Morning Edition host Rachel Martin introduced an interview with Tom Nickels, spokesperson for the American Hospital Association by referring to Republican efforts to “fix” the nation’s health care system. This implies that the Republicans are trying to make the system better. This is certainly not obvious since all of their proposals are likely to take away insurance from tens of millions of people.
It shouldn’t be too hard to use neutral terms, like “change” or simply refer to efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. There is no reason for NPR to attribute good motives to the Republicans, especially when there is zero evidence to support this view of their actions.
Morning Edition host Rachel Martin introduced an interview with Tom Nickels, spokesperson for the American Hospital Association by referring to Republican efforts to “fix” the nation’s health care system. This implies that the Republicans are trying to make the system better. This is certainly not obvious since all of their proposals are likely to take away insurance from tens of millions of people.
It shouldn’t be too hard to use neutral terms, like “change” or simply refer to efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. There is no reason for NPR to attribute good motives to the Republicans, especially when there is zero evidence to support this view of their actions.
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That’s the arithmetic according to the Washington Post. The article told readers that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker claims he is giving $3 billion in economic incentives to the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. The company, in turn, says that it will build a factory that will eventually employ 3,000 people. It would have been helpful to include the arithmetic so it was clear how much Scott Walker planned to spend for each job that Foxconn claims it will create. (Foxconn has not always followed through on its promises, as the piece points out.)
It also would have been worth mentioning the importance of these jobs to Wisconsin’s labor market. The state currently has 472,000 manufacturing jobs (it added 7,900 in the last year), so the jobs pledged by Foxconn would increase this figure by just under 0.6 percent.
Addendum
As several comments noted, the Washington Post had a follow up piece that gives more details on this deal. The 3,000 jobs figure is the number who are originally expected to be employed in the factory when it is projected to be completed in 2020. Foxconn said the number of people employed has the “potential to grow” to 13,000. It appears that the full $3 billion in subsidies is at least partly contingent on the number of jobs actually created, although the terms do not seem to be clear at this point.
That’s the arithmetic according to the Washington Post. The article told readers that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker claims he is giving $3 billion in economic incentives to the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. The company, in turn, says that it will build a factory that will eventually employ 3,000 people. It would have been helpful to include the arithmetic so it was clear how much Scott Walker planned to spend for each job that Foxconn claims it will create. (Foxconn has not always followed through on its promises, as the piece points out.)
It also would have been worth mentioning the importance of these jobs to Wisconsin’s labor market. The state currently has 472,000 manufacturing jobs (it added 7,900 in the last year), so the jobs pledged by Foxconn would increase this figure by just under 0.6 percent.
Addendum
As several comments noted, the Washington Post had a follow up piece that gives more details on this deal. The 3,000 jobs figure is the number who are originally expected to be employed in the factory when it is projected to be completed in 2020. Foxconn said the number of people employed has the “potential to grow” to 13,000. It appears that the full $3 billion in subsidies is at least partly contingent on the number of jobs actually created, although the terms do not seem to be clear at this point.
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At a speech in Youngstown Ohio last night, Donald Trump talked about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state and told his audience:
“They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. They’re coming back. Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”
Actually, they were coming back (at least some of them) before President Trump took office, but the state is again losing manufacturing jobs.
Manufacturing Employment in Ohio
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Employment in manufacturing in Ohio had increased by 4,700 in the year from January 2016 to January 2017. In the five months since January 2017, it has fallen by 5,400. If this rate of job loss continues, Ohio will lose almost 70,000 jobs manufacturing jobs, more than 10 percent of employment in the sector, over a two-term Trump administration.
At a speech in Youngstown Ohio last night, Donald Trump talked about the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state and told his audience:
“They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. They’re coming back. Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”
Actually, they were coming back (at least some of them) before President Trump took office, but the state is again losing manufacturing jobs.
Manufacturing Employment in Ohio
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Employment in manufacturing in Ohio had increased by 4,700 in the year from January 2016 to January 2017. In the five months since January 2017, it has fallen by 5,400. If this rate of job loss continues, Ohio will lose almost 70,000 jobs manufacturing jobs, more than 10 percent of employment in the sector, over a two-term Trump administration.
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Neil Irwin had an interesting Upshot piece highlighting a new paper by J.W. Mason arguing that slow productivity growth is in large part due to slow GDP growth. The basic argument is that if growth were faster, labor markets would be tighter, and companies would have more reason to invest in labor saving equipment.
While this argument strikes me as undoubtedly true, there is another aspect to productivity growth that is often missed. One thing that is even easier than replacing workers with equipment is simply not replacing workers. In other words, most employers can run stores, restaurants, or other businesses with fewer workers. The cost of this is likely to mean that customers have to wait longer to be served.
This could mean, for example, that when you get to the checkout counter at a supermarket you have to wait ten or fifteen minutes in line rather than having someone immediately available immediately to serve you. The same would apply to lines at fast food restaurants or the pace of service at a sit-down restaurant. Instead of having workers available for customers at all times (which means they do nothing, some of the time), employers will make customers wait.
This would show up as an increase in productivity as conventionally measured. Output would be unchanged, but fewer workers are employed than in the good service scenario. In principle, if we have perfect productivity data, this would not be the case, since the longer wait times should be reported as a deterioration in quality and therefore a price increase, which would mean lower output. But we don’t have perfect data, so in our productivity numbers, longer wait times mean higher productivity (and vice versa).
Neil Irwin had an interesting Upshot piece highlighting a new paper by J.W. Mason arguing that slow productivity growth is in large part due to slow GDP growth. The basic argument is that if growth were faster, labor markets would be tighter, and companies would have more reason to invest in labor saving equipment.
While this argument strikes me as undoubtedly true, there is another aspect to productivity growth that is often missed. One thing that is even easier than replacing workers with equipment is simply not replacing workers. In other words, most employers can run stores, restaurants, or other businesses with fewer workers. The cost of this is likely to mean that customers have to wait longer to be served.
This could mean, for example, that when you get to the checkout counter at a supermarket you have to wait ten or fifteen minutes in line rather than having someone immediately available immediately to serve you. The same would apply to lines at fast food restaurants or the pace of service at a sit-down restaurant. Instead of having workers available for customers at all times (which means they do nothing, some of the time), employers will make customers wait.
This would show up as an increase in productivity as conventionally measured. Output would be unchanged, but fewer workers are employed than in the good service scenario. In principle, if we have perfect productivity data, this would not be the case, since the longer wait times should be reported as a deterioration in quality and therefore a price increase, which would mean lower output. But we don’t have perfect data, so in our productivity numbers, longer wait times mean higher productivity (and vice versa).
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I know we all share that fear every time we are in a huge traffic jam or face a forever long line at the grocery store. This fear appears at the end of an Arthur Brooks column berating a country that just elected Donald Trump for being unwilling to take risks. (Okay, it was a foolish risk, but you can’t argue it wasn’t a risk.)
Brooks tells us that the reluctance to take risks:
“Family formation, perhaps the ultimate personal leap of faith, looks to be another victim of this imprudent hesitation. Census Bureau demographers recently reported that while only a quarter of 24- to 29-year-olds were unmarried in the 1980s, almost half of that age group is unmarried today. And delaying the jump to adulthood has real social consequences. Last August, the Centers for Disease Control announced that the United States fertility rate had fallen to its lowest point since they began calculating it in 1909.”
I don’t see the problem here. Certainly, it is important that people feel they have sufficient security and support to have children if they want them. This means secure incomes, access to health care, and access to child care so that parents of young children have the ability to work. But if large numbers of young people still choose not to have kids, so what? Brooks may be worried about running out of people, but fans of arithmetic don’t share this concern.
It’s striking that just last month the New York Times ran a column warning that we were going to be running out of jobs because robots were taking all of them. It speaks to the unbelievably bad state of economics that the country’s leading newspaper somehow thinks that the arguments that we are running out of people and that we are running out of jobs are both plausible. This would be comparable to a situation in the medical profession in which, depending on the doctor we see, we will find out that we are 50 pounds overweight and desperately need to go on a diet or 50 pounds underweight and need to start eating more.
If the medical profession routinely produced such diametrically opposed diagnoses most people would probably stop seeing doctors and save their money for something more useful. Unfortunately, we seem destined to waste an ever large share of our money paying the salaries of economists.
I know we all share that fear every time we are in a huge traffic jam or face a forever long line at the grocery store. This fear appears at the end of an Arthur Brooks column berating a country that just elected Donald Trump for being unwilling to take risks. (Okay, it was a foolish risk, but you can’t argue it wasn’t a risk.)
Brooks tells us that the reluctance to take risks:
“Family formation, perhaps the ultimate personal leap of faith, looks to be another victim of this imprudent hesitation. Census Bureau demographers recently reported that while only a quarter of 24- to 29-year-olds were unmarried in the 1980s, almost half of that age group is unmarried today. And delaying the jump to adulthood has real social consequences. Last August, the Centers for Disease Control announced that the United States fertility rate had fallen to its lowest point since they began calculating it in 1909.”
I don’t see the problem here. Certainly, it is important that people feel they have sufficient security and support to have children if they want them. This means secure incomes, access to health care, and access to child care so that parents of young children have the ability to work. But if large numbers of young people still choose not to have kids, so what? Brooks may be worried about running out of people, but fans of arithmetic don’t share this concern.
It’s striking that just last month the New York Times ran a column warning that we were going to be running out of jobs because robots were taking all of them. It speaks to the unbelievably bad state of economics that the country’s leading newspaper somehow thinks that the arguments that we are running out of people and that we are running out of jobs are both plausible. This would be comparable to a situation in the medical profession in which, depending on the doctor we see, we will find out that we are 50 pounds overweight and desperately need to go on a diet or 50 pounds underweight and need to start eating more.
If the medical profession routinely produced such diametrically opposed diagnoses most people would probably stop seeing doctors and save their money for something more useful. Unfortunately, we seem destined to waste an ever large share of our money paying the salaries of economists.
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Thomas Heath used his column to give readers some incredibly bad investment advice. The piece titled, “a first lesson on the stock market: don’t run from a good sale,” told readers that the recent dip in the market makes this a good time to buy stock. This makes no sense.
Whether or not it is a good time to buy stocks depends on the price of stock relative to the fundamentals of the market. This means current price-to-earnings ratios and the prospect for future earnings growth. Current price-to-earnings ratios, at well over 20 to 1 by most measures, are high by historical standards. Most economists are not projecting especially good profit growth in the years ahead, but a big tax cut may allow shareholders to keep a larger portion of their gains, which would make stock more valuable.
But the point is not whether it is a good or bad time to buy stock, the point is the fact that stock prices have fallen really doesn’t tell you anything. In March of 2000, the Nasdaq peaked at just over 5000. It fell back from this peak, so that a month or so out it was at 4,000. By Heath’s investment advice, everyone should have taken advantage of this big sale. After all, prices were down 20 percent from their peak.
If you followed the Heath investment strategy you would have lost more than two thirds of your money as the Nasdaq eventually bottomed out at just over 1200 in the fall of 2002. While the Nasdaq did eventually come back and is now near 6,400, this would not have provided much of a return if you bought in at 4,000. Adjusted for inflation, this would give a real return of just over 11.0 percent over a seventeen year period. Dividends would add to this modestly, but since most Nasdaq stocks pay little or no dividend, the return would still be extraordinarily low over this period.
The moral of this story is that if the price of an over-valued asset falls, it is less over-valued, but a drop in price does not mean that the asset is under-valued. An investment advice column should show a little clearer thinking on this issue.
Thomas Heath used his column to give readers some incredibly bad investment advice. The piece titled, “a first lesson on the stock market: don’t run from a good sale,” told readers that the recent dip in the market makes this a good time to buy stock. This makes no sense.
Whether or not it is a good time to buy stocks depends on the price of stock relative to the fundamentals of the market. This means current price-to-earnings ratios and the prospect for future earnings growth. Current price-to-earnings ratios, at well over 20 to 1 by most measures, are high by historical standards. Most economists are not projecting especially good profit growth in the years ahead, but a big tax cut may allow shareholders to keep a larger portion of their gains, which would make stock more valuable.
But the point is not whether it is a good or bad time to buy stock, the point is the fact that stock prices have fallen really doesn’t tell you anything. In March of 2000, the Nasdaq peaked at just over 5000. It fell back from this peak, so that a month or so out it was at 4,000. By Heath’s investment advice, everyone should have taken advantage of this big sale. After all, prices were down 20 percent from their peak.
If you followed the Heath investment strategy you would have lost more than two thirds of your money as the Nasdaq eventually bottomed out at just over 1200 in the fall of 2002. While the Nasdaq did eventually come back and is now near 6,400, this would not have provided much of a return if you bought in at 4,000. Adjusted for inflation, this would give a real return of just over 11.0 percent over a seventeen year period. Dividends would add to this modestly, but since most Nasdaq stocks pay little or no dividend, the return would still be extraordinarily low over this period.
The moral of this story is that if the price of an over-valued asset falls, it is less over-valued, but a drop in price does not mean that the asset is under-valued. An investment advice column should show a little clearer thinking on this issue.
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The Washington Post has devoted enormous resources to trying to convince its readers that the federal government’s disability programs are in crisis. And it has no qualms about misrepresenting the data to make its case.
Today we got a great example in a question and answer session in reference to its latest major feature piece. In answer to the question, “what’s the problem?” it tells readers:
“The program for disabled workers, which Congress had to rescue from insolvency in 2015, is estimated to go broke again sometime over the next decade or so. The government this year is expected to spend $192 billion on disability payments — more than the combined total that will be spent on welfare, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and food stamps.”
The assertion that the program will go broke is extremely misleading. Even if Congress never did anything it could still pay will over 90 percent of projected benefits for more than two decades into the future and even at the end of the 75-year planning period, it is still projected to be able to pay over 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
This is an important point since many politicians have advocated cutting benefits to keep the program fully funded. If the point is to ensure to prevent benefits from being cut due to a shortfall, cutting benefits to make up the gap doesn’t help.
It is also worth noting that the $192 billion figure includes the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program which is funded out of general revenue, not a payroll tax. While it can make sense to combine the programs as disability programs, in doing so it would be worth noting the third program in this category, workers’ compensation. Most states have substantially reduced the generosity of their Workers Compensation programs over the last three decades. As a result, the total amount spent on disability as a share of GDP has not increased by very much over this period.
The comparison to “welfare, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and food stamps” is also misleading, since we actually spend very little on these programs even though the public perception is that they comprise a large share of the budget. The Post presumably knows the public hugely overestimates the share of the budget spent on these programs so why would it use them as a base of comparison, unless the point is to create the impression that these disability programs are a very big share of the budget.
It actually would not be hard to convey the spending in a way that would be meaningful to most readers. It is equal to roughly 1.0 percent of GDP. It is a bit less than 5.0 percent of total federal spending. Alternatively, it is a bit more than 30 percent of projected military spending for 2017.
The Washington Post has devoted enormous resources to trying to convince its readers that the federal government’s disability programs are in crisis. And it has no qualms about misrepresenting the data to make its case.
Today we got a great example in a question and answer session in reference to its latest major feature piece. In answer to the question, “what’s the problem?” it tells readers:
“The program for disabled workers, which Congress had to rescue from insolvency in 2015, is estimated to go broke again sometime over the next decade or so. The government this year is expected to spend $192 billion on disability payments — more than the combined total that will be spent on welfare, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and food stamps.”
The assertion that the program will go broke is extremely misleading. Even if Congress never did anything it could still pay will over 90 percent of projected benefits for more than two decades into the future and even at the end of the 75-year planning period, it is still projected to be able to pay over 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
This is an important point since many politicians have advocated cutting benefits to keep the program fully funded. If the point is to ensure to prevent benefits from being cut due to a shortfall, cutting benefits to make up the gap doesn’t help.
It is also worth noting that the $192 billion figure includes the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program which is funded out of general revenue, not a payroll tax. While it can make sense to combine the programs as disability programs, in doing so it would be worth noting the third program in this category, workers’ compensation. Most states have substantially reduced the generosity of their Workers Compensation programs over the last three decades. As a result, the total amount spent on disability as a share of GDP has not increased by very much over this period.
The comparison to “welfare, unemployment benefits, housing subsidies and food stamps” is also misleading, since we actually spend very little on these programs even though the public perception is that they comprise a large share of the budget. The Post presumably knows the public hugely overestimates the share of the budget spent on these programs so why would it use them as a base of comparison, unless the point is to create the impression that these disability programs are a very big share of the budget.
It actually would not be hard to convey the spending in a way that would be meaningful to most readers. It is equal to roughly 1.0 percent of GDP. It is a bit less than 5.0 percent of total federal spending. Alternatively, it is a bit more than 30 percent of projected military spending for 2017.
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Catherine Rampell has a nice column pointing out how Republican efforts to block suits against companies that abuse their customers effectively deny customers the opportunity to use the legal system when they are wronged. The argument is well-taken but it doesn’t go far enough. Donald Trump and the Republicans are also encouraging waste that will be a drag on economic growth,
The point here is simple, although it always gets lost in the discussion. Good economists assume that people are motivated by money. If you’re a reasonably competent lawyer you can write contracts in ways that the typical consumer will either not understand or not take the time to read. If you put in wording in these contracts that screws the consumer, then you make a lot of money for your employer which they will be happy to share with you.
The implication, for people who believe in free markets and economic incentives, is that if we allow people to make money by writing deceptive contracts that screw people, then they will write deceptive contracts that screw people. This means that instead of doing something productive for the economy, we will have many highly educated people devoted their skills to an activity with zero economic value. In fact, their work actually has negative economic value, since consumers will know they have to spend time scrutinizing contracts if they don’t want to be screwed.
So the opponents of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and related measures to protect consumers are not just arguing for another way to redistribute upward, they are arguing for a policy that increases waste and slows economic growth. But hey, no one ever said that we couldn’t get greater inequality without having to sacrifice economic growth.
Catherine Rampell has a nice column pointing out how Republican efforts to block suits against companies that abuse their customers effectively deny customers the opportunity to use the legal system when they are wronged. The argument is well-taken but it doesn’t go far enough. Donald Trump and the Republicans are also encouraging waste that will be a drag on economic growth,
The point here is simple, although it always gets lost in the discussion. Good economists assume that people are motivated by money. If you’re a reasonably competent lawyer you can write contracts in ways that the typical consumer will either not understand or not take the time to read. If you put in wording in these contracts that screws the consumer, then you make a lot of money for your employer which they will be happy to share with you.
The implication, for people who believe in free markets and economic incentives, is that if we allow people to make money by writing deceptive contracts that screw people, then they will write deceptive contracts that screw people. This means that instead of doing something productive for the economy, we will have many highly educated people devoted their skills to an activity with zero economic value. In fact, their work actually has negative economic value, since consumers will know they have to spend time scrutinizing contracts if they don’t want to be screwed.
So the opponents of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and related measures to protect consumers are not just arguing for another way to redistribute upward, they are arguing for a policy that increases waste and slows economic growth. But hey, no one ever said that we couldn’t get greater inequality without having to sacrifice economic growth.
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