May 11, 2015
Robert Samuelson apparently doesn’t understand much about the economy and economics. That’s fine, many people don’t. Unfortunately, Mr. Samuelson has an economics column in a major national newspaper and he wants to attribute his ignorance to the rest of us.
In his column today bemoaning the seeming end of a trade-off between inequality and efficiency (we could buy ourselves some more equality at the price of a loss of efficiency) he tells readers:
“We do not know enough to manipulate economic growth, productivity and income distribution. …
“Okun’s book is emblematic of an era of overconfident economics. The underlying questions remain. Is the convergence of rising inequality and falling economic growth simply a coincidence? Or is more inequality a cause of weaker growth, a consequence of it — perhaps both? We lack definitive answers. Government must routinely act without full knowledge. That’s the point: In the real world, we often don’t know the true tradeoffs.”
Actually “we” know pretty well what happened. Since the rise in the dollar in the late 1990s, the U.S. has had a large trade deficit, which creates a big gap in demand. This gap in demand was filled by a stock bubble at the end of the 1990s and a housing bubble in the last decade. When the housing bubble burst, there was nothing to fill the demand gap created by the trade deficit.
Since it is not politically acceptable to talk about large budget deficits, and there is little interest in work sharing and other policies to reduce supply, the economy is likely to remain well below full employment levels of output. When the economy is below full employment, workers lack the bargaining power to secure their share of productivity growth, leading to upward redistribution. Upward redistribution is also helped by stronger and longer patent and copyright protection, special tax breaks that cultivate niches for finance, and subsidies to top management at non-profits (e.g. universities, hospitals, and foundations) in the form of tax exempt status.
We could reverse the situation by either having the government spend more money, pushing legislation that will tighten the labor market by reducing average hours worked per worker, or by measures that will reduce the value of the dollar against other currencies, thereby reducing the trade deficit. All of these measures would boost growth and led to stronger wage growth, thereby lessening inequality.
There is very little mystery about any of this, even if Robert Samuelson finds the situation confusing.
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