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Article Artículo

Denialism on Trade

It is really amazing how the political and economic establishment types feel the need to deny that trade can actually have a negative impact on manufacturing jobs and total employment in their arguments against Donald Trump's trade policies. George Will gave us a great lesson in this silliness in his column today.

Among the highlights were the claim that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the years after 2000 had little to do with the explosion of the trade deficit to almost 6 percent of GDP ($1.1 trillion in today's economy), but rather was almost all due to productivity. There are two points about this one that should immediately lead numerate types to tear up the column.

First, we always have productivity growth, that was not something that just happened in the decade of the 2000s. In spite of productivity growth, manufacturing employment changed little from 1973 to 1997, when our trade deficit first began to explode following the East Asian financial crisis and the surge in the value of the dollar. While manufacturing was declining as a share of total employment, the level remained roughly even (with cyclical ups and downs) at 17.5 million. Employment then plunged to around 12 million as the trade deficit soared. Productivity growth was not the new part of the story, the trade deficit was. (Susan Houseman has done excellent research showing that manufacturing productivity growth in the 2000s was almost entirely in the information technology sector, which means it will not explain a loss of jobs in sectors like steel and furniture.)

The other troubling item to numerate readers of Will's column is the implicit claim that if we had been producing an additional 6 percentage points of GDP worth of manufactured goods in the U.S. (e.g. another $1.1 trillion of manufacturing goods annually in today's economy) it wouldn't require any new workers. That sounds really cool. After all, it takes more than 12 million workers to produce the current $1.7 trillion in manufacturing output in the United States, so Will apparently thinks we can increase this output by 60 percent without hiring any new workers? That would be quite a surge in productivity growth, something our slow growing economy could badly use. Sounds like a great argument for protectionist measures if anyone really believed it.

CEPR / December 29, 2016

Article Artículo

Trump and Growth

Neil Irwin used an Upshot column to address the issue of whether Donald Trump can acheive the 4.0 percent annual growth rate he has promised over the next decade. He argues that insofar as it is possible it is likely to involve two items that Trump voters may not like: job displacing innovations and increased immigration. While Irwin is right in identifying these two factors in promoting growth, there are few additional points to add to his discussion.

In the case of job displacing innovation, Irwin points to the prospect of self-driving trucks destroying up to 1.7 million long-haul trucking jobs over the next decade. Irwin notes that these jobs pay an average of $42,500 a year to workers who generally do not have a college education. (Many truck drivers do earn considerably more than this amount, especially if they are in a union.)

While the spread of self-driving trucks is likely to cost a substantial number of jobs, the savings should in principle allow other workers to be paid more. For example, the remaining workers involved in loading and offloading trucks (who might be supervising robots), should be a position to get higher pay. This was the pattern among longshoreman, as pay increased as fewer workers were needed for the job. If there are strong unions and/or a tight labor market, this can be the outcome.

The tight labor market issue brings up a second point. The Federal Reserve Board has been actively working to limit the number of jobs. This was the purpose of its rate hike earlier this month. The point was to slow demand growth in the economy and thereby reduce the rate of job creation. The rationale for this move was the fear of inflation.

Whether or not the Fed is right to fear inflation, there is a simple point here that everyone should understand. The Fed is deliberately acting to limit the number of jobs in the economy. It is more than a bit bizarre that we have people worried that automation will destroy large numbers of jobs who are fine with the Fed raising interest rates to destroy jobs. If we think there are too few jobs in the economy, then we should be very upset that the Fed, an arm of the government, is trying to keep people from getting jobs.

CEPR / December 28, 2016

Article Artículo

Affordable Care Act

Can We Kill the "Young Invincibles" Once and For All?

Don't worry, I'm not advocating mass murder; I want to put to death a silly myth about Obamacare that keeps getting spread by people who should know better. The basic story is that Obamacare is dependent on getting large numbers of young and healthy people into the system. The premiums these people pay will help to cover the costs incurred by older and less healthy people.

The latest repetition of this myth appears in a NYT editorial urging Republicans not to destroy the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The piece notes the sharp increases in premiums last year and then told readers:

"Still, the cost of insurance, deductibles and co-payments is too high for many people, especially middle-class families that earn too much to qualify for subsidies. But the solution is not to take away the benefits of the law but to strengthen it. Costs could be lowered if more young and healthy people were encouraged to sign up to spread costs over a larger pool of people."

This comment wrongly implies that the problem of the system is that not enough young people have signed up. This is not true, the age distribution of enrollees has little impact on the cost of the program. While the distribution of premiums works slightly against the young, it is not enough to have a substantial impact on the finances of the system.

The Kaiser Family Foundation showed that even an extreme age skewing of enrollees would raise costs by less than 2.0 percent. It matters much more whether there is a skewing based on health conditions.

To see this point, think of the premium people pay as a tax. Under the ACA, people in the oldest age bracket (ages 55 to 64) pay premiums that are three times as large as people in the youngest age bracket (ages 18 to 34). This means that each older person pays three times as much into the system as a younger enrollee. This would mean, other things equal, we should value getting an older enrollee into the exchanges three times as much as a younger enrollee.

CEPR / December 24, 2016