The Great Debate

Robert Fogel, who died this week, won a Nobel for economics by mining historical data and in the process shook up the study of history forever. Just as with cholesterol, it seems there is good data mining and bad data mining. Fogel’s was undoubtedly the good kind.

As a teenager when World War Two was ending, he switched from chemistry and physics to study economics at Cornell because he feared, as did others, that when military spending was withdrawn the economy might retrench and sink back into a reprise of the Great Depression. It didn’t turn out that way.

Governments in the Western world switched from spending money on arms to spending on hospitals and schools and the buoyancy kept another slump at bay until the economy was on its feet. Fascinated by figures, as an academic Fogel applied quantitative methods used in economics to test whether historians’ hunches about the cause and effect of events were correct. His findings led to immense controversy and, eventually, a Nobel Prize.

He first tested whether, as was then commonly thought, railroads opened up America and provoked the surge in economic growth in the nineteenth century. When he looked closely at the data and ran it through computers, which had only recently become available, Fogel found that the great railroad barons had little to do with spurring growth.

Indeed, the building of railroads coast to coast amounted to a mere 2.7 percent extra growth. Different parts of America would have been turned over to agriculture, Fogel discovered, but the nation would have been almost as prosperous without Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Jay Gould and the like.

During the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. Promises like this one inspired a generation of young voters, excited long-neglected progressive voters and gave hope to millions of his supporters across the country.

President Obama ran a campaign of soaring rhetoric and uplifting ideas. Amidst two unpopular wars, a rapidly deteriorating financial crisis and the wildly unpopular presidency of George W. Bush, Americans were desperate for a change. He was viewed as a “transformational” candidate, a president who would turn the page on the stagnant politics of Washington.

It is now four years later, and there has been no increase to the minimum wage. There has been no congressional vote, much less a whisper from the White House on the minimum wage.

The death of Anna Schwartz has been marked with reverential obituaries. Her contribution to economics was making sense of historical facts to offer a guide to what should be done today. Posterity will know her as the co-author, with Milton Friedman, of Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which revolutionized our understanding of the Great Depression. The pair concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the slump was caused by the Federal Reserve not pumping enough money into the economy.

From this Friedman and Schwartz led a monetarist revolution that claimed that inflation, which had been thought to be caused by either insufficient supply or too much demand, was in all cases and solely caused by too large a supply of money. They led a counterrevolution against Keynesianism, which over three booming decades had driven economies into stagflation – a marriage of runaway inflation and stagnant growth that Keynesians were at a loss to explain or cure.

Although Friedman took much of the credit for the new orthodoxy, and won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his efforts, Schwartz was more than the midwife of monetarism – she was an equal partner in its conception. When asked why she had not been awarded credit equal to the extrovert Friedman, she modestly responded: “I’m not a media person.” Like the winemaker Luigi Rossi, whose name appears second on Martini bottles, she was an important, if largely silent, partner. Just as no one ever asks for a dry Rossi, so few today remember Schwartz.

The Law of Diminishing Returns  states that a continuing push towards a given goal tends to  decline in effectiveness after a certain amount of effort has been expended. If this weren't the case, Usain Bolt would be able to run the mile in  less than 2-1/2 minutes.

From an economic standpoint, this law now seems to be fully in force in Greece. The latest jobs figures from the twice-bailed out euro zone country paint a bleak numerical picture of the impact of unrelenting austerity in ordinary Greeks, regardless of whether it was self-inflicted or not. To wit:

More than one in five Greeks is unemployed.

There are more young people without a job than with one.

The record 1.08 million people  without work in January was a  47 percent tumble  in a year.

This essay is adapted from Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, published this week. For more from these authors, see their blog.

If you start in the city center of Nogales, Santa Cruz [Arizona] and walk south for a while, at some point you see houses become much more run down, streets turn decrepit. You have crossed the Mexican border into Nogales, Sonora. Though the two cities are made of the same cloth and were once united, now there are sharp differences between the two. Those in the north are about three times as rich, have access to much better health care, stay in school much longer and of course take part in a much more democratic political process than their cousins in the south. The differences between the two halves of Nogales are a micro, tiny version of huge differences in prosperity and living standards we see around the world. Take Mexico as a whole, for example: it has less than one quarter of the GDP per capita of the United States. Take Peru; it has about one seventh of the GDP per capita of the United States. Or take Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia or the Congo, each of [which] has less than one thirtieth of the GDP per capita of the United States. Our thesis is that these differences are the outcome of different economic and political institutions which lead to very different incentives.

Though history bears out the defining role of institutions in shaping prosperity and poverty, most social scientists and experts have emphasized different factors. One of the most widely accepted alternative theories of world inequality is the geography hypothesis, which claims that the great divide between rich and poor countries is created by geographical differences. Many poor countries, such as those of Africa, Central America, and South Asia, are between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Rich nations, in contrast, tend to be in temperate latitudes. This geographic concentration of poverty and prosperity gives a superficial appeal to the geography hypothesis, which is the starting point of the theories and views of many social scientists and pundits alike. But this doesn’t make it any less wrong.

Reaganomics is so well established that state officials, both Republican and Democratic, don’t call it that anymore. They simply call it smart policy.

Even so, the idea of boosting supply to raise demand, instead of the other way around, is hardly uncontroversial. States spend billions annually on economic development subsidies to try and create jobs. But recent evidence suggests tax breaks, “forgivable loans,” and the like don’t work as well as hoped.

Up to now the thinking went like this: Devoting public funds to pull companies into the state will eventually yield returns, which is to say, yield jobs. Those jobs stimulate spending, which raises demand for the very products and services of the corporation that brought the jobs in the first place. And thus the virtuous cycle is sent into overdrive. That, at least, has been the theory.

By Roger Martin
The opinions expressed are his own.

This is part one of this essay. Read part two here.

As the economy teeters and the capital markets gyrate, I can’t get out of my mind the evening of May 19, 2009.  We were near the stock market nadir and fears were cresting that we were heading straight into the next Great Depression. I was invited to a dinner along with half a dozen tables of guests to hear a very prominent macroeconomist opine on the state of the economy and the path to recovery.

The economist held forth with a detailed, analytical account of what had caused the economic meltdown in the second half of 2008 and the path that he predicted recovery would take. I was struck by how scientific he was, spewing myriad statistics, employing technical terms by the boatload, and praising his econometric model. It was ‘very sophisticated’.  Given the nods and encouraged looks in the room, it seemed as though he had provided great comfort to the guests; they could go to bed confident that thanks to his science, they could trust that this man knew where we were headed.

I wasn’t quite so confident. Being the curious sort, before coming to dinner I had checked his forecast from a year earlier, mere months before the crash.  His spring 2008 forecast for the second half of 2008 was for modest positive economic growth for America.  This was not unusual; no credible economist predicted anything less rosy for the back half of 2008, although many now claim that they did.  I don’t blame or ridicule him for being cautiously optimistic mere months before the worst economic downturn in 80 years.  Economic forecasting is fraught with peril.

By Ian Bremmer
The views expressed are his own.

One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the world since the 2008 financial crisis can be summed up in one sentence: Security is no longer the primary driver of geopolitical developments; economics is. Think about this in terms of the United States and its shifting place as the superpower of the world. Since World War II, the U.S.’s highly developed Department of Defense has ensured the security of the country and indeed, much of the free world. The private sector was, well, the private sector. In a free market economy, companies manage their own affairs, perhaps with government regulation, but not with government direction. More than sixty years on, perhaps that’s why our military is the most technologically advanced in the world while our domestic economy fails to create enough jobs and opportunities for the U.S. population.

Contrast the U.S. and its free market economy with China’s system.  For years now, that country has experienced double digit growth. Many observers would say that China’s embrace of capitalism since 1978, and especially since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, has been responsible for its boom. They would be mostly wrong. In fact, a new study prepared for the U.S. government says it’s not capitalism that’s powering China, but state capitalism -- China’s massive, centrally directed industrial policy, where the government positions huge amounts of capital and labor in economic sectors it intends to nurture. The study, prepared by consultants Capital Trade for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, reads in part:

In a world in which central planning has been so utterly discredited, it would be natural to conclude that the Chinese government and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party have been abandoning the institutions associated with the communist economic system, such as reliance on state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), as fast as possible. Such conclusion would be wrong.

By Robert Frank
The opinions expressed are his own.

What do the following slogans have in common?

“All taxation is theft.”

“It’s your money and you know how to spend it better than any bureaucrat in Washington.”

“It’s unjust to tax some people more heavily than others.”

“Taxing the rich kills the geese that lay the golden eggs.”

Although each has been repeated so often by conservatives during recent decades as to have acquired an air of settled truth, each is also either clearly false or conveys no useful information. A more troubling shared feature of these slogans is that they are causing serious harm. Their enthusiastic embrace by Tea Party members and large
factions of the Republican Party now threatens to transform the United States economy, once the envy of the world, into an economic backwater.

Let’s consider them in turn.

“All taxation is theft” is easily the most mindless of the batch. Functionally, it’s equivalent to the “It’s your money…” entry, since the ostensible point of each is that meddlesome government officials shouldn’t be allowed to confiscate the hard-won fruits of our own talent and effort. But there isn’t much economic value to confiscate in countries that lack well-defined and enforced systems of property rights and the public infrastructure required for highly developed and specialized markets. None of that could exist unless government could levy mandatory taxes. No informed person would seriously consider living in a society whose government lacked that power—think Somalia, or the Sudan—even apart from the concern that it would quickly be conquered by an army supported by a neighboring country’s mandatory taxation.

By David Callahan
The opinions expressed are his own.

It’s a cruel fact for millions of unemployed Americans that the jobs plan President Obama unveiled last night will never be fully enacted by Congress. What’s even crueler, though, is that the least effective elements of the plan have the best chance of passage. New direct federal spending, the most powerful form of stimulus, is widely considered DOA on Capitol Hill – while weaker tax cut options will get a real hearing.

That’s not how things would go if mainstream economists were calling the shots. Economics is not an exact science, but economists do have pretty good models to predict what “fiscal policy multipliers” will be most effective at stimulating growth and new hiring. Just last month, for example, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi released an analysis of stimulus measures work. Zandi advised John McCain in 2008 and is anything but a committed liberal. But his study, supported by the full weight of Moody’s modeling expertise, clearly shows that spending is the best form of stimulus.

The single most effective form of stimulus, the study found, are increased outlays for food stamps — which create $1.71 in economic activity for each dollar in federal spending. The other top two boosters are spending on unemployment benefits and infrastructure. Earlier studies, including by the Congressional Budget Office, have found largely the same thing.