Category: Economics

Even outer-space aliens can see the effects of communism.

Also check out North Korea’s creepy Ryugyong Hotel, built at a cost of some 2% of GDP the hotel towers over Pyongyang but it’s a shell that has never been completed because of stuctural problems due to poor quality. The North Koreans have gone so far as to remove it from some maps but there is no hiding the 7th tallest building in the world!

Thanks to Mahalanabois for the picture and Ted Frank for the hotel recommendation.

Though Alex has already blogged about the Kremer/Snyder paper on vaccines versus cures, there are, I think, a couple of comments worth adding.

According to Kremer and Snyder, monopoly sellers would rather sell cures than vaccines. To get this result, they need some heterogeneity: we all have different probabilities of getting sick (though we all find it equally costly to get sick).

But what if you introduce the opposite kind of heterogeneity? (That is, we all have different costs of getting sick, even though we all face the same probability of getting sick.) Then it’s a nice little exercise for your students to show that the cure and the vaccine are equally lucrative monopolies (ignoring the positive externalities of the vaccine).

A more important observation: In the Kremer/Snyder setup (still ignoring positive externalities), it’s a good thing for sellers to invest in cures rather than vaccines. The reason cures are more profitable is that they in essence allow perfect price discrimination. So with cures, there’s no deadweight loss due to monopoly; with vaccines there is.

The analysis changes if you assume, say, that a vaccine prevents a four-day illness, but a cure only cuts two days off your illness. Then vaccines might or might not be socially preferable to cures—but in that case, willingness-to-pay for vaccines versus cures would double. This gives sellers an incentive to produce vaccines. The incentive isn’t perfect, but it goes in the right direction.

Social security privatization has a little-discussed benefit, done properly it is equivalent to a cut in marginal tax rates. A problem with the current system is that there is little relationship on the margin between taxes paid and benefits received. On average, of course, those who pay more taxes get more benefits (although not proportionately there is a subsidy to low-earners). But because the rules are complex and based on average earnings over a long period of time there is little connection between your social security taxes on an additional hour of work and your social security benefits for that additional hour.

To see why this is important consider the difference between social security and an IRA. If a worker works an additional hour, earns $10 and puts $1 into the IRA he knows the $1 will produce a benefit 30 years down the line when he retires. The $1 contribution to the IRA is not a tax, it’s consumption, a benefit of working extra hours. On the other hand if a worker earns $10 and $1 is taken and paid into social security there is no clear connection to retirement benefits. Social security payments, therefore, are taxes – and like other taxes they deter work effort and create a dead weight loss.

Privatizing social security, or in some other way creating personal accounts, would reestablish a link between marginal payments and marginal benefits and thus would be equivalent to a cut in tax rates.

The insight goes back to my colleague Jim Buchanan and his 1968 paper “Social Insurance in a Growing Economy: A Proposal for Radical Reform.” National Tax Journal, Vol. 21 (December 1968): 386-95

See also Tyler, Arnold Kling, Victor Davis and Brad DeLong who have been discussing the political issues of social security privatization.

For antiglobalization demonstrators, Nike came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the emerging capitalist world order. Yet this animus toward Nike did create occasional moments of embarrassment. During the famous Seattle riots of 1999, the downtown Niketown was trashed by protestors, but videotape recorded at the scene showed several protestors kicking in the front window wearing Nike shoes. It occurred to many people that if you think Nike is the root of all evil, you really shouldn’t be wearing their shoes.

Here is the link, which offers further arguments against Adbusters magazine. It is an advertisement for a forthcoming book entitled The Rebel Sell, Amazon lists it under its old title.

This week’s Forbes (the Nov. 1 issue) has a feature story on Alex’s work to make drug regulation more sensible.

Alex notes that off-label drug uses are largely unregulated. No proof of efficacy is required, and off-label drug prescriptions bring a net health gain; see this paper. Yet to get a new drug approved it must go through, in addition to Phase I trials,

…Phase II and Phase III trials, which typically take years and focus on efficacy as well as safety. The long wait can cost lives and runs up new-drug costs–to an estimated $900 million per successful drug.

Tabarrok says this system makes little sense; the FDA demands costly, time-consuming efficacy tests for some uses and no tests for others. And while the FDA allows off-label prescribing by docs, it strictly limits the drugmakers’ promotion of such uses to doctors and permits none at all to patients.

Alex argues that FDA regulation ought to be reduced, making the regulation of new and old drugs more consistent. But that is not all:

Tabarrok and [Dan] Klein also offer some alternative proposals at FDAReview.org. One is to make all FDA testing optional. Drugs that didn’t go through the process would be labeled “Not FDA Approved.” Under this approach, they say, “the FDA would become a genuinely voluntary institution, much like Underwriters Laboratories.” Another idea is for the FDA to award letter grades, A to D, to claims made by drugmakers, much as it is considering doing for health claims for foods and dietary supplements. The FDA could still have its say, but wouldn’t be able to impose long delays, since a new drug could be marketed at first as “unrated.”

At the least, Tabarrok argues, the FDA should permit drug companies to sell any drug that has been approved by other sophisticated drug regulators, such as those in Canada, Australia or the European Union. Under such a system U.S. patients would get speedier access to new medicines without losing out on safety protection.

Kudos to Alex, the only sorrow is that the on-line version does not reproduce the excellent photo of him in the magazine. But you can see that at your local Borders.

Brad DeLong writes:

There is a bigger, unmentioned reason to be against private accounts. Ten years down the road or so, there will be pressure on Congress to allow people to borrow against their private accounts, or to withdraw them to buy a house, or to use them to meet unexpected medical expenses. Congress will bow to that pressure–it’s their money, after all. And in the end a lot of people will hit 70 having drained their Social Security private account dry. The rest of us will then have to decide whether to let them starve on the street, or tax ourselves a second time to give them Social Security benefits. As Dick Schmalensee says, “You have to ask yourself not just, ‘Is this good policy?’ but ‘Will this still be good policy after Congress does its worst to it?'” The Medicare drug benefit and the corporate tax boondoggle are powerful evidence that the Bush administration holds no leashes to use to control what this Congress does to policy proposals, while lobbyists can make this Congress roll over and beg.

Brad also takes on whether the government could finance the transition to a more private system by borrowing (also read Bruce Webb’s comment, number two in the list). After all, government debt would be higher but government long-term implicit obligations are lower. Would this simply be a wash? (Arnold Kling believes “yes”). I am skeptical. When it comes to government, measured nominal flows tend to be sticky. So say our government increases its borrowing today but lowers its SSA obligations for tomorrow. Even if the transaction can balance without a current increase in interest rates, the increased rate of borrowing (or taxation) will tend to stick in the long run. Plus there is a time consistency problem. If the new debt is placed smoothly, government has an incentive, ex post, to accept some new unfunded liabilities for the future. Knowing this in advance, the bond market will be suspicious about the new debt offering.

What should we do? Here is my previous post on social security privatization.

Dueling articles on the flu vaccine shortage today in the Washington Post and NYTimes. The Times article is much better. As Russ Roberts, points out you have to wade far into the Post article before you get to a decent explanation of the shortage. The Times article correctly pinpoints low prices, liability and regulation early on (the same factors I wrote about here).

In recent decades, many drug companies in the United States abandoned the manufacture of vaccines, saying that they were expensive to make, underpriced and not profitable enough. Flu vaccine can be a particular gamble, because the demand for it varies from year to year and companies throw away what they do not sell because a new vaccine must be made each year to deal with changing strains of the virus. Some companies dropped out because of lawsuits, and others because they determined that it would not pay to retool aging vaccine plants to meet regulatory standards.

Yesterday I discussed some of the reasons for the current shortage. Today, I will discuss an important paper by Michael Kremer and Christopher Snyder. Kremer and Snyder argue that for the same cost and effectiveness drugs are more profitable to produce than vaccines. As a result, private incentives bias the market against vaccines.

A well known reason is that some people free rider on vaccine provision. When you are vaccinated, I benefit from one less possible transmitter. As a result, some who benefit do not pay. Drugs, in contrast, offer more excludable benefits thereby increasing demand and profits.

Drugs also provide a very natural method for firms to, in effect, price discriminate.

A simple example suffices to illustrate this point. Suppose there are 100 total consumers, ninety of whom have a ten percent chance of contracting the disease and ten of whom have a 100 percent chance. Suppose consumers are risk neutral and are willing to pay 100,000 to be cured of the disease if they contract it. A monopolist selling a vaccine could either charge 100,000 and sell to the ten high-risk consumers or charge 10,000 and sell to all 100 of them. Either way, the monopolist’s revenue is 1,000,000. A monopolist selling a treatment would, in expectation, sell to the nineteen consumers contracting the disease (all ten of the high risk consumers as well as an average of nine consumers from the low-risk group) at a price of 100,000 for a total revenue of 1,900,000, almost twice the revenue from a vaccine.

Damn, that’s clever. I wish I had thought of that.

Having praised Kremer and Snyder I now must say that I am not convinced that the forces they discuss matter very much. First, if the pharmaceutical market is competitive and vaccines pay then they will be produced even when drugs would be more profitable to a monopolist. K&S underestimate the competitiveness of the pharmaceutical market.

Second, my suspicion is that nature and science combine to make it the case that some diseases at some times are better treated by vaccines and other diseases by drugs. K and S’s model works best if there are many cases where drugs and vaccines are close cost-substitutes. Firms then choose drugs even when vaccines would have been more desirable. I think, in contrast, that cost differences will usually exceed the profit differences. On the margin, K and S are correct but suppose vaccines had been subsidized would we today have an AIDS vaccine? I doubt it.

I’m not necessarily against their conclusion, however, that vaccines should be subsidized relative to drugs. It’s sad to say, therefore, that as discussed yesterday we currently do precisely the opposite.

Remember tit for tat? I will cooperate if you do, but otherwise I defect. Many consider this to beeconsidered the best way to play in repeated prisoner dilemma situations. But the old wisdom is being revised:

…the Southampton team submitted 60 programs. These, Jennings explained, were all slight variations on a theme and were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume “master and slave” roles — one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.

If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers — but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team…

Our initial results tell us that ours is an evolutionarily stable strategy — if we start off with a reasonable number of our colluders in the system, in the end everyone will be a colluder like ours,” he said.

This, by the way, is how the Soviets used to win chess tournaments. Throw games to the leading Soviet player, and fight especially hard against the leading non-Soviet rivals.

I have not seen the primary information on the games or the program, but I suspect that some caveats are in order. First, simulated game results usually are sensitive to the choice of parameter values. Second, this strategy may be appropriate for genetically-related teams, but otherwise it will not be implemented in the real world without side payments or coercion (both are typically prohibited in the game in question).

Here is the full story, which also provides useful background information for those new to this debate. And thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

Robert Samuelson is one of my favorite economics columnists:

Many middle-class families achieved large income gains in the 1990s and — despite the recession and halting recovery — have kept those gains. They’re worse because the increase in poverty in recent decades stems mainly from immigration. Until our leaders acknowledge the connection between immigration and poverty, we’ll be hamstrung in dealing with either.

Let’s examine the Census numbers. They certainly don’t indicate that, over any reasonable period, middle-class living standards have stagnated. Mostly, the middle class is getting richer. Consider: In 2003, 44 percent of U.S. households had before-tax incomes exceeding $50,000; about 15 percent had incomes of more than $100,000 (they’re included in the 44 percent). In 1990, the comparable figures were 40 percent and 10 percent. In 1980, they were 35 percent and 6 percent. All comparisons are adjusted for inflation.

True, the median household income has dropped since 1999 and is up only slightly since 1990. That’s usually taken as an indicator of what’s happened to a typical family. It isn’t. The median income is the midpoint of incomes; half of households are above, half below. The median household was once imagined as a family of Mom, Dad and two kids. But “typical” no longer exists. There are more singles, childless couples and retirees. Smaller households tend to have lower incomes. They drag down the overall median. So do more poor immigrant households.

A slightly better approach is to examine the incomes of households of similar sizes: all with, say, two people. In 2003 those households had a median income of $46,964, off about $900 from the peak year (1999) but up almost 10 percent from 1990. For four-person households, the median income in 2003 was $64,374, off about $2,200 from its peak but still up about 14 percent from 1990. Though unemployment and a decline in overtime have temporarily dented incomes, the basic trend is up.

Now look at poverty. For 2003, the Census Bureau estimated that 35.9 million Americans had incomes below the poverty line; that was about $12,000 for a two-person household and $19,000 for a four-person household. Since 2000 poverty has risen among most racial and ethnic groups. Again, that’s the recession and its aftermath.

But over longer periods, Hispanics account for most of the increase in poverty. Compared with 1990, there were actually 700,000 fewer non-Hispanic whites in poverty last year. Among blacks, the drop since 1990 is between 700,000 and 1 million, and the poverty rate — though still appallingly high — has declined from 32 percent to 24 percent. (The poverty rate measures the percentage of a group that is in poverty.) Meanwhile, the number of poor Hispanics is up by 3 million since 1990. The health insurance story is similar. Last year 13 million Hispanics lacked insurance. They’re 60 percent of the rise since 1990.

To state the obvious: Not all Hispanics are immigrants, and not all immigrants are Hispanic. Still, there’s no mystery here. If more poor and unskilled people enter the country — and have children — there will be more poverty. (The Census figures cover both legal and illegal immigrants; estimates of illegal immigrants range upward from 7 million.) About 33 percent of all immigrants (not just Hispanics) lack a high school education. The rate among native-born Americans is about 13 percent.

The bottom line: The American middle class is doing better than many commentators would have you believe. And while I don’t think we should neglect the welfare of Hispanics, in many cases the correct comparison is with their native countries, not with other U.S. statistical aggregates.

Addendum: Here is a good piece on how the federal government defines poverty.