different questions, Why a pin factory?  Why are the 18 steps to make a pin performed by a single firm rather than two or more?  Why are there many firms instead of one large firm?  Why does the pin factory not vertically integrate upwards to buy the steel factory and downwards to buy the retail hardware shop?

Williamson’s answers rest on the notions of bounded rationality, contract incompleteness, asset specificity and opportunism. Start at the end, asset specificity and opportunism.  When a deal has been sealed the parties typically move from having many potential partners to being locked in.  That’s bad because it raises the possibility of opportunism–one party can exploit the other.  But it’s also good because when the lock-in is credible each party may be more willing to invest in assets which are extra-productive but specific to the relationship.

Marriage, for example, takes away some possibilities but it adds others.  With marriage, for example, comes a greater willingness to invest in children (n.b. asset specificity, the child is of extra value but only to the specific parties involved in the marriage) but that very benefit also means that one of the parties has the leverage to be opportunistic.  Knowing all of this when they enter the contract the parties bargain ex-ante, they exchange promises and make investments (the ring), they establish rules for ex-post bargaining or decide on the background rules to apply in that eventually (pre-nup, no fault divorce, covenant marriage).  The rules are never perfect and the contacts are always incomplete.

Transaction cost economics is all about applying these ideas in different settings to figure out the best governance structures (marriage, vertical integration etc.) in different circumstances. How does one deal with expensive investments (such as highly
individual dies or plant construction) that are specific to a given
trade and put the investor at risk yet which increase productivity? Williamson analyzes how firms
come to rely on long term contracts or vertical integration or other
seemingly non-competitive solutions to enhance market productivity.
Early generations of antitrust enforcers often saw these as
monopolistic dealings, but scholars such as Williamson helped us
understand how these are essential to the workings of the invisible
hand.

Williamson’s paper, The Economics of Governance (working version) published in the May 2005 AER is an excellent recent summary of his views in the area.

Williamson’s work is notable for inspiring a large body of empirical and theoretical work in modern industrial organization and having influence in law, political science, and management. His work has been widely cited, and by some counts he was the most widely cited economist in the world.

I especially thank John Nye who contributed to this post.

Elinor Ostrom and the well-governed commons

Elinor Ostrom may arguable be considered the mother of field work in development economics.  She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal.  In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy-hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.  

With her husband, political scientist Vincent Ostrom, she established the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in 1973 at Indiana University, an extraordinarily productive and evolving association of students and professors which has produced a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments in political science and especially collective action.  The Ostrom's work bridges political science and economics.  Both are well known at GMU since both have been past presidents of the Public Choice society and both have been influenced by the Buchanan-Tullock program.  You can also see elements of Hayekian thought about the importance of local knowledge in the work of both Ostroms (here is a good interview).  My colleague, Peter Boettke has just published a book on the Ostrom's and the Bloomington School.

Elinor Ostrom's work culminated in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action which uses case studies to argue that around the world private associations have often, but not always, managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and develop efficient uses of resources.  (Ostrom summarizes some of her findings from this research here).  Using game theory she provided theoretical underpinnings for these findings and using experimental methods she put these theories to the test in the lab. 

For Ostrom it's not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons.  Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement.  A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate.  In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law.  Ostrom's work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

Yglesias channels his inner Robin Hanson

Matt Yglesias offers wisdom on cutting health care spending.

Still, though waste is a huge element of our insurance spending, insurance-related waste is a relatively small portion of the overall waste–about 14 percent. The biggest chunk of excess spending we’re involved with is spending on “outpatient care.” We pay doctors more than other people do, our doctors order more tests than other doctors do, our tests are more expensive than other people’s tests, and we have many more relatively expensive specialists and relatively few relatively cheap GPs. And we have nothing to show for it.

The prospects for changing this, however, don’t look great to me. People don’t like insurance companies. Taking them on is popular. And nevertheless we see how difficult it is to really hurt their interests. Now imagine taking on the doctor lobby. More money is at stake. And doctors have a much better public image. And doctors and there families are a much bigger voting block than insurance executives and their families. And on top of that, people have a very strong mistaken intuition that getting lots of tests and seeing lots of specialists is in their interests.

Payroll tax cuts and gross job flows

In the comments section to my last post a number of people argued that in the current recession firms simply don't have the sales to support a larger workforce so a small reduction in labor costs from a payroll tax cut isn't going to increase employment appreciably.

The argument sounds plausible but the premise is wrong – in fact, lots of firms are selling and hiring.  In July, for example (the most recent data), firms hired over 4 million workers.  Yes, 4 million.  Even in declining sectors like construction there were 346,000 new hires in July alone.  In the 12 months preceding July, firms hired 51.3 million workers.  The problem of course is that during the same time there were 56.6 million job separations (quits, layoffs, retirements) for a net job loss of 5.3 million.

Even though we are still experiencing a daily net loss of jobs it's important to remember that there are about 200,000 hires every working day  Lots of firms are hiring.  In order to increase employment a payroll tax cut need not shift firms "from firing to hiring" it need only increase the hiring rate of those firms already hiring or on the margin of hiring.

The data is from the JOLTs survey which releases more data tomorrow.  The uber-source on job flows is Davis and Haltiwanger and their extensive work with co-authors.  For a good, non-technical, introduction to this and related topics I recommend, The Natural Survival of Work,

Is the plan to rework Tysons Corner collapsing?

Maybe so:

Fairfax County planners on Wednesday will propose rules for builders in Tysons Corner that retreat from the vision
local officials approved last fall, a shift some civic leaders worry
will jeopardize the blueprint to remake the area into a walkable urban
center.

It seems the eight "mini-cities" are on the way out.  Why?  The area's Revolutionary War era roads can't handle too much additional population density:

Zook and his staff have concluded that the density of what the task
force envisions could be built when Tysons is fully redeveloped in
about 40 years would overwhelm traffic. [TC: Forget about 40 years, it's close to that point right now for about four hours each day.]  Planners say that would be
about five times the 44 million square feet of offices, malls, condos
and townhouses there now. Before developers can build high-rises, even
near the Metrorail stations, planners say, the area's already clogged
road network will need to expand to accommodate the extra development
because many of the new residents and office workers will drive. That
would require three new interchanges on the Dulles Toll Road; another
lane on the Beltway between Interstate 66 and Route 7, in addition to
the high-occupancy toll lanes now under construction; and wider lanes
on other local roads.

That is, in a nutshell, why Fairfax County cannot and will not become like central Arlington in the Ballston and Clarendon areas.  Recall that some time ago Tysons Corner was ranked as #4 in office space in the entire U.S., if it were to be counted as a city.  Many Fairfax County residents look upon Arlington as a quaint experiment, a kind of well-laid out duck pond in somebody's backyard, but not a model for the broader suburban area.  The walkable part of Arlington is quite small compared to Tysons Corner (by the way I used to live at Tysons and also have spent time walking it) and density in central Arlington doesn't threaten to crush much of anything.

So the result at Tysons likely will be a bigger edge city with broader roads and more difficult illegal U-Turns.  As one local rent-seeker put it:

"We're not like downtown D.C., where you walk three blocks and there's
another Metro station," said Rob Jackson, president of the McLean
Citizens Association.

Rent-seeker he may be, but he's right to suggest that a much denser Tysons — no matter how well done — will overwhelm the local support roads of Vienna and McLean.  The bottom line is that path dependence is a very strong force in all these comparisons.

“Speed shrinking”

It's a bit like speed dating, except you see a shrink or rather a series of shrinks:

Many receiving therapy became so engrossed in conversation that they
lost track of time. At one point, Lianne Stokes, the energetic emcee, a
freelance writer, became annoyed that a session had gone well past the
allotted time – about 30 seconds – and barked into her microphone:
“Move the line, people. Believe it or not, someone here has worse
problems than you do, if you can imagine.”

Spain fact of the day

To put things in perspective, Spain now has as many unsold homes as the US, even though the US is about six times bigger. Spain is roughly 10% of the EU GDP, yet it accounted for 30% of all new homes built since 2000 in the EU. Most of the new homes were financed with capital from abroad, so Spain’s housing crisis is closely tied in with a financing crisis.

You will find more information here.