Category: Political Science
Will America come to envy Japan’s lost decade?
That's Ezra's question, read this too. Moving away from traditional macro, I would add two points:
1. Japan has seen numerous quality improvements over the last twenty years, and Japanese consumers are renowned for valuing quality. The CPI mismeasurement problem may be greater for Japan and real Japanese living standards perhaps have risen a bit more rapidly than the numbers indicate.
2. Japanese politics is less competitive and Japanese rent-seeking is less competitive than in the United States. Sustained near-zero growth in the United States would mean that interest groups tear apart the social fabric and grab too lustily at the social surplus. Whether we like it or not, we are "built to grow" and we use the fruits of that growth to buy off interest groups as we go along. Japan in contrast has greater capacity to stifle these grabs for new redistributions because their politics is more of an insider's game.
Imagine a future world history where, fifty years from now, we look back and decide that Japan was the one country that made a semi-success of near-zero growth. Which means we are now watching a Golden Age there of sorts. I'm not betting on that, but if you're looking for strange scenarios that's my suggestion for the day.
Trolley Problem Biases
In one variant of the trolley problem a trolley is rapidly bearing down on the innocent five who can be saved but only by pushing a single fat man onto the tracks. Do you push the fat man or not? The question throws into stark relief the moral theories of consequentialism and deontology.
Now suppose the fat man is named Tyrone. Does that change your answer? What if the fat man is named Chip?
In The Motivated Use of Moral Principles (pdf) the authors show that self-identified liberals are more reluctant to sacrifice Tyrone than Chip despite prior agreement that race is irrelevant to moral questions of this kind. Even more interesting when first presented with the Tyrone story liberals subsequently become less consequentialist even regarding Chip. But when first presented with the Chip story they maintain consequentialism for Tyrone.
On different questions, such as how consequentialist to be in military situations, self-identified conservatives swing back and forth in similar ways depending on whether Americans are attacking or being attacked.
Unfortunately, the authors don't present their statistical results in as clear a form as I would have liked (percentage changes would have been nice) so it's a little unclear how large the effect is. Nevertheless, although the conclusion isn't surprising it's interesting to see these results even in as clean a context as one could ever hope for:
Rather than being moral rationalists who reason from general principle to specific judgment, it appears as if people have a “moral toolbox” available to them where they selectively draw upon arguments that help them build support for their moral intuitions. While the present studies do not imply that general principles never play a direct, a priori role in moral judgment, they do suggest that moral judgments can be influenced by social desires or motivations, and that moral principles can be rationalizations for other causes of the judgment.
Hat tip Psychology Today.
Department of Unintended Consequences
Here's Stanley Fish:
Commentators who explain smugly that O’Donnell’s position on masturbation (that it is a selfish, solitary act) is contradicted by her Ayn Rand-like attack on collectivism, or who wax self-righteous about Paladino’s comparing Sheldon Silver to Hitler and promising to wield a baseball bat in Albany, or who laugh at Sharron Angle for being in favor of Scientology (she denies it) and against fluoridation and the Department of Education, are doing these candidates a huge favor. They are saying, in effect, these people are stupid, they’re jokes; and the implication (sometimes explicitly stated) is that anyone who takes them the least bit seriously doesn’t get the joke and is stupid, too.
Sometimes I think of the political blogosphere as a huge commons. An individual blogger can gain in readership or influence by attacking or ridiculing some enemy, but at the cost of making that enemy stronger in the world as a whole.
I also believe that every time the words "stimulus" or "fiscal policy" are blogged it helps the electoral prospects of the Republican Party, no matter what the content of the blog post.
Will social networks boost good political change?
Malcolm Gladwell says not so much:
Shirky considers this [web-based] model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
The point is well-taken but still activism of some kinds should go up. Loose ties favor campaigns to get out the vote and sign petitions; those developments can bring about many positive changes. Most unsettled issues in American politics today would not be well-served by organizing less cooperative confrontations, even if you perceive a great injustice. I believe that "making the existing social order" more efficient, to use Gladwell's phrase, is positively correlated with many desirable reforms, as are the qualities of "resilience" and "adaptability." If we look at the recent experience in Iran, web mobilization seems to have encouraged — not discouraged — people from risking their lives for a cause. Is the web doing much to help the worst African dictators or the totalitarians in North Korea? Not so many data are in, but so far I score this one for Shirky.
Adam Smith is usually smarter than you think
In passing, Jacob T. Levy effectively scores the point and fills us in:
Adam Smith, generally thought of as the first systematic analyst of the market economy, was in my view the first major analyst of the modern state who saw it more or less completely: its permanent system of taxation and debt, its permanent expenditures on public works, its standing army, its bureaucratic structure, its colonial and imperial ventures, its complicated relationship with economic growth and prosperity, and in general the inevitability of a system of “police” or policy. This is not wholly distinct from his work as an analyst of the market; standing armies and professional bureaucracies are aspects of the division of labor, and the wealth of nations is a key determinant of their ability to fulfill their state projects. But it is partly distinct.
The Shape of Things to Come and Not to Come
Here is a very good post from Matt Yglesias, who gets to keep his name on the Yglesias Award. I am reluctant to pull any bit out of context (do read the whole thing), but here is one excerpt:
Get 40 Senators together to filibuster everything and that’s what you get. And when you add in state and local government, that’s a pretty healthy big government agenda right there, especially when you consider that states are shouldering a health slice of the Medicaid bill. Realistically, does anyone think we’re going to increase the overall size of the government faste than that? I sure don’t.
…So the future of American politics is necessarily going to be about things like making the tax code more efficient, finding areas of government spending to cut relative to projection, and thinking of policy measures that will help people that don’t involve spending more money.
I've arrived at somewhat similar conclusions, though from a different direction. Here is an alternative version of What is Not to Come:
1. Obamacare won't be repealed or declared unconstitutional, nor will Republican candidates be running against it six years from now. Trying to repeal parts of it would likely backfire and destroy the private insurance industry, given that the process would be ruled by public choice considerations rather than rational technocracy. We still would end up with a larger public sector role in our health care institutions.
2. I don't view "$200 billion a year to redistribute what is for this purpose a largely fixed supply resource" as an especially good investment, but it won't bring this country to its knees. The policy won't do much for fiscal responsibility.
3. Social Security won't much change, keeping in mind that the number of elderly voters is growing larger every day. Given all their elderly white voters, the Republicans are already "the party of Medicare." The Democrats have become "the party of Medicaid." That locks three major programs into place, more or less. I don't hear serious talk of major cuts in defense spending.
4. Taxes won't be raised much (do the Dems seem to have great love for reversing the Bush tax cuts?), spending won't be cut enough (the recent Republican document is extremely weak), and within twenty years we will have a sovereign debt crisis in the United States, as one day a Treasury auction won't go well. I'll predict, but not favor, the emergency passage of a VAT, a' la TARP, which will restore fiscal stability but lower the long-term rate of growth. When that time comes, the VAT will indeed be necessary, though ex ante I would opt for less social protection and a higher rate of economic growth.
5. The most important changes will come from aging, how other nations in the world fare especially China and India, the rate of technological progress, and foreign policy events which are exogenous from the point of view of economic policy. Overall it will be more interesting to follow other nations than the United States. Get ready for this and pick a few countries.
6. We should try to take back many of our vanquished civil liberties. Such a fight may or may not succeed, but at least fiscal considerations won't rule out this counterblow for liberty.
7. On issues such as drug legalization and gay rights, I see a more cyclic than melioristic pattern. We will see marginal improvements but we won't enter a new age of reason, in either the public sector or the private sector. The Netherlands is backing away from its very liberal social policies, including on drugs, and the cause of gay rights could as easily fall back as progress. I believe that many people are broadly programmed to be prejudiced in this area.
8. We will tweak financial regulation, but whether this is for better or worse, the link between reforms and final outcomes will continue to be opaque, to say the least.
9. More and more laws will be frozen in place. This already seems to be the case with immigration policy. More and more expenditures will be frozen into place. Politics will become more symbolic, and in some ways more disgusting, in response to the absence of real issues to argue over.
10. Climate change will remain an important yet insoluble issue. Even major legislation (which seems unlikely) would not change this much, not for a long time at least.
11. People will write profound books and papers on how and why "status quo bias" has strengthened, and then one day some new technological development will change everything. It's an open question whether this will happen before or after the sovereign debt crisis.
12. In the meantime, the United States will experience an ongoing "late" period of cultural blossoming, driven by the proliferation and democratization of new electronic media.
That's all for now!
The Value of Political Connections
In an excellent paper titled, Revolving Door Lobbyists, Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen use data on the lobbying revenues of ex-Senate staffers to show:
[L]obbyists connected to US Senators suffer an average 24% drop in generated
revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with
pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected Senator exits Congress
and it persists in the long-term. The sharp decrease in revenue is also present when we study separately
a small subsample of unexpected and idiosyncratic Senator exits. Measured in terms of median revenues
per ex-staffer turned lobbyist, this estimate indicates that the exit of a Senator leads to approximately
a $177,000 per year fall in revenues for each affiliated lobbyist….We also fi nd evidence that ex-sta ffers are more likely to leave the lobbying industry
after their connected Senator or Representative exits Congress.
Here is the key figure showing the drop in revenues at the time the Senator exits:
Guess who is lobbying against marijuana legalization?
Yup, beer distributors and the police. Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post does a very nice job on the politics:
The California Beer & Beverage Distributors is spending money in the
state to oppose a marijuana legalization proposition on the ballot in November,
according to records filed with the California Secretary of State. The beer sellers are the first
competitors of marijuana to officially enter the debate; backers of the
initiative are closely watching liquor and wine dealers and the pharmaceutical
industry to see if they enter the debate in the remaining weeks…
Public Safety First is largely funded by a different industry whose interests are threatened by the legalization of marijuana: law enforcement. Police forces are entitled to keep property seized as part of drug raids and the revenue stream that comes from waging the drug war has become a significant source of support for local law enforcement. Federal and state funding of the drug war is also a significant supplement to local forces' budgets.
Amusingly, the Teamsters and the teachers (!) are supporting legalization:
The Service Employees International Union, a major presence in California, has endorsed the proposition. The Teamsters in September made its first successful foray into organizing pot growers. The United Food and Commercial Workers is backing the initiative and organizing cannabis club employees in the Bay Area. The teachers union, citing the revenue that could be raised for the state, is also backing the initiative.
The Irish haven’t in fact tried “austerity”
The escalating cost of bailing out Anglo Irish Bank is set to balloon the deficit to at least 25 per cent of GDP this year, cancelling out the benefits of previous austerity budgets.
*Winner-Take-All Politics*, the new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
That's the new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have a different take on the main argument, but this is an important book for raising some of the key questions of our time. I would recommend that people read it and give it serious thought. The writing style is also clear and accessible. Two of the key arguments are:
1. Skill-based technological change is overrated as a cause of growing income inequality among the top earners.
2. "The guilty party is American politics."
You'll find an article-length version of some of the Hacker-Pierson argument here, although the book covers much more.
I agree with #1, so let me explain why my take on #2 differs:
1. Median income starts stagnating in 1973 and income inequality starts exploding in 1984, according to the authors. However, I consider this a "long" time gap for the question under consideration, namely whether there is a direct causal relation and whether people at the top are using politics to skim from people further below in the income distribution. Furthermore income growth stagnates around 1973 for many countries, not just the United States, and most of those countries never experienced the subsequent "inequality boom" of the Anglosphere. If they avoided the later inequality, why didn't they also avoid the stagnation? The discussion of the causal issues here isn't convincing and the authors' hypothesis is not compared to alternatives or tested against possible disconfirming evidence.
2. There is a lot of talk of unions, but I could concede various points and that's still just a ten to fifteen percent one-time wage premium, when workers are unionized. It won't much explain persistent changes in growth rates over time, whether for the top one percent or the slow income growth at the median. Furthermore the main U.S. sectors are harder to usefully unionize than, say, Canada's mineral and resource wealth or Europe's manufacturing.
3. The authors underestimate the role of finance in driving the growth in income inequality. Their p.46 shows a graph suggesting that non-financial professionals are 40.8% of the top 0.1 percent. Maybe so, but the key question is what percentage of income those professionals account for. The Kaplan and Rauh paper, not cited in this book, suggests a central role for finance. In 2007 the top 5 hedge fund earners pulled in more income than all the CEOs of the S&P 500 put together. On top of that, some "non-financial" incomes are driven by financial market trading, such as in energy or commodity companies. And a lot of top-earning lawyers are doing financial deals, etc.
Turn to Table 7 of the paper cited by the authors, p.56 here. The "non-financial" category still looks bigger but it's incomes in the finance category which grow most rapidly and Bakija and Heim suggest that stock options and asset price movements account for a big share of the growth in "non-financial" incomes. My view is that the increasing liquidity of financial markets drove much of the trend, which was distributed across both the "non-financial" and the "financial" sector. If liquid financial markets allow a privately-owned warehouse company to buy a trucking company on the cheap, and profit greatly (plus the managers pull in a lot), I am calling that a financial markets development, even though it's in the "non-financial" sector.
4. Let's say the story at the top is mostly one of finance. You could describe that as: "some change in financial markets led to rapid income growth for the top earners and politics did nothing about that." Fair enough. But it's still a big leap from that claim to portraying politics as the active force behind the change. Politics was only the allowing force and I don't think there was much of a conspiracy, even if various wealthy figures did push for deregulation or more importantly an absence of new regulation. I also don't think anybody was expecting incomes at the top to rise at the rates they did; it was a kind of pleasant surprise for the top earners to be so lucratively rewarded. So the major change is left unexplained, for the most part, and the whole story is then shifted onto the passive actor, namely the public sector, which is elevated to a major causal role which it does not deserve.
5. pp.47-51 the authors talk about tax rates. If we had kept earlier high marginal rates, the top earners would not have received nearly so much and also they would not have worked so hard. Maybe so, yet this won't much explain the stagnating pre-tax incomes at the median and it doesn't fit very well into the overall story, unless you wish to make a complicated "lower tax revenue, lower quality public services, MP of the median earner goes down" sort of story.
6. If the top earners are screwing over their wage earners in the big companies, by pulling in excess wages, options, and perks, we should observe non-stagnant median pay for people who avoid working in firms with fat cat CEOs. Or we should observe talented lower-tier workers fleeing the big corporations, to keep their wages up. Yet no evidence for these predictions is given, nor are the predictions considered. It is likely that the predictions are false.
7. To the extent the high incomes at the top come through capital markets, it is either value created or a transfer/redistribution. You can argue over the percentages, but to the extent it is the former it is not at the expense of the median. To the extent it is the latter, the losers will be other investors, not the median earner or household, who does not hold much in the way of stock (lower pension fund returns don't count in the measure of median stagnation).
8. What follows p.72 is an engaging, readable progressive history of recent American politics, but the economic foundations of the underlying story have not been pinned down.
9. In my view, most likely we have two largely separate phenomena: a) median wage growth slows in 1973 because technology stagnates in some regards, and b) liquid financial markets, in various detailed ways, allow people with resources to earn a lot more than before. Politics may well play a role in each development, but with respect to b) its role has been largely passively, rather than architectural and driving.
Anyway, I found it a very useful book for organizing my thoughts on these topics.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments.
The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959-61
Written by Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pirerre Yared, this paper is a very good applied study of Mises and Hayek:
This paper investigates the institutional causes of China’s Great Famine. It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation. A simple model based on historical institutional details shows that these patterns are consistent with the policy outcomes in a centrally planned economy in which the government is unable to easily collect and respond to new information in the presence of an aggregate shock to production.
You can find ungated copies here.
A new theory of monopsony, or how to bargain with trapped miners
In an effort to dominate the miners, the team of psychologists led by Mr Iturra has instituted a series of prizes and punishments. When the miners behave well, they are given TV and mood music. Other treats – like images of the outside world are being held in reserve, as either a carrot or a stick should the miners become unduly feisty.
In a show of strength, the miners have at times refused to listen to the psychologists, insisting that they are well. ''When that happens, we have to say, 'OK, you don't want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music – because we administer these things,''' said Dr Diaz. ''And if they want magazines? Well, then they have to speak to us. This is a daily arm wrestle.''
Here is more. Here is one upshot:
''NASA told us we have to receive the arrows, so that they don't start shooting the arrows at each other,'' said Dr Diaz.
''So we are putting our chests forward – now they can target the doctors and psychologists.''
In other words, don't be too nice to the miners. For the pointer I thank The Browser.
Why aren’t we using monetary policy to stimulate aggregate demand?
My NYT column today is about why we can't move to a three percent inflation target (which I favor, at least for some number of years) and how we might make the leap. Excerpt:
…if the Fed announces a commitment to a higher inflation target but fails to establish its credibility, it will have shown impotence. It would be a long time before the Fed was trusted again, and the Fed might even lose its (partial) political independence. All of a sudden, the Fed would end up “owning” the recession.
Part of the credibility problem stems from the political environment, especially in Congress. Imagine the day after the announcement of a plan for 3 percent inflation. Older people, creditors and workers on fixed incomes – all connected to powerful lobbies – would start to complain. Republicans would wonder whether they had found a new issue on which to campaign, namely, opposition to inflation. And Democrats would worry about what position to take. Presidents of some regional Fed banks would probably oppose the policy publicly.
…The Fed lost some of its political independence during the financial crisis. It undertook major rescue operations in conjunction with the Treasury, and these bailouts proved extremely unpopular. Congress has taken a closer look at Fed operating procedures and will engage in a one-time audit of the Fed’s emergency lending. When it comes to inflation, the Fed cannot easily turn to Congress and simply ask to be trusted.
This is the sad side story of our financial crisis: especially when it comes to financial matters, a great deal of trust has been lost. There is the prospect of a free lunch right before us, yet it is unclear that we will be able to grab it.
…In failing to push harder for monetary expansion, is Mr. Bernanke a wise and prudent guardian of the limited discretionary powers of the Fed? Or is he acting like a too-hesitant bureaucrat, afraid to fail and take the blame when he should be gunning for success?
A few points:
1. For reasons of space, I could not note that the so-called "robust Reagan recovery" had price inflation of over four percent a year. Many conservatives shy away from recognizing this.
2. Three percent inflation also would help the currently impossible state of the real estate market, by lowering the real value of debts.
3. I do not mean to discriminate against Scott Sumner's nominal gdp idea, but it is easier to explain an inflation rate target to a public audience. Here is my earlier column on Scott.
4. Maybe we are in a new political economy equilibrium where each government agency is given "one shot" at a problem. Treasury had its one shot with the stimulus plan. The Fed had its exotic monetary policy operations and deal-making during the crisis. Maybe in bad times voters aren't happy no matter what, and no one is allowed to try twice. We have not yet thought through the political economy of this scenario.
5. If the Fed can't make the commitment today, when did it go wrong? Perhaps at the peak of the crisis, when it was operating with a high degree of discretion, and various radical actions were viewed as justified, it should have announced that, to complete recovery, the three percent price inflation commitment would commence after the dust had settled. That would have required Magnus Carlsen-like levels of foresight, however. If nothing else, Bernanke may not have realized that some version of #4 was operating.
6. Contra Mark Thoma, I am not so worried about time consistency problems, provided that Congress supports the Fed. As long as the economy is weak, it's in the Fed's interest to keep up the three percent inflation. If people know that in better times we will eventually settle back to two percent inflation, I don't think this undercuts the whole idea.
7. It remains instructive to read Bernanke's 1999 Japan piece, for instance:
BOJ officials have strongly resisted the suggestion of installing an explicit inflation target. Their often-stated concern is that announcing a target that they are not sure they know how to achieve will endanger the Bank’s credibility; and they have expressed skepticism that simple announcements can have any effects on expectations. On the issue of announcement effects, theory and practice suggest that “cheap talk” can in fact sometimes affect expectations, particularly when there is no conflict between what a “player” announces and that player’s incentives. The effect of the announcement of a sustained zero-interest-rate policy on the term structure in Japan is itself a perfect example of the potential power of announcement effects.
With respect to the issue of inflation targets and BOJ credibility, I do not see how credibility can be harmed by straightforward and honest dialogue of policymakers with the public.
Maybe I'm too Straussian or too Freudian here, but I read him as trying to promote the commitment, without being totally sure it is possible; note the "distancing" language at the critical points of the argument. I believe Bernanke wrote this next part before he completely understood the incentives of bureaucracies to conserve information:
But if BOJ officials feel that, for technical reasons, when and whether they will attain the announced target is uncertain, they could explain those points to the public as well. Better that the public knows that the BOJ is doing all it can to reflate the economy, and that it understands why the Bank is taking the actions it does. The alternative is that the private sector be left to its doubts about the willingness or competence of the BOJ to help the macroeconomic situation.
The markets speak
I read so much blogospheric debate on the future of the Republican Party. As for the 2012 Republican nominee, at Intrade.com, Romney is still leading the pack in the 31 range, and Palin remains in the 17-18 range. John Thune is very much underdiscussed, given that his chance of winning the nomination seems to be about as large as Palin's.
As Robin Hanson would say, politics isn't about policy. Of course if you think these numbers are wrong, go and improve them.
Scary sentences
It seems the Obama administration is looking for any possible argument to justify its policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal restraint. But that's not always easy to manage:
“The more forcefully the administration urges a court to stay out because this is warfare, the more it puts itself in the uncomfortable position of arguing we’re at war even in Yemen,”
The administration doesn't want any possibility of judicial review:
…they are seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed without discussing its merits. For example, officials say, the brief is virtually certain to argue that Mr. Awlaki’s father has no legal standing to file a lawsuit on behalf of his son.
Is the administration trying to figure out the law, and then follow it, or to simply push through whatever it wants to do?