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Robert Samuelson Wants to Give Reagan Credit (see addendum)

Robert Samuelson uses his column today to tell readers that he is very unhappy with Paul Krugman. The specific complaint is that Krugman gives Paul Volcker credit for reducing inflation in the early 1980s, rather than Reagan. (Actually, I thought Krugman was giving Volcker credit for the recovery from the recession, which Krugman said was primarily due to lower Fed interest rates rather than Reagan tax cuts.)

Anyhow, Samuelson insists that Volcker has to share credit with Reagan, since Reagan gave him the political cover to carry through policies that pushed the unemployment rate to 10.8 percent and ruined millions of lives. I'm inclined to agree with Samuelson on this one. A different president might have put pressure on the Fed chair to back away before his policies had done so much damage.

Where Samuelson is wrong is in his characterization of the need for the Volcker policies. He tells readers:

"From 1960 to 1980, inflation — the general rise of retail prices — marched relentlessly upward. It went from 1.4?percent in 1960 to 5.9 percent in 1969 to 13.3 percent in 1979. The higher it rose, the more unpopular it became. People feared that their pay and savings wouldn’t keep pace with prices.

"Worse, government seemed powerless to defeat it."

Actually, the inflation picture was not quite as bad as Samuelson describes. He apparently is referring to the measure using the official consumer price index (CPI), which had a well-known measurement error (more in a moment) that led to an exaggerated measure of inflation. In fact the inflation rate using the now popular consumer expenditure deflator peaked at just over 11 percent.

Dean Baker / January 12, 2015

Article Artículo

More on Pay by the Mile Auto Insurance

Earlier in the week I took the environmental movement to task for its lack of interest in pay by the mile auto insurance. I consider it a major failing because this one should be a relative freeby in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In contrast to a carbon tax or cap and trade mechanism, it doesn't raise the price on average, it just changes the incentive structure. And in doing so, it can have a large impact in reducing driving. If the average insurance policy costs $1,000 a year, and people drive 10,000 miles on average, then this converts to a fee of 10 cents a mile. If a car gets 20 miles per gallon, shifting to pay by the mile insurance would have the same incentive effect in reducing driving as a $2.00 a gallon gas tax.

Also, unlike a carbon tax, which is really bad news for the oil and coal industries, insurers could still make plenty of money with pay the mile insurance. The only real obstacle for them is inertia. After all, why should they change the way they sell insurance just to save the planet? 

And, pay by the mile also has the great advantage that insurance is regulated at the state level. This means that if the enviros concentrated their forces on a green-friendly state, they should be able to win support for pay by the mile policies. And, with adverse selection going the right way (low-mileage, low accident drivers go into the pay by the mile pool, driving up the cost of conventional policies), it shouldn't be too hard to quickly get most of a state's drivers into pay by the mile policies. If one state could go this route and substantially reduce miles driven, then others could follow.

Anyhow, several people wrote comments and e-mails complaining that the environmentalists have in fact been pushing for pay by the mile insurance. I can't say I'm aware of everything enviros do, but anything they do on pay by the mile certainly is not as visible as something like the effort on the Keystone pipeline. (Which is worth opposing.)

Mark Brucker, one of my correspondents, sent along a list of relevant pieces for those who might be interested:

Dean Baker / January 10, 2015

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Affordable Care Act

No, the ACA Isn’t Forcing Firms to Cut Workers’ Hours

Earlier this morning, CEPR’s Dean Baker reported on the good news about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in today’s jobs report:

“Most of the other news in the household survey was positive. The number of people involuntarily working part-time fell by 60,000 and is now almost 1 million below its year-ago level. The number of people who chose to work part-time also fell from the November level, but it is still 1.1 million higher than its year-ago level. This is likely due to the ACA, which has allowed workers to get health care insurance outside of employment.”

This directly contradicts critics’ claims that the ACA would force firms to cut their workers’ hours. As can be seen from the graph below, the number of workers involuntarily working part-time has come down drastically since last April, while the number of workers choosing to work part-time has increased. (I use April as my start date because many of the ACA’s 2014 enrollees only purchased insurancein March, even though the exchanges had been open since October 2013.)

CEPR and Nicolas Buffie / January 09, 2015

Article Artículo

David Leonhardt Goes Off the Deep End in Creating False Equivalence

As Paul Krugman likes to point out, conservative leaders have a bad habit of just making things up: global warming isn't happening, tax cuts pay for themselves, quantitative easing will lead to hyper-inflation etc.. David Leonhardt tells readers that at the Upshot section of the NYT, which he edits, they are committed to calling both sides out when the facts don't support their claims.

And he is taking the occasion to beat up on liberals on the relationship between marriage and happiness. He proudly calls attention to a new study that purports to show that married couples are happier on average than people who are not married, and this is even after controlling for states of happiness before they were married.

It's not clear exactly what liberal view Leonhardt thinks he is challenging. There is an obvious survivor bias in a long marriage. We expect that people in unhappy marriages are less likely to stay married, so this study has effectively found that people in happy stable relationships are happier on average than people not in happy stable relationships. Are there liberals who feel it is important to argue that this is not true?

There is a problem that liberals, like any believer in logic, may have with policy prescriptions that could be mistakenly based on this finding. For example, it certainly does not follow, based on this research, that the government should make it more difficult for couples to divorce. The point is that happy couples are happier, if we forced unhappy couples to remain married, it does not follow that they would be happier than if they were separated.

We may also think that the government should foster happy couples by having subsidies for marriage. But this effectively amounts to penalizing the people who are already unhappy because they are single. After all, someone has to pay for these subsidies, which means that on average we would have money flowing from already unhappy single people to our happy couples. Is this good policy?

It's also not clear that there is importance to marriage as opposed to a stable relationship. In the U.K. (where the subjects for the study lived), like the U.S., most people in stable relationships tend to get married. However in other countries this is not a cultural norm. Are we supposed to believe the sheet of paper makes people happy? Did the Wizard of Oz make the straw man smart when he handed him a diploma?

Dean Baker / January 09, 2015

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JOBS FLASH: Unemployment Edges Down to 5.6 Percent as Workers Leave Labor Force

The unemployment rate edged down from 5.7 percent in November (revised from an earlier reported 5.8 percent) to 5.6 percent in December. However, the main reason was that 273,000 workers reportedly left the labor force. The employment-to-population ratio was unchanged at 59.2 percent, roughly 4.0 percentage points below the pre-recession level.

Most of the other news in the household survey was positive. The number of people involuntarily working part-time fell by 60,000 and is now almost 1 million below its year ago level. The number of people who chose to work part-time also fell from the November level, but it is still 1.1 million higher than its year-ago level. This is likely due to the ACA, which has allowed workers to get health care insurance outside of employment.

Dean Baker / January 09, 2015

Article Artículo

Haiti by the Numbers, Five Years Later

En français

 

(Note: A number of the links below are for PDF or Excel files.)

Number of people killed in the earthquake in 2010: over 217,300

Minimum number of Haitians killed by the U.N.–caused cholera epidemic: 8,774

Number of years it took after the introduction of cholera for the international community to hold a donor conference to raise funds for the cholera response: 4

Amount pledged for cholera eradication: $50 million

Amount needed: $2.2 billion

Number of years it would take to fully fund the cholera-eradication plan at current disbursement rate: 40

Number of Haitians who died from cholera through the first 8 months of 2014: 55

Number who have died since, coinciding with the start of the rainy season: 188

Number of new cholera cases in 2014, through August: 9,700

Projected number of cholera cases for all of 2014, after the United Nations reduced their estimate in September 2014: 15,000

Minimum number of new cholera cases since that announcement: 14,000 (through December 8)

Number of U.N. lawyers who were present during oral arguments in a federal court in New York to argue in favor of the U.N.’s immunity: 0

Number of members of the U.S. Congress who wrote to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last month urging the U.N. to respond justly to cholera claims: 77

Humanitarian funding appeal for 2014, by the United Nations: $157 million

Percent of appeal covered, as of December 30, 2014: 54 percent

Jake Johnston / January 08, 2015

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Japan's Declining Population: More Which Way Is Up Problems at the Post

Yes, Japan looks like it is becoming less crowded and the folks at the Post are terrified. A Wonkblog piece warned readers that, "Japan's birth rate problem is way worse than anyone imagined."

The basic story is it seems that Japan has consistently over-projected its birthrate. As a result, its population is now declining and the rate of decline may be even faster than is now projected.

The question is why is this a problem? First, just to take an issue off the table, it is important that Japan, like the United States, create a situation where families and especially women, feel they can have children and still have a fulfilling career. But the question here is whether it is a problem for society if people choose to have fewer children and we have a declining population.

The piece tells readers:

"Japan’s declining population has a powerful impact on its economic situation, and not for the better. An aging population leaves the country with fewer workers and more dependents. And conventional wisdom says aging leads to slower economic growth and more deflationary forces, both of which make it more difficult for Japan to chip away at the substantial debt burden from its economic crisis at the beginning of the 1990s."

Actually, since Japan is a densely populated country with expensive real estate, a declining population could be associated with substantial improvements in living standards as the property values and rents would drop due to less demand. It's not clear why fewer workers and more dependents should be a big problem. This has been the reality for the last 60 years, a period in which countries have generally enjoyed rising living standards. The key of course is productivity growth which means that we need fewer workers to produce the same amount of output. (Remember the robots who are supposed to take all of our jobs? That is productivity growth.)

Dean Baker / January 08, 2015

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The It's Hard to Get Good Help Crowd Bemoans the Fact Europe is Becoming Less Crowded

The horror, the horror! Europe has a declining ratio of workers to retirees, just as has been the case for the last fifty years.

That is the message Arthur Brooks gave us in his NYT column this morning, although he left out the part about the last fifty years.

"Start with age. According to the United States Census Bureau’s International Database, nearly one in five Western Europeans was 65 years old or older in 2014. This is hard enough to endure, given the countries’ early retirement ages and pay-as-you-go pension systems. But by 2030, this will have risen to one in four. If history is any guide, aging electorates will direct larger and larger portions of gross domestic product to retirement benefits — and invest less in opportunity for future generations."

Brooks' source shows the share of the over 65 age group in the population rising from 18.8 percent in 2015 to 23.7 percent in 2030. If that sounds really scary consider that it has risen from 15.7 percent in 2000 to the current 18.8 percent over the last 15 years. In other words, this is a trend that has been taking place for a long time: people are living longer. This is usually viewed as good news.

Even as the ratio of older people to working age population has risen in Europe and elsewhere, people have seen rising living standards due to productivity growth. This is why we can all have enough to eat even though only less than 2.0 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture. (Remember the robots who are taking our jobs? That is a story of rising productivity. It's a story where we have too many people who want to work.)

Dean Baker / January 07, 2015