Monthly Archives: October 2015

Oh, Barf

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I am afraid that was my reaction to Luigi Zingales,

Inquisitive, daring and influential media outlets willing to take a strong stand against economic power are essential in a competitive capitalist society. They are our defence against crony capitalism.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. Our media outlets dismiss the opponents of the Ex-Im bank or people who want to wind down Freddie and Fannie as Tea Party nut cases. If you want to stop crony capitalism, what we need are fewer influential media outlets and more Tea Party nut cases.

Heterogeneity of Firms and Workers, Scarcity of Management Talent

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Jason Furman and Peter Orszag write,

Longstanding evidence (e.g. Krueger and Summers 1988) has documented substantial inter-industry differentials in pay—a mid-level analyst may have the same marginal product wherever he or she works but is paid more at a high-return company than at a low-return company. Newer evidence (Barth et al. 2014 and Song et al. 2015) suggests that much of the rise in earnings inequality represents the increased dispersion of earnings between firms rather than within firms. This is consistent with the combination of a rising dispersion of returns at the firm level and the inter-industry pay differential model, as well as with the notion that firms are wage setters rather than wage takers in a less-than-perfectly-competitive marketplace.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I bristle at the phrase “same marginal product.” Modern workers are not widget-makers, and their value inside an organization is not visible to people outside the organization. Indeed, even within the organization, the value contributed by individual workers cannot be calculated with any precision.

I know someone, call him A, who works in information technology at a firm in a buggy-whip industry. One of his friends, call him B, just took a job at Google. Assume, probably correctly, that the difference between their two compensation packages is a lot wider than the difference in their skills. Some possibilities:

1. This is a disequilibrium situation. Information technology workers currently produce more value at Google than in the buggy-whip industry. In equilibrium, A will move out of the buggy-whip industry and go to work for Google.

2. This is an “efficiency-wage” equilibrium, in which Google pays B slightly more than B’s opportunity cost. This enables Google to be highly selective in who it hires and also to give B an incentive to provide top performance.

I am inclined toward (2). But in either case, the value of B’s work is high relative to B’s wage, which raises the question of why Google does not hire more engineers. Perhaps the value of the next engineer would be lower, because of management limitations at Google.

I think that the key factor here is that the collective management talent assembled at Google is scarce. It generates more value that the collective management talent at the firm in the buggy-whip industry.

What I am suggesting is that the value of a firm depends a great deal on collective management talent. This includes the skills of individual key executives as well as the team chemistry among them.

One of the challenges of maintaining a high-functioning management team is that the “tournament” to get to the top can become corrupt. That is, managers can start to get ahead by undermining other managers rather than by exercising better judgment. As this sort of corruption becomes widespread, a firm can rapidly deteriorate. For me, this is one of the most interesting phenomena in the sociology of organizations.

Mishkin Before vs. Bernanke After

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In Greg Ip’s new book, Foolproof, he writes,

Frederic Mishkin, an expert on banking who had studied the Great Depression, examined what would happen if housing prices fell 20 percent. The Fed, he argued in a lengthy presentation to other central bankers, would lower interest rates quite quickly, the economy would shrink only 0.5 percent, and unemployment would barely rise.

I have not yet read Bernanke’s new book, but I gather that he thinks that without the bailouts the economy was headed toward another Great Depression. So my point is that there is quite a gap between what Mishkin thought would happen if housing prices fell and what Bernanke was afraid was going to happen. Some possibilities.

1. Mishkin actually was right. The economy easily could have withstood the housing price crash. The problem must have been something else. (Scott Sumner would say that it was tight money.)

2. Mishkin was working with a simplistic model of the economy, which did not include the fragility of the financial sector or the feedback from loss of confidence in banks to the rest of the economy. There are two variations on this view

a) the bailouts helped, just as Bernanke says they did.
b) the bailouts made no macroeconomic difference. They simply served to redistribute losses away from the some of the stakeholders in the bailed out firms.

3. Mishkin actually was right. The economy would have recovered quickly with only a small recession. However, Bernanke and other policy makers did the wrong thing and turned what would have been a short-term crisis and the failure of a few firms into a long, drawn-out period of slow growth.

I think that (2a) is the most generally accepted view. My own view is 2b. I could also make a case for (3). Note that in the Great Depression, both Hoover and Roosevelt thought that destructive competition was a major problem. Both tried to discourage businesses from competing, Hoover through exhortation and Roosevelt through the National Industrial Recovery Act. In hindsight, reducing competition was a counterproductive idea. Perhaps in hindsight TARP and the other bailouts will not look so good, either.

By the way, I can offer a lot of praise for Ip’s economic judgment. However, I think I will end up putting Foolproof in the “very good but could have been even better if. . .” category.

Many Margins

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Don Boudreaux writes,

Statists, in contrast, seem me to suppose both that the number of margins on which private people can adjust their actions is relatively small, and that these margins are mostly detectable by outside observers.

The contrast is with what Boudreaux calls marketists, who believe that private actors can adjust along many margins, including some that are not visible to outsiders.

the large number of such margins and the invisibility of their details to everyone who is not ‘on the spot’ combine with the subjectivity of each person’s preferences to make it practically impossible for government officials to assess how well or how poorly markets are working. Too much is unseen – indeed, too much is unseeable – to render imposed collective decisions likely to improve the general welfare.

I think that it may help to consider examples. Consider a doctor, a set of patients, and an outsider, such as an insurance company or the government. The outsider has to choose a method of compensating the doctor. If the compensation is for procedures, then the margin along which the doctor will adjust is likely to be to order excessive procedures. If the compensation is per patient, then the margin of adjustment is likely to be to order insufficient procedures, in order to have time to see more patients. If the compensation is for outcomes, then the margin of adjustment is likely to select for patients who the doctor expects to have good outcomes.

A standard trope among statist economists is that patients cannot know enough to second-guess their doctors, so that there is likely to be a “market failure” with doctors exploiting the patient’s lack of knowledge. But this ignores the margin of adjustment whereby the patient can affect and be affected by the doctor’s reputation. It ignores the margin of adjustment whereby a patient can get a second opinion. It ignores the margin of adjustment whereby a patient, while not acquiring the full range of knowledge as a doctor, can read intensively about the patient’s particular condition. etc.

Other Countries Matter

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Timothy Taylor writes,

the number of cars sold in China has exceeded the number sold in the U.S. market for several years now.

…in 2001 the US was about half of the global market for movies. Now the US/Canada share of the global market for movies is just over one-quarter, and falling.

…more and more, Americans are going to be seeing brands and titles and products where the US market is just one among several–and not necessarily the most important one.

Read the whole post.

Creating Inflation Consciousness

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Scott Sumner writes,

The simplest solution is to commit to buy T-bonds (and, if needed, Treasury-backed MBSs) until TIPS spreads show 4% expected inflation. At that high an inflation rate you don’t need much QE, because the public and banks don’t want to hold much base money.

My reply:

1. Central banks have tried many times to commit to pegging exchange rates, which in principle seems easier to do than pegging an inflation rate. These attempts have often failed, as the central bank finds itself overwhelmed by private speculators. This suggests to me that one should be skeptical of the effectiveness of open-mouth operations.

2. Suppose that the Fed backed up its commitment to 4 percent inflation with a lot of action. My belief is that it would take a great deal of action–an order of magnitude more than what we have seen.

3. By the time inflation reached its 4 percent target, there would be a great deal of “inflation consciousness” among investors and in the general public. We would get into a regime of high and variable inflation. You do not know whether inflation would tend toward 4 percent, 8 percent, or 12 percent.

4. In this regime of high and variable inflation, prices would lose some of their informational value, as people find it harder to sort out relative price changes from general inflation. This would be detrimental to economic activity. Scott and I both remember the 1970s, and from a macroeconomic perspective, they were not pretty.

5. So fairly soon, you would see a reversal of policy, with Scott complaining about the stupidity of the Fed overshooting its inflation target. The Fed would take dramatic action to undo what it did before.

6. After several painful years, we would be back to the regime of low and stable inflation.

Bethany McLean responds

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In an email (which she gave me permission to post), she writes,

So first of all, thank you for your kind words about All the Devils. I’ve always been a fan of your work, and I wholeheartedly second the title of your blog! Secondly, I’m always fine with criticism of my work and disagreement with any interpretation I’ve made. In particular, the GSEs are a nuanced, difficult subject, and frankly, I learn new things all the time. I am always willing to change my mind if someone shows me that I’m wrong.

What I’m not ok with is mischaracterizations of my work, whether deliberate or because you didn’t actually read most of the book [her newest book, Shaky Ground]. My main reason for writing is that you say I dismiss Ed DeMarco as a free market ideologue. That is exactly the opposite of what I actually wrote, which is that you cannot dismiss him as just that! I think Ed is a good man who did the best job he could and held true to his beliefs – saving taxpayers money – under very difficult circumstances. I don’t want people reading your review to think I impugned someone’s character when in fact, I did the opposite. It’s really unfair of you.

You are intellectually dishonest about some other points as well, but frankly, everyone is intellectually dishonest about the GSEs, so I won’t bother with most of it. But since I’m writing, I’m going to point another one out.

You also say that the shareholders made a political bet, which they lost, fair and square. There are many different types of shareholders, but as I detail (gory detail – it’s hard to miss!) a number of them made a purely financial bet, and totally missed the poisonous politics. They did loan level analysis and saw that the GSEs were going to become profitable again. Their bet was not that they could buy special favors, but precisely the opposite: that the government would treat Fannie and Freddie as normal companies – ie, like AIG, like Chrysler, like the big banks. Which, not incidentally, is what Jim Lockhart said would happen at the time of conservatorship. And the government set up this situation by leaving the common and preferred shares outstanding. You can blame the investors for being politically naive, but I don’t see how you can fail to acknowledge that there’s a lot of blame to go around here. (It might be a fair point to say that the GSEs are only profitable again because of government support. But then, you’d have to say the same thing about the big banks. In fact, you’d have to say the same thing about our whole stock market, which is supported by the Fed! Etc, etc. )

I agree with your point about there being a powerful case to be made against the government caving into the housing lobby. Perhaps I do give in too easily to what I view as the political reality. That said, the history of the private market financing residential real estate is not a pretty one either! Look back to the booms and busts in the 1800s and the spectacular default rates in the Great Depression. I also would contest the idea that there is such a thing today as a private sector, as pertains to the mortgage market. If the big banks finance the mortgage market, they too will be GSEs, if they aren’t already. But on this, there is much grist for debate, and criticism is fair.

Anyway, the tag line on your blog, “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree,” is so important. Live up to it! Don’t set up straw men so that you can knock me down.

My remarks:

1. I am glad that she respects Ed DeMarco, and I am sorry that I interpreted her as siding with his opponents.

2. She and I will have to agree to disagree about the hedge fund investors in Freddie and Fannie stock. I see no role for financial calculation, or “loan-level analysis.” Instead, it would have been obvious that the GSEs could be restored to profitability if you kept them going long enough using Treasury funds to borrow while having the entire mortgage market to themselves. The wild, speculative bet was that in the meantime there would be no reform of the housing finance system and that politicians would then decide to return Freddie and Fannie to the status quo prior to 2008. However, neither the Bush Administration nor the Obama Administration indicated any intent to do that. If you bought GSE stock for pennies in 2009 or 2010, you were making a bet that could pay off spectacularly, but only if Congress and the Administration were to do something very different from what they were saying.

In dealing with the crisis, the only purist, follow-the-law approach would have been to put the firms (including big banks) through bankruptcy. I would have preferred that, although I understand the fears that policy makers had about such a process. In my view, the next best alternative would have been to nationalize the GSEs and the failed banks, on the grounds that taxpayers were on the hook for the losses of those firms. Then the government would gradually wind these firms down. Instead, the policy makers chose bailouts, which necessarily involved arbitrary treatment of stakeholders. I do not think that any of those stakeholders has a compelling legal complaint at this point, because the rule of law went out the window with TARP and the bailouts.

Just the other day, some bloggers at the New York Fed wrote,

our view is that an optimal intervention into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would have involved the following elements:

The firms would be able to continue their core securitization function as going concerns, supporting the supply of mortgage credit.

The firms would continue to honor their debt and mortgage-backed securities obligations.

The value of the common and preferred equity in the two firms would be extinguished, reflecting their insolvent financial position.

Note that last sentence.

3. For writing my earlier post, I have been subjected to vicious, ad hominem attacks from former members of the Fannie Mae lobbying arm. If nothing else were to convince me that restoring the status quo for the GSE’s is a bad idea, then these crude, juvenile social media posts would suffice. Perhaps government backing for housing finance is inevitable in America. But at least let us hope that the institutions that receive such support do not replicate Fannie Mae’s aggressive and unprincipled lobbying machine.

In an opinion piece in today’s WaPo, McLean dismisses this lobbying with an “everybody does it” line.

One legitimate complaint about the old Fannie and Freddie was the way they garnered political clout through their promotion of homeownership. In their heyday, it was immense and ugly. (“Fannie has this grandmotherly image, but they will castrate you, decapitate you, tie you up, and throw you in the Potomac,” a congressional source told the International Economy in the late 1990s. “They are absolutely ruthless.” That would pale next to the political clout of a big bank that also controlled the mortgage market, and whatever evils grew out of the GSEs’ need to please politicians, there could be worse. Imagine the conversation in a back room between the politicians and the bank executives, where they agree that if the bank will loosen up credit in their states, the politicians will go easy on, say, derivatives regulation. It almost makes the old Fannie and Freddie look pure.

No it doesn’t. And the rest of her piece consists of cheerleading for housing finance subsidies, which is exactly what makes her new book such a disappointment.

Alan Kirman on Hayek

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He says,

he had very clever ideas—but he was extremely bigoted, he was racist. There is a wonderful interview with him that you can find on You Tube, where he says (imitating Hayek’s accent) “I am not a racist! People accuse me of being a racist. Now it’s true that some of the Indian students at the London School of Economics behave in a very nasty way, typical of Indian people…” and he carries on like this. So that’s one reason he is horrid. A second thing is that if you don’t believe he is horrid, David, I will send you his book The Road to Serfdom, which said that if there is any planning going on in the economy, it will inevitably lead you to a fascist situation. When he produced that book it had a big success, particularly in the United States, and what is more, he authorized a comic book version of it, which is absolutely dreadful. One Nobel Prize winner, [Ronald] Coase, said “you are carrying on so much against central planning, you forget that a large part of our economy is actually governed by centrally planned institutions, i.e., big firms, and these big firms are doing exactly what you say they can’t do.

From a new web site called Evonomics, to which Jason Collins contributes. It seems like an eclectic grab-bag of not-necessarily-original content. Worth a visit. For example, in a different piece, Rory Sutherland writes,

The market mechanism is loosely efficient. But the idea that efficiency is the main virtue of free markets is wrong. Competition itself is highly inefficient. In my home town, I can buy food from about eight different places; I’m sure this system could be much more ‘efficient’ if Waitrose, M&S and Lidl were forcibly merged into one huge ‘Great Grocery Hall of The People No. 1306’. I am equally confident that after a few initial years of success, the shop would be terrible.

The missing metric here is semi-random variation. Truly free markets trade efficiency for a costly process of market-tested innovation heavily reliant on dumb luck. The reason this inefficient process is necessary is that, though we pretend otherwise, no one knows anything about anything: most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned; they are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.

Back to Kirman, I found this interesting:

in France when I arrived here it used to take about a day and a half to make my tax return. Now it takes around about 20 minutes, because some sensible guy realized that you could simplify this whole thing and you could put a lot of stuff already into the form which they have received. They have a lot of information from your employer and so forth. They’ve simplified it to a point where it takes me about 20 minutes a year to do my tax return.

Advantage France, apparently.

Overall, you will find the interview annoying. Lots of use of “neoliberalism” and “laissez-faire” as boo-words. Just once, I would like to see someone on the left walk through the Federal Register’s list of regulations and justify the claim that we are living in a laissez-faire economy. And I would like more people to have Sutherland’s understanding of the virtues of markets rather than the neoclassical understanding.

Market Denialism

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Jayson Lusk and Pierre Desrochers write,

In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

I am stunned by the casual way in which environmentalists dismiss the information that markets provide concerning costs. They instead substitute their own cost estimates.

Some further thoughts:

1. If you really have a better estimate of costs than the market, then there should be profit opportunity. In the case of locavorism, you should be able to offer local food for lower prices. Do any locavorists stop to wonder why food that comes from far away cost less? Do they suppose it is some perverse conspiracy on the part of “big food” to subsidize the transportation industry (or perhaps the other way around)?

2. Consider recycling. At a local elementary school, I saw the winning poster in a county contest to promote recycling. The poster pictured a barren, brown earth, and said that this is what would happen if we did not recycle. And yet, economically, government-forced recycling is unsustainable, and it probably results in a net cost to environmental desiderata. (I wonder if people on the left would be so attached to government-run schools if the propaganda coming from those schools offended them.)

3. Consider two extremes: “free-market fundamentalism,” which says that markets always lead to optimal outcomes; and “market denialism,” which I will define as the belief that the information found in markets is of so little importance that one’s personal opinions should take precedence. I think that in practice market denialism is much more prevalent than free-market fundamentalism. In fact, it is so prevalent that no one refers to it as “market denialism.” They just presume that it is the appropriate point of view.

Related: Clive Crook cites Dani Rodrik‘s 10 commandments for economists.

“Substituting your values for the public’s is an abuse of your expertise.”

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. And how can Rodrik be immune from “abuse of your expertise”?

Schumpeter 1, Galbraith 0

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Mark Perry writes,

In other words, only 12.2% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 were still on the list 60 years later in 2015, and nearly 88% of the companies from 1955 have either gone bankrupt, merged with (or were acquired by) another firm, or they still exist but have fallen from the top Fortune 500 companies (ranked by total revenues). Most of the companies on the list in 1955 are unrecognizable, forgotten companies today (e.g. Armstrong Rubber, Cone Mills, Hines Lumber, Pacific Vegetable Oil, and Riegel Textile).

Patterns of sustainable specialization and trade are in constant flux.