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Affordable Care Act

Resolutions to Improve Debates on Economic Policy in 2019

(This post originally appeared on my Patreon page.)

Okay, it’s that time of year when we are all supposed to commit ourselves to performing nearly impossible tasks over the next twelve months. I will play the game. Here is the list of areas where I will try to bring economics into economic policy debates in 2019.

1) Patent and copyright monopolies are government policies

This one is pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. It should be pretty obvious that these and other forms of intellectual property are government policies explicitly designed to promote innovation and creative work. We can (and have) make them stronger and longer, or alternatively, make them shorter and weaker, or not have them at all. We can also substitute other mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work, including expanding those that already exist. (Anyone hear of the National Institutes of Health?)  

Incredibly, most policy debates, especially those on inequality, treat these monopolies as though they were just given to us by the gods. It is endlessly repeated that technology has allowed people like Bill Gates to get incredibly rich while leaving less-educated workers behind. But that’s not true. It is our rules on patents and copyrights that have allowed people to get enormously wealthy from technological developments. With a different set of rules, Bill Gates would still be working for a living.

There are a few pieces on the topic here, here, and here (chapter 5).

2) Patent and copyright rents are equivalent to interest payments on government debt

This is a point that directly follows from the recognition that patent and copyright monopolies are government policies. We can think of granting these monopolies as alternatives to direct government spending.

CEPR / January 01, 2019

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Steven Rattner's Charts in the NYT Don't Show What He Says They Show

Steven Rattner used his NYT column to present a number of charts to show Donald Trump's failures as president. While some, like the drop in enrollments in the health care exchanges, do in fact show failure, others do not really make his case. 

For example, he has a chart with a headline "paltry raise for the middle class." What his chart actually shows is that middle class wages, adjusted for inflation, fell sharply in the recession, but have been rising roughly 1.0 percent a year since 2014. They recovered their pre-recession levels in 2017 and now are almost a percentage point above the 2008 level. This is not a great story, but the picture under Trump is certainly better than under Obama. (This wasn't entirely Obama's fault, since he inherited an economy in the toilet.)

The chart shows more rapid growth at the bottom of the pay latter and a modest downturn under Trump for those at the top. By recent standards, this is not a bad picture, even if Trump does not especially deserve credit for it. (He came in with an unemployment rate that was low and falling.)

Rattner also presents as a bad sign projections for fewer Fed rate hikes. While one basis for projecting fewer rate hikes is that the economy now looks weaker for 2019 than had been thought earlier in the year (but still stronger than had been projected in 2016), another reason is that inflation is lower than expected. Economists have consistently over-estimated the impact that low unemployment would have on the inflation rate. With inflation coming in lower than projected, there is less reason for the Fed to raise rates.

Contrary to what Rattner is implying, this is a good development. It means that the unemployment rate can continue to fall and workers at the middle and the bottom of the pay ladder can continue to see real wage gains.

CEPR / December 31, 2018

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More Fun with the Stock Market Plunge

The media continue to be in a panic over the drop in the stock market over the last few weeks. Fortunately for political pundits, there is no expectation that they have any clue about the subjects on which they opine.  For those more interested in economics than hysterics, the drop in the market is not a big deal.

The market is at best very loosely related to the economy. It generally rises in recoveries and falls in recessions, but it also has all sorts of movements that are not obviously related to anything in the real economy.

The most famous example of such an erratic movement was the crash in October of 1987. The market fell by more than 20 percent in a single day. There was no obvious event in the economy or politics that explained this fall, which hit markets around the world. Nor did the decline presage a recession. The economy continued to grow at a healthy pace through 1988 and 1989. It didn’t fall into a recession until June of 1990, more than two years later.

There is little reason to believe the recent decline will have any larger impact on the economy than the 1987 crash. As a practical matter, stock prices have almost no impact on investment. The bubble of the late 1990s was the major exception when companies were directly issuing stock to finance investment.

Stock prices do affect consumption through the wealth effect, but the recent decline is not large enough to have all that much impact. Also, since it was just reversing a sharp run-up in the prior 18 months, it essentially means that we will not see some of the positive wealth effect that the economy would have felt otherwise.

Basically, the hysteria over the drop in the stock market is either people in the media displaying their ignorance or a political swipe at Donald Trump by people who apparently don’t think there are substantive reasons to criticize him. This drop is not the sort of thing that serious people should concern themselves with.

CEPR / December 28, 2018

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No, Donald Trump Is Not Leaving Us Poorly Prepared for the Next Recession

There is a popular theme in the media these days that the Trump administration is leaving us poorly prepared for the next recession. The basic story is that high deficits and debt will leave us less room to have a large stimulus when the next recession hits. This is wrong, at least if we are talking about the economics.

Before laying out the argument, let me first say that I do not see a recession as imminent. The recent plunge in the stock market means that the rich have less wealth, not that we will have a recession.

Okay, I realize that not everyone with money in the stock market is rich, but the impact on spending is going to be barely noticeable to the economy. Furthermore, while middle class people are going to be upset to see their 401(k)s fall by 15 percent, they were fortunate to see the sharp rise the prior two years. Long and short, this is just not a big deal.

As far as other factors pushing us into a recession, I don't see it for reasons explained here. So I am not writing this because I think we are about to see a recession, but rather because I am trying to clear the path for when we eventually do.

The complainers in this picture say that because Trump's tax cuts mean the deficits are large even when the economy is near full employment, we won't be able to have even larger deficits when we are in a recession. They also say that high debt levels are leaving us near our borrowing limits. Both claims are just plain wrong.

First, as good Keynesians have long argued, our ability to run deficits is limited by the economy's economic capacity. This means that if we run very large deficits when the economy is near full employment, we would be seeing higher inflation as excess demand pushes up wages, which get passed on in prices.

We may be close to this point now, but higher interest rates, at least partly as a result of Federal Reserve Board policy, are leading to classic crowding out. Housing is falling and the value of the dollar has risen against other currencies, crowding out net exports. But inflation remains low and stable, so there is still likely room to expand further even with the unemployment rate at 3.7 percent.

CEPR / December 23, 2018

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Harvard’s Choice: Hedge Funds or Scholarships

The New York Times highlighted the findings of a remarkable study last week. The study, by Markov Processes International, examined the 10-year returns of the endowments of the eight Ivy League schools. The study found that all eight endowments had lower returns than a simple mix of 60 percent stock index funds and 40 percent bonds. In some cases, the gap was substantial. Harvard set the mark with its annual returns lagging a simple 60/40 portfolio by more than 3.0 percentage points. 

This finding is remarkable because these endowments invest heavily in hedge funds and other “alternative” investments. A main feature of these alternative investments is the high fees paid to the people who manage them. A standard hedge fund contract pays the fund manager 2 percent of the assets under management every year, plus 20 percent of returns over a target rate.

If Harvard’s $40 billion endowment was entirely managed by hedge funds, they would get $800 million in fees, plus 20 percent of the endowment’s earnings over some threshold. This means that even if the hedge funds completely bombed, as seems to have been the case over the last decade, they would be pocketing $8 billion over the decade for costing the school money.

This should have people connected with Harvard and the other Ivy League schools up in arms. It is common for hedge fund partners to make more than $10 million a year and some pocket over $100 million. These exorbitant paychecks are justified by the outsized returns they get for university endowments and other investors. But how do you justify this sort of pay when they are making bad investment calls that actually lose the universities money?

CEPR / December 21, 2018

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United States

Workers

Labor Market Policy Research Reports, December 2018

CEPR regularly publishes a curated collection of original research from academic institutions and nonprofits on the state of the US labor market. The compilation is part of our ongoing effort to promote informed debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people's lives.

The Brookings Institution

How to Adjust to Automation

Automation is likely to exacerbate existing deficiencies in the government approach to worker development and training. Current policies tend to target young people at the beginning of their working lives, leaving many older workers unable to upgrade their skills in the face of shifting labor market demands. The author calls for substantial reorientation in approaches to (and subsidization of) training throughout workers’ lives and points to the disruptive potential of automation and the likelihood of future recession as reasons for urgency.

Who Makes the Rules in the New Gilded Age?

The author makes a robust comparison between the digital information age of today and the Gilded Age that took place a few decades after the Civil War. Both then and now, the rules governing new technology were made by an elite few for their own benefit, resulting in societal instability and inequality. The comparison yields several takeaways for the reassertion of the public interest and the preservation of democracy.

CEPR and Hayley Brown / December 20, 2018