Vaccines: The Short Run
President Bush was correct when he said that liability risk is one factor in the recurrent shortage of vaccines. Based on a post by Mark Kleiman, suggesting that flu vaccines are immune from liability due to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, Brad De Long called Bush’s claim an “eternal lie.” To his credit, Kleiman (but not DeLong) quickly retracted his post when others pointed out that the VICP applies only to pediatric vaccines.
Liability is not the only issue, however. Costly FDA regulations and requirements, for example to remove thimerosal from vaccines despite no evidence of safety problems, have pushed firms out of the industry. See this paper in the The Independent Review (I am an assistant editor) for more on these regulations and their consequences.
A further problem is that the federal government is the major purchaser of vaccines, although not the flu vaccine, and it uses its monopsony powers and the law to require companies to sell at low prices. Firms have left the industry because they are squeezed on one end by regulation and on the other by low prices and, for vaccines like the flu vaccine not covered by VICP, potential liability. Note that even if the prices are high enough to earn the company a modest profit the point is that they are not high enough to make it worthwhile to make a surplus of vaccine that can be sold in the event of a contamination problem, as has happened this year. If the firms can’t price high during a shortage then there is no incentive to plan for a shortage.
Even without legal price caps there are significant disincentives to high prices. Here is a CDC spokesperson (link to audio file) on recent price increases:
Shame on the people who are price gouging. This is a reprehensible thing to be doing. I think an immoral thing.
Is it any wonder that firms don’t want in on this market?
Henry Miller, a former head of the FDA’s biotechnology division, summarizes well:
The fundamental problem is that government regulatory policies and what amounts to price controls discourage companies from investing aggressively to develop new vaccines. Producers have abandoned the field in droves….Although their social value is high, their economic value to pharmaceutical companies is low because of vaccines’ low return on investment and the exposure to legal liability they bring manufacturers….
Moreover, the FDA has a history of removing safe and effective vaccines from the market based merely on perceptions of excessive side effects — a prospect that terrifies manufacturers.
We need a fundamental change in mind-set: The rewards for creating, testing and producing vaccines must become commensurate with their benefits to society, as is the case for therapeutic pharmaceuticals.
Read Henry’s article for more on dealing with the problem today, (he notes, for example, that it may be possible to dilute current stocks and still maintain good effectiveness). Also, as Tyler reported last year, simply targeting vaccines to at-risk people is not necessarily the best approach. A better approach is to target super-spreaders, people who may not be at great risk themselves but who can and will spread it to many others.
Tomorrow: Vaccines: The Long Run.
Fastest Flip-Flop Ever?
Here from last night’s debate, is President Bush making a good case against government-run health care:
I think government- run health will lead to poor-quality health, will lead to rationing, will lead to less choice.
Once a health-care program ends up in a line item in the federal government budget, it leads to more controls.
And just look at other countries that have tried to have federally controlled health care. They have poor-quality health care.
Our health-care system is the envy of the world because we believe in making sure that the decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by officials in the nation’s capital.
And what does he say less than two minutes later?
We’ve increased VA funding by $22 billion in the four years since I’ve been president. That’s twice the amount that my predecessor increased VA funding.
Of course we’re meeting our obligation to our veterans, and the veterans know that.
We’re expanding veterans’ health care throughout the country. We’re aligning facilities where the veterans live now. Veterans are getting very good health care under my administration…
True, you can’t blame him much for the flip-flop – it’s what the public wants to hear. How many people even noticed the glaring contradiction? I suppose that on this issue I’d rather have flip-flop than all flop.
Turns of fate
Here are two juxtaposed headlines from today’s CNN.com:
California lottery winner shot to death by police
and
Should we buy weapons from Iraqis?
Payments for weapons handed over in Sadr City on Monday reportedly ranged from $5 for a hand grenade to $150 for an AK-47 to $2,000 for a highly specialized mortar. It appeared that both noncombatants and Mahdi Army insurgents were taking part in the buyback.
Abdulla Abu Ghassan, a bakery owner, received $1,200 after turning in a grenade launcher, an assault rifle and ammunition, all of which he said he had kept after serving in the now-disbanded Iraqi army.
The idea, presumably, is to take weapons out of the hands of terrorists. But will this work?
Under an optimistic scenario, the weapons are gone and the Iraqis are richer. Under a pessimistic scenario, the terrorists use weapons sales to finance future operations. If the terrorists have accumulated large weapons inventories, this should not be hard to do.
The dynamic problems are formidable. By bidding up the price of weapons, we raise the return to accumulating large weapons inventories in the future. We also make the weapons market more liquid. So weapons buy-back plans become less effective over time, unless we create the expectation that price will be falling. This means we had better get it right now, if indeed we can.
In some models government does best by accumulating its own inventory. The government then precommits to selling its stock, and driving down prices, if private traders accumulate too many of the forbidden assets. Knowing this danger in advance, private traders might be reluctant to invest in large stocks. Now I am not suggesting this as a viable policy option (hey, why don’t we sell off some nukes from Colorado, and lower the world price? That would show those nasty North Koreans…). Nonetheless the scenario shows just how far buying weapons can be from an ideal, incentives-driven economic policy.
Addendum: David Nishimura offers more information.
Dog the Bounty Hunter
Check out Dog the Bounty Hunter, the latest reality-tv show on, believe it or not, A&E (Thursdays at 10/9C is the regular time-slot but it repeats often). As you know, I have a special interest in bounty hunters but the show is good entertainment. Surprisingly, it’s not just the chase that’s interesting but also the life-story of the arrestees and Dog and his family.
The man who killed the draft
The influence of Milton Friedman in ending conscription is well-known. But an economist named William Meckling arguably played a larger role, read the story. Many of you will know that Meckling, working with Michael Jensen, made seminal contributions to the theory of the debt-equity ratio. Here’s hoping that Congress meant its recent vote.
And consider these words from David Henderson:
Many of you who have made or are now making your fortunes would not have done so if the draft had been in the way. Consider Bill Gates, who in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft: during the draft years, young men like him who left college risked being certified as prime military meat. Computer programmers and other IT workers, who often do their best work relatively early in life, regularly drop out of college now because high-paying, interesting jobs beckon. If we still had the draft — even a peacetime draft — many wouldn’t have that chance.
People often wonder why today’s 20-somethings have such entrepreneurial spirit. One reason, I believe, is that a whole generation has grown up without the draft looming over its head.
Thanks to Bryan Caplan for the pointer.
Prescott on Bush’s fiscal policy
Edward Prescott, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Economics, said President George W. Bush tax rate cuts were “pretty small” and should have been bigger.
“What Bush has done has been not very big, it’s pretty small,” Prescott told CNBC financial news television.
“Tax rates were not cut enough,” he said.
Lower tax rates provided an incentive to work, Prescott said.
As spoken, I agree with the words. But I must wonder if negative numbers count as “pretty small”? We all know that Bush has shifted taxes into the future, not cut them. Government spending is a better (albeit still imperfect) measure of what government takes from the economy. And domestic spending is way, way up; read Alex here.
We try to vary our content on MarginalRevolution; still if there were one point that we would make every day, it would be this one. “It’s the spending, stupid,” you might say.
Prescott should not be blamed for any possible misquotation or removal from context of his words by the news media; if there is any economist who understands the difference between real and nominal variables, or the importance of intertemporal budget constraints, it is he. Here is the link.
Markets in everything
Ms. Frenkel was not on a date with Mr. Blumberg, in pursuit of a kinky threesome; she was on the clock. A 29-year-old graduate student, she is one of a dozen women who work for a New York-based Web site called Wingwomen.com, earning up to $30 an hour to accompany single men to bars and help them chat up other women. The Web site’s founder, Shane Forbes, a computer programmer, started it in December after realizing he had more success with women when he went to clubs with female friends. “Every time I was with them, I would meet women,” he said.
I find that women often judge a husband by the quality of his wife. We call this a “sufficient statistic.”
But do Wingwomen work for everyone?
When asked about the women he had met, he shrugged. “They are all nice and cute, but two were in insurance, and the other one is from New Jersey.”
Here is the full story. Thanks to Andy for the pointer.
Addendum: Randall Parker discusses other possible dating strategies…don’t be shocked…
The virtues of a nasty central banker
The most important application of the time-consistency ideas in Kydland and Prescott’s work (with due credit going also to Barro and Gordon and Kenneth Rogoff) is to monetary policy. Consider a central bank that wants low inflation and low unemployment. To keep inflation low the central bank promises to hold down the growth rate of money. Let us suppose that the public believes the central bank’s promise and as a result they plan on low inflation in their writing of contracts. At some point, however, unemployment will increase and the central bank will be tempted to juice the economy with a spurt of inflation. Since the public has planned on low inflation a higher than expected inflation rate will be very effective at reducing unemployment and thus very tempting.
But the situation that I have just described cannot be a rational equilibrium. When the central bank promises to keep inflation low the public will say, ‘this promise isn’t credible – if we take the central bank at their word they will surely try to deceive us later with high inflation rates’. As a result, the public does not plan on low inflation and when the central bank does want to reduce unemployment it must increase inflation even more than when low inflation was expected. The only equilibrium of this game is one with high inflation and no systematic reduction in unemployment.
How can we improve the situation? Surprisingly, a nasty central banker can make everyone better off. A nasty central banker cares only about reducing inflation and not at all about reducing unemployment (think fat-cat Republican living off fixed income bonds). Precisely because a nasty central banker won’t juice the economy to reduce unemployment, the nasty central banker can credibly commit to keep inflation low. The public believes the promise and safely plans for low inflation. Unemployment is the same in both scenarios – because the central bank can never systematically surprise the public with higher than expected inflation – but inflation itself is lower with the nasty central banker and thus the public is better off.
Thomas Schelling once described a similar idea this way: If you are kidnapped who do you want in charge of the negotiations, your loving wife or your nasty ex-wife? Easy, right? But suppose that the kidnappers know in advance who will be in charge of the negotiations – now who do you want? See? Sometimes, nasty people do good things.
Barter clubs for everything
You visit my blog site, I’ll visit yours. Well, that is one way to get your hit count up. It is called BlogExplosion.com. Kind of sad when you think about it.
A Nobel for Real Business Cycles
Tyler has commented on the time-consistency problem so I will post on the other contribution for which Kydland and Prescott were awarded the Nobel, real business cycles. (I see now that Tyler also has a post on real business cycles – that guy is fast!.)
Recessions have almost always been thought of as a failure of market economies. Different theories point to somewhat different failures, in Keynesian theories it’s a failure of aggregate demand, in Austrian theories a mismatch between investment and consumption demand, in monetarist theories a misallocation of resource due to a confusion of real and nominal price signals. In some of these theories government actions may prompt the problem but the recession itself is still conceptualized as an error, a problem and a waste.
Kydland and Prescott show that a recession may be a purely optimal and in a sense desirable response to natural shocks. The idea is not so counter-intuitive as it may seem. Consider Robinson Crusoe on a desert island (I owe this analogy to Tyler). Every day Crusoe ventures onto the shoals of his island to fish. One day a terrible storm arises and he sits the day out in his hut – Crusoe is unemployed. Another day he wanders onto the shoals and he finds an especially large school of fish so he works long hours that day – Crusoe is enjoying a boom economy. Add to Crusoe’s economy some investment goods, nets for example, that take “time to build.” A shock on day one will now exert an influence on the following days even if the shock itself goes away – Crusoe begins making the nets when it rains but in order to finish them he continues the next day when it shines. Thus, Crusoe’s fish GDP falls for several days in a row – first because of the shock and then because of his choice to build nets, an optimal response to the shock.
An analogy is one thing but K and P showed that a model built from exactly the same microeconomic forces as in the Crusoe economy could duplicate many of the relevant statistics of the US economy over the past 50 years. This was a real shock to economists! There are no sticky prices in K & P’s model, no systematic errors or confusions over nominal versus real prices and no unexploited profit opportunities. A perfectly competitive economy with no deviations from classical Arrow-Debreu assumptions could/would exhibit behavior like the US economy.
Models like K & P’s called dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) models are now the standard in macroeconomics but today they may also include demand side shocks and sticky prices as well as real shocks. Thus thesis has met anti-thesis and the synthesis has demand and supply shocks both contributing to business cycles.
Addendum: More at the Nobel site.
Why real business cycle theory is important
Most nineteenth century theories of the business cycle were real (non-monetary) in nature, often involving agricultural causes. The harvest is bad and next thing you know, the economy stands in ruins. A pretty good theory when agriculture accounts for more than half of gdp. The Swede Knut Wicksell stood at the peak of this tradition, although he used changes in the natural rate of interest as a more general way of thinking about the initial real shock. In the basic Wicksellian story, a decline in the real rate of return causes entrepreneurs to contract their economic activity. Money and credit contract as well, leading to a downward “cumulative process.”
Real business cycle theory to some extent went underground during the “years of high theory.” Both Hayek and Keynes, while they drew from Wicksell, diverted our attentions away from traditional real business cycle theory mechanisms. Hayek blamed monetary expansion, while Keynes focused more on issues of animal spirits and liquidity premia, and sometimes sticky prices. Kalecki and others worked on the real approach, but it lost its professional centrality.
The rational expectations revolution of the 1970s led us back to real approaches. If people anticipate the future with a fair degree of accuracy and rationality, money will likely be neutral or close to neutral. Furthermore if all markets clear, there should be no room for sticky prices and wages. So what else is left other than real theories of the business cycle?
Any business cycle theory, real or not, must account for at least two generalized phenomena of business cycles: persistence (the cycle is not over right away but rather drags on) and comovement (many sectors of the economy move together). Kydland and Prescott were among the first people to see this problem (kudos to Long, King, and Plosser as well), and among the first to address it.
Kydland and Prescott wrote a seminal article (Econometrica 1982) about “Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations.” They resurrected the old Austrian concept of a “period of production.” But rather than engaging in the metaphysics of capital theory, they ran some simulations. They showed that if production takes time, an initial negative shock can cause lower inputs and outputs over a longer period of time. Furthermore they showed that reasonable assumptions about parameter values can lead this mechanism to fit the real world. This article made an immediate splash, and rightly so.
Now today the purely real approach to business cycles no longer stands. Wage and price stickiness now play some role in virtually all business cycle theories, if only because labor market data otherwise appear inexplicable. But you might also say that today “we are all real business cycle theorists.” Most economists subscribe to a hybrid theory involving monetary shocks, real shocks, and imperfect adjustment mechanisms. All of these theories, to some extent or another, rely on the real transmission mechanisms outlined by Kydland, Prescott, and others.
Kydland and Prescott: New Nobel Laureates
This year’s Nobel Prize in economics went to Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott . Kydland and Prescott wrote a famous 1977 piece (Journal of Political Economy) on time inconsistency. Ever wonder why government policy toward prescription drugs is so problematic? Kydland and Prescott had the answer. The optimal policy will first award the drugmakers a patent and allow them to charge a high price. But once the drug is developed, the “rents” will be confiscated. Optimal policy will revoke the patent and lower the price. After all, once you have the drug. why not let everybody have it cheaply? Of course the drugmakers are aware of this danger in advance, and they are correspondingly reluctant to develop new drugs. Alex posted on this logic just days ago.
In more formal language, the optimal policy is not a time consistent policy. This develops earlier ideas from Thomas Schelling on game theory. Schelling’s point was that nuclear deterrence can fail because, once destruction is aimed your way, you don’t necessarily wish to retaliate.
The logic of time consistency is quite general. It applies to regulatory policy issues, tax policy, monetary policy, foreign policy (threaten Saddam, but do you really want to have go to through with it?), and strategic behavior in a wide variety of settings.
Here are my earlier comments on Prescott, which link to other facets of his work. He arguably has enough contributions to win the prize twice. Kydland is less well known but is an important figure nonetheless. And it doesn’t hurt that he is Scandinavian (Norwegian).
Are the pair deserving? Absolutely yes.
Why did they win this year? I’m guessing that in the midst of a partisan U.S. election, the Swedes did not want to pick Paul Krugman or Robert Barro (pro-Bush), for fearing of appearing too political. Note that the economics prize has stood under criticism for some time now, for not being “scientific” enough.
And this pick the betting market got right. Prescott had opened up a clear lead in the betting market some time ago.
The limits of consumer choice
It’s acceptable for consumers to use software that edits out nudity or bad language from a DVD movie — but they had better leave the commercials and promotional announcements in, according to legislation adopted by the House of Representatives this week.
Here is the full story.
It is easy to see how this differential treatment might be efficient. Sex-edited DVDs increase market value by giving some parents a choice. Yet at the same time ads in DVDs help fund new issues; if consumers found the ads too burdensome the DVD makers would leave them out (admittedly the marginal consumers may not represent the interests of the market as a whole, but this is a special case).
Yet many people — myself included — feels a twinge of disapproval, or perhaps even slight rage, on reading the quotation above. It reflects how our intuitions are programmed to reflect views about autonomy and control: “How come prudish moralists can remove artistically vital movie segments, but hip culture fiends cannot eliminate the offensive abominations known as commercials?”
The prudes gain control, the artists and film directors lose control over their product, and the culture fields are stuck with their initial level of control. It seems that only the “unworthy” gain autonomy, therefore the idea must be a bad one. Yet, as stated above, the policy probably maximizes economic value.
The bottom line: Our moral intuitions have only a very loose connection to long-run efficiency, especially when impersonal market forces are involved, and someone bears an annoying cost (i.e., commercials) in the short run.
Addendum: One of my readers cites the long-run elasticity of prudishness, in an attempt to reconcile our intuitions with efficiency. If edited DVDs lower the cost of being an (interfering) prude, they may not be so good after all.
The history of life, on a postcard?
Will your children see an exponential growth explosion? Here is Robin Hanson’s latest:
A revised postcard summary of life, the universe, and everything, therefore, is that an exponentially growing universe gave life to a sequence of faster and faster exponential growth modes, first among the largest animal brains, then for the wealth of human hunters, then farmers, and then industry. It seems that each new growth mode starts when the previous mode reaches a certain enabling scale. That is, humans may not grow via culture until animal brains are large enough, farming may not be feasible until hunters are dense enough, and industry may not be possible until there are enough farmers.
Notice how many “important events” are left out of this postcard summary. Language, fire, writing, cities, sailing, printing presses, steam engines, electricity, assembly lines, radio, and hundreds of other “key” innovations are not listed separately here. You see, most big changes are just a part of some growth mode, and do not cause an increase in the growth rate. While we do not know what exactly has made growth rates change, we do see that the number of such causes so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
While growth rates have varied widely, growth rate changes have been remarkably consistent — each mode grew from one hundred and fifty to three hundred times faster than its predecessor. Also, the recent modes have made a similar number of doublings. While the universe has barely completed one doubling time, and the largest animals grew through sixteen doublings, hunting grew through nine doublings, farming grew through seven and a half doublings, and industry has so far done a bit over nine doublings.
This pattern explains event clustering – transitions between faster growth modes that double a similar number of times must cluster closer and closer in time. But looking at this pattern, I cannot help but wonder: are we in the last mode, or will there be more?
If a new growth transition were to be similar to the last few, in terms of the number of doublings and the increase in the growth rate, then the remarkable consistency in the previous transitions allows a remarkably precise prediction. A new growth mode should arise sometime within about the next seven industry mode doublings (i.e., the next seventy years) and give a new wealth doubling time of between seven and sixteen days. Such a new mode would surely count as “the next really big enormous thing.”
Read the whole thing. Yes you should pay attention to these ideas; even if their chance of being right is small, their expected value in terms of importance is high. That being said, I sometimes tease Robin for offering us a secular version of Pascal’s Wager.
Note that Robin makes Arnold Kling look like a pessimist.