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Article Artículo

Intro Econ and Why the Recovery Is Weak

Robert Samuelson used his column this week to note my friend Josh Biven's piece on the reason for the weak recovery. Biven puts the blame on insufficient government spending, noting that government spending per capita has been much weaker in this recovery than in prior recoveries. Samuelson says Biven could be right but then argues that maybe there is another explanation.

Samuelson offers the possibility that higher government spending in past downturns may have been the result of more rapid economic growth rather than the cause. He notes that the stimulus failed to lead to sustained growth in this recovery, despite its large size. He then offers three possible explanations:

"Some economists see a broad slowdown in technological advances (despite the Internet) whose adverse effects were masked by easy credit. Another theory is that the costs of the welfare state and regulation have come home to roost; they allegedly discourage risk-taking, business investment and work. Another view is that the financial crisis and the Great Recession so scared consumers and businesses that they are reluctant to spend."

Let's deal with these issues in turn. First, Samuelson does have a reasonable point on the cause and effect story. State and local governments were seeing more rapid revenue growth in prior recoveries, so it would not be surprising that their spending grew more rapidly. Bivens is undoubtedly right that austerity at all levels of government slowed growth, but the issue is not quite as simple as it first appears.

On Samuelson's three points, he is right that many economists point to a broad slowdown in technological advances. While this is a very big issue, one point that should bother anyone taking it seriously is that the slowdown seems to have hit most of the world at the same time. Some countries, like the United States, were much further along in adopting the new technologies of the prior decade than countries like Greece. The fact that we all are experiencing a productivity slowdown at the same time nonetheless suggests that it is not the lack of technology that is the problem. 

CEPR / August 15, 2016

Article Artículo

As Productivity Growth Falls to New Lows, David Ignatius Warns Us of Dangers of Rapid Productivity Growth

Yes folks, this is yet another example of the which way is up problem in economics, which seems to badly afflict the Washington Post opinion pages. It's the old story of someone being told that its incredibly hot and humid outside and then rushing to put on hat, gloves, and an extra sweater.

The Labor Department released new data on productivity growth this week showing that in the second quarter of 2016 productivity actually fell for the third consecutive quarter. While this decline is likely an anomaly, and may even be reversed in revisions to the data, productivity growth has been extraordinarily slow the last six years, averaging less then 0.5 percent annually. This compares to rates of 3.0 percent annual growth in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and 2.9 percent in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973. Even the 1.4 percent rate of the slowdown years (1973 to 1995) looks great compared to the recent productivity performance.

Given this pattern of weak productivity growth, we would naturally expect to see David Ignatius on the Post's oped page warning us that rapid productivity growth is going to cost huge numbers of jobs, in a column titled, "the brave new world of robots and lost jobs." Ignatius notes job insecurity and concerns that people are losing jobs to trade.

He then tells readers:

"A look at the numbers suggests that the country is having the wrong economic debate this year. Employment security won’t come from renegotiating trade deals, as Donald Trump said in a speech Monday in Detroit, or rebuilding infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton argued in Warren, Mich., on Thursday. These are palliatives.

"The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and 'machine learning' systems."

Of course "a look at the numbers" tells us the opposite, as noted above. These new technologies are thus far having a minimal impact on reducing the demand for labor. That could of course change, which would be a great thing, it would open the door for higher wages and more rapid improvement in living standards.

One of the studies that he cites projects that automation could cost us as much as 47 percent of current jobs over the next two decades. While Ignatius calls this a "automation bomb," this rate of job loss translates into 3.1 percent annual productivity growth, roughly the same pace as during the long Golden Age. That was a period of low unemployment and rapidly rising real wages and living standards, which can also mean more leisure and shorter work years. Are you scared yet?

CEPR / August 12, 2016

Article Artículo

Health and Social Programs

United States

Social Security and the 1 Percent

In February of last year, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled The Effect of Rising Inequality on Social Security. The report shows how the increase in economic inequality in the U.S. has led to deteriorating Social Security revenues, often to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. Earlier research by Dean Baker showed that the upward redistribution of wage income was responsible for 43.5 percent of the projected 75-year shortfall in Social Security funding as of 2013.

Social Security is funded through federal payroll taxes. These taxes are currently applied to the first $118,500 of a worker’s wages; this means that only a portion of high-wage workers’ earnings are subject to taxation. For example, a worker earning $237,000 a year will pay payroll taxes on just half his earnings in 2016; a worker earning a million dollars will pay payroll taxes on less than 12 percent of his earnings. By contrast, any worker making $118,500 or less will have all of his earnings held subject to taxation. This $118,500 “cap” rises in line with average wage growth every year.

CEPR and Nicolas Buffie / August 11, 2016

Article Artículo

United States

Workers

The Rise of Involuntary Part-Time Employment — by Race, Gender, Age, Industry, and Occupation

One of the most striking aspects of the 2008–2009 recession was the rise in involuntary part-time employment. In 2007, involuntary part-time employment — the condition of working a part-time job while seeking a full-time one — was just 3.0 percent of total employment. The rate peaked at 6.7 percent in March 2010 and has averaged 4.0 percent through the first six months of 2016.

This is important for two reasons. First, it is a source of labor market weakness that results in a significant loss of income for many workers. Over 6 million people are working part-time involuntarily, and on average they work 23 hours per week. Because full-time workers are typically employed 42–43 hours per week, this is effectively a wage cut of almost 50 percent for the affected workers. When the labor market fully recovers from the recession, over 1.5 million involuntary part-time workers will be moved to full-time hours.

Second, today’s relatively high rate of involuntary part-time employment stands as evidence that the unemployment rate is overstating the strength of the economy. Currently the unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, just slightly above the pre-recession rate of 4.6 percent. This implies that the economy has almost fully recovered since unemployment peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2009. However, the unemployment rate falls when the unemployed stop searching for work, and given how many of the unemployed gave up on finding a job during the recession, it is clear that the unemployment rate is failing to pick up on a large number of jobless Americans who would like to work. The involuntary part-time employment rate, by contrast, is not subject to this bias.

To illustrate this point, Table 1 compares the rate of involuntary part-time employment for the year ending in May 2016 with two other periods with a similar unemployment rate. Between June 2015 and May 2016, the unemployment rate averaged 5.0 percent; between 2000 and the recession, there were two other periods with the same unemployment rate. (We start with the year 2000 because much of the demographic data on involuntary part-time employment only go back to 2000.) Those two periods were March 2001 to February 2002 and February 2005 to January 2006. If the unemployment rate were painting an accurate picture of the labor market, we’d expect the current involuntary part-time employment rate to be about the same as during the two previous periods.

CEPR and Nicolas Buffie / August 10, 2016

Article Artículo

Why Do the NYT and Economists Feel the Need to Lie to Push Trade Agreements?

The NYT is inadvertently doing a good job convincing people that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a really bad deal. (I'm picking on the TPP because that is the trade deal currently on the agenda.) The reason that the NYT is making readers believe that the TPP is a really bad deal is that it is obviously lying to push the case for trade — and you don't have to lie if you have a real case.

The outright lie in this case is its effort to trivialize the job loss due to trade in the United States. Its editorial, titled "the rage for trade," (okay, I misread it, only the people against trade "rage") told readers:

"Many economists believe that automation has had a much bigger impact. They point out that other industrialized countries like Germany and Japan have also lost manufacturing jobs even though they, unlike the United States, export more than they import. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent in Japan, 31 percent in the United States and 25 percent in Germany, according to an April report by the Congressional Research Service."

See, everyone is losing jobs in manufacturing, only those racist Trump backers would see it as an issue with trade.

Now let's imagine that the folks at the NYT editorial board are capable of tying their own shoes. Then they would know that the labor force in the United States is growing much more rapidly than the labor force in Japan and Germany. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. labor force was more than 25 percent larger in 2014 than in 1990. According to data from the OECD, Japan's labor force was about 3 percent larger in 2014. Germany's labor force was about 5.0 percent larger.

Other things equal, because of the much more rapid growth in the labor force, we would expect much more rapid growth (or smaller decline) in the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. The fact we actually lost a larger share of our manufacturing jobs than Germany and almost as large a share as Japan, means that manufacturing fell far more rapidly as a share of total employment in the United States than in these other countries.

Economists who "point out that other industrialized countries like Germany and Japan have also lost manufacturing jobs" understand this basic arithmetic point, as presumably do the editorial writers at the NYT. The only reason to ignore it, and imply that the decline in manufacturing in the three countries has been comparable, and has nothing to do with trade, is to deceive readers.

CEPR / August 07, 2016