the continuing crisis – Page 2

Macroeconomic Lessons from the Past Decade

Below the fold is a draft of a chapter I’m contributing to an edited volume on aggregate demand and employment. My chapter is supposed to cover macroeconomic policy and employment in the US, with other chapters covering other countries and regions.

The chapter is mostly based on material I’ve pulished elsewhere, mainly my Roosevelt papers “What Recovery?” and “A New Direction for the Federal Reserve.” My goal was something that summarized the arguments there for an audience of (presumably) heterodox macroeconomists, and that could also be used in the classroom.

There is still time to revise this, so comments/criticisms are very welcome.

Continue reading Macroeconomic Lessons from the Past Decade

What It’s About

Shortly after Syriza’s victory in January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis is traveling around Europe for his first official meetings with various and economics ministers. Here’s an interesting conversation with one of them:

Pier Carlo Padoan, Italy’s finance minister and formerly the OECD’s chief economist, is in many ways a typical European social democrat: sympathetic to the Left but not prepared to rock the boat… Our discussion was friendly and efficient. I explained my proposals, and he signalled that he understood what I was getting at, expressing not an iota of criticism but no support. To his credit, he explained why: when he had been appointed finance minister a few months earlier, Wolfgang Schäuble had made a point of having a go at him at every available opportunity…

I enquired how he had managed to curb Schäuble’s hostility. Pier Carlo said that he had asked Schäuble to tell him the one thing he could do to win his confidence. That turned out to be “labour market reform” – code for weakening workers’ rights, allowing companies to fire them more easily with little or no compensation and to hire people on lower pay with fewer protections. Once Pier Carlo had passed appropriate legislation through Italy’s parliament, at significant political cost to the Renzi government, the German finance minister went easy on him. “Why don’t you try something similar?” he suggested.

“I’ll think about it,” is Varoufakis’ diplomatic reply.

A couple days later, he has a meeting with the German finance minister himself, perhaps the most important single figure in the Euroepan establishment. Schauble brushes off Varoufakis’ suggestions for strengthening the Greek tax authorities, insisting instead on

his theory that the “overgenerous” European social model was no longer sustainable and had to be ditched. Comparing the costs to Europe of maintaining welfare states with the situation in places like India and China, where no social safety net exists at all, he argued that Europe was losing competitiveness and would stagnate unless social benefits were curtailed en masse. It was as if he was telling me that a start had to be made somewhere and that that somewhere might as well be Greece.

I’m supposed to be writing a review of Adults in the Room.That right there is the story, I think. Debates over fiscal arrangements were a pretext, the real agenda has always been restoring the rule of market over society, over labor in particular. And Greece was just a convenient place to start, or to make an example of. Despite the constant framing of Eruope’s divisions in national terms, I think it’s clear that for German conservatives like Schauble, the real target has always been their own working class.

What Recovery: Reading Notes

My Roosevelt Institute paper on potential output came out last week. (Summary here.) The paper has gotten some more press since Neil Irwin’s Times piece, including Ryan Cooper in The Week and Felix Salmon in Slate. My favorite headline is from Boing Boing: American Wages Are So Low, the Robots Don’t Want Your Jobs.

In the paper I tried to give a fairly comprehensive overview of the evidence and arguments that the US economy is not in any meaningful sense at potential output or full employment. But of course it was just one small piece of a larger conversation. Here are a few things I’ve found interesting recently on the same set of issues. .

Perhaps the most important new academic contribution to this debate is this paper by Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Mauricio Ulate, on estimates of potential output, which came out too late for me to mention in the Roosevelt report. Their paper rigorously demonstrates that, despite their production-function veneer, the construction of potential output estimates ensures that any persistent change in growth rates will appear as a change in potential. It follows that there is “little value added in estimates of potential GDP relative to simple measures of statistical trends.” (Matthew Klein puts it more bluntly in an Alphaville post discussing the paper: “‘Potential’ output forecasts are actually worthless.”) The paper proposes an alternative measure of potential output, which they suggest can distinguish between transitory demand shocks and permanent shifts in the economy’s productive capacity. This alternative measure gives a very similar estimate for the output gap as simply looking at the pre-2008 forecasts or extrapolating from the pre-2008 trend. “Our estimates imply that U.S. output remains almost 10 percentage points below potential output, leaving ample room for policymakers to close the gap through demand-side policies if they so chose to.” Personally, I ‘m a little less convinced by their positive conclusions than by their negative ones. But this paper should definitely put to the rest the idea (as in last year’s notorious CEA-chair letter) that it is obviously wrong — absurd and unserious — that a sufficient stimulus could deliver several years of 4 percent real growth, until GDP returned to its pre-recession trend. It may or may not be true, but it isn’t crazy.

Many of the arguments in my paper were also made in this valuable EPI report by Josh Bivens, reviving the old idea of a “high pressure economy”. Like me, Bivens argues that slow productivity growth is largely attributable to low investment, which in turn is due to weak demand and slow wage growth, which blunts the incentive for business to invest in labor-saving technology. One important point that Bivens makes that I didn’t, is that much past variation in productivity growth has been transitory; forecasts of future productivity growth based on the past couple of years have consistently performed worse than forecasts based on longer previous periods. So historical evidence gives us no reason see the most recent productivity slowdown as permanent. My one quibble is that he only discusses faster productivity growth and higher inflation as possible outcomes of a demand-driven acceleration in wages. This ignores the third possible effect, redistribution from from profits to wages — in fact a rise in the labor share is impossible without a period of “overfull” employment.

Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari wrote a long post last fall on “diagnosing and treating the slow recovery.” Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that he poses the question at all. There’s a widespread view that once you correct for demographics, the exceptional performance of the late 1990s, etc., there’s nothing particularly slow about this recovery — no problem to diagnose or treat.

Another more recent post by Kashkari focuses on the dangers of forcing the Fed to mechanically follow a Taylor rule for setting interest rates. By his estimate, this would have led to an additional 2.5 million unemployed people this year. It’s a good illustration of the dangers of taking the headline measures of economic performance too literally. I also like its frank acknowledgement that the Fed — like all real world forecasters — rejects rational expectations in the models it uses for policymaking.

Kashkari’s predecessor Narayan Kocherlakota — who seems to agree more with the arguments in my paper — has a couple short but useful posts on his personal blog. The first, from a year ago, is probably the best short summary of the economic debate here that I’ve seen. Perhaps the key analytic point is that following a period of depressed investment, the economy may reach full employment given the existing capital stock while it is still well short of potential. So a period of rapid wage growth would not necessarily mean that the limits of expansionary policy have ben reached, even if those wage gains were fully passed through to higher prices. His emphasis:

Because fiscal policy has been too tight, we have too little public capital. … At the same time, physical investment has been too low… Conditional on these state variables, we might well be close to full employment. … But, even though we’re close to full employment, there’s a lot of room for super-normal growth. Both capital and TFP are well below their [long run level]. The full-employment growth rate is going to be well above its long-run level for several years. We can’t conclude the economy is overheating just because it is growing quickly.

His second post focuses on the straightforward but often overlooked point that policy should take into account not just our best estimates but our uncertainty about them, and the relative risks of erring on each side. And if there is even a modest chance that more expansionary policy could permanently raise productivity, then the risks are much greater on the over-contractionary side. [1] In particular, if we are talking about fiscal stimulus, it’s not clear that there are any costs at all. “Crowding out” is normally understood to involve a rise in interest rates and a shift from private investment to public spending. In the current setting, there’s a strong case that higher interest rates at full employment would be a good thing (at least as long as we still rely on as the main tool of countercyclical policy). And it’s not obvious, to say the least, that the marginal dollar of private investment is more socially useful than many plausible forms of public spending. [2] Kashkari has a post making a similar argument in defense of his minority vote not to raise rates at the most recent FOMC meeting. (Incidentally, FOMC members blogging about their decisions is a trend to be encouraged.)

In a post from March which I missed at the time, Ryan Avent tries to square the circle of job-destroying automation and slow productivity growth. One half of the argument seems clearly right to me: Abundant labor and low wages discourage investment in productivity-raising technologies. As Avent notes, early British and even more American industrialization owe a lot to scarce labor and high wages. The second half of the argument is that labor is abundant today precisely because so much has been displaced by technology. His claim is that “robots taking the jobs” is consistent with low measured productivity growth if the people whose jobs are taken end up in a part of the economy with a much lower output per worker. I’m not sure if this works; this seems like the rare case in economics where an eloquent story would benefit from being re-presented with math.

Along somewhat similar lines, Simon Wren-Lewis points out that unemployment may fall because workers “price themselves into jobs” by accepting lower-wage (and presumably lower-productivity) jobs. But this doesn’t mean that the aggregate demand problem has been solved — instead, we’ve simply replaced open unemployment with what Joan Robinson called “disguised unemployment,” as some of people’s capacity for work continues to go to waste even while they are formally employed. “But there is a danger that central bankers would look at unemployment, … and conclude that we no longer have inadequate aggregate demand…. If demand deficiency is still a problem, this would be a huge and very costly mistake.”

Karl Smith at the Niskanen Center links this debate to the older one over the neutrality of money. Central bank interventions — and aggregate demand in general — are understood to be changes in the flow of money spending in the economy. But a lon-standing tradition in economic theory says that money should be neutral in the long run. As we are look at longer periods, changes in output and employment should depend more and more on real resources and technological capacities, and less and less on spending decisions — in the limit not at all. If you want to know why GDP fell in one quarter but rose in the next (this is something I always tell my undergraduates) you need to ask who chose to reduce their spending in the first period and who chose to increase it in the first. But if you want to know why we are materially richer than our grandparents, it would be silly to say it’s because we choose to spend more money. This is the reason why I’m a bit impatient with people who respond to the fact that, relative to the pre-2008 trend, output today has not recovered from the bottom of the recession, by saying “the trend doesn’t matter, deviations in output are always persistent.” This might be true but it’s a radical claim. It means you either take the real business cycle view that there’s no such thing as aggregate demand, even recessions are due to declines in the economy’s productive potential; or you must accept that in some substantial sense we really are richer than our grandparents because we spend more money. You can’t assert that GDP is not trend-stationary to argue against an output gap today unless you’re ready to accept these larger implications.

The invaluable Tom Walker has a fascinating post going back to even older debates, among 19th century anti-union and pro-union pamphleters, about whether there was a fixed quantity of labor to be performed and whether, in that case, machines were replacing human workers. The back and forth (more forth than back: there seem to be a lot more anti-labor voices in the archives) is fun to read, but what’s the payoff for todays’ debates?

The contemporary relevance of this excursion into the archives is that economic policy and economic thought walks on two legs. Conservative economists hypocritically but strategically embrace both the crowding out arguments for austerity and the projected lump-of-labor fallacy claims against pensions and shorter working time. They are for a “fixed amount” assumption when it suits their objectives and against it when it doesn’t. There is ideological method to their methodological madness. That consistency resolves itself into the “self-evidence” that nothing can be done.

That’s exactly right. When we ask why labor’s share has fallen so much over the past generation, we’re told it’s because of supply and demand — an increased supply of labor from China and elsewhere, and a decreased demand thanks to technology. But if it someone says that it might be a good idea then to limit the supply of labor (by lowering the retirement age, let’s say) and to discourage capital-intensive production, the response is “are you crazy? that will only make everyone poorer, including workers.” Somehow distribution is endogenous when it’s a question of shifts in favor of capital, but becomes exogenously fixed when it’s a question of reversing them.

A number of heterdox writers have identified the claim that productivity growth depends on demand as Verdoorn’s law (or the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law). For example, the Post Keynesian blogger Ramanan mentions it here and here. I admit I’m a bit dissatisfied with this “law”. It’s regularly asserted by heterodox people but you’ll scour our literature in vain looking for either a systematic account of how it is supposed to operate or quantitative evidence of how and how much (or whether) it does.

Adam Ozimek argues that the recent rise in employment should be seen as an argument for continued expansionary policy, not a shift away from it. After all, a few years ago many policymakers believed such a rise was impossible, since the decline in employment was supposed to be almost entirely structural.

Finally, Reihan Salam wants to enlist me for the socialist flank of a genuinely populist Trumpism. This is the flipside of criticism I’ve sometimes gotten for making this argument — doesn’t it just provide intellectual ammunition for the Bannon wing of the administration and its calls for vast infrastructure spending, which is also supposed to boost demand and generate much faster growth? Personally I think you need to make the arguments for what you think is true regardless of their political valence. But I might worry about this more if I believed there was even a slight chance that Trump might try to deliver for his working-class supporters.

[1] Kocherlakota talks about total factor productivity. I prefer to focus on labor productivity because it is based on directly observable quantities, whereas TFP depends on estimates not only of the capital stock but of various unobservable parameters. The logic of the argument is the same either way.

[2] I made similar arguments here.

EDIT: My comments on the heterodox literature on the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law were too harsh. I do feel this set of ideas is underdeveloped, but there is more there than my original post implied. I will try to do a proper post on this work at some point.

The Big Question for Macroeconomic Policy: Is This Really Full Employment?

Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog. This is a summary of my new paper What Recovery? The Case for Continued Expansionary Policy, also discussed in Neil Irwin’s July 26 article in the Times.

“Right now,” wrote Senator Chuck Schumer in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, “millions of unemployed or underemployed people, particularly those without a college degree, could be brought back into the labor force” with appropriate government policies. With this seemingly anodyne point, Schumer took sides in a debate that has sharply divided economists and policymakers: Is the US economy today operating at potential, with enough spending to make full use of its productive capacity? Or is there still substantial slack, unused capacity that could be put to work if someone — households, businesses or governments — decided to spend more? Is there an aggregate-demand problem that government should be trying to solve?

It’s difficult to answer this question because the economic signals seem to point in conflicting directions. Despite the recession officially ending in June 2009 and the economy enjoying steady growth for the past eight years, GDP is still far below the pre-2008 trend. If we compare GDP to forecasts made before the recession, the gap that opened up during the recession has not closed at all — in fact, it continues to get wider. Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate — probably the most watched indicator for the state of aggregate demand — is down to 4.4%, well below the level that was considered full employment even a few years ago. But this positive performance only partially reflects an increase in the number of Americans with jobs; mostly it comes from a decline in the size of the labor force — people who have or are seeking jobs. The fraction of the adult population employed is down to 60 percent from 63 percent a decade ago (and nearly 65 percent at the end of the 1990s).

Is this decline in the fraction of people employed the inevitable result of an aging population and similar demographic changes, or is it a sign that, despite the low measured unemployment rate, the economy is still far short of full employment? The Federal Reserve — one of the main sites of macroeconomic policy — has already indicated its belief that full employment has been reached by raising interest rates 3 times since December 2016. Fed Chair and Janet Yellen are evidently convinced that the economy has reached its potential — that, given the real resources available, output and employment are as high as can reasonably be expected.

Other policymakers have been divided on the question, in ways that often cut across partisan lines. Senator Schumer’s statement — that the decline in employment is not an inevitable trend but rather a problem that government can and should solve — is a sign of new clarity coming to this murky debate. Along with his call for $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending, it’s an important acknowledgement that, despite the progress made since 2008, the country remains far from full employment.

In a new paper out this week, we at the Roosevelt Institute offer support for the emerging consensus that the economy needs policies to boost demand. The paper reviews the available data on where the economy is relative to its potential. We find that the balance of evidence suggests there is still a great deal of space for more expansionary policy.

We offer several lines of argument in support of this conclusion.

GDP has not recovered from the recession. GDP remains about 10 percent below both the long-term trend and the level that was predicted by the CBO and other forecasts prior to the 2008–2009 recession. There is no precedent in the postwar period for such a persistent decline in output. During the sixty years between 1947 and 2007, growth lost in recessions was always regained in the subsequent recovery.

The aging population does not explain low labor force participation. It is true that an aging population should contribute to lower employment, since older people are less likely to work than younger people. But this simple demographic story cannot explain the full fall in employment. Starting from the employment peak in 2000, aging trends only explain about half the decrease in employment that has actually occurred. And there are good reasons to think that even this overstates the role of demographics. First, during the same period, education levels have increased. Historically, higher education has been associated with higher employment rates, just as a share of elderly people has been associated with less employment; statistically, these two effects should just about cancel out. Second, the post-recession fall in employment rates is not concentrated in older age groups, but among people in their 20s — something that a demographic story cannot explain.

The weak economy has held back productivity. About half the shortfall in GDP relative to the pre-2008 trend is explained by exceptionally slow productivity growth — that is, slow growth in output per worker. While many people assume that productivity is the result of technological progress outside the reach of macroeconomic policy, there are good reasons to think that the productivity slowdown is at least in part due to weak demand. Among the many possible links: Business investment, which is essential to raising productivity, has been extraordinarily weak over the past decade, and economists have long believed that demand is a central factor driving investment. And slow wage growth — a sign of labor-market weakness — reduces the incentive to adopt productivity-boosting technology.

Only a demand story makes sense. The overall economic picture is hard to understand except in terms of a continued demand shortfall. If employment is falling due to demographics, that should be associated with rising productivity and wages, as firms compete for scarce labor. If productivity growth is slow because there aren’t any more big innovations to make, that should be associated with faster employment growth and low profits, as firms can no longer find new ways to replace labor with capital. But neither of these scenarios match the actual economy. And both stories predict higher inflation, rather than the persistent low inflation we have actually encouraged. So even if supply-side stories explain individual pieces of macroeconomic data, it is almost impossible to make sense of the big picture without a large fall in aggregate demand.

Austerity is riskier than stimulus. Finally, we argue that, if policymakers are uncertain about how much space the economy has for increased demand, they should consider the balance of risks on each side. Too much stimulus would lead to higher inflation — easy to reverse, and perhaps even desirable, given the continued shortfall of inflation relative to the official 2 percent target. An overheated economy would also see real wages rise faster than productivity. While policymakers often see this as something to avoid, the decline in the wage share over the past decade cannot be reversed without a period of such “excess” wage growth. On the other hand, if there is still an output gap, failure to take aggressive steps to close it means foregoing literally trillions of dollars of useful goods and services and condemning millions of people to joblessness.

Fortunately, the solution to a demand shortfall is no mystery. Since Keynes, economists have known that when an economy is operating below its potential, all that is needed is for someone to spend more money. Of course, it’s best if that spending also serves some useful social purpose; exactly what that should look like will surely be the subject of much debate to come. But the first step is to agree on the problem. Today’s economy is still far short of its potential. We can do better.

Links and Thoughts for March 15, 2017

Do you guys know The Death Ship? B. Traven’s first novel, the only one not set in Mexico? It begins with an American sailor who goes ashore in the Netherlands, gets distracted as you do, his ship leaves. The Dutch don’t want him, they send him across the border to Germany. The Germans don’t want him, send him to Belgium, the Belgians send him to France. The French send him back to the Netherlands, where he ends up on the eponymous ship. It’s a good book. I was just thinking of it the other day, for some reason.

Against the sonderweg. Here is a fascinating article on the pre-history of Swedish social democracy. Contrary to claims of Swedish “sonderweg”, or special path, toward egalitarianism, Erik Bengtsson convincingly shows that until the 1930s, Sweden was not especially egalitarian relative to other West European countries or the US. Both economically and politically, it was at the unequal end of the European continuum, and considerably less equal than the US. “In 1900, it was one of the countries in Western Europe with the most restricted suffrage, and wealth was more unequally distributed than in the United States. …The more likely explanation of Swedish twentieth-century equality, rather than any deep roots, is the extraordinary degree of popular organization in the labour movement and other popular movements” in the 210th century. Income and wealth distribution were similar to France or Britain, while the franchise was more restricted than in any other major West European country. Up through World War One, Swedish politic was dominated by the same kind of “iron and rye” alliance of feudal landowners with big industrialists as Bismarkian Germany. “The exceptional equality of Swedish economy and society c. 1920-1990 did not arrive as the logical conclusion of a long historical continuity”; rather, it was the result of an exceptionally effective mass mobilization against what was previously an unusually inegalitarian state.

More speculatively, Bengtsson suggests that it was precisely the exceptionally strong and persistent domination by a small elite that created the conditions for Swedish social democracy: “the late democratization of Sweden” may have “fostered a liberal-socialist democratizing alliance … [between] petit bourgeois liberals and working-class socialists … unlike Germany, where the greater inclusion of lower-middle class men meant that middle class liberals and haute bourgeois market liberals could unite around a program of economic liberalism.” It’s a neat inversion of Werner Sombart’s famous argument that “the free gift of the ballot” prior to the appearance of an organized working class was the reason no powerful socialist party ever developed in the United States. Bengttson’s convincing claim that Swedish egalitarianism was not the result of a deep-rooted history but of a deliberate political project to transform a previously inegalitarian society, has obvious relevance for today.

High productivity in France. While we are debunking myths about social democracy, here is Thomas Piketty on French productivity. “If we calculate the average labour productivity by dividing the GDP … by the total number of hours worked … we then find that France is at practically the same level as the United States and Germany, … more than 25% higher than the United Kingdom or Italy.” And here’s a 2014 post from Merijn Knibbe making the same point.

Against Hamilton. In The Baffler, Matt Stoller argues that Hamilton is overrated. Richard Kreitner makes a similar case in The Nation, with an interestingly off-center focus on Paterson, New Jersey. Christian Parenti (my soon-to-be colleague at John Jay College) made the case for Hamilton not long ago in the Jacobin; he’s writing an introduction to a new edition of Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures. This is not a new debate. Twenty years ago, as the books editor of In These Times, I published a piece by Dan Lazare making a similar pro-Hamilton case; it was one of the things that Jimmy Weinstein fired me for.

My sense of these arguments is that one side says that Hamilton was a predecessor of today’s Koch brothers-neocon right, an anti-democratic militarist who believed the country should be governed by and for the top 1 percent; his opponent Jefferson must therefore have been a democrat and anti-imperialist. The other side says that Jefferson was a predecessor of today’s Tea Party right, an all-in racist and defender of slavery who opposed cities, industry and progress; his opponent Hamilton must therefore have been an abolitionist, an open-minded cosmopolitan and a liberal. I am far from an expert on early American politics. But in both cases, I think, the first half of the argument is right, but the second half is much more doubtful. There are political heroes in circa-1800 America, but to find them we are going to have look beyond the universe of people represented on dollar bills.

Against malinvestment. Brad Delong has, I think, the decisive criticism of malinvestment theories of the Great Recession and subsequent slow recovery. In terms of the volume of investment based on what turned out to be false expectations, and the subsequent loss of asset value, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s was much bigger than the housing bubble. So why were the macroeconomic consequences so much milder?

Selective memory in Germany. Another valuable piece of political pre-history, this one of German anti-Keynesianism by Jörg Bibow. Among a number of valuable points, he describes how German economic debate has been shaped by a strangely selective history of the 20th century, from which depression and mass unemployment – the actual context for the rise of Nazism — have been erased. Failures of economic policy can only be imagined as runaway inflation.

The once and future bull market in bonds. Here is an interesting conversation between Srinivas Thiruvadanthai of the Levy Center and Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg, on the future of the bond market. Thiruvadanthai’s forecast: interest rates can fall quite a bit more in the coming decades. He makes several interesting and, to me, convincing points. First, that in an environment of large balance sheets, we can’t analyze the effects of things like interest rate changes just in terms of the real sector. The main effect of higher rates today wouldn’t be to discourage borrowing, but to raise the burden of existing debt. He also makes the converse argument, which I’m less sure about — that after another round or two of fiscal expansion and unconventional monetary policy, public sector debt could make up a large share of private balance sheets, with proportionately less private debt. Under those conditions, an increase in interest rates would be much less contractionary, or even expansionary, creating the possibility for much larger rate hikes if central banks continue to use conventional policy to stabilize demand.

More generally, he points out that, historically, the peacetime inflation of the 1970s is a unique event over the hundreds of years in which bond markets have existed, so it’s a little problematic to build a whole body of macroeconomic theory around that one episode, as we’ve done. And, he says, capitalism doesn’t normally face binding supply constraints — the vast majority of firms, the vast majority of the time, would be happy to sell more at their current prices. And he expresses some — much-needed, IMO — skepticism about whether central banks can in general hit an inflation target, reliably or at all.

Positive money? Here is a vigorous critique of 100 percent reserve backed, or positive, money. (An idea which is a staple of monetary reformers going back at least to David Hume, and perhaps most famous as the Chicago Plan.) I don’t have a settled view on this idea. I do think it’s interesting that the reforms the positive money people are calling for, are intended to produce essentially the tight link between public liabilities and private assets which MMT people claim already exists. And which Thiruvadanthai thinks we might inadvertently move toward in the future.

Captial flows: still unstable. Here’s a useful piece in VoxEU on the volatility of capital flows. Barry Eichengrreen and his coauthors confirm the conventional wisdom among heterodox critics of the Washington Consensus: free movement of finance is the enemy of macroeconomic stability. FDI flows — which are linked to the coordination of real productive activity across borders — are reasonably stable; but portfolio flows remain as prone to sudden stops and reversals as they’ve always been.

Killing conscience. Over at Evonomics, Lynn Stout makes the important point that any kind of productive activity depends on trust, norms, and the disinterested desire to do one’s job well – what Michelet called “the professional conscience.” These are undermined by the creation of formal incentives, especially monetary incentives. Incentives obstruct, discourage, even punish, the spontaneous “prosocial” behavior that actually makes organizations work, while encouraging the incentivized people to game the system in perverse ways. under socialism, to speak of someone’s interests will be considered an insult; to give someone incentives will be considered an act of violence.

It’s a good piece; the one thing I would add is that one reason incentives are used so widely despite their drawbacks is that they are are about control, as well as (or rather than) efficiency. Workers’ consciences are very powerful tools at eliciting effort; but the boss who depends on them is implicitly acknowledging a moral claim by those workers, and faces the prospect that conscience may at some point require something other than following orders.

The deficit is not the problem. Jared Bernstein makes the same argument about trade that I made in my Roosevelt Institute piece a few months ago. The macroeconomic-policy question posed by US trade deficits should not be, how do we move our trade towards balance? It should be: how do we ensure that the financial inflows that are the counterpart of the deficit, are invested productively?

We simply do not know. Nick Rowe has always been one of my favorite economics bloggers – a model for making rigorous arguments in a clear, accessible way. I don’t read him as consistently as I used to, or comment there any more — vita breve and all that — but he still is writing good stuff. Here he makes the common-sensical point that someone considering investment in long-lived capital goods does not face symmetric risks. “A recession means that capital services are wasted at the margin, because the extra output cannot be sold. But booms are not good, because a bigger queue of customers does nothing for profitability if you cannot produce more to meet the extra demand.” So uncertainty about future economic outcomes — or, what is not quite the same thing, greater expected variance — will depress the level of desired investment. I don’t know if Nick was thinking of Keynes — consciously or unconsciously when he wrote the post, but it’s very much in a Keynesian spirit. I’m thinking especially of the 1937 article “The General Theory of Employment,” where Keynes observes that to carry out investment according to the normal dictates of economic rationality, we must “assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than a candid examination of past experience would show it to have been hitherto.”

The health policy tightrope. The Republican plan health care plan, the CBO says, would increase the number of uninsured Americans by 24 million. I don’t know any reason to question this number. By some estimates, this will result in 40,000 additional deaths a year. By the same estimate, the Democratic status quo leaves 28 million people uninsured, implying a similar body count. Paul Ryan’s idea that health care should be a commodity to be bought in the market is cruel and absurd but the Democrats’ idea that heath insurance should be a commodity bought in the market is not obviously less so. Personally, I’m struggling to find the right balance between these two sets of facts. I suppose the first should get more weight right now, but I can’t let go of the second. Adam Gaffney does an admirable job managing this tightrope act in his assessment of the Obama health care legacy in Jacobin. (But I think he’s absolutely right, strategically, to focus on the Republicans for the Guardian’s different readership .)

On other blogs, other wonders.

I’m looking forward to reading Ann Pettifor’s new book on money. In the meantime, here’s an interview with her in Vogue.

Towards the Garfield left.

The end of austerity is perfectly feasible in Spain.

“Underfunded” doesn’t mean what it sounds like. Based on the excellent Sgouros piece I linked to earlier.

Uber is doomed.

The decline of blue-collar jobs. I admit I was surprised to see what a large share of employment manufacturing accounted for a generation ago.

Perry Anderson: Why the system will win. Very worth reading, like everything Anderson writes. But too sympathetic to anti-immigrant politics.

The ECB should give money directly to European citizens.

Manchester by the Sea is a good movie. But Margaret is a great movie.

Two Papers in Progress

There are two new papers on the articles page on this site. Both are work in progress – they haven’t been submitted anywhere yet.

[I’ve taken the debt-distribution paper down. It’s being revised.]

The Evolution of State-Local Balance Sheets in the US, 1953-2013

Slides

The first paper, which I presented in January in Chicago, is a critical assessment of the idea of a close link between income distribution and household debt. The idea is that rising debt is the result of rising inequality as lower-income households borrowed to maintain rising consumption standards in the face of stagnant incomes; this debt-financed consumption was critical to supporting aggregate demand in the period before 2008. This story is often associated with Ragnuram Rajan and Mian and Sufi but is also widely embraced on the left; it’s become almost conventional wisdom among Post Keynesian and Marxist economists. In my paper, I suggest some reasons for skepticism. First, there is not necessarily a close link between rising aggregate debt ratios and higher borrowing, and even less with higher consumption. Debt ratios depend on nominal income growth and interest payments as well as new borrowing, and debt mainly finances asset ownership, not current consumption. Second, aggregate consumption spending has not, contrary to common perceptions, risen as a share of GDP; it’s essentially flat since 1980. The apparent rise in the consumption share is entirely due to the combination of higher imputed noncash expenditure, such as owners’ equivalent rent; and third party health care spending (mostly Medicare). Both of these expenditure flows are treated as household consumption in the national accounts. But neither involves cash outlays by households, so they cannot affect household balance sheets. Third, household debt is concentrated near the top of the income distribution, not the bottom. Debt-income ratios peak between the 85th and 90th percentiles, with very low ratios in the lower half of the distribution. Most household debt is owed by the top 20 percent by income. Finally, most studies of consumption inequality find that it has risen hand-in-hand with income inequality; it appears that stagnant incomes for most households have simply meant stagnant living standards. To the extent demand has been sustained by “excess” consumption, it was more likely by the top 5 percent.

The paper as written is too polemical. I need to make the tone more neutral, tentative, exploratory. But I think the points here are important and have not been sufficiently grappled with by almost anyone claiming a strong link between debt and distribution.

The second paper is on state and local debt – I’ve blogged a bit about it here in the past few months. The paper uses budget and balance sheet data from the census of governments to make two main points. First, rising state and local government debt does not imply state and local government budget deficits. higher debt does not imply higher deficits: Debt ratios can also rise either because nominal income growth slows, or because governments are accumulating assets more rapidly. For the state and local sector as a whole, both these latter factors explain more of the rise in debt ratios than does the fiscal balance. (For variation in debt ratios across state governments, nominal income growth is not important, but asset accumulation is.) Second, despite balanced budget requirements, state and local governments do show substantial variation in fiscal balances, with the sector as a whole showing deficits and surpluses up to almost one percent of GDP. But unlike the federal government, the state and local governments accommodate fiscal imbalances entirely by varying the pace of asset accumulation. Credit-market borrowing does not seem to play any role — either in the aggregate or in individual states — in bridging gaps between current expenditure and revenue.

I will try to blog some more about both these papers in the coming days. Needless to say, comments are very welcome.

Demand and Productivity

I’m picking up, after some months, the project I was working on over the summer on potential output. Obviously the political context is different now. But the questions of what potential output actually means, how tightly it binds, and how close the economy is to it at any given moment, are not going away. Previous entries: one, two, three, four, and five.

You’ve probably heard the story about Ed Rensi, the former McDonald’s CEO who claimed the company’s move to replace cashier’s with self-serve kiosks was a response to minimum wage increases.

“I told you so,” he writes. “In 2013, when the Fight for $15 was still in its growth stage, I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives.”

Is this for real? Maybe not: The shift toward kiosks has been happening for a while, so it’s not just a response to the recent minimum wage hikes; and it may not end up reducing labor costs anyway.

But let’s say the move is as as Rensi claims. Then we should call it what it is: an increase in labor productivity. With fewer workers McDonald’s will produce just as many hamburgers; in other words, production per worker will be higher. [1]

As I’ve suggested, this sort of thing is a real problem for a certain strand of minimum wage advocacy. Advocates like to point to productivity gains in response to higher wages as an argument in their favor. (The gains are usually imagined in terms of loyalty, motivation, lower turnover, etc. rather than machines, but functionally it’s the same.) But productivity gains can only reduce the job losses from a minimum wage increase if those losses are large; they are not consistent with a story in which employment stays the same. [2]

But at the macro level, this dynamic has different implications. If the McDonald’s case is typical — if higher labor costs regularly lead to higher productivity — then we need to rethink our idea of supply constraints. There is more space for expansionary policy than we usually think.

Let’s start at the beginning. Suppose there is some policy change, or some random event, that boosts desired spending in the economy. It could be more government spending, it could be lower interest rates, it could be a rise in exports. What happens then?

In the conventional story, higher spending normally leads to greater production of goods and services, which in turn requires higher employment. This leaves fewer people unemployed. Lower unemployment increases the bargaining power of workers, forcing employers to bid up nominal wages. [3] These higher wages are passed on to prices, leading to higher inflation. When inflation reaches whatever level is considered price stability, then we say the economy is at full employment, or at potential output. (In this story the two are equivalent.) If spending continues to rise past this point, the responsible authorities (normally the central bank) will intervene to bring it back down.

This is the story you’ll find in any good undergraduate macroeconomics textbook. It’s a reasonable story, as far as these things go. In the strong form it’s usually given in, it implies a hard limit to how much demand can increase before inflation starts rising unacceptably. Once the pool of unemployed workers falls to the “full employment” level, any further increase in employment will lead to rapid increases in money wages, which will be passed on one for one to inflation.

One place this chain can break is that new workers are not necessarily drawn from the ranks of the currently unemployed — that is, if the size of the laborforce is endogenous. Insofar as people counted as out of the laborforce are in fact available for employment (or net immigration responds to demand), an increase in output doesn’t have to reduce the ranks of the officially unemployed. In other words, the official unemployment rate may underestimate the space available for raising output via increased employment. This motivates the question of how much the the fall in laborforce participation since 2007 is due to demographics, and how much is due to weak demand.

The conventional story can also break down at two other places if productivity growth is endogenous. First, output can increase without a proportionate increase in employment. And second, wages can rise without a proportionate rise in prices.

It’s useful to think about this in terms of a couple of accounting identities, which in my opinion should be part of every macroeconomics textbook. [4] The first is obvious (but worth spelling out), the second a little less so:

(1) growth in demand = percent change in labor productivity + percent change in employment + inflation

(2) percent change in nominal wages = percent change in labor productivity + percent change in labor share + inflation

The standard story is that productivity change on its own due to technology, and the labor shared is fixed and can be ignored in this context. If productivity and labor share can be taken as given, then an increase in demand (money spent on final goods and services) must lead to higher inflation if either employment fails to rise, or if it rises only with higher wages. In this story, if nominal wages rise thanks to a lower unemployment rats, that will pass on one for one to inflation. Pick up an advanced undergraduate textbook like Blanchard or Krugman or Carlin and Soskice, and you will find a Phillips curve of exactly this form, with exactly this story behind it. [5] Policy discussions at central banks conducted in same terms.

This is what underlies idea of hard supply constraints. Output growth is dictated by the fixed, exogenous growth of the laborforce and of productivity. If changes in demand push the economy off that fixed trajectory, all you’ll get is higher or lower inflation. Concretely: To keep inflation at 2 percent, unemployment must be such as to generate nominal wage growth 2 points above the technologically-determined growth of productivity.

But an alternative story is that variation in demand can lead to adjustment in one of the other terms. One possibility is that the laborforce adjusts, as participation rates vary in response to demand conditions. This is what is most often meant by hysteresis: persistent deviations in unemployment from the “natural” level lead to people entering or exiting the laborforce. That implies that even when headline unemployment rates are fairly low, further increases in employment may be possible without a rise in wages. Another possibility is that while higher employment will lead to (or require) higher wages, the wage increase is not passed on to prices but comes at the expense of profits instead. This is Anwar Shaikh’s classical Phillips curve; I’ve written about it here before.

A third possibility is that higher wages are accompanied by higher productivity. Again, this appears as a problem when we are talking about wage increases from legislation, union contracts, or similar developments. But it’s not a problem if the wage increases are thanks to low unemployment. In this case, the joint movement of wages and productivity just means that output can rise higher — that supply constraints are softer. That’s what I want to focus on now.

There are a number of reasons why productivity might rise with wages. Some of them simply amount to mismeasurement of employment — it appears that output per worker is rising but really the effective number of workers is. Others are more fundamental. If productivity responds strongly and persistently to demand, it blurs the distinction between aggregate supply and aggregate demand, to the point that it’s not clear what “potential output” even means.

Suppose we do find a consistent pattern where, if demand is strong, unemployment is low, and wages are rising rapidly, then productivity growth is high. What could be happening?

1. Increased hours. If we measure productivity as output per worker, as we usually do, then an increase in average hours worked will show up as an increase in productivity. There is a cyclical component to this — in recessions, employers reduce hours as well as laying off workers. According to the BLS, seasonally adjusted weekly hours fell from 34.4 prior to the recession to a low of 33.7 in summer 2009. While a 2 percent fall in hours might seem small, it’s a big change in less than two years, especially when you consider that real output per worker normally rises by less than 2 percent a year.

2. Workers moving into real jobs from pseudo-employment or disguised unemployment. In any economy there are activities that are formally classified as jobs but are not employment in any substantive sense — you can take these “jobs” without anyone making a decision to hire you, and they don’t come with a wage or any similar claim on any established production process. Joan Robinson’s examples were someone who gathers firewood in a poor country, or sells pencils on streetcorners in a richer one. You could add work in family businesses and various kinds of self-employment and commission-based work to this category. In countries with traditional rural sectors — not the US — work on a family farm is the big item here. These activities absorb people who are unable to find formal jobs; the marginal product of additional workers here is normally very low. So if higher demand draws people from this kind of disguised unemployment back into regular jobs, measured productivity will rise.

3. Workers may be more fully utilized at their existing jobs. Because hiring and firing is costly, business don’t immediately adjust staffing in response to changes in sales. when demand falls, businesses will initially keep some redundant workers because paying them is cheaper than laying them off and replacing them later; and when demand rises, businesses will first try to get more work out of existing employees rather than paying the costs of hiring more. Some of this takes the form of the hours adjustment above, but some of it simply takes the form of hiring “too little” or “too much” labor for the current level of production. These changes in the utilization of existing labor will show up as changes in labor productivity.

4. Higher wages may lead to more capital-intensive production. This is the McDonald’s story: When labor gets more expensive (or scarcer), businesses use more capital instead. This is presumably what people mean when they say “Econ 101” shows that rising wages lead to less employment (assuming they mean anything at all). This may be seen as a negative when it’s a question of raising wages through legislation or unions, but it shouldn’t be when it’s a question of rising wages due to labor scarcity. Insofar as businesses can substitute machines for labor, rising wages will not be passed on to prices, so there is more space to push unemployment down.

5. Productivity-boosting innovations may be more likely when demand is strong and wages rise. This is a variant of the previous story. Now instead of high wage leading business to adopt more capital-intensive techniques from those already available, they redirect innovation toward developing new labor-saving techniques. Conceptually this is not a big difference, but it implies a different signal in the data. In the previous case we would expect the productivity improvements to be associated with higher investment and to be concentrated at the firms actually experiencing higher wages costs; in this case they might not be.

6. The composition of employment may shift toward higher-productivity sectors. This might happen for either of two reasons. First, higher wages will disproportionately raise costs for more labor-intensive sectors; these higher costs may be absorbed by profits or by prices, but either way they will presumably depress growth in those sectors to the benefit of less labor-intensive, more productive ones. Second, it may so happen that the more income-elastic sectors are also higher-productivity ones. In the short run this is presumably true since durables and investment goods are both capital-intensive and income-elastic. Over the longer run, the opposite is more likely — the composition of demand slowly but steadily shifts toward lower-productivity sectors.

7. The composition of employment may shift toward higher-productivity firms. This sounds similar but it’s a different story. Technical change isn’t an ineffable output-raising essence diffusing across society, it’s embodied in specific new production processes and new businesses — Schumpeter’s new plant, new firms, new men. This means that productivity increases often require new or growing firms to attract workers away from established ones. Given the “frictions” in the labor market, this will require offering a wage significantly above the going rate. And on the other side the fact that the least productive firms can’t afford to pay higher wages will cause them to decline or exit, which also raises average productivity. When wages are flat, on the other hand, low-productivity firms can continue operating. In this sense, higher wages are an integral part of productivity growth. [6]

8. There may be increasing returns in production. It may literally be the case that output per worker rises — at the firm, industry or economy-wide level — when the number of workers rises. Or this may be a more abstract version of some of the stories above. It’s worth noting that increasing returns is an area where the intuitions of people with economics training diverge sharply from people who look at the economy through other lenses. To almost anyone except an economist, it’s obvious that costs normally fall as more of something is produced. [7]

All of these stories imply that higher demand should lead to higher measured labor productivity. But to figure out how strong this relationship is in reality, we’ll look at different data depending on which of these stories we think it works through.

Another important difference between the stories is they imply different domains over which the relationship should operate. The first three suggest a more or less immediate response of productivity to changes in demand, but also one that cannot continue indefinitely. There’s limits to how much hours per worker can rise and how much additional effort can be extracted from the existing workforce, and a limited pool of disguised unemployment to draw from. (The last is not true in developing countries, where the “latent reserve army” in subsistence agriculture may be effectively unlimited.) The other mechanisms are presumably slower, requiring a sustained “high-pressure economy.” With these stories, increased demand may push the economy up against supply constraints, with rising inflation, bottlenecks, and so on; but if it keeps pushing against them, eventually they’ll give. In this case, potential output is a medium-term constraint — over longer periods it can adjust to actual output, rather than the reverse. So in the opposite of conventional story, a temporary increase in inflation can lead to a permanent increase in output. People like Laurence Ball say exactly this about hysteresis, but they are usually thinking of the longer-run adjustment coming on the laborforce side.

If we follow this a step further, we could even say that in the long run, the big problem isn’t that excessively high wages do lead to the substitution of capital for labor but that excessively low wages don’t. People like Arthur Lewis argue that it’s the low wages of poor countries that have led to low productivity there, and not vice versa; there’s a well-known argument that the reason the industrial revolution happened first in Britain rather than in China or India (or Italy or France) is not that that the necessary technical innovations were present only in Britain. They were present many places; it was the uniquely high cost of British labor that made them profitable to adopt for production.

I think that productivity does respond to demand. I think this is a good reason to doubt whether the US economy close to “potential output” today, and to doubt what, if anything, this concept actually means. But I also think we need to be clearer about how they are linked concretely. If we want to tell a story about productivity responding to demand, it makes a difference which of the stories above we have in mind. Heterodox people, it seems to me, are too quick to just invoke Verdoorn’s law (productivity rises with output), and justify it with some vague comments about how labor is used more efficiently when it is scarce. [8] Does this apparent law work via substitution of machines for labor, or through fuller utilization of existing employees’ times, or through reallocation of labor to more productive firms and/or industries, or through a labor-saving-bias in technical change, or pure increasing returns, or what? If you’re just making a formal model it may not matter. But if we want to connect the model to concrete historical developments, it certainly does.

Personally, I am most interested in the reallocation stories. They shift our idea of the fundamental constraint on capitalist economies from biophysical resources, to coordination. The great difficulty for any program of raise or transform production — industrialization, wartime mobilization, decarbonization — isn’t the limited supply of “real” resources, but the speed at which people’s productive activity can be redirected in a coordinated way. This connects with the historical fact that the more rapid and the larger scale is economic development, the more it requires some form of central planning. And it implies that at the most basic level, what the capitalist provides is not money or means of production, but cooperation.

To tell this story, it would be nice if big shifts in productivity growth took the form of changes in the composition of employment, rather than higher output per worker in given jobs. That may or may not be there in the data. For the more immediate question of how much space there is in the US for further expansion, it doesn’t matter as much which of these stories is at work, as long as we can show that at least some of them are. [9]

In the next post or two — which I hope to write in the next week, but we’ll see — I will ask what we can say about the link between demand and productivity based on historical US data. In particular, it’s fairly straightforward to decompose changes in output per worker into three components: within-industry output per hour, within-industry hours per worker, and shifts in the employment between industries. Splitting up productivity growth this way cannot, of course, directly establish a causal link with demand. but it can help clarify which stories are plausible and which are not.

[1] Throughout this discussion, I use “productivity” to mean labor productivity — output per worker or per hour. There is also “total factor productivity,” which purports to be a measure of output for a given input of labor and capital. This concept, which IMF chief economist Paul Romer memorably called “phlogiston,” is measured as the residual from a production function — the output growth the function does not explain. Since construction of the production function requires several unobseravable parameters, total factor productivity cannot be derived even in principle from economic data. It’s a fun toy for economic theory but useless for describing the behavior of actual economies.

Nonetheless it is widely used — for instance by the CBO as discussed here. As Nathan Tankus pointed out to me the other day, under the ARRA Medicare payments to hospitals are reduced each year based on an estimate of TFP growth for the economy as a whole. It’s a great example of the crackpot wonkery of the law’s authors.

[2] Unless productivity improvements all take the form of higher quality, rather than higher output per worker.

[3] This unemployment-money wages relationship was the original Phillips curve, but it’s better now to refer to it as a wage curve.

[4] It’s a topic for another time, but I think it would be very natural to replace the “aggregate supply” framework of the textbooks with these two identities.

[5] Other textbooks, like Mankiw, base the wage-unemployment relationship on a labor-supply curve rather than a bargaining relationship. Graduate textbooks, of course, replace the institutional detail of workers and employers with a single representative agent, in order to make more space for playing with math.

[6] Andrew Glyn and his coauthors have a good discussion of this in the context of the postwar boom in Capitalism Since 1945 (p. 122-123).

[7] For example, here’s Laurie Winkless in Science and the City, which happens to be sitting nearby:

Bessemer’s system rapidly began to change the world of steel manufacturing, and by 1875, costs had dropped to $32 (£23) per tonne. as always, in the supply-and-demand equation, the availability of cheap, high-quality steel made it immensely popular, leading to another huge drop in the price per tonne.

Winkless has made the mistake of studying the actual history of the steel history. If she were an economist, she would know that in the world of supply and demand, immense popularity makes prices rise, not fall!

[8] In Shaikh’s Capitalism, for example, there are a number of models that rely on the claim that productivity rises with output. It’s a big book and I may well have missed a part where he explains more fully why this is true. But as far as I can tell, all he says is that higher unit labor costs “provide a strong incentive for firms to raise productivity.”

[9] The politics of this question under Trump are for another time. But certainly Jeff Spross is right that we don’t want to oppose Trump’s (dubious) plans for a big stimulus by embracing the politics of austerity. We should not respond to Trump by reflexively insisting that the US is already at full employment, and by mocking “vulgar Keynesians” who think there might still be problems for macro policy to solve.

EDIT: Fixed the footnote numbering, which was garbled before.

Can We Blame Low Labor Participation on Past High Unemployment?

Fifth post in a series. Posts one, two, three and four.

We know that US GDP fell sharply in 2008-2009. We know that none of that decline has been made up by faster growth since the recession: GDP today is about 14 percent below the pre-2008 trend, a gap that shows no sign of closing. We also know that one-third of that shortfall is accounted for by slower productivity growth, and the remaining two-thirds by slower employment growth.

To put numbers on it: Over the past decade, US employment rose by a total of 6 percent, or about 0.5 percent per year. This is about half the rate of employment growth over the last ten years before the recession, and less a quarter the average rate for the postwar period as a whole. 2000-2010 was the first decade since the Depression in which US employment actually fell. Since the unemployment rate today is very close to that of ten years ago, this whole slowdown is accounted for by a decline in laborforce participation.

Employment growth, unlike productivity growth, was already slowing prior to the recession, and pre-recession forecasts predicted a further slowdown comparable to what actually occurred. This is consistent with a widely-held view that the slowdown in employment is the result of demographic and other structural factors, not of the recession or demand weakness in general. In the next couple posts, I want to take a critical look at this claim. How confident should we be that employment would be the same today in a counterfactual world where the 2008-2009 didn’t happen? How responsive might employment be to stronger demand going forward? And more broadly, how much do changes in laborforce participation seem to be explained by more or less exogenous factors like demographics, and how much by demand and labor-market conditions?

The rest of this post is about an approach to this question that did not produce the results I was hoping for. So I probably won’t include this material in whatever paper comes out of these posts. But as we feel our way into reality it’s important to note down the dead ends as well as the routes that seem promising. And even though this exercise didn’t help much in answering the big questions posed in the previous paragraph, it’s still interesting in its own right.

Can the fall in laborforce participation be explained as a direct, predictable effect of the rise in unemployment during the recession? It seems like maybe it can. The starting point is the observation that unemployed workers are much more likely to drop out of the laborforce than people with jobs are. You can see this clearly in the BLS tables on employment transitions. As the figure below shows, about 3 percent of employed people exit the laborforce each month, a fraction that has been remarkably stable since the data begins in 1990. Meanwhile, about 20 percent of unemployed people drop out of the laborforce each month.

On the face of it, this 17-point difference suggests an important role for the unemployment rate in changes in labor force participation. All else equal, each year-point of additional unemployment should reduce the labor-force participation rate by two points. (0.17 x 12 = 2.) So you would think that much of the recent fall in laborforce participation could be explained simply by the rise in unemployment during the recession.

When I thought of this it seemed very logical. It would be easy to do a counterfactual exercise, I thought, showing how laborforce participation would have evolved simply based on the historical transition rates between employment, unemployment and out of the laborforce, and the actual evolution of employment and unemployment. If you could show that something like the actual fall in laborforce participation was a predictable result of the rise in unemployment during the recession, that would support the idea that demand rather than “structural” factors are at work. And even if it wasn’t that strong positive evidence, it would suggest skepticism about similar counterfactual exercises using historical participation rates by age and so on.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Unemployed people are much more likely to leave the workforce than employed people, so a rise in unemployment should naturally lead to a decline in laborforce participation. But as the figure below shows, the numbers don’t work.

What I did was start with the populations of employe, unemployed and not-in-the-laborforce people at the end of the recession in December 2009. Then I created a counterfactual scenario for the remaining period using the actual transition rates between employment and unemployment but the pre-recession average rates for transitions between not in the workforce and unemployment and employment. In other words, just knowing the average rates that people move between employment, unemployment and out of the workforce, and the actual shifts between employment and unemployment, what path would you have predicted for laborforce participation over 2010-2016?

The heavy gray line shows the historical fraction of the population aged 16 and over who are not in the laborforce. The black line shows the results of the counterfactual exercise. Not very close.

There turn out to be two reasons why the counterfactual exercise gives such a poor fit. Both are interesting and neither was obvious before doing the exercise. The first reason is that there are surprisingly large flows from out of the labor force back into it. Per the BLS, about 7 percent of people who report being out of the labor force in a given month are either employed or unemployed (i.e. actively seeking work) the following month. This implies that the typical duration of being out of the workforce is less than a year — though of course this is a mix of people who leave the workforce for just a month or two and people who leave for good. For present purposes, the important thing is that exogenous changes to the employment-population ratio decline quickly, with a half-life of only about a year. So while the historical data suggests that a rise in unemployment like we saw in 2008-2009 should have been associated with a large rise in the share of the population not in the laborforce, it also suggests that this effect should have been transitory — a couple years after unemployment rates returned to normal, participation rates should have as well. This is not what we’ve seen.

The large gross movements in and out of the laborforce mean that sustained lower participation rates can’t be straightforwardly understood as the “echo” of high unemployment in the past. But they do also tend to undermine the structural story — if the typical stint outside the laborforce lasts less than a year it can hardly be due to something immutable.

The second reason why the counterfactual doesn’t fit the data was even more surprising, at least to me. I constructed my series using the historical average transition rates into and out of the workforce. But transition rates during the recession and early recovery departed from the historical average in an important way: unemployed workers were significantly less likely to exit the workforce. This turns out to be the normal pattern, at least over the previous two business cycles — if you look back to that first figure, you can see dips in the transition rate from unemployed to out of the workforce in the early 1990s and early 2000s downturns as well. The relationship is clearer in the next figure, a scatter of the unemployment rate and the share of unemployed workers leaving the workforce each month.

As you can see, there is a strong negative relationship — when unemployment was around 4 percent in 1999-2000 and again in 2006-2007, about a quarter of the unemployed exited the laborforce each month. But at the peak of the past recession when unemployment reached 10 percent, only 18 percent of the unemployed left the laborforce each month. That might not seem like a huge difference, but it’s enough to produce quite different dynamics. It’s also a bit surprising, since you would think that people would be more likely to give up searching for work when unemployment is high than when when it is low. The obvious explanation would be that the people who are out of work when the unemployment rate is low are not simply a smaller set of the same people who are out of work when the rate is high, but are different in some way. The same factors that keep them at the back of the hiring queue may make also be likely to push them out of the laborforce altogether. Extended unemployment insurance might also play a role.

It would be possible to explore this further using CPS data, which is the source for the BLS tables I’m working with. No doubt there are papers out there describing the different characteristics of the unemployed in periods of high versus low unemployment. (Not being a labor economist, I don’t know this literature.) But I am going to leave it here.

Summary: The fact that unemployed people are much more likely to leave the laborforce than employed people are, suggests that some part of the fall in laborforce particiaption since 2008 might be explained by the lingering effects of high unemployment in the recession and early recovery. But this story turns out not tow work, for two reasons. First, the rapid turnover of the not in the laborforce population means that this direct effect of high unemployment on participation is fairly shortlived. Second, the rate at which unemployed people exit the laborforce turns out to be lower when unemployment is high. Together, these two factors produce the results shown in the second figure — the fall in participation you would predict based simply on high unemployment is steeper but shorter-lived than what actually occurred. The first factor — the large flows in and out of the laborforce — while it vitiates the simple story I proposed here, is consistent with a broader focus on demand rather than demographics as an explanation for slow employment growth. If people are frequently moving in and out of the laborforce, it’s likely that their decisions are influenced by their employment prospects, and it means they’re not determined by fixed characteristics like age. The second factor — that unemployed people were less likely to give up looking for jobs during 2009-2011, as in previous periods of high unemployment — is, to me, more surprising, and harder to fit into a demand-side story.

Employment, Productivity and the Business Cycle

Fourth post in a series. Posts one, two and three.

Empirically-oriented macroeconomists have recognized since the early 20th century that output, employment and productivity move together over the business cycle. The fact that productivity falls during recessions means that employment varies less over the cycle than output does. This behavior is quite stable over time, giving rise to Okun’s law. In the US, Okun’s law says that the unemployment rate will rise by one point in each 2.5 point shortfall of GDP growth over trend — a ratio that doesn’t seem to have declined much since Arthur Okun first described it in the mid-1960s. [1]

It’s not obvious that potential should show this procyclical behavior. As I noted in the previous post, a naive prediction from a production function framework would be that a negative demand shock should reduce employment more than output, since business can lay off workers immediately but can’t reduce their capital stock right away. In other words, productivity should rise in recessions, since the labor of each still-employed worker is being combined with more capital.

There are various explanations for why labor productivity behaves procyclically instead. The most common focus on the transition costs of changing employment. Since hiring and firing is costly for businesses, they don’t adjust their laborforce to every change in demand. So when sales fall in recessions, they will keep extra workers on payroll — paying them now is cheaper than hiring them back later. Similarly, when sales rise businesses will initially try to get more work out of their existing employees. This shows up as rising labor productivity, and as the repeated phenomenon of “jobless recoveries.”

Understood in these terms, the positive relationship between output, employment and productivity should be a strictly short-term phenomenon. If a change in demand (or in other constraints on output) is sustained, we’d expect labor to fully adjust to the new level of production sooner or later. So over horizons of more than a year or two, we’d expect output and employment to change in proportion. If there are other limits on production (such as non-produced inputs like land) we’d expect output and labor productivity to move inversely, with faster productivity growth associated with slower employment growth or vice versa. (This is the logic of “robots taking the jobs.”) A short-term positive, medium term negative, long-term flat or negative relationship between employment growth and productivity growth is one of the main predictions that comes out of a production function. But it doesn’t require one. You can get there lots of other ways too.

And in fact, it is what we see.

The figure shows the simple correlation of employment growth and productivity growth over various periods, from one quarter out to 50 quarters. (This is based on postwar US data.) As you can see, over periods of a year or less, the correlation is (weakly) positive. Six-month periods in which employment growth was unusually weak are somewhat more likely to have seen weak productivity growth as well. This is the cyclical effect presumably due to transition costs — employers don’t always hire or fire in response to short-run changes in demand, allowing productivity to vary instead. But if sales remain high or low for an extended period, employers will eventually bring their laborforce into line, eliminating this relationship. And over longer periods, autonomous variation in productivity and labor supply are more important. Both of these tend to produce a negative relationship between employment and productivity. And that’s exactly what we see — a ten-year period in which productivity grew unusually quickly is likely to be one in which employment grew slowly. (Admittedly postwar US data doesn’t give you that many ten-year periods to look at.)

Another way of doing this is to plot an “Okun coefficient” for each horizon. Here we are looking at the relationship between changes in employment and output. Okun’s law is usually expressed in terms of the relatiojship between unemployment and output, but here we will look at it in terms of employment instead. We write

(1) %ΔE = a (g – c)

where %ΔE is the percentage change in employment, g is the percentage growth in GDP, c is a constant (the long-run average rate of productivity growth) and a is the Okun coefficient. The value of a says how much additional growth in employment we’d expect from a one percentage-point increase in GDP growth over the given period. When the equation is estimated in terms of unemployment and the period is one, year, a is generally on the order of 0.4 or so, meaning that to reduce unemployment by one point over a year normally requires GDP growth around 2.5 points above trend. We’d expect the coefficient for employment to be greater, but over short periods at least it should still be less than one.

Here is what we see if the estimate the equation for changes in output and employment for various periods, again ranging from one quarter up to ten years. (Again, postwar US data. The circles are the point estimates of the coefficients; the dotted lines are two standard errors above and below, corresponding to a standard 95% confidence interval.)

What’s this show? If we estimate Equation (1) looking at changes over one quarter, we find that one percentage point of additional GDP growth is associated with just half a point of additional employment growth. But if we estimate the same equation looking at changes over two years, we find that one point of additional GDP growth is associated with 0.75 points of additional employment growth.

The fact that the coefficient is smallest for the shorter periods is, again, consistent witht he conventional understanding of Okun’s law. Because hiring and firing is costly, employers don’t fully adjust staffing unless a change in sales is sustained for a while. If you were thinking in terms of a production function, the peak around 2 years represents a “medium-term” position where labor has adjusted to a change in demand but the capital stock has not.

While it’s not really relevant for current purposes, it’s interesting that at every horizon the coefficient is significantly below zero. What this tells us is that there is no actual time interval corresponding to the “long run” of the model– a period long enough for labor and the capital stock to be fully adjusted but short enough that technology is fixed. Over this hypothetical long run, the coefficient would be one. One way to think about the fact that the estimated coefficients are always smaller, is that any period long enough for labor to adjust, is already long enough to see noticeable autonomous changes in productivity. [2]

But what we’re interested in right now is not this normal pattern. We’re interested in how dramatically the post-2008 period has departed from it. The past eight years have seen close to the slowest employment growth of the postwar period and close to the slowest productivity growth. It is normal for employment and productivity to move together for a couple quarters or a year, but very unusual for this joint movement to be sustained over nearly a decade. In the postwar US, at least, periods of slow employment growth are much more often periods of rapid productivity growth, and conversely. Here’s a regression similar to the Okun one, but this time relating productivity growth to employment growth, and using only data through 2008.

prod on emp While the significance lines can’t be taken literally given that these are overlapping periods, the figure makes clear that between 1947 and 2008, there were very few sustained periods in which both employment and productivity growth made large departures from trend in the same direction.

Put it another way: The past decade has seen exceptionally slow growth in employment — about 5 percent over the full period. If you looked at the US postwar data, you would predict with a fair degree of confidence that a period of such slow employment growth would see above-average productivity growth. But in fact, the past decade has also seen very low productivity growth. The relation between the two variables has been much closer to what we would predict by extrapolating their relationships over periods of a year. In that sense, the current slowdown resembles an extended recession more than it does previous periods of slower growth.

As I suggested in an earlier post, I think this is a bigger analytic problem than it might seem at first glance.

In the conventional story, productivity is supposed to be driven by technology, so a slowdown in productivity growth reflects a decline in innovation and so on. Employment is driven by demographics, so slower employment growth reflects aging and small families. Both of these developments are negative shifts in aggregate supply. So they should be inflationary — if the economy’s productive potential declines then the same growth in demand will instead lead to higher prices. To maintain stable prices in the face of these two negative supply shocks, a central bank would have to raise interest rates in order to reduce aggregate spending to the new, lower level of potential output. Is this what we have seen? No, of course not. We have seen declining inflation even as interest rates are at historically low levels. So even if you explain slower productivity growth by technology and explain slower employment growth by demographics, you still need to postulate some large additional negative shift in demand. This is DeLong and Summers’ “elementary signal identification point.”

Given that we are postulating a large, sustained fall in demand in any case, it would be more parsimonious if the demand shortfall also explained the slowdown in employment and productivity growth. I think there are good reasons to believe this is the case. Those will be the subject of the remaining posts in this series.

In the meantime, let’s pull together the historical evidence on output, employment and productivity growth in one last figure. Here, the horizontal axis is the ten-year percentage change in employment, while the vertical axis is the ten-year percentage change in productivity. The years are final year of the comparison. (In order to include the most recent data, we are comparing first quarters to first quarters.) The color of the text shows average inflation over the ten year period, with yellow highest and blue lowest. The diagonal line corresponds to the average real growth rate of GDP over the full period.

What we’re looking at here is the percentage change in productivity, employment and prices over every ten-year period from 1947-1957 through 2006-2016. So for instance, growth between 1990 and 2000 is represented by the point labeled “2000.” During this decade, total employment rose by about 20 percent while productivity rose by a total of 15 percent, implying an annual real growth of 3.3 percent, very close to the long-run average.

One natural way to think about this is that yellow points below and to the right of the line suggest negative supply shocks: If the productive capacity of the economy declines for some reason, output growth will slow, and prices will rise as private actors — abetted by a slow-to-react central bank — attempt to increase spending at the usual rate. Similarly, blue points above the line suggest positive supply shocks. Yellow points above the line suggest positive demand shocks — an increase in spending can increase output growth above trend, at least for a while, but will pull up prices as well. And blue points below the line suggest negative demand shocks. This, again, is Delong and Summers’ “elementary signal identification point.”

We immediately see what an outlier the recent period is. Both employment and productivity growth over the past ten years have been drastically slower than over the preceding decade — about 5 percent each, down from about 20 percent. 2000-2010 and 2001-2011 were the only ten-year periods in postwar US history when total employment actually declined. The abruptness of the deceleration on both dimensions is a challenge for views that slower growth is the result of deep structural forces. And the combination of the slowdown in output growth with falling prices — especially given ultra-low interest rats — strongly suggests that we’ve seen a negative shift in desired spending (demand) rather than in the economy’s productive capacities (supply).

Another way of looking at this is as three different regimes. In the middle is what we might call “the main sequence” — here there is steady growth in demand, met by varying mixes of employment and productivity growth. On the upper right is what gets called a “high-pressure economy,” in which low unemployment and strong demand draw more people into employment and facilitates the reallocation of labor and other resources toward more productive activity, but put upward pressure on prices. On the lower left is stagnation, where weak demand discourages participation in the labor force and reduces productivity growth by holding back investment, new business formation and by leaving a larger number of those with jobs underemployed, and persistent slack leads to downward pressure on prices (though so far not outright deflation). In other words, macroeconomically speaking the past decade has been a sort of anti-1960s.

[1] There are actually two versions of Okun’s law, one relating the change in the unemployment rate to GDP growth and one relating the level of unemployment to the deviation of GDP from potential. The two forms will be equivalent if potential grows at a constant rate.

[2] The assumption that variables can be partitioned into “fast” and “slow” ones, so that we can calculate equilibrium values of the former with the latter treated as exogenous, is a very widespread feature of economic modeling, heterodox as much as mainstream. I think it needs to be looked at more critically. One alternative is dynamic models where we focus on the system’s evolution over time rather than equilibrium conditions. This is, I suppose, the kind of “theory” implied by VAR-type forecasting models, but it’s rare to see it developed explicitly. There are people who talk about a system dynamics approach, which seems promising, but I don’t know much about them.

Links for May 25, 2016

Deliberately. The IMF has released its new Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece. Frances Coppola has the details, and they are something. Per the IMF,

Demographic projections suggest that working age population will decline by about 10 percentage points by 2060. At the same time, Greece will continue to struggle with high unemployment rates for decades to come. Its current unemployment rate is around 25 percent, the highest in the OECD, and after seven years of recession, its structural component is estimated at around 20 percent. Consequently, it will take significant time for unemployment to come down. Staff expects it to reach 18 percent by 2022, 12 percent by 2040, and 6 percent only by 2060.

Frances adds:

For Greece’s young people currently out of work, that is all of their working life. A whole generation will have been consigned to the scrapheap. …

The truth is that seven years of recession has wrecked the Greek economy. It is no longer capable of generating enough jobs to employ its population. The IMF estimates that even in good times, 20 percent of adults would remain unemployed. To generate the jobs that are needed there will have to be large numbers of new businesses, perhaps even whole new industries. Developing such extensive new productive capacity takes time and requires substantial investment – and Greece is not the most attractive of investment prospects. Absent something akin to a Marshall Plan, it will take many, many years to repair the damage deliberately inflicted on Greece by European authorities and the IMF in order to bail out the European banking system.

For some reason, that reminds me of this. Good times.

Also, here’s the Economist, back in 2006:

The core countries of Europe are not ready to make the economic reforms they so desperately need—and that will change, alas, only after a diabolic economic crisis. … The sad truth is that voters are not yet ready to swallow the nasty medicine of change. Reform is always painful. And there are too many cosseted insiders—those with secure jobs, those in the public sector—who see little to gain and much to lose. … One reason for believing that reform can happen … is that other European countries have shown the way. Britain faced economic and social meltdown in 1979; there followed a decade of Thatcherite reform. … The real problem, not just for Italy and France but also for Germany, is that, so far, life has continued to be too good for too many people.

I bet they’re pretty pleased right now.

Polanyism. At Dissent, Mike Konczal and Patrick Iber have a very nice introduction to Karl Polanyi. One thing I like about this piece is that they present Polanyi as a sort of theoretical back-formation for the Sanders campaign.

The vast majority of Sanders’s supporters … are, probably without knowing it, secret followers of Karl Polanyi. …

One of the divides within the Democratic primary between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton has been between a social-democratic and a “progressive” but market-friendly vision of addressing social problems. Take, for example, health care. Sanders proposes a single-payer system in which the government pays and health care directly, and he frames it explicitly in the language of rights: “healthcare is a human right and should be guaranteed to all Americans regardless of wealth or income.” … Sanders offers a straightforward defense of decommodification—the idea that some things do not belong in the marketplace—that is at odds with the kind of politics that the leadership of the Democratic Party has offered … Polanyi’s particular definition of socialism sounds like one Sanders would share.

Obamacare and the insurers. On the subject of health care and decommodification, I liked James Kwak’s piece on Obamacare.

The dirty not-so-secret of Obamacare … is that sometimes the things we don’t like about market outcomes aren’t market failures—they are exactly what markets are supposed to do. … at the end of the day, Obamacare is based on the idea that competition is good, but tries to prevent insurers from competing on all significant dimensions except the one that the government is better at anyway. We shouldn’t be surprised when insurance policies get worse and health care costs continue to rise.

It’s too bad so many intra-Democratic policy debates are conducted in terms of the radical-incremental binary, it’s not really meaningful. You can do more or less of anything. Would be better to focus on this non-market vs market question.

In this context, I wish there’d been some discussion in the campaign of New York’s new universal pre-kindergarten, which is a great example incremental decommodification in practice. Admittedly I’m a bit biased — I live in New York, and my son will be starting pre-K next year. Still: Here’s an example of a social need being addressed not through vouchers, or tax credits, or with means tests, but through a universal public services, provided — not entirely, but mainly and increasingly — by public employees. Why isn’t this a model?

The prehistory of the economics profession. I really liked this long piece by Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger on the early history of the American Economics Association. The takeaway is that the AEA’s early history was surprisingly radical, both intellectually and in its self-conception as part of larger political project. (Another good discussion of this is in Michael Perelman’s Railroading Economics.) This is history more people should know, and Steinbaum and Weisberger tell it well. I also agree with their conclusion:

That [the economics profession] abandoned “advocacy” under the banner of “objectivity” only raises the question of what that distinction really means in practice. Perhaps actual objectivity does not require that the scholar noisily disclaim advocacy. It may, in fact, require the opposite.

The more I struggle with this stuff, the more I think this is right. A field or discipline needs its internal standards to distinguish valid or well-supported claims from invalid or poorly supported ones. But evaluation of relevance, importance, correspondence to the relevant features of reality can never be made on the basis of internal criteria. They require the standpoint of some outside commitment, some engagement with the concrete reality you are studying distinct from your formal representations of it. Of course that engagement doesn’t have to be political. Hyman Minsky’s work for the Mark Twain Bank in Missouri, for example, played an equivalent role; and as Perry Mehrling observes in his wonderful essay on Minsky, “It is significant that the fullest statement of his business cycle theory was published by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.” But it has to be something. In economics, I think, even more than in other fields, the best scholarship is not going to come from people who are only scholars.

Negative rates, so what. Here’s a sensible look at the modest real-world impact of negative rates from Brian Romanchuk. It’s always interesting to see how these things look from the point of view of market participants. The importance of a negative policy rate has nothing to do with the terms on which present consumption trades off against future consumption, it’s about one component of the return on some assets relative to others.

I’m number 55. Someone made a list of the top 100 economics blogs, and put me on it. That was nice.