Results for “piketty”
176 found

Consistency about elasticities, revisited

From Ross Rheingans-Yoo, the content is all his, I will not do a double indent:

  • If marginal wealth is taxed an additional 0.5%/yr at the high end, then fewer people will amass and invest that much wealth—some will instead disperse it among a wider number of family members, donate it to charitable or political causes, or spend it on expensive consumption. (Saez and Zucman, in their potential-revenue analyses, assume that this effect is quite small, and that the wealthy will mostly accept lower returns on wealth.)
  • Similarly, if the marginal opportunities to invest became worse by 0.5%/yr, fewer people would chose to invest, by the same token. Additionally,the effects should be the same size, as it’s the same decision-makers facing the same incentives!
  • But if pushing on the price (read: rate of return) has little effect on the quantity of investment, then pushing on the quantity of investment should have a large​ effect on the price! (Unless we’re at some magic kink in the supply curve for unspecified reasons…)
  • So a small amount of additional capital competing for investment opportunities should quickly reduce the competitive rate of return.

What’s the practical upshot? Well, if the authors’ assumptions about revenues are right, then Piketty’s r>gr>g “wealth spiral” can’t proceed unchecked, since capital simply can’t accumulate without competition quickly reducing the average rate of return back below gg.

What is the incidence of the corporate income tax?

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman seem to think the correct answer is to assume that there is no substitution away from capital or from the corporate sector:

This paper proposes a new way to do distributional tax incidence better connected with tax theory. It is crucial to distinguish current distributional analysis from tax reform distributional analysis. Current distributional analysis shows the current tax burden by income groups and should assign taxes on each economic factor without including behavioral responses: taxes on labor should fall on labor earners, taxes on capital on the corresponding asset owners, and taxes on consumption on consumers. This allows to distribute both pre-tax and post-tax current incomes and measure the economically relevant tax wedges on each factor without having to specify behavioral responses. Tax reform distributional analysis shows the impact of a tax reform and should describe the effect on pre-tax incomes, post-tax incomes, and taxes paid by income group separately and factoring in potential behavioral responses. Various scenarios can be considered given the uncertainty in behavioral responses. We illustrate our methodology using a simple neo-classical model of labor and capital taxation.

No Western fiscal authority I have heard of thinks of tax incidence in these terms.

There is an argument that you first write down the “no-response” burden in order to arrive at the actual estimated burden, as the authors seem to note.  That is not an argument for coming up with a “no adjustment” estimate and marketing it to The New York Times (and others?) as correct and based on normal assumptions, without first adjusting for incentives and capital responses and shifts in the ultimate tax burden.  Would we have known about these underlying assumptions — which lie behind their subsequent calculation of wealth inequality — at all, if not for the tireless work of Phil Magness and Wojtek Kopczuk on Twitter?

Returning to the paper, it has some quite weak sentences, such as: “But it [no adjustment] also has the advantage of not being dependent on assumptions on behavioral responses.”

You might as well argue that assuming zero price elasticity of demand “has the advantage of not being dependent on assumptions on behavioral responses.”  In reality, one is assuming about the least plausible behavioral response possible.

Here is some background material from Wojtek Kopczuk, which works through how the proffered inequality measures and corporate tax assumptions are related.  And from Steven Hamilton.  Here is also the recent David Splinter summary analysis on tax progressivity.  Wojtek notes in his Twitter thread:

The bottom line: corporate tax should be felt by other forms of capital. That’s the standard assumption. CBO makes it, Auten-Splinter make it, Piketty-Saez-Zucman make it. Who does not? Saez-Zucman (2019) do not.

Here is the semantic innovation from the Saez-Zucman paper:

We think it is more useful to say that cutting corporate taxes could increase workers’ wages rather than say
that the tax burden on workers would fall.

Say both!  Here are two well-known and also generally accepted AER papers suggesting that the corporate income tax places a burden on real wages.

Michael Smart agrees with me on the new Saez-Zucman piece:

Zucman has now kindly posted an early working paper to support the SZ assumption. I do not find this WP convincing. We’re simply told that the “natural description” of tax incidence is its legal incidence, i.e. 100% shareholder incidence of CIT.

I find this episode appalling, and I hope The New York Times is properly upset at having been “had.”

#TheGreatForgetting

Saturday assorted links

1. Human corpses keep moving for a year after death.

2. Scarce labor and low interest rates.  By Benzell and Brynjolfsson.

3. My Stubborn Attachments philosophy podcast, Elucidations, with Matt Teichman.

4. Are we living in the most influential time ever?

5. Average is Over: “These synthetic husbands have an average income that is about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men that are currently available to unmarried women.

6. Thomas Piketty slides based on his forthcoming book; the word “Mormon” does not appear.

Increases in Inequality Have Been Overestimated

Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute (not exactly a right-wing or libertarian think tank) compares recent studies measuring changes in inequality and finds that although inequality has increased the Piketty and Saez (2003) results, which generated a tremendous amount of discussion and research, are very likely over-stated.

The results from at least four studies were compared for three measures of income change: change in median incomes, share of growth captured by the top 10 percent, and the changing income share of  the top 1 percent. In all cases, Piketty and Saez (2003) were the outlier, showing the most increased inequality. And in all three measures of income change , Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) found much less growth in income inequality than Piketty and Saez (2003).

This brief does a meta-analysis of different findings to estimate a “consensus” level of change…I find that instead of stagnating, real median incomes grew by just over 40 percent (1 percent a year) from  1979 to 2014;  the top 10 percent of the income ladder captured 45 percent of income growth from 1979 to  2014; and the share of the top 1 percent grew 3.5 percentage points.

All studies find that income inequality rose after 1979, but common perceptions that all income gain went to the top 10 percent and middle class incomes stagnated (or even declined) are wrong.

Russ Roberts also has several good videos showing how the numbers can be cut in various ways.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Markets in everything: Sol LeWitt sports bra.  And there is no great stagnation.

2. Canadian documentary about Jordan Peterson.  Covers gnosticism, the Heideggerian side, Jung, etc.  Not so much about the anti-PC stuff or the personality psychology.

3. Virtual reality gyms.

4. Chetty’s on-line Stanford class.

5. The drone wars heat up, this time in Syria and against Russia.

6. Dylan Matthews on Auten and Splinter and inequality debates.

The rate of return on everything

There is a new NBER paper on that topic by Òscar Jordà, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor, here is the abstract:

This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the long-run?Which particular assets have the highest long-run returns? We answer these questions on the basis of a new and comprehensive dataset for all major asset classes, including—for the first time—total returns to the largest, but oft ignored, component of household wealth, housing. The annual data on total returns for equity, housing, bonds, and bills cover 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015, and our new evidence reveals many new insights and puzzles.

Here is what I learned from the paper itself:

1. Risky assets such as equities and residential real estate average about 7% gains per year in real terms.  Housing outperformed equity before WWII, vice versa after WWII.  In any case it is a puzzle that housing returns are less volatile but about at the same level as equity returns over a broader time span.

2. Equity and housing gains have a relatively low covariance.  Buy both!

3. Equity returns across countries have become increasingly correlated, housing returns not.

4. The return on real safe assets is much more volatile than you might think.

5. The equity premium is volatile too.

6. The authors find support for Piketty’s r > g, except near periods of war.  Furthermore, the gap between r and g does not seem to be correlated with the growth rate of the economy.

I found this to be one of the best and most interesting papers of the year.

The working rich are driving income inequality, not the rentiers

Anti-Piketty:

Have passive rentiers replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using administrative data linking 10 million firms to their owners, this paper shows that private business owners who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Private business income accounts for most of the rise of top incomes since 2000 and the majority of top earners receive private business income—most of which accrues to active owner-managers of mid-market firms in relatively skill-intensive and unconcentrated industries. Profit falls substantially after premature owner deaths. Top-owned firms are twice as profitable per worker as other firms despite similar risk, and rising profitability without rising scale explains most of their profit growth. Together, these facts indicate that the working rich remain central to rising top incomes in the twenty-first century.

That is from a new paper by Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

My short essay on opportunity concepts for South Africa

Here is the piece (pdf), here is the broader symposium, with other notable contributors, including Bill Easterly, Charles Kenny, and Brandon Fuller.  Here is one excerpt from my essay:

…we should keep in mind the strictures of Dani Rodrik that every country, or sometimes every region, is different. Nonetheless this reorientation of measures of progress would have some implications for policy analysis. In particular, high levels of inequality, inequality of opportunity, and relative income mobility would not be seen as problems per se.

Furthermore, the frequent appearance of those concepts in political and also scholarly rhetoric would be seen as misleading and a distraction. The focus instead would be on expanding the absolute size of opportunities for the poor. To make this more concrete, consider a policy change which benefitted both the rich and the poor. Many of the equality metrics would have to struggle with such a policy, which might increase inequality in some manner, whereas the approach recommended in this paper could endorse it wholeheartedly.

It is interesting to note the recent visit of Thomas Piketty to South Africa. He called for a national minimum wage, greater worker participation in company boards, and land reform. Those are all attempts to provide equalizing measures across one dimension or another. Although some parts of those ideas may have merit, they do not seem overall focused on incentivizing wealth creation and opportunity. Piketty even stated: “I think it’s fair to say that black economic empowerment strategies, which were mostly based on voluntary market transactions […] were not that successful in spreading wealth.” It perhaps would have been more appropriate to note South Africa remains a highly regulated, highly legally privileged, and indeed mercantilist economy; the country ranked only number 72 on the 2015 Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. So perhaps empowerment based on voluntary market transactions has not yet really been tried.

The absolute opportunities approach also suggests a different emphasis for a topic such as land reform. Many arguments for land reform focus on the difference in the land holdings between the rich and the poor, yet perhaps those are not the relevant numbers. A better focus would be the following question: “by how much would receiving more land elevate the opportunities of the poor?” If indeed the answer to that question is optimistic, the case for land reform will be stronger.

Do read the whole thing.

What I’ve been reading

1. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution.  Excellent author, the chapters on the time period before the Constitution are good enough to make the “best books of the year list,” the rest is a much above-average summary and distillation, but of more familiar material.  At 880 pp. of clear, limpid, and instructive prose, it is a winner in any case.

2. W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland.  More of a mutual travelogue, with alternating contributions, than a series of letters, one learns that even in 1936: “There is little stigma attached to illegitimacy.  Bastards are brought up on an equal footing with legitimate children of the family.”  Furthermore, “All chocolate or sweets should be bought in London.”  During the trip they run into Goering, yes the Goering.

3. Richard A. Posner, The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses.  This is a grumpy book, but I don’t mean that in a grumpy kind of way, as I like many grumpy books: “The dominant theme of this book has been judicial standpattism — more precisely, the stubborn refusal of the judiciary to adapt to modernity.”  By the end, Posner gives the federal judiciary a grade between B and B+, I was surprised it was so high.

4. Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite. “In the early 1920s, HBS was still without its own buildings at Harvard, faculty were crammed together in cramped offices, and classrooms were scattered around Harvard Yard.”  This is a remarkably clear and engaging survey of its subject matter, the main drawback being it never explains the rise of HBS in terms of…management, as HBS itself might do so.  There is thus an odd cipher at the book’s core, plus from the discussion of Michael Jensen onward, the book descends increasingly into ad hominem attacks and unfair moralizing.  This volume is an odd mix, but still worth reading for its contributions.

Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime, is one of the better books on that country: “…there are even private colleges in Lagos offering courses in credit card fraud and advance-fee fraud.”

Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, is a series of essays on society and theology from one of the Mormon “grandmasters.”

After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, collects many essays on the Piketty book and also on the topic more generally.

Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses of Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.”  Ahmed, a brilliant scholar at Harvard, passed away in 2015, here is a short appreciation.  If they wrote books for me, someone would be working on “Islam and Strauss” right now.