From an op-ed by Rupert Darwall in the Wall Street Journal today:
"The case for ObamaCare, as with the NHS, rests on what might be termed the "lump of health care" fallacy."
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
"Because health-care resources are assumed to be fixed..."
by the Sandwichman
From an op-ed by Rupert Darwall in the Wall Street Journal today:
From an op-ed by Rupert Darwall in the Wall Street Journal today:
Monday, September 14, 2009
How Seriously Wrong John Cochrane Is
I have stated here already that I have problems with Paul Krugman's analysis of what went wrong with macro, most notably his nearly total ignoring of the analysis made by many heterodox economists. However, the inflamed reply by John Cochrane has been a joke. He presents himself as speaking for "the economics profession" rather than just a narrow group of Chicago-based or inspired economists. He is the expert, and Krugman supposedly makes trivial technical errors such as not distinguishing CAPM from Black-Scholes, etc. So, I decided to see how wise Cochrane is by going back to look at his widely praised (including even by Robert Shiller: "impressive treatise of very high quality" and "can also serve as a textbook in an advanced finance course") 2001 book published by Princeton University Press, _Asset Pricing_. On what has happened in the last few years, it is utterly useless.
In the index I went to find the following words/phrases: "fat tails" "kurtosis" "leptokurtosis." They are not there, even though pretty much all practitioners and a large literature already existed discussing how to explain the ubiquity in practically all asset markets of exactly those phenomena. He has a big fat zero to say about them, nothing.
I did find "bubbles," which he discusses briefly near the end of the book (pp. 399-402). He seems to recognize that they might exist, but his discussion is strictly in terms of "rational bubbles" and cites Peter Garber ("Tulipmania" JPE, 1989) on how they are not econometrically identifiable (and later says they do not explain empirical variations of price/dividend ratios; oh, and Garber). The model of rational bubbles he discusses supposedly must go on forever, which he then sneers at because "Infinity is a long time...The solar system will end at some point." Somehow he ignores the Blanchard-Watson 1983 paper on stochastically crashing bubbles, which indeed crash in finite time after rising at an accelerating rate to provide a risk premium for the ever-rising probability of the inevitable crash. Ironically, this last model lies at the base of the forecasting model used by econophysicist Didier Sornette and his associates, whose not-too-bad recent forecasting record on crashes is ultimately based on estimating the moment that such a process (complicated by oscillations) blows to infinity.
Oh, and Peter Garber is also wrong, see "Complex bubble persistence in closed-end country funds," by Ehsan Ahmed, Roger Koppl, me, and Mark V. White, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Jan. 1997, 32(1), 19-37, although the basic insight that one can identify the fundamental by the net asset value of a closed-end fund and thus can identify increases in price of the fund above its NAV as a bubble had been made by many others prior to us. So, it is simply ridiculous of Cochrane to have ignored this point as well (he does recognize on p. 408 that some such funds trade regularly at discounts but never mentions that some have shown massive increases in price above NAV or that this clearly shows the existence of a bubble).
In the index I went to find the following words/phrases: "fat tails" "kurtosis" "leptokurtosis." They are not there, even though pretty much all practitioners and a large literature already existed discussing how to explain the ubiquity in practically all asset markets of exactly those phenomena. He has a big fat zero to say about them, nothing.
I did find "bubbles," which he discusses briefly near the end of the book (pp. 399-402). He seems to recognize that they might exist, but his discussion is strictly in terms of "rational bubbles" and cites Peter Garber ("Tulipmania" JPE, 1989) on how they are not econometrically identifiable (and later says they do not explain empirical variations of price/dividend ratios; oh, and Garber). The model of rational bubbles he discusses supposedly must go on forever, which he then sneers at because "Infinity is a long time...The solar system will end at some point." Somehow he ignores the Blanchard-Watson 1983 paper on stochastically crashing bubbles, which indeed crash in finite time after rising at an accelerating rate to provide a risk premium for the ever-rising probability of the inevitable crash. Ironically, this last model lies at the base of the forecasting model used by econophysicist Didier Sornette and his associates, whose not-too-bad recent forecasting record on crashes is ultimately based on estimating the moment that such a process (complicated by oscillations) blows to infinity.
Oh, and Peter Garber is also wrong, see "Complex bubble persistence in closed-end country funds," by Ehsan Ahmed, Roger Koppl, me, and Mark V. White, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Jan. 1997, 32(1), 19-37, although the basic insight that one can identify the fundamental by the net asset value of a closed-end fund and thus can identify increases in price of the fund above its NAV as a bubble had been made by many others prior to us. So, it is simply ridiculous of Cochrane to have ignored this point as well (he does recognize on p. 408 that some such funds trade regularly at discounts but never mentions that some have shown massive increases in price above NAV or that this clearly shows the existence of a bubble).
Earthquakes, Financial and Geological
As Paul Krugman’s diagnosis of the state of economics bounces around the blogosphere, we are being treated once again to the old debate over whether economics can ever be as scientific as the “real” sciences, the hard ones that have big budgets for lab gear.
If you want to talk about hard sciences, talk about geology. They even have hardness tests, which I remember from my freshman course many long years ago. (I did pretty well in it, but would have done better if I could have ID’ed coal on a midterm exam.) Yet when it comes to a crucial task like predicting earthquakes, geologists are not much better than the pseudo-scientists who populate economics departments. They do even worse, actually, when you consider that their margins of error are hundreds of miles, hundreds of years, and an order of magnitude or two. This makes Alan Greenspan look like Nostradamus.
But of course, that’s not what does or does not qualify geology as a science. Rather, scientists are researchers who subject themselves to rigorous falsification testing that, in the long run, weeds out error. What’s important about the study of earthquakes, for instance, is not its predictive power but that it’s based on an understanding derived from plate tectonics. Yet this was not always the case. That freshman course I mentioned was taught by some of the last holdouts against plate theory; we learned about igneous intrusions and isostatic rebound, but not subduction faults.
You can’t take a course like that any more, because the reward system for geologists gives lots of points for devising critical tests and takes away even more for failure to pass them. Suppose there were a parallel universe in which geologists acted like economists. You might have a popular school of thought that holds that earthquakes are caused by the differential pressure exerted by topography; that’s why there are more quakes in California than Kansas. You could show that the coefficient on topographical variation is significant at a very low p-value in a pooled cross-section. You could calibrate a model showing how much variation is associated with how many earthquakes. Hell, you could generate hundreds of models with different functional forms and control variables and estimators and build whole careers around nuanced discussions of which one “performs” better.
But none of this has anything to do with science. In the universe we actually live in, geologists looked for critical tests: evidence that decisively discriminated between plate tectonics and competing theories.
If you want to tell me that people formulate lifetime spending plans based on the present value of their expected future stream of real after-tax income, and that because of this any dollar of additional government spending is a dollar less of private spending, fine. But don’t calibrate it or show me results “consistent” with it. Think of a critical test, a real-world situation in which we would get a particular result only if this story is correct, and then live or die by the result. Yes, I know this can be difficult in economics, just as it is in geology, but it’s even harder if you don’t try.
If you want to talk about hard sciences, talk about geology. They even have hardness tests, which I remember from my freshman course many long years ago. (I did pretty well in it, but would have done better if I could have ID’ed coal on a midterm exam.) Yet when it comes to a crucial task like predicting earthquakes, geologists are not much better than the pseudo-scientists who populate economics departments. They do even worse, actually, when you consider that their margins of error are hundreds of miles, hundreds of years, and an order of magnitude or two. This makes Alan Greenspan look like Nostradamus.
But of course, that’s not what does or does not qualify geology as a science. Rather, scientists are researchers who subject themselves to rigorous falsification testing that, in the long run, weeds out error. What’s important about the study of earthquakes, for instance, is not its predictive power but that it’s based on an understanding derived from plate tectonics. Yet this was not always the case. That freshman course I mentioned was taught by some of the last holdouts against plate theory; we learned about igneous intrusions and isostatic rebound, but not subduction faults.
You can’t take a course like that any more, because the reward system for geologists gives lots of points for devising critical tests and takes away even more for failure to pass them. Suppose there were a parallel universe in which geologists acted like economists. You might have a popular school of thought that holds that earthquakes are caused by the differential pressure exerted by topography; that’s why there are more quakes in California than Kansas. You could show that the coefficient on topographical variation is significant at a very low p-value in a pooled cross-section. You could calibrate a model showing how much variation is associated with how many earthquakes. Hell, you could generate hundreds of models with different functional forms and control variables and estimators and build whole careers around nuanced discussions of which one “performs” better.
But none of this has anything to do with science. In the universe we actually live in, geologists looked for critical tests: evidence that decisively discriminated between plate tectonics and competing theories.
If you want to tell me that people formulate lifetime spending plans based on the present value of their expected future stream of real after-tax income, and that because of this any dollar of additional government spending is a dollar less of private spending, fine. But don’t calibrate it or show me results “consistent” with it. Think of a critical test, a real-world situation in which we would get a particular result only if this story is correct, and then live or die by the result. Yes, I know this can be difficult in economics, just as it is in geology, but it’s even harder if you don’t try.
The 'medium' is what you actually do.
In 1970 Charles A Reich wrote his book 'The Greening of America' in praise of the cultural protest movement of the 1960s.. It was one of the most personally influential books I have read.
Over the years since Reich's publication the mainstream media have placed much emphasis on the relative affluence of the young people of '60s generation. Leading journalists and TV hosts often supposed that an unprecedented rise in material wealth was somehow causative of the rebellious spirit that was the hallmark of the youth at that time.
It is clear, however, that great waves of alienation with modern western society had already swelled in the hearts of many individuals that were born in a different time altogether. As much as many former hipsters would hate the thought, the real depths of dissent that shaped the events of the 1960s may have actually come from their parents' and earlier generations. A small, particularly articulate and thoughtful number of people such as the likes of Martin Luther King, Charles Reich (as above), John Kenneth Galbraith, C Wright Mills, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lewis Mumford, Laurence J Peter, Barry Commoner, Karl Polanyi and others took the limelight and shaped the thoughts of many a draft-dodger and pot-smoking greenie.
What was new and potentially revolutionary was the new medium of television and the ubiquity of cheap books; these people mostly understood how to use these media to best advantage. They knew well the ways and means by which public consciousness was actively manipulated and sought to explain this predicament to their large audiences.
In 1970, for instance, Charles Reich drew upon the thinking of Marshall McLuhan to explain how the medium of our lives was the real message:
More likely, the father would respond to his son by saying:
Reich moves his focus onto the trapped realm of the modern 'liberal-intellectual'. No matter how great their sophistication, he says, they still keep to such goals as excellence, approval of colleagues, recognition and achievement. They may have fewer myths or illusions, but their despairing view of life's possibilities bar their way to a new consciousness and their dependence on goals involving outside approval deprives them of courage to be themselves.
To profess freedom without a change in personal consciousness it seems to me is like wanting the thunder and lightening without the rain, to want the sun without the heat and the light.
“No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”**
** 'All the Pretty Horses', McCarthy 1992
Over the years since Reich's publication the mainstream media have placed much emphasis on the relative affluence of the young people of '60s generation. Leading journalists and TV hosts often supposed that an unprecedented rise in material wealth was somehow causative of the rebellious spirit that was the hallmark of the youth at that time.
It is clear, however, that great waves of alienation with modern western society had already swelled in the hearts of many individuals that were born in a different time altogether. As much as many former hipsters would hate the thought, the real depths of dissent that shaped the events of the 1960s may have actually come from their parents' and earlier generations. A small, particularly articulate and thoughtful number of people such as the likes of Martin Luther King, Charles Reich (as above), John Kenneth Galbraith, C Wright Mills, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lewis Mumford, Laurence J Peter, Barry Commoner, Karl Polanyi and others took the limelight and shaped the thoughts of many a draft-dodger and pot-smoking greenie.
What was new and potentially revolutionary was the new medium of television and the ubiquity of cheap books; these people mostly understood how to use these media to best advantage. They knew well the ways and means by which public consciousness was actively manipulated and sought to explain this predicament to their large audiences.
In 1970, for instance, Charles Reich drew upon the thinking of Marshall McLuhan to explain how the medium of our lives was the real message:
"....let us borrow some thinking frm Marshall McLuhan. A young boy asks his father, "What do you do, Daddy?". Here is how the father might answer:
"I struggle with crowds, traffic jams and parking problems for about an hour. I talk a great deal on the telephone to people I hardly know. I dictate to a secretary and then proof-read what she types. I have all sorts of meetings wtih people I don't know very well or like very much. I eat lunch in a big hurry and can't taste or remember what I've eaten. I hurry, hurry, hurry. I spend my time in very functional offices with very functional furniture, and I never look at the weather or sky or people passing by. I talk but I don't sing or dance or touch people. I spend the last hour, all alone, struggleing with crowds, traffic and parking."
More likely, the father would respond to his son by saying:
"I am a lawyer. I help people and businesses to solve their problems. I help everybody to know the rules that we all have to live by, and to get along according to these rules."
Reich moves his focus onto the trapped realm of the modern 'liberal-intellectual'. No matter how great their sophistication, he says, they still keep to such goals as excellence, approval of colleagues, recognition and achievement. They may have fewer myths or illusions, but their despairing view of life's possibilities bar their way to a new consciousness and their dependence on goals involving outside approval deprives them of courage to be themselves.
To profess freedom without a change in personal consciousness it seems to me is like wanting the thunder and lightening without the rain, to want the sun without the heat and the light.
“No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.”**
** 'All the Pretty Horses', McCarthy 1992
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Why Japanese Health Care is Bad
Harden, Blaine. 2009. "Health Care in Japan: Low-Cost, for Now: Aging Population Could Strain System." Washington Post. (7 September).
So, public intervention of the medical system is obviously bad. The problem is that the Japanese health system makes the mistake of failing to let enough people die. The article does admit that a healthy lifestyle is also a factor, but let's hope that the US does not follow Japan.
Half a world away from the U.S. health-care debate, Japan has a system that costs half as much and often achieves better medical outcomes than its American counterpart. It does so by banning insurance company profits, limiting doctor fees and accepting shortcomings in care that many well-insured Americans would find intolerable.
But many health-care economists say Japan's low-cost system is probably not sustainable without significant change. Japan already has the world's oldest population; by 2050, 40 percent will be 65 or older. The disease mix is becoming more expensive to treat.
So, public intervention of the medical system is obviously bad. The problem is that the Japanese health system makes the mistake of failing to let enough people die. The article does admit that a healthy lifestyle is also a factor, but let's hope that the US does not follow Japan.
Why Capitalism Fails... and Minsky Punts!
by the Sandwichman
The Boston Globe today carries an op-ed by Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia, highlighting the aptness of Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis:
The political objections to the latter policy would seem at first glance to be insurmountable. But hold on a minute. A few years ago, the "house-price bubble" only existed in the fevered rantings of a smattering of chronic doomsayers. Today, who has heard of the "youth jobs crisis"? No one. Crisis? What crisis? Here's the chart again. Read it and weep.
Employment-Population Ratio - 16-24 yrs. Seasonally Adjusted
Digging deeper into the data, it gets worse. Long story short: youth employment has been COLLAPSING since the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000. There was no recovery for youth employment during the last "boom" -- only a leveling off. In the context of the youth employment crisis -- which will not be solved by a traditional bastard Keynesian fiscal-spending stimulus -- a far-reaching government jobs program might become politically feasible. But would it be economically feasible? Sandwichman doubts it. (to be continued...)
The Boston Globe today carries an op-ed by Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia, highlighting the aptness of Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis:
Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse."But does Minsky’s work offer us any practical help?" Mihm asks. Part of the solution, he continues, is to have the Federal Reserve act as a lender of last resort to distressed firms. Nothing new there. But the other part is more radical: to have the government act as employer of last resort, guaranteeing a job to anyone who wanted one.
In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. "Instability," he wrote, "is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism."
The political objections to the latter policy would seem at first glance to be insurmountable. But hold on a minute. A few years ago, the "house-price bubble" only existed in the fevered rantings of a smattering of chronic doomsayers. Today, who has heard of the "youth jobs crisis"? No one. Crisis? What crisis? Here's the chart again. Read it and weep.
Digging deeper into the data, it gets worse. Long story short: youth employment has been COLLAPSING since the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000. There was no recovery for youth employment during the last "boom" -- only a leveling off. In the context of the youth employment crisis -- which will not be solved by a traditional bastard Keynesian fiscal-spending stimulus -- a far-reaching government jobs program might become politically feasible. But would it be economically feasible? Sandwichman doubts it. (to be continued...)The Futility of Financial Regulation: Lessons from Science and Professional Football
The Wall Street Journal does not make the connection explicit, the editors must realize that the sophisticated investors, who own luxury boxes (or even professional football teams), will get the message: financial regulation is futile. The offense has a scientific advantage over the defense. No matter what strategy the defense uses, the offense can find a way to overpower it. The Journal even gives scientific analysis to make this point. Of course, the possibility remains, of moving from a competitive capitalistic game to a more cooperative system will eliminate the need for offenses and defenses. Notice the similarity between the analysis of football and neoclassical descriptions of the economy.
Futterman, Matthew. 2009. "Behind the NFL's Touchdown Binge As Scoring Soars, One Professor Sees Parallels in Nature; the 'River Basin' Theory." Wall Street Journal (10 September).
Futterman, Matthew. 2009. "Behind the NFL's Touchdown Binge As Scoring Soars, One Professor Sees Parallels in Nature; the 'River Basin' Theory." Wall Street Journal (10 September).
The NFL has become so fast and efficient that last season, teams each scored 22.03 points per game, the highest since 1967, while all the league's 32 teams combined for 11,279 points—the most in NFL history.
The game has become less cluttered. Offenses averaged just 3.09 turnovers (interceptions and fumbles) per game, the lowest of all time by more than 10%, and offensive lines allowed just 4.04 sacks per game—also the lowest ever. Even place kickers set a new mark: They made a record-high 84.5% of their field-goal attempts.
Adrian Bejan a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, likens the NFL's evolution to a river's effect on its basin. (Stay with us, here.) Over time, a river relentlessly wears away its banks and, as a result, water flows faster and faster toward its mouth. When obstacles fall in its way, say, a tree, or a boulder -- or in the case of an NFL offense, beefy linebackers like the Baltimore Ravens' Ray Lewis or the Chicago Bears' Brian Urlacher -- it will figure out how to wear those away, too.
"The game is a flow system, a river basin of bodies that are milling around trying to find the most effective and easiest way to move," says Prof. Bejan. "Over time you will end up with the right way to play the game, with the patterns that are the most efficient."
In 1996, Prof. Bejan, who began following the NFL after coming to the U.S. from Romania to attend college, came up with a theory about natural phenomena known as the Constructal Law. The theory, he says, can be used to explain the evolution of efficiency in everything from river basins to mechanical design. By extension, he says, it could also be applied to the explosion of offense in the NFL.
Tom Lemming, the recruiting expert and analyst for CBS College Sports, says no one on the college level has figured out how to neutralize the speed of the spread offense, either. "The offense always sets the agenda, and the defense plays catch-up," Mr. Lemming says.
Considered more broadly, Constructal Law may be the closest thing to a grand unified theory for the evolution of sports. In a sports context, the river is the relentless search for the easiest way to score or win more often. In soccer, there is the indefensible through-ball, passed between two defenders to a striker sprinting into open space. In basketball, the two-handed set shot eventually gave way to finding the tallest, fastest players who could jump the highest and dunk.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Cochrane's Complaint
by the Sandwichman
I did learn this from Cochrane's essay: "the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going.... . This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences." Hello? That is indeed a fascinating thing. Markets are efficient because nobody can tell where they are going. That is to say, if nobody can tell where they are going; then markets are efficient. Or, to put it more bluntly, if there is a Goldman, Sachs; then there is no such thing as an efficient market. Notwithstanding the non-trivial detail that the term "efficient" in the proposition is either a non sequitur or a tautolgy. What are efficient markets efficient at? Being inscrutable!
The catch is there will always be a Goldman, Sachs. The inherent tendency of all markets is toward monopolization and manipulation. It is precisely because people will not settle for the "nobody can tell" fairy tale that markets get rigged. To pretend that actually existing markets are somehow almost the same thing as efficient markets is no different than pretending that actually existing socialism was virtually a workers' paradise or that the moon is made of green cheese and the central bank is a green cheese factory. It's all dress up and make believe.
Like Paul Krugman, John Cochran has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do.
Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. "Irrationality" and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.How sad, indeed. All the fascinating things economists are writing about "it" these days! What does the word "it" refer to? What caused our current financial and economic problems? What policies might have prevented it? What might help us in the future? Perhaps a little math would help:
How sad.
Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the "then" really does follow the "if," which it so frequently does not if you just write prose.That depends on what the meaning of the word "if" is. Or the word "it". And "what". Professor Cochrane's mistake was not waiting a week before uncorking his rant and giving himself the opportunity of filing it in the unsent-rants file where it belongs.
I did learn this from Cochrane's essay: "the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going.... . This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences." Hello? That is indeed a fascinating thing. Markets are efficient because nobody can tell where they are going. That is to say, if nobody can tell where they are going; then markets are efficient. Or, to put it more bluntly, if there is a Goldman, Sachs; then there is no such thing as an efficient market. Notwithstanding the non-trivial detail that the term "efficient" in the proposition is either a non sequitur or a tautolgy. What are efficient markets efficient at? Being inscrutable!
The catch is there will always be a Goldman, Sachs. The inherent tendency of all markets is toward monopolization and manipulation. It is precisely because people will not settle for the "nobody can tell" fairy tale that markets get rigged. To pretend that actually existing markets are somehow almost the same thing as efficient markets is no different than pretending that actually existing socialism was virtually a workers' paradise or that the moon is made of green cheese and the central bank is a green cheese factory. It's all dress up and make believe.
Like Paul Krugman, John Cochran has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Job-Market Slack as "Leading Indicator"
by the Sandwichman
A couple of days ago, the Sandwichman characterized the employment-as-a-lagging-indicator meme as a prescription for doing nothing. Yesterday, over on Macroblog, David Altig contemplated, "Economists got it wrong, but why?" concluding, "I've yet to see the evidence that progress requires moving beyond the intellectual boundaries in which most economists already live." That comment sent the S-man down memory lane to a WSJ debate on job market slack Max Sawicky and Sandwichman had with David Altig back in the boom times of August, 2005.
Max and I were of the opinion that the job market was then slack in spite of a nominal 5% unemployment rate. David Altig leaned toward the interpretation that changes in labor force participation were being driven by demographic trends and the informed choice of participants and non-participants. In hindsight, I wish we had followed up on the demographic clue. Decomposing the employment-population ratio by age groups produces the following arresting picture:
Employment-Population Ratio - 16-24 yrs. Seasonally Adjusted
While the drop-off since September 2008 has been steep, the decline began in December 2006, three months before unemployment bottomed out for 16-24 year olds. Perhaps more auspicious, the "peak" employment-population ratio for 16-24 year olds during the last recovery barely climbed above it's trough following the 2001 recession. As they say, the youth of today is the future -- or the canary in the coal mine. The above chart is "evidence that progress requires moving beyond the intellectual boundaries in which most economists already live" whether David Altig sees it that way or not.
A couple of days ago, the Sandwichman characterized the employment-as-a-lagging-indicator meme as a prescription for doing nothing. Yesterday, over on Macroblog, David Altig contemplated, "Economists got it wrong, but why?" concluding, "I've yet to see the evidence that progress requires moving beyond the intellectual boundaries in which most economists already live." That comment sent the S-man down memory lane to a WSJ debate on job market slack Max Sawicky and Sandwichman had with David Altig back in the boom times of August, 2005.
Max and I were of the opinion that the job market was then slack in spite of a nominal 5% unemployment rate. David Altig leaned toward the interpretation that changes in labor force participation were being driven by demographic trends and the informed choice of participants and non-participants. In hindsight, I wish we had followed up on the demographic clue. Decomposing the employment-population ratio by age groups produces the following arresting picture:
While the drop-off since September 2008 has been steep, the decline began in December 2006, three months before unemployment bottomed out for 16-24 year olds. Perhaps more auspicious, the "peak" employment-population ratio for 16-24 year olds during the last recovery barely climbed above it's trough following the 2001 recession. As they say, the youth of today is the future -- or the canary in the coal mine. The above chart is "evidence that progress requires moving beyond the intellectual boundaries in which most economists already live" whether David Altig sees it that way or not.Taking Liberties with History
by the Sandwichman
At the "Library of Economics and Liberty" blog, Bryan Caplan, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, is impressed by Lee Ohanian's historical contribution: "But his history genuinely advances our knowledge of the Hoover phase of the Great Depression."
The Sandwichman duly points out a few flaws in Ohanian's historiography.
At the "Library of Economics and Liberty" blog, Bryan Caplan, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, is impressed by Lee Ohanian's historical contribution: "But his history genuinely advances our knowledge of the Hoover phase of the Great Depression."
The Sandwichman duly points out a few flaws in Ohanian's historiography.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Monetary Economists: One-Third Are Ill-Fed
Ryan Grim at the Huffpost has set off a buzz by claiming that the Federal Reserve exercises undo influence over the economics profession. By his count, there are about 1500 economists specializing in monetary theory and policy, and about a third are employed or otherwise lubricated by the Fed at any one time. He cites several sources who have witnessed the corrupting influence of Fed contracts and invitations, as well as outright censorship. Fed staff and veterans dominate the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics. Is this a conspiracy?
I think Grim’s tale relies too much on partial equilibrium analysis. A better model would incorporate all the functional relationships: how journal publication influences hiring at top graduate departments, how the curriculum in these departments molds the next generation of economists, how students self-select in their education and career choices once they know the biases of their professors, how the self-reproducing ideological bent of the profession influences the Fed, the IMF and other policy/research outfits, and how the ideological and practical demands of the finance sector influence and are influenced by academic research. You can’t pull one piece out of this puzzle and say it controls all the others.
Any good DSGE modeler would tell you this.
I think Grim’s tale relies too much on partial equilibrium analysis. A better model would incorporate all the functional relationships: how journal publication influences hiring at top graduate departments, how the curriculum in these departments molds the next generation of economists, how students self-select in their education and career choices once they know the biases of their professors, how the self-reproducing ideological bent of the profession influences the Fed, the IMF and other policy/research outfits, and how the ideological and practical demands of the finance sector influence and are influenced by academic research. You can’t pull one piece out of this puzzle and say it controls all the others.
Any good DSGE modeler would tell you this.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Joblessness by Design
by the Sandwichman
My earlier message on kurzarbeit drew a response from Jon Messenger of the ILO who wrote a policy brief on work sharing for the International Labour Conference in Geneva last June. Following up from Jon's bibliography and subsequent sources it becomes apparent that there is an active discussion going on in Europe about work sharing as a response to the current JOBS CRISIS -- with the OECD, the ILO and the TUC all advocating subsidies for short-time working (or "work-sharing").
This is the kind of thing that Dean Baker was calling for last January but nobody (in the USA) has taken up. After all, employment is a lagging indicator. Right? Wrong. According to the Conference Board, non-farm employment is a coincident indicator. Which is to say, when economists talk about employment being a lagging indicator, they are spouting BS.
The "employment is a lagging indicator" meme is a prescription for doing nothing about unemployment other than waiting for the (initially jobless) "recovery" to eventually restore a tolerable level of employment. Of course if government does nothing about unemployment while expanding credit and investment then employment-as-lagging-indicator becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The jobless recovery is jobless BY DESIGN.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: "Short-time working subsidies or reduction in social security contributions will help preserve viable jobs, if they are well-targeted on firms facing a temporary fall in demand and workers who will find it difficult to get another job if made redundant."
International Labour Organization: "In the context of the current global economic recession there has been a growing interest in work sharing as a labour market policy tool aimed at preserving existing jobs."
Trades Union Congress: "We are advocating access to a subsidy package for private sector employers who make short-term reductions in staff hours or temporary lay-offs as a means to save costs and give their businesses a better chance of survival."
My earlier message on kurzarbeit drew a response from Jon Messenger of the ILO who wrote a policy brief on work sharing for the International Labour Conference in Geneva last June. Following up from Jon's bibliography and subsequent sources it becomes apparent that there is an active discussion going on in Europe about work sharing as a response to the current JOBS CRISIS -- with the OECD, the ILO and the TUC all advocating subsidies for short-time working (or "work-sharing").
This is the kind of thing that Dean Baker was calling for last January but nobody (in the USA) has taken up. After all, employment is a lagging indicator. Right? Wrong. According to the Conference Board, non-farm employment is a coincident indicator. Which is to say, when economists talk about employment being a lagging indicator, they are spouting BS.
The "employment is a lagging indicator" meme is a prescription for doing nothing about unemployment other than waiting for the (initially jobless) "recovery" to eventually restore a tolerable level of employment. Of course if government does nothing about unemployment while expanding credit and investment then employment-as-lagging-indicator becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The jobless recovery is jobless BY DESIGN.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: "Short-time working subsidies or reduction in social security contributions will help preserve viable jobs, if they are well-targeted on firms facing a temporary fall in demand and workers who will find it difficult to get another job if made redundant."
International Labour Organization: "In the context of the current global economic recession there has been a growing interest in work sharing as a labour market policy tool aimed at preserving existing jobs."
Trades Union Congress: "We are advocating access to a subsidy package for private sector employers who make short-term reductions in staff hours or temporary lay-offs as a means to save costs and give their businesses a better chance of survival."
Seeing the Crisis Coming...
From the Financial Times (via Andrew Jackson at the Progressive Economics Forum)
Official models missed the crisis not because the conditions were so unusual, as we are often told. They missed it by design. It is impossible to warn against a debt deflation recession in a model world where debt does not exist. This is the world our policymakers have been living in. They urgently need to change habitat.
I [Dirk Bezemer] undertook a study of the models used by those who did see it coming...
Can we save the planet by working less?
by the Sandwichman
The Ecologist features an article by Ewan Kingston making the environmental case for work time reduction.
The Ecologist features an article by Ewan Kingston making the environmental case for work time reduction.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)