Muddle Class Task Force

by the Sandwichman

"We don't think that 'less bad' is good. 'Less bad' is not our measure of success." -- Vice President Joe Biden

Dear Joe, Christy, Larry, Peter, Terrell, Jared, Curly and Moe,

Wake up!

Vice President Biden assures Americans that the Recovery Act, by some estimates, has already saved and created a million jobs. Think of it! A million jobs! That's like a one with six zeros after it.

Meanwhile, buried deep in the BLS employment report today is mention of the "benchmark revision" for 2008, subtracting 825,000 jobs. Those job losses don't show up in the monthly statistics or even in the revisions. They only show up a year later in the benchmark revision. The prime suspect for the extent of the discrepancy is the BLS birth/death model, which added a net total of 904,000 717,000 "imputed" jobs to the fiscal 2008 employment situation reports. So far this year there have been 707,000 815,000 imputed jobs added to the BLS reports. If 90% of we assume those jobs don't actually exist, as in 2008, then the cumulative statistical distortion is 1.5 1.6 million jobs. That's more than half again as many phantom jobs created by statistical miscalculation as estimated to be saved and created by the Recovery Act!

"Less bad" may indeed not be good. But getting worse somewhat more slowly is not even "less bad". It is just plain worse.

Eight months ago, when the "White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families" was announced, the Sandwichman sent Jared Bernstein a draft submission, outlining the role that work-time reduction could play in a full-employment strategy. A month and a half later, I posted a final version of the submission and submitted a summary to the Task Force along with a link to the full document.

I am posting it again for your information...

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Economics environment working families

Sincerely,

The Sandwichman

P.S. -- except I keep getting error messages when I try to submit this to the White House Task Force webpage.

Good News On Iran-US Relations

I am very pleased by the reports today of agreements made yesterday in the 5+1 talks with Iran, despite natterings by various nabobs of negativism and paranoid hysteria. The posts for the past two days by Juan Cole at http://www.juancole.com are in my mind very useful. He reminds people of some basics that are regularly forgotten in the drumb beat of propaganda that most of the US media hands out about Iran. It has not invaded another country since the 1700s; it has an official policy (based on a fatwa by its Supreme Leader) against acquiring nuclear weapons; it has an official policy of no first strikes (fitting in with its long history of non-aggression); all the uranium it has enriched is at a level far below being able to be used for nuclear weapons; both the IAEA and an official NIE of the US government (from the Bush presidency) state that it does not have an active nuclear weapons program. And, to add to all that, the democratic opposition to the current government opposes increasing sanctions on Iran.

In any case, it now looks like Obama made good use of his private conversation with Putin, which went on for much longer than expected and out of which there were no reports, given the constructive role that Russia is playing at this time in regard to this situation. Sometimes there is good news, and it does appear that having a president who is both smart and well informed is a good thing once in awhile.

Putting America to Work?

Shovel Off to Buffalo

by the Sandwichman

Former Clinton Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, thinks deficit spending on infrastructure is a panacea for unemployment:

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

The Sandwichman sympathizes with Reich's sentiment. But why can't a university professor and ex-Secretary of Labor rise above cracker-barrel wisdom and deal with real facts on the ground. The fact is the unemployment rate among 16-24 year olds is already nearly 20 percent and the underemployment rate, including discouraged job-seekers and economic part-timers is over 30 percent. That's three-zero -- thirty percent.

Not all the unemployed are qualified construction workers.

In fact, it's likely a relatively small proportion are. Even if they were, it's not likely that building all the roads, bridges, schools and parks WE NEED would require enough labor to employ them all... unless you're going to opt for those eight-person crews with one shovel. And another catch is that those infrastructure projects will also require the services of people whose skills and credentials are already in short supply -- thus creating bottlenecks.

No, spending even more on all those public works projects is not such a brand-new, fabulous, fool-proof panacea. Ahem. Did you know the patron saint of fiscal stimulus, John Maynard Keynes, didn't exactly have the house of pancakes bottomless coffee pot of government spending in mind?

Don't take my word for it. Read Lord Robert Skidelsky's "Keynes: The Return of the Master." Everybody else is. Even at the OECD. But even Skidelsky is being a bit coy in the latest book. He says, "Over time... the high-investment policy should yield to the encouragement of consumption through redistributing income from the higher to the lower-saving section of the population. This should be coupled with a reduction in the hours of work." That's a lot vaguer than what Keynes actually wrote and also much vaguer than what Skidelsky wrote about Keynes a decade ago.

The bottom line is that Keynes's ultimate solution for unemployment now is WORKING LESS and not "spending more". Maybe Keynes was wrong, eh? But in that case the burden of proof is on the advocates of more stimulus to show why Keynes was wrong or at least to honestly acknowledge that what they propose is NOT what Keynes advocated.

Watering the Tree of Liberty

I have recently been reading Connor Cruise O'Brien's book on Burke, The Great Melody, which I highly recommend, especially as an antidote to the highly selective uses of Burke by pop conservatives like Brooks and Will. So anyway, I also picked up another book by O'Brien, The Long Affair, which is, in the first place, about Jefferson's fascination with the French Revolution - what O'Brien calls his cult of the French Revolution, and his full-throated defense of Terror in the name of "Liberty." But the thesis is much bigger than that. O'Brien wants to undermine the liberal white-washing of Jefferson, especially when it comes to race. He points out that Jefferson was bitterly opposed to the very idea of a multi-racial society and that the only way he could contemplate slavery ending would be with the freed slaves immediately shipped back to Africa.

The final chapter finds O'Brien worrying, circa 1996, about the prospects of American democracy. He says that American civic religion cannot be adapted to a genuinely multi-racial democracy without jettisoning Jefferson from the pantheon. And he worries that this in turn may produce a schism, with the return of what has been repressed in the liberal portrait of Jefferson ( the release of "the spell-binding and anarchic racist prophet within Jefferson") in which Jefferson would become "the prophet and patriot of the fanatical racist far right in America."

Needless to say, reading this in the wake of the news story from this past summer about the guy who showed up at one of Obama's town-halls with a loaded gun, wearing a shirt inscribed with the "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" quote from Jefferson - well, it was beyond chilling.

Will The Fed Unwind Its Enormous Balance Sheet Via Reverse Repos?

A few days ago at Econbrowser, Jim Hamilton showed the latest Fed balance sheet and quoted scattered reports that Bernanke and the Fed are contemplating the use of "reverse repos" to unwind the Fed's balance sheet, which has been about three times its normal size since last September, "Federal Reserve reverse repurchases". The balance sheet was initially ballooned by such entities as the TAF and the CPLF, which picked up all kinds of things, from banks and whatnot in the US economy to something like $600 billion in euro-junk. However, there has been a noticeable shift since January, with that stuff getting unwound, and the main item keeping the balance sheet thick with liabilities being a massive increase in repurchase (repo) agreements. Indeed, this has long been the main tool by which the Fed has engaged in open market expansion operations. The new report is that they are hoping to drain these through reverse repos, but are hoping to do so without "tightening." Hmm, we shall see...

The Blowing Winds Of Climate Change in Australia

Last Sunday, 27th September, the Australian state of Tasmania was battered by exceptionally strong winds that brought down thousands of trees, ripped off roofs and guttering from houses, tore power lines and blocked many rural roads with large piles of debris from fallen limbs and trunks of trees from adjacent forests and plantations.

Today, two and a half days after the event, our house is one of the 2,700 still without power.[1] There are at least a dozen large trees on our bush block that lie with their roots protruding out of the ground. Fortunately the local road is now just cleared enough to allow access to vehicles but powerlines are down; they lie in a neighbour's paddock. A tree still leans precariously onto electricity wires only half a kilometre away.[2]

The sheer force of the winds were beyond the experience of local people. Farmer Hayes approached on his tractor this morning. He simply nodded his head in his usual mode of gleeful resignation and declared that we can now expect this sort of thing from now on. "We may as well get used to it."

Only four days earlier a red dust cloud "70 times the level rated hazardous" to health [3] enveloped large parts of New South Wales and southern Queensland; an area approximately 1,500 kilometres long by 400 kilometres wide [4].... to be more precise. This was yet another unprecedented event. No other single dust storm of such magnitude has occurred before, although the last one in October 2002 came close.

Paramedics attended hundreds of calls to distressed, choking individuals. Airline flights were cancelled or redirected to other cities. Traffic was held up for hours due to low visibility. However, the repercussions for Australian farmers after the loss of roughly four million tonnes of soil is yet to be felt.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this month heralds the new winds of climate change in Australia. The portents are so many that most people in this hotter and dryer island continent are pretty well convinced that the weather we have now is entirely new and ominous.

Abrupt and stark changes are happening in Australia's climate[5] and landscape so frequently they're becoming a type of online diary entry for me. This winter just ended was Australia's hottest on record.[6] It followed only a few month's after Australia's most catastrophic summer [7] which, in turn, was followed by massive fire outbreaks in Southern Australia.[8] These six hundred odd fires in one state alone were yet another example of a tragedy whose enormity (like the vast majority of other recent changes) is unprecedented in its scale and effect.

The blunt truth is that the changes in our climate give Australia its new reality. It gives it now; it gives it with or without our acceptance. Things have already become very complicated.

Unfortunately, the climate didn't wait for us.


[1] http://www.examiner.com.au/news/local/news/disasters-accidents/2700-still-without-power-and-it-could-be-days-for-some/1634901.aspx

[2] I write from the house of a family member.

[3] 'Air-quality readings off the chart' Aden Creswell and Angus Hohenboken. The Australian, page 6. 24th September 2009.

[4] 'Red Centre causes havoc in big city' The Australian. Page 1. 24th September 2009.

[5] Outside of the Vortex. Brenda Rosser
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2009/03/outside-of-vortex.html

[6] Only a Decade. Brenda Rosser
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2009/09/only-one-decade.html

[7] Australia's Catastrophic Summer of 2009. Brenda Rosser. Jan/Feb 2009
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/.../australias-catastrophic-summer-of-2009.html

[8] Australia's Catastrophic Summer - Update. Brenda Rosser. February 2009
http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2009/02/australias-catastrophic-summer-update.html

Worth Quoting

"The 'flexibility' explanation of unemployment is wrong." -- Bell and Blanchflower, "What Should Be Done about Rising Unemployment in the UK?" February 2009, page 15. To elaborate on that point:

In a recent article, Howell et al (2007) econometrically examined the impact of these rigidity variables, or what they call Protective Labor Market Institutions (PLMIs), and concluded that: "while significant impacts for employment protection, benefit generosity, and union strength have been reported, the clear conclusion from our review of these studies is that the effects for the PLMIs is distinctly unrobust, with widely divergent coefficients and levels of significance." Indeed, in his published comments on the Howell et al. article, Jim Heckman (2007) argues that the authors "…are convincing in showing the fragility of the evidence on the role of labour market institutions in explaining the pattern of European unemployment, using standard econometric methodology." Freeman (2007) also finds the evidence for the impact of these institutional variables less than convincing "despite considerable effort, researchers have not pinned down the effects, if any, of institutions on other aggregate economic outcomes, such as unemployment and employment."

Fooled by Randomness

"Hysteria seems especially out of place when people proclaim that the large losses triggered by derivatives could threaten the stability of the world financial system. While enormous leverage and extraordinary potential losses from derivatives will continue to receive banner headlines, a number of international study groups have concluded that a spreading worldwide financial crisis caused by derivatives is highly unlikely. Speculators who take large risks will continue to risk ruin, and some financial institutions -- even large ones -- will continue to fail. But a systematic undermining of world financial stability caused by derivatives trading does not deserve to be on the top of anyone's worry list." -- Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, p. 415, 2007 (revised and updated, but not updated quite enough)

It's On!

by the Sandwichman

David Blanchflower's keynote address to the OECD Policy Forum: "How can Labour Market and Social Policies best help workers weather the storm of the crisis?." Page 19 (the punchline):

Keynes’ Biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky

"Keynes’s big idea was to use macroeconomic policy to maintain full employment. His specific suggestion was to use monetary policy to secure a permanently low interest rate and fiscal policy to achieve a continuously high level of public or semi-public investment.

"Over time, as the returns on further additions to capital fell, the high-investment policy should yield to the encouragement of consumption through redistributing income from the higher to the lower-saving section of the population. This should be coupled with a reduction in the hours of work. In short, the object of macro-policy should be to keep the economy in 'quasi-boom' till the economic problem was solved and people could live 'wisely, and agreeably, and well.'"

Washington Post Puffs Gold Buggery

The business section of today's Washington Post contains one of the most ridiculous news stories I have seen yet. I would not mind if this were a column, but "What's Making Gold a Hot Commodity" by Frank Ahrens is supposedly a news story, and as such it should not contain whoppingly erroneous statements without some correction. So, Ahrens himself says the following: "In the long term, with each new dollar introduced into the system, each dollar you hold becomes worth less. That's more than just inflation, which we think of as simply rising prices. That's debasement of not only our currency, but the globe's reserve currency." It may well be that nonsensical thinking such as this has pushed the price of gold back over $1,000 per ounce again, but why should a business section reporter repeat it without the slightest doubt. It is not even good monetarism, as monetarists only view money supply expansions beyond growth of real output and not offset by velocity changes as inflationary.

A bit later, Ahrens uncritically quotes Peter Boockvar, an equities trader at Miller Tabak: "It amazes me that any self-respecting central banker is not alarmed that gold is over $1,000 an ounce and the dollar is trading at all-time record lows." All-time record lows? Only against gold. Currently the dollar is about 1.46 against the euro, while it hit 1.5990 in July 2008. It is around 92 against the yen, but in 1995 got as low as 79.95. It is a bit over 1.5 against the pound, but was at 1.98 last year (and further back in history was over 4.0). Utter drivel.

I do recognize that later in the article Ahrens brings up some factors that might caution people a bit against buying gold too frenziedly, such as how much of it is held by central banks, and how little demand for it is due to industrial use (only about 10%). But he never mentions that it has already been above $1,000 twice before, only to fall back, and in the late 1970s was much higher in real terms, at well over $800, only to fall very far below that and stay well below that for decades. The warnings could have been a bit clearer, along with avoiding mindlessly repeating totally ridiculous non-facts spouted by wacko gold bugs.

OECD Jobs Crisis Policy Forum

As part of the OECD Labour and Employment Ministerial meeting on the Jobs Crisis, taking place in Paris on Monday and Tuesday, there will be a policy forum engaging "the social partners, researchers, Ministers and representatives of the civil society." (One wonders what the difference is between "social partners" and "representatives of the civil society". Are the partners not civil?). Professor David Blanchflower will be the keynote speaker at the Policy Forum.

Blanchflower is a "happiness" economist and, as a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, was early in warning of the impending credit crisis. He has also been in the front lines warning of the jobs crisis and now writes a weekly column for the New Statesman.

The Policy Forum's website presents four questions for discussion at the forum:

- Are standard employment policies adequate to respond to the crisis?

- Do these measures need to be reinforced or complemented by other less conventional measures?

- What should be done to minimize the risk that the current steep rise in unemployment will become persistent into the recovery and beyond?

- How can dialogue with social partners and other stakeholders facilitate the design and implementation of the most suitable labour market and social policy package to help workers weather the storm of the crisis?

The Sandwichman sent Professor Blanchflower his response to these four questions and is pleased that he has acknowledged the email. Below are the responses.

1. "Are standard employment policies adequate to respond to the crisis?"

Certainly not.

2. "Do these measures need to be reinforced or complemented by other less conventional measures?"

Yes, see below.

3. "What should be done to minimize the risk that the current steep rise in unemployment will become persistent into the recovery and beyond?"

The traditional trade union prescription for high unemployment put forward in the 19th century, in the 1930s and even as late as the 1950s and 1960s was to reduce the hours of work. Samuel Gompers said, "So long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long." John Maynard Keynes agreed. In a 1945 letter to T.S. Eliot, Keynes explained, "The full employment policy by means of investment is only one particular application of an intellectual theorem. You can produce the result just as well by consuming more or working less. Personally I regard the investment policy as first aid. In U.S. it almost certainly will not do the trick. Less work is the ultimate solution." Keynes expressed the same opinion more formally in a 1943 Treasury Department memorandum on "The Long Term Problem of Full Employment".

A fuller explanation of the theory underlying the trade union position can be found in Dorothy Wolff Douglas's 1932 Journal of Political Economy article on "Ira Steward on Consumption and Unemployment". For the context of Keynes's views on working less and their centrality to Keynes's thought, see the conclusion to Robert Skidelsky's 1998 paper, "Keynes and Employment Policy in the Second World War." In light of the uncanny convergence between Steward's ideas on unemployment and Keynes's, it would be a serious mistake to overlook them.

4. "How can dialogue with social partners and other stakeholders facilitate the design and implementation of the most suitable labour market and social policy package to help workers weather the storm of the crisis?"

Dialogue on the relationship between unemployment, wages and reduction of the hours of work has been effectively banished from mainstream economics by the bogus accusation that proponents of shorter working time commit a "lump of labor fallacy". Even the unions in the US have finally acceded to the shibboleth. Below is the abstract to my 2007 Review of Social Economy article, "Why Economists Dislike a Lump of Labor":

"The lump-of-labor fallacy has been called one of the “best known fallacies in economics.” It is widely cited in disparagement of policies for reducing the standard hours of work, yet the authenticity of the fallacy claim is questionable, and explanations of it are inconsistent and contradictory. This article discusses recent occurrences of the fallacy claim and investigates anomalies in the claim and its history. S.J. Chapman's coherent and formerly highly regarded theory of the hours of labor is reviewed, and it is shown how that theory could lend credence to the job-creating potentiality of shorter working time policies. It concludes that substituting a dubious fallacy claim for an authentic economic theory may have obstructed fruitful dialogue about working time and the appropriate policies for regulating it."

The unreasoning antagonism of contemporary economists to shorter hours of work is not unprecedented. Mark Blaug's 1958 article, "The Classical Economists and the Factory Acts," revealed how most of the 19th century political economists opposed the reduction of hours on the basis of "principles" that owed nothing to any actual economic analysis. Fortunately, that earlier opposition was overcome by persistent agitation. The current impasse, though, has been hard-wired into theoretical models that owe more to their fanciful premises than to their mathematical rigor.

Occupation at UC Santa Cruz

Occupation Statement

"Let’s be frank: the promise of a financially secure life at the end of a university education is fast becoming an illusion. The jobs we are working toward will be no better than the jobs we already have to pay our way through school. Close to three-quarters of students work, many full-time. Even with these jobs, student loan volume rose 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. There is a direct connection between these deteriorating conditions and those impacting workers and families throughout California. Two million people are now unemployed across the state. 1.5 million more are underemployed out of a workforce of twenty million. As formerly secure, middle-class workers lose their homes to foreclosure, Depression-era shantytowns are cropping up across the state. The crisis is severe and widespread, yet the proposed solutions – the governor and state assembly organizing a bake sale to close the budget gap – are completely absurd.

"We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over. Appeals to the UC administration and Sacramento are futile; instead, we appeal to each other, to the people with whom we are struggling, and not to those whom we struggle against. A single day of action at the university is not enough because we cannot afford to return to business as usual. We seek to form a unified movement with the people of California. Time and again, factional demands are turned against us by our leaders and used to divide social workers against teachers, nurses against students, librarians against park rangers, in a competition for resources they tell us are increasingly scarce. This crisis is general, and the revolt must be generalized. Escalation is absolutely necessary. We have no other option.

"Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles, a tactic recently used at the Chicago Windows and Doors factory and at the New School in New York City. It can happen throughout California too. As undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff, we call on everyone at the UC to support this occupation by continuing the walkouts and strikes into tomorrow, the next day, and for the indefinite future. We call on the people of California to occupy and escalate."

Mankiw, Posner, Krugman (and Leonard) on Skidelsky on Keynes

by the Sandwichman

Paul Krugman in the Guardian and N. Gregory Mankiw in the Wall Street Journal have written reviews of Robert Skidelsky's Keynes, The Return of the Master. Now Richard Posner in the New Republic gives the book prominent mention in his essay on "How I Became a Keynesian." That's pretty respectable buzz.

But only Andrew Leonard on Salon.com really gets it:

To your run-of-the-mill market fundamentalist, questions of ethics are irrelevant. Capitalism works by satisfying consumer needs and wants. Government should stay out of the way. But Keynes is on the comeback trail because our present-day predicament shows this to be manifestly untrue.

Let me give the microphone to Skidelsky. In a paragraph and a half, he asks a set of questions that are at the heart not just of his book, but of our existence on this planet.

Keynes looked forward to a saturation of wants. But he did not see this as a natural, but an ethical terminus. Wants were to be controlled not by the size of the stomach, but by a generally accepted conception of "sufficiency" for the good life.

In terms of arithmetic, he was almost spot on in his predictions of growing wealth, but attitudes have changed less than he expected. Although real incomes in rich countries have doubled in the last thirty years, the populations of these countries work harder than ever and are no happier. This raises the question of why they are still on the growth treadmill. Is it because capitalism needs constantly to expand markets, and ensnare by advertising more and more people into useless consumption? Is it because economists have ignored the fact that, as societies become wealthier, positional goods -- goods which satisfy not our needs, but our longing for status -- become more and more desirable? Is it because globalization has made affluence too insecure and too uneven in its spread for most people in wealthy societies to ease off work? Or is it because we lack any agreed idea of the good life in the name of which we can say "enough is enough"?

If Keynes were alive today, these would be questions he would be asking. And after reading "Keynes: The Return of the Master," one can only conclude that we would be well-served to have him out and about, confounding the status quo with his impertinence.

Posner bites but can't quite swallow:

And then the challenge to society would be the management of unprecedented voluntary leisure. This was a popular 1930s theme--think of Huxley's Brave New World--but it underestimated the ability of business to create new wants, and new goods and services to fulfill them.

That was merely a mistake, an oddity in Keynes's belief in the possibility of perpetual boom.

Mankiw is unable to find it with a flashlight:

According to Keynes, economic downturns are not a fundamental indictment of the market economy. Rather, recessions and depressions arise from insufficient aggregate demand. A smart government can remedy the problem with its monetary and fiscal policy—say, by printing up some money and spending it. Once the right policies are put in place, the thinking goes, the world is safe again for free markets.

Krugman is enthusiastic about the book but reserved about the prescription:

Surely it's possible to make the case for a less profound reconstruction of economics than Skidelsky advocates...

To again give the microphone to Skidelsky: "Down with Keynsianism, and up with Keynes!"

Econospeak #19 blog for Econ students?

Yesterday an outfit called Online Universities Weblog posted a list of "100 Best Blogs for Econ Students." http://www.onlineuniversities-weblog.com/50226711/100-best-blogs-for-econ-students.php Blogs were listed in order with numbers in categories, with Econospeak at #19 and in the first category of "General." This was posted on Marginal Revolution with little comment, although some of the commenters there made negative remarks about the list (perhaps because Marginal Revolution came in at #86 under the "Hard Times" category, even though some its allied libertarian blogs were very near the top, Econlog at #2 and Cafe Hayek at #3.

In any case, I do not think I want to make too much about the numerical ranking, but I do think it is interesting to get the recognition, and pretty early on in the list, whoever these folks are. Most recently Econospeak is 57th in the Gongol.EconDirectoy ranking based on views per page among economics blogs. Just before Max stepped aside, Maxspeak was at 12th. This blog has been as high as in the low 40s, but more recently has been floating around in the 50s and 60s. I further note that the Online Universities Weblog people gave no criteria or reasons for their selection or rankings, if they even are rankings at all, which is unclear.