Results for “stagnation”

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Paul Krugman argues the contrary here.  But let’s say there was a supply slowdown starting in 1999 or so, as reflected in wage and jobs data, masked a bit by the real estate bubble of 2004-2006 and with some of the productivity figures inflated for domestic purposes due to outsourcing.

If there is less produced, there are eventually perceived negative wealth effects.  What happens to demand?  It goes down, in this case with a lag because of credit.  Yes, it is a big mistake to assume Say’s Law always holds but it is an even bigger mistake to think it never holds.  Supply slowdowns are bad for demand, and they likely are bad for credit creation too, which hurts demand further yet.

There is no contradiction in a model where both aggregate demand and aggregate supply curves shift in unfavorable directions!  And in the medium run, each of these shifts pushes the other curve around too.

Let’s not forget that economies have real wage and price stickiness in addition to nominal stickiness.  That is another channel through which negative supply shocks can hurt aggregate demand and throw people out of work.

Krugman is worried about policy implications:

If labor force growth and productivity growth are falling, the indicated response is (a) see if there are ways to increase efficiency and (b) if there aren’t, live within your reduced means. A growth slowdown from the supply side is, roughly speaking, a reason to look favorably on structural reform and austerity.

But if we have a persistent shortfall in demand, what we need is measures to boost spending — higher inflation, maybe sustained spending on public works (and less concern about debt because interest rates will be low for a long time).

It’s not either/or.  Circa 2008-2009, we should have had a higher inflation or ngdp target.  We could do structural reform too, whatever you might think that means, obviously opinions will differ.  We could build productive infrastructure, boosting both supply and demand, and with little risk of default on the debt.  And yes, we might wish to cut some other government expenditures in the process (farm subsidies anyone?), with looser money to pick up the slack.  What we shouldn’t do is all that Keynesian ditch digging.  Even if you agree with the argument for it (and I don’t), it so hurts the reputation of legitimate government investment that we shouldn’t be going near it.  There are many, many other better things to do, including giving our government a reputation for careful project selection looking forward.

Simple textbook economics indicates that the AD-AS distinction makes the most sense in the short run.  Of course hysteresis is a mechanism by which low AD can over time translate into low AS as well, but the causation runs both ways, don’t forget that.

B.B. writes:

In “National Income and the Price Level,” Martin Bailey discussed the issues of the liquidity trap and secular stagnation.

He observed that at a zero real interest rate, it would be profitable to level the Rocky Mountains and fill in the Gulf of Mexico. The land created would have a rate of return over zero. Also, replacing all steel with stainless steel would pay off.

The examples get to the problem. If someone wanted to level a mountain and fill in the Gulf, it would take a decade to get EPA approval, if it ever came. At negative real interest rates, there are plenty of profitable investments. Maybe in the medical sector, or energy, or finance, or banking, or education, or transportation….where government approval can block the investment for a decade. Secular stagnation is feasible in a world of heavy regulations and taxes, regardless of technological opportunities or the productivity of capital. Keystone Pipeline, anyone?

In a regulated state, easy Fed policy might boost the stock market and lower bond yields without boosting investment much at all. Sound familiar?

Their new paper is here, ungated here (pdf), here is the key passage:

We have shown that in the model with capital, the presence of productive assets carrying a positive marginal product does not eliminate the possibility of a secular stagnation. The key assumption is that capital has a strictly positive rate of depreciation. In the absence of depreciation, capital can serve as a perfect storage technology which places a zero bound on the real interest rate. It is straightforward to introduce other type of assets, such as land used for production, and maintain a secular stagnation equilibrium. For these extensions, however, it is important to ensure that the asset cannot operate as a perfect storage technology as this may put a zero bound on the real interest rate.

Let me recapitulate the basic problem.  Secular stagnation models are supposed to exhibit persistent negative real rates of return, but how is this compatible with economic growth and positive investment?  Just hold onto stuff if need be and of course the goverment can help you do this with safe assets, if need be.  The earlier models had no capital, which ruled out this possibility.  The new model assumes storage costs for capital are fairly high, or alternatively the depreciation rate for capital is high.  Since you can’t sit on your wealth, you might as well invest it at negative real rates of return.

But at the margin, storage costs for goods (and some capital) are not that high.  My cupboard is full of beans and cumin seed, but I eat the stuff only slowly.  In the meantime it is hardly a burden, nor is it risky since I know it will be tasty once I make the right brew.  Art has negative storage costs (for the marginal buyer it is fun to look at), although its risk admittedly makes this a more complicated example.  Advances in logistics, and the success of Amazon, show that storage costs are getting lower all the time.

Secular stagnation might be a good model for Liberia and Venezuela and Mad Max, but not for the United States today or other growing economies with forward momentum.  But a credible stagnation model for America needs to recognize that rates of return will be lower than usual but not negative in real terms.  And there won’t be a long-run shortfall of demand because eventually market prices will adjust so that demand meets the supply we have.  That is a supply-side stagnation model of the sort promoted by myself, Robert Gordon, Peter Thiel, Michael Mandel, and others.  In the secular stagnation model as it is now being discussed by Keynesian macroeconomists, you end up twisting yourself in knots to force that real rate of return into permanently negative territory.  Of course if you allow the real rate of return to be positive albeit low, the economy is not stuck in a perpetual liquidity trap as people move out of cash into investment assets.  The demand-side stagnation mechanisms fade away into irrelevance once prices have some time to adjust.

Izabella Kaminska comments here.  Josh Hendrickson has a very good blog post on the model here.  I’ve already cited Stephen Williamson here, he notes the model is really about a credit friction and would be remedied with a greater supply of safe assets for savings, an easy enough problem to solve, for instance try the Bush tax cuts.  Here is Ryan Decker on the model, and here is Ryan arguing that investment is aggregate demand also and many of us seem to have forgotten that, a very good post.

This is an important and interesting paper, but only because it shows the model doesn’t really hold and requires such contortions.  The discussion of policy results is premature and way off the mark.  The authors should have included sentences like “storage costs aren’t very high, and the economy as a whole does not exhibit negative real rates of return, so these policy conclusions are not actual recommendations.”

It seems to me that the Krugman/Summers view has three big problems:

1. The standard textbook model says demand shocks have cyclical effects, and that after wages and prices adjust the economy self-corrects back to the natural rate after a few years. Even if it takes 10 years, it would not explain the longer-term stagnation that they believe is occurring.

2. Krugman might respond to the first point by saying we should dump the new Keynesian model and go back to the old Keynesian unemployment equilibrium model. But even that won’t work, as the old Keynesian model used unemployment as the mechanism for the transmission of demand shocks to low output. If you showed Keynes the US unemployment data since 2009, with the unemployment rate dropping from 10% to 6.1%, he would have assumed that we had had fast growth. If you then told him RGDP growth had averaged just over 2%, he would have had no explanation. That’s a supply-side problem. And it’s even worse in Britain, where job growth has been stronger than in the US, and RGDP growth has been weaker. The eurozone also suffers from this problem.

The truth is that we have three problems:

1. A demand-side (unemployment) problem that was severe in 2009, and (in the US) has been gradually improving since.

2. Slow growth in the working-age population.

3. Supply-side problems ranging from increasing worker disability to slower productivity growth.

I agree completely, his post is here.  And on labor turnover, don’t forget Alex’s earlier post here.

From ChinaRealTime:

China’s 1% average annual growth in total factor productivity between 1978 and 2012 – a period when average per capita annual incomes rose from $2,000 to $8,000 — compares with 4% annual gains for Japan during its comparable 1950-1970 high-growth period, 3% for Taiwan from 1966-1990 and 2% for South Korea from 1966-1990, he said, when purchasing power in the relative economies is taken into account.

“Our study shows that China’s spectacular growth in the reform period has been mainly investment-driven and quite inefficient,” Mr. Wu wrote.

A big problem, which often complicates efforts to assess the health of China’s economy, is the reliability of Chinese data. Using three measures of productivity, J.P. Morgan economist Haibin Zhu concludes in a research note that China’s total factor productivity grew 1.1% in 2013 from a 3.2% expansion in 2008. Mr. Wu draws on different methodology to argue that total factor productivity turned negative from 2007 to 2012.

“Correctly measuring China’s productivity has, not surprisingly, been obstructed by severe data problems that have resulted in widely contradictory productivity performance estimates,” Mr. Wu said.

I would classify this as highly speculative.  TFP is hard enough to measure in the first place, but in a rapidly growing economy productivity boosts are especially likely to be embodied in (and measured as) rising capital expenditures.  Still, it is an interesting perspective on what is the number one economic problem in the world today.

Well, Eggertsson and Mehrotra have fleshed out a theory that they think captures what Summers and Krugman are trying to get at. The Eggertsson and Mehrotra chapter in this volume is a summary of a formal academic paper that I discussed in this post. The gist of that blog post is that Eggertsson and Mehrotra – as with Eggertsson/Krugman, which is closely related – focus on the wrong problem. The key inefficiency in their model arises from a credit friction, but they are focusing their attention on the secondary zero-lower-bound inefficiency that the credit friction creates. Basically, the problem is insufficient government debt, and the solution is straightforward.

There is more here, interesting throughout, for those who find this interesting that is.

Addendum: Scott Sumner has some more practical comments.