Hedge Funds: Ben Stein Finds the Money Machine That Will Eliminate the Federal Debt

While Ben Stein hearts Stephen Cohen of SAC Capital, Dean Baker has a closer look. I sense a tie to the Social Security debate!



Ben Stein writes:

magicians like Steven A. Cohen, founder of SAC Capital in Stamford, Conn., can regularly earn 40 percent a year - often more - on their capital. But why waste our time on envy or disbelief? Let’s put Mr. Cohen to work for the greater good. Let’s have the federal government issue about $10 trillion in Steven A. Cohen National Debt Retirement Fund Bonds. After interest is paid on the bonds, if Mr. Cohen makes 40 percent on the money, the fund will return 36 percent a year. That means that in only two years, he will have made roughly $10 trillion for the taxpayers, with which he can pay off the entire United States federal debt.

As I read this, I had to wonder about my belief in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. But then Dean Baker brought a little reality to this discussion:

Well Cohen's modus operandi is to make bets ahead of the market. He finds the winners just before they start winning and dumps the losers just before they start losing. The economic benefit from Cohen's actions is that prices adjust somewhat quicker than they otherwise would ... Mr. Cohen's gains come from other shareholders. If he buys IBM stock before it rises, he helps to bring the stock price to its proper level, but he gets the gain rather than some other potential stock purchaser. By being faster and better informed than other traders, Cohen is able to garner earnings that would otherwise have gone to other shareholders. Higher returns for Cohen mean lower returns for everyone else.

OK, this may be a very small departure from a perfectly efficient market but Ben Stein’s 36 percent return is not a measure of the benefits from exploiting inefficiency. Rather it is the benefit to SAC Capital from exploiting others. But isn’t this kind of wealth transfer the real agenda for those who wish to privatize Social Security?

The Fire This Time and The Water Last Time

I see there are no refugees this time - only evacuees. And we don't have Barbara Bush talking about the greater opportunities dislocation offers to the dislocatees. And we do have free massages in the stadium. And so on. Words fail me. I'll take them from Leadbelly: "If you're white, you're alright/ If you're brown, stick around/ but if you're black, oh baby/ Get back, Get back, Get back."

Speaking of Wal-Mart and Avoiding Taxes

Michael talks about how Wal-Mart has played the transfer pricing manipulation game to reduce its state income taxes. But this is small potatoes when compared to the Federal tax reduction game.



AB readers know that I have had lots of posts on this topic – often giving huge hat tips to Max Sawicky. Here I document the drop in Wal-Mart’s overall effective tax rate. Here I note how part of this play relates to how they source goods from China. As I note – none of this is rocket science so one has to wonder why the tax authorities are not doing a better job at enforcing arm’s length pricing under section 482.

Wal-Mart's Efficiency -- In Avoiding Taxes!

This Wall Street Journal article describes how Wal-Mart is able to pay about half as much state tax as a typical corporation.

Drucker, Jesse. 2007. "Inside Wal-Mart's Bid To Slash State Taxes." Wall Street Journal (23 October): p. A 1.

"In May 2001, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. issued an appeal to big accounting firms: Find us creative new ways to cut our state tax bills. Ernst & Young LLP swung into action. Senior tax experts at the big accounting firm swapped ideas via email and in a series of meetings. At least one gathering, according to an internal Ernst & Young calendar, took place in Wal-Mart's headquarters in the "Tax Shelter Room"."



"Big companies hardly ever discuss how outside accountants, lawyers and investment bankers help them cut their tax bills. But Ernst & Young's contributions to Wal-Mart's state-tax minimization project are outlined in a raft of documents filed in recent months in North Carolina state court, where the state's attorney general is challenging a Wal-Mart tax-cutting structure involving real-estate investment trusts. The material, which includes company emails and memos, provides a rare window into accountants' role in generating tax-reduction ideas at one major company."

"Companies often assert that tax savings are simply happy byproducts of transactions pursued for other business reasons. But documents from the North Carolina case indicate that Wal-Mart, from the outset, had one primary purpose: cutting its state income taxes. Ernst & Young worked to fulfill that goal. In 2002, for example, the accounting firm delivered a 37-page proposal laying out a smorgasbord of 27 potential tax strategies, most tailored to a particular state's tax code. It described one of them as "a very aggressive strategy with considerable risk."

"Publicly traded companies reduced their federal income taxes by about $12 billion in 2004 through potentially abusive tax transactions, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Some experts say companies save far more than that each year through elaborate tax-cutting maneuvers."

"Wal-Mart's 2001 letter to accounting firms got right to the point. It began: "Wal-Mart is requesting your proposal(s) for professional tax advice and related implementation services in connection with minimization of state income taxes in the following states: Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania"."

"State income-tax rates for corporations average about 6.9%, and come on top of a federal statutory rate of 35%. Tax rates vary from state to state, and some states have no corporate tax at all on certain income. That provides ample opportunity for so-called tax arbitrage, in which companies allocate expenses and revenues between states in order to minimize taxes owed."

"On average, Wal-Mart has paid taxes at a rate equal to about half of the average statutory state rate over the past decade, according to an analysis of the company's regulatory filings by Standard & Poor's Compustat."

"In the early 1990s, it employed an "intangibles holding company," a unit operating in tax-friendly Delaware into which it transferred ownership of its brand names such as Sam's Club. It then made payments to that unit for use of those brands, deducting them as expenses from its taxable income in other states, according to court records. That strategy fell out of favor after several states successfully challenged Wal-Mart and other companies in court over the maneuver."

"Wal-Mart set aside about $526 million for state and local income taxes last year, not including its substantial property-tax bills, according to the company's financial reports. But its various state tax-cutting strategies seem to have had an impact. On average, Wal-Mart has paid taxes at a rate equal to about half of the average statutory state rate over the past decade, according to an analysis of the company's regulatory filings by Standard & Poor's Compustat."

"After Wal-Mart hired the firm in 1996 ..., an Ernst & Young tax executive urged his team to be discreet, according to a staff memo included in North Carolina court records. "We don't think there is much the state taxing authorities can do to mitigate these savings to Wal-Mart, however some states might attempt something if they had advance notification," he wrote. "We think the best course of action is to keep the project relatively quiet .... there just seems to be too many opportunities for it to get out to the press or financial community and we all know they are difficult to control, particularly when we are dealing with a client as well-known as Wal-Mart"."

"David Bullington, Wal-Mart's vice president for tax policy, said in a deposition that he began feeling pressure to lower the company's effective tax rate after the current chief financial officer, Thomas Schoewe, was hired in 2000. Mr. Schoewe was familiar with "some very sophisticated and aggressive tax planning," Mr. Bullington said, according to a transcript of the deposition, taken by the North Carolina attorney general's office in July. "And he ride herds [sic] on us all the time that we have the world's highest tax rate of any major company"."

"As Ernst & Young worked on its proposals, one high-ranking tax partner sent an email to a colleague addressing a concern often faced by companies: how to describe a tax-driven transaction in a way that won't create problems later on with tax authorities. "You asked if we have a document that details how the tax savings will work, how much they will save .... We really don't have anything like that except for the sales document, partly because we have avoided calling this a 'tax' project, to show that we did not have a tax savings motivation, rather it is a 'domestic restructuring' project," he wrote."

"As for Wal-Mart's "Tax Shelter Room," North Carolina officials asked Mr. Bullington about the odd name. In his deposition, the Wal-Mart vice president said the moniker was "a bit of a pun," stemming from the conference room's use by tax-department employees to conduct safety drills for natural disasters such as tornadoes."

Fred Thompson Takes Credit for Clinton’s Fiscal Record

This CNN Video is entitled Thompson Talks Immigration but the real whoppers come when Fred talks fiscal policy. Take a listen and then let’s talk.



Fred Thompson mentions cutting taxes and balancing the budget almost in the same sentence. He fails to mention the 1993 tax increase – opposed by all Republicans in the Senate – even though this was one of the two major moves that did lead to fiscal responsibility. The other major move has often been called the “Peace Dividend” where we felt able to sharply reduce defense spending. There is only one candidate running for the GOP Presidential nomination that would once again reduce defense spending. His name is Ron Paul and he tends to be mocked by his colleagues when they are not promising more tax cuts. So it goes in the Spend & Borrow wing that dominates the Republican Party.

CHINA: EMERGENCE OF THE NEW CLASS

The 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has just ended, with a roll-out of the new members of the Standing Committee of the Poltiburo of the Central Committee of the party. Identified among those as the current leading candidate to succeed newly reentrenched leader, Hu Jintao, is Xi Jinping, identified by news reports (WaPo) as one of many "princelings" in newly powerful positions, in his case, son of Xi Zhongxun, a former Politburo member and Vice Premier. Just as in North Korea, with Kim Il Jong succeeding his father, and the children of the ruling Nomenklatura coming to power in the later stages of the former Soviet Union, we see The New Class reproducing itself in the PRC. (Of course in the US we cannot complain to much with our succession of Bushes.)

PER CAPITA CARBON EMISSIONS AND PER CAPITA INCOME

Here is ranking of top 25 or so countries in real per capita income with their ranks in per capita carbon emissions, with Singapore and Taiwan missing data. Oil producers mostly do badly, but users of nuclear for electricity tend to do well. Real GDP is for 2006, IMF data, per capita carbon emissions from Wikipedia for 2004.

Real per cap GDP in order Per cap carbon emissions rank

Luxembourg 4 (burns lots of coal for electricity)
Ireland 32
Norway 12
USA 10 (third worst on list, big surprise)
Iceland 53 (lots of geothermal)
Hong Kong 72 (don't know why so good, best on list)
Switzerland 69 (don't know its breakdown for electricity production)
Netherlands 43
Denmark 36 (tops in use of wind power)
Qatar 1 (small OPEC oil producer)
Austria 46
Finland 21
Canada 11 (fourth worst on list, oil)
UK 37
Belgium 40
Sweden 66 (lots of nuclear and hydro)
UAE 3 (small OPEC oil producer)
Australia 13
Greece 44
Japan 34
France 63 (lots of nuclear)
Israel 29
Germany 38
Italy 52

Book Announcement

MORE UNEQUAL: ASPECTS OF CLASS IN THE UNITED STATES

Monthly Review Press Edited by Michael D. Yates

With contributions by John Bellamy Foster, Vincent Navarro, William K. Tabb, Michael Perelman, Richard D. Vogel, David Roediger, Kristen Lavelle and Joe Feagin, Sabiyha Prince, Martha Gimenez, Stephanie Luce and Mark Brenner, Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, Michael D. Yates, Angela Jancius, and Michael Zweig.

"Workers in the United States are systematically being allocated a shrinking share of the prodigious wealth we produce, and that's old news. This widening exploitation of workers and communities further exposes the myth of a 'just' capitalist economy. Despite the radical increase in economic and social inequality, we still lack a cohesive popular understanding and consciousness of why and how our market-based economic system facilitates this 'one-sided class war' against us.




"More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States is a strategically assembled collection which binds diverse, informed, often compellingly personal explorations of social and economic inequity together into a revealing journey through the scarred terrain of today's working-class reality. This book should be off the shelf and in the hands, and backpacks, of a new generation of working-class activists who can lead the struggle to collectively claim a new direction." -Jerry Tucker, former UAW International Executive Board Member & co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal

"The shocking data about wealth, income, home ownership, access to health care, education, and political influence cry out for analysis which is driven by the desire not only to understand but also to transform. Fortunately, the scholars and activists who have contributed to More Unequal offer such analysis, and they do so clearly and succinctly. This book will prove useful to teachers, students, researchers, and activists as we struggle to understand how class is working in the twenty-first century United States." -Peter Rachleff, professor of history, Macalester College, and President, Working Class Studies Association

"This excellent collection helps us to further rehabilitate the discussion of class both in the United States and globally." -Bill Fletcher, Jr., writer and activist

"Extraordinarily comprehensive.focuses on the effects of class oppression and exploitation" -Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, writer

Table of Contents

Introduction & Acknowledgements - Mike Yates

1. Aspects of Class in the United States: A Prologue - John Bellamy Foster

2. The Worldwide Class Struggle - Vincent Navarro

3. The Power of the Rich - William K. Tabb

4. Some Economics of Class - Michael Perelman

5. Harder Times: Undocumented Workers and the U.S. Informal Economy - Richard D. Vogel

6. The Retreat from Race and Class - David Roediger

7. Hard Truth in the Big Easy: Race and Class in New Orleans, Pre- and Post-Katrina - Kristen Lavelle and Joe Feagin

8. Will the Real Black Middle Class Please Stand Up? - Sabiyha Prince

9. Back to Class: Reflections on the Dialectics of Class and Identity - Martha Gimenez

10. Women and Class: What Has Happened in Forty Years? - Stephanie Luce and Mark Brenner

11. The Pedagogy of Oppression - Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur

12. Class: A Personal Story - Michael D. Yates

13. Class for a Downwardly Mobile Generation - Angela Jancius

14. Six Points on Class - Michael Zweig

Contributors Notes Index

Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. For many years he taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the author of Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue (2006), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global System (2004), and Why Unions Matter (1998), all published by Monthly Review Press.

Rich and Poor Multipliers Again

Earlier I asked about the multipliers for the consumption of rich and poor people. Let me be a little bit and more explicit. I would assume that rich people spend a lot more on personal services and expensive goods.

Expensive goods tend to have much higher markups. Remember Henry Ford II responding to the influx of Volkswagens observing that mini cars mean mini profits. Expensive branded goods have very high markups, meaning relatively few jobs per dollar of expenditure compared to the spending of the less affluent. Personal services are probably bimodal. Some professional work would probably mean relatively few jobs per dollar of expenditure; some less prestigious work might mean quite a few jobs per dollar of expenditure; for example, underpaid immigrant nannies. Any thoughts?

Would Redistributing Income to the Poor Increase National Savings and Long-term Growth?

It would seem that Scott Patterson has turned the usual tinkle down argument on its head.



As Michael notes, this WSJ piece is arguing:

The Wall Street Journal suggests that the economy might not be affected by the credit crunch because it will mostly hit the poor. Since the poor don't spend that much, the economy can happily sail along. I was wondering how multipliers might differ by income class.

Exactly the right question. The usual rightwing argument for NIBOR DOOH economics (take from the poor and give to the rich) is that the poor have a high marginal propensity to consume, while the rich have a high marginal propensity to save. My own (maybe too much Ando-Modigliani lifecycle dominated) is that the marginal propensities to consume v. save don’t differ by income class. But if the WSJ wants to tell us that the poor save more – great. I’m all in favor of things that would increase long-term growth such as movements that would reduce income inequality!

Economic Benefits of the Trickle-up?

The Wall Street Journal suggests that the economy might not be affected by the credit crunch because it will mostly hit the poor. Since the poor don't spend that much, the economy can happily sail along. I was wondering how multipliers might differ by income class.


Patterson, Scott. 2007. "Has the Crunch Filtered Down to Consumers?" Wall Street Journal (18 October): p. C 1.
"Dean Maki, an economist at Barclays Capital, expects households to muddle through even as lenders get more strict. He says many of these credit problems have hit lower-income consumers, while wealthier spenders remain largely unscathed. Roughly half of consumer spending comes from the top 20% of the income bracket, Mr. Maki says."

Lieberman-Warner: The Fall Lineup

I haven’t had time to study the new edition of Lieberman-Warner, which bills itself as this fall’s comprehensive political consensus on national climate change policy. The broad outlines provided here make two things clear however:



1. The bill falls far short of what is needed. It covers only a portion of the economy, sets targets that are too low and auctions too few of the permits. It allows too many loopholes, such as offsets and provisions to raise the caps against promises of future tightening. It rebates exactly none of the (insufficient) auction revenues. This last point is important for both political and economic (demand-sustaining) reasons. It micromanages funding for energy alternatives, with several earmarks that are dubious at best. It would take a much longer post to spell out all of the particulars, but I hope we will soon have a thorough analysis. (If you are producing one, or if one crosses your screen, please give us a link.)

2. The bill represents a compromise based on today’s political alignment. If it were to be passed, and if someone could get Bush to sign it as he lay in a hospital post-surgical room fogged out on painkillers, it would be a terrible mistake, locking us into a bad framework for years to come. 2008 should be the year of climate debate, not climate decision. Progressives should put forward a simple, comprehensive, forward-looking bill to focus the discussion, even though it would have no chance in the current congress. After November 2008 we should be in a position to get something on climate that goes far beyond what is possible today.

The U.S. Tax Bite: 1975 v. 2006

Via Greg Mankiw comes a chart provided by David Cay Johnston entitled Increasing Cost of Government. A couple of things strike me about this graph. The first is that the U.S. “tax share” as Greg calls it is #17 out of the 20 nations listed. The second is the statement that the share of GDP has increased in most nations, which includes the U.S. according to this 1975 v. 2006 comparison.

Point in time comparisons can be misleading especially when the measurement of taxes does not included deferred tax liabilities, which is why I have graphed both spending and taxes as a share of GDP for the period from 1967 to 2006 using information provided by table 3.1 from this source. The year 1975 was an odd one to pick for the comparison point. Taxes as a share of GDP may have been less than 27% as compared to 29.8% in 2006, but government spending as a share of GDP was 31% in 1975 as compared to 31.3% in 2006. You see, we had a recession back then followed by Ford’s tax cut designed to offset this recession.

To be fair, government spending as a share of GDP had spiked and then retreated for the next four years. Who knew Jimmy Carter was a small government Republican? President Carter’s term of office was followed by 12 years of Republican leadership where Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush promised to keep our taxes low. But it seems government spending as a share of GDP grew over this period. They were followed by big spending Bill Clinton – or so some would have you believe. But our graph shows spending as a share of GDP fell to 29.4% by 2000. Since then – spending as a share of GDP has increased. While George W. Bush would tell you that he cut our taxes, Milton Friedman might rebut with simply “to spend is to tax”.

Raiding Your Social Security Benefits

Mark Thoma demolishes some nonsense from Amity Shlaes so we don’t have to. First the nonsense:

The wage increases mean that newer beneficiaries get a bigger pension than their predecessors, even after adjusting for inflation. Thompson was suggesting that we base the formula upon inflation alone. Then every pensioner gets what his big brother or sister did, adjusted for inflation. But not more.

Mark notes:

Now, as to indexing, here's what happens if you don't adjust for rising living standards. Nominal wage indexing (as is done now) accounts for both changes in inflation and changes productivity over time (see the %Δ equation above), whereas price indexing only adjusts for price changes, it makes no allowance at all for changes in living standards (i.e. for changes in productivity).

True but we need to add one bit to this. Ms. Shlaes is not comparing what my son will receive when he retires some 45 years from now to what my daughter will get when she retires. Fred Thompson’s proposal will make sure that my kids get no more than I get even though they are likely to earn more over their lifetime than I did. Which means they will pay more into the Trust Fund than I did. Yet, they are supposed to get no more than their dad got? Is Amity Shlaes too stupid to understand this? If so, why is Bloomberg giving her a column?

Schumpeter, War, and the Woeful Deficiency of Economic Theory

Was Schumpeter correct when he wrote: "Economics is a very unsatisfactory science. But it would have to be much more unsatisfactory than it is if such an event as a war, however extensive and destructive, sufficed to upset its teaching."



Was Schumpeter correct when he wrote: "Economics is a very unsatisfactory science. But it would have to be much more unsatisfactory than it is if such an event as a war, however extensive and destructive, sufficed to upset its teaching."

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954. History of Economic Analysis (NY: Oxford University Press): p. 1146

During all-out wars when a country's very existence is at stake, only the most foolish leader would rely on markets to run the economy. Also, during wartime, many people (excluding corporate executives?) respond to nonmarket incentives, allowing the economy to produce much more than conventional economic theory would predict.

Here is a short section from my book, Transcending the Economy:

Earlier, we discussed how economies cast aside the market when society mobilizes for war. People too behave differently during wars. Rather than performing work in a perfunctory manner, many people redouble their efforts on the job in order to contribute to the mobilization.

I do not deny that many people are unmoved by patriotic fervor. Nor would I suggest that wartime profiteering is unknown. The point is that such individualistic motives recede during times of war, while more socially-oriented behavior becomes more common.

People even leave traces of this changed motivation in the statistical residue of the times. For example, Robert Lucas, a conservative economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in developing techniques that cast doubt on the effectiveness of government policy, estimated the average level of economic efficiency for the United States economy by calculating the trend of the ratio of output per unit of capital between 1890 and 1954. He found that, at times, for instance during depressions, the actual output per unit of capital fell below his trend line. At other times, the actual output per unit of capital exceeded the trend line.

Lucas discovered that during the war years, 1944 through 1946, the output per unit of capital surpassed the trend line by more than 20 percent. At no time, before or after, did the United States economy match this remarkable performance (Lucas 1970, p. 154).

This achievement is extraordinary because during this period, many of the most qualified workers were in the military rather than on the shop floor. The workers who replaced them had considerably less work experience. Because of decades of discrimination, the black workers who came from the South to work in Northern factories had far less education than the workers that they replaced. Similarly, many women without much experience in working for wages effectively "manned" the assembly lines.

Conventional economic theory suggests that industrial efficiency should have suffered dire consequences from this reliance on a supposedly less qualified labor force, yet Lucas shows that nothing of the sort happened. Instead, productivity soared.

Of course, we are accustomed to expecting productivity to increase during war time. War stimulates demand, which makes the economy work more efficiently. In addition, Lucas himself attributes some of the marvelous performance of the wartime economy to the use of overtime in industry.

While increased demand and overtime may have been a factor in stimulating the economy, emotional forces were also at work. War can make people pull together. War can create a sense of urgency. At times, powerful ideals can motivate working during times of war.

In the United States, World War II called forth just such a sense of idealism. People who labored in the factories in the United States during the war often did their best in order to contribute to the struggle against fascism. Such ideals were more compelling than greed for most workers.

Casey B. Mulligan, a colleague of Lucas's at the University of Chicago, found further statistical evidence suggesting the influence of ideals (Mulligan 1998). According to economic theory, only changes in monetary incentives can change behavior. When wages fall, work effort should shrink accordingly.

He found that roughly ten million more civilians were employed during the war than if employment had followed its prewar trend (Mulligan 1998, p. 1040), even though "after-tax real wages of manufacturing production workers were lower in absolute terms (and even lower relative to trend) during the war years 1942-1945 than in the few years immediately preceding and following the war" (p. 1044). Mulligan reported on his efforts to attempt to develop alternative explanations within the confines of standard economic theory to interpret this bulge in employment even though real after-tax wages were falling. In every case he failed, suggesting that patriotic idealism lay behind the rise in labor force participation. In other words, more people were working than would be expected based merely on the desire to earn more wages. Instead, people were coming into the labor force to contribute to the war effort.

Eventually, the patriotic consensus frayed around the edges. Workers became frustrated seeing their sacrifices unmatched by their employers who were enjoying unparalleled profits. As a result, toward the end of the war, strike activity began to pick up. Still, the spirit of community was sufficiently strong to produce the high levels of productivity that caught the attention of Robert Lucas.

Similarly, Israel mobilized 15 percent of its labor force for the Yom Kippur War, but the Gross National Product declined only 5 percent (Maital 1982, p. 114). The decline in production might not seem to be as impressive as the experience of the United States, but remember the United States had time to adjust to the wartime demands, while the Yom Kippur War was a brief affair.

The wartime experiences of Japan and Germany offer even more powerful illustrations of the ability of people to overcome adversity. Jack Hirshleifer, an economist from the University of California at Los Angeles, reported that ten days of bombing raids during July and August 1943 destroyed half the buildings in Hamburg. Yet, within five months the city had regained up to 80 percent of its productive capacity (Hirshleifer 1987, pp. 32-33). The United States government was interested to find out what determined the effectiveness of the Allied bombing attacks. John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous Harvard University economist, assembled a team that included some of the most prominent economists in the world. These researchers found that bombing only made the Germans more resolute. According to the findings of the survey, "the air raids of 1943-4 ... may have kept up the tension of national danger, and created the requisite atmosphere for sacrifice" (cited in Galbraith 1994, p. 131; see also Galbraith 1981, p. 205; and Scitovsky 1991, p. 258).

On August 6, 1945, the United States Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The next day, electric power service was restored to surviving areas. One week later, telephone service restarted (Hirshleifer 1987, p. 34).

No doubt the Germans and the Japanese, like their counterparts in the United States, worked overtime to rebuild their economic capacity, but even trebling the average work day would not have sufficed to accomplish what they did. Their success in reconstructing their economy required enormous creativity and ingenuity.

We also see a more intensive development of new technologies during periods of crisis. Ordinarily, the typical large corporation is timid about exploring new ideas, yet the same people, who typically display little creativity within the confines of the large corporations, are more inclined to promote great scientific breakthroughs under the urgency of war.

Based on his reading of Japanese history, Shigeto Tsuru, an important Japanese economist, proposed the concept of creative defeat, meaning that a horrendous defeat can unleash a torrent of energy and ingenuity. The end result can be an even greater level of economic development than would have occurred in the absence of the setback. In his words: "Japan is an example of a fantastically creative response to defeat. One recalls that Schumpeter used to puzzle the students of his 'Business Cycle' course ascribing the Japanese boom of 1924-1925 to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The defeat in the last war brought about, of course, a far greater scale of devastation in the economy of Japan, necessitating a fresh renovating start in almost every aspect" (Tsuru 1993, p. 67).