Category Archives: Timothy Taylor is my Favorite Blogger

Overblown, you say?

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Timothy Taylor writes,

I’ll add my obligatory reminder here that just because past concerns about automation replacing workers have turned out to be overblown certainly doesn’t prove that current concerns will also prove out to be overblown. But it is an historical fact that for the last two centuries, automation and technology has played a dramatic role in reshaping jobs, and also helped to lower the average work-week, without leading to a jobless dystopia.

He quotes from a speech warning of technological displacement of workers that was given in 1927 by then Secretary of Labor James J. Davis.

Taylor writes as if the dire prediction proved false. And yet, within 5 years, unemployment hit 25 percent. Those dots connect in the PSST story, but too many economists are fixated on Keynesian AD.

Praise for the Council of Economic Advisers

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1. Timothy Taylor writes,

When you read a CEA report, there is always a certain admixture of politics, and at some points over the roughly 40 years I’ve been reading these resorts, the partisanship has been severe enough to make me wince. But it’s also true that one can read just about any report looking for ways to discredit it. My own approach is instead to search for nuggets of fact and insight, and over the years, CEA reports have typically offered plenty.

2. Robert J. Samuelson writes,

Thumbing through the annual report of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is always an education. This year’s 430-page edition is no exception. Crammed with tables and charts, it brims with useful facts and insights.

●On page 62, we learn that the growth of state and local government spending on services (schools, police, parks) has been the slowest of any recovery since World War II. One reason: Payments into underfunded pensions are draining money from services. . .

Probably a useful corrective to my typical focus on what I didn’t like about the CEA report.

The Secular Decline in Real Interest Rates

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Lukasz Rachel and Thomas D. Smith write,

Our analysis suggests the desired savings schedule has shifted out materially due to demographic forces (90bps of the fall in real rates), higher inequality within countries (45bps) and a preference shift towards higher saving by emerging market governments following the Asian crisis (25bps). If this had been the whole story, we would have expected to see a steady rise in actual saving rates globally. But global saving and investment ratios have been remarkably stable over the past thirty years suggesting desired investment levels must have also fallen. We pin this decline in desired investment on a fall in the relative price of capital goods (accounting for 50bps of the fall in real rates) and a preference shift away from public investment projects (20bps). Also, we note that the rate of return on capital has not fallen by as much as risk free rates. The rising spread between these two rates has further reduced desired investment and risk free rates down (by 70bps). Together these effects can account for 300bps of the fall in global real rates.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor. Rachel and Smith expect that the forces driving down real interest rates will continue to operate. However, Taylor also cites and e-book on real interest rates in which the authors foresee a shift in the underlying fundamentals.

I believe that the outlook for real interest rates is most important for governments around the world, which have run up high debts. A rise in real interest rates could accelerate sovereign debt crises.

Prizes Have Not Worked Well

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Timothy Taylor quotes from a paper by historian B. Zorina Khan.

industrial prizes faltered in part because of their lack of market-orientation, and even the democratic nature of economic institutions in the United States could not overcome such drawbacks in administered prize systems.Judges had to combine technical and industry-specific knowledge with impartiality, but even the most competent personnel could not ensure consistency; decision-making among panels was complicated by differences in standards, interpretation, capture, and risk-aversion. Such difficulties tended to lead to haphazard decisions, or were often overcome by simply making the award to the person or the firm with the most established reputation. Juries were not immune to the effects of outright bias, capture, cognitive dissonance, lobbying, and “marketing.” Prizes tended to offer private benefits to both the proposer and the winner, largely because they served as valuable advertisements, with few geographical spillovers. Winners of such awards were generally unrepresentative of the most significant innovations, in part because the market value of useful inventions would typically be far greater than any prize that could be offered by private or state initiative.

Suppose that the commercial value of an idea is highly uncertain before it has become embedded in a business product or service. This leads to what we might call market-valuation errors. You can think of many examples of companies that have come out with products that they thought would be successful but failed to excite consumers.

With a prize fund, these market-valuation errors are borne by whoever puts up the prize fund. For example, if the government creates a prize fund for somebody who develops a better wind turbine, but the wind turbine still fails to penetrate the market, then the taxpayers take the hit. Instead, if the wind turbine inventor is given a reward in the form of a patent, then it’s the inventor who suffers if the turbine fails in the marketplace.

Going from patents to prizes serves to separate two functions: guessing the value of a potential invention; and coming up with the invention. Separating those two functions may not be such a good idea.

Adam Smith raised this concern. See David Henderson’s response to Taylor’s post. Henderson writes,

Essentially, the problem is a central planning problem. A government that gives prizes has to know what to give prizes for. It could give a big prize for something that matters little or a small prize for something that matters a lot. It’s hard to know in advance. Patents, as Smith points out, solve that problem.

As Henderson indicates, patents are problematic also. They are susceptible to other forms of errors by governments.

Uncovered Interest (Dis?) Parity

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Timothy Taylor reads a semi-annual update from the Fed, and is struck that

A divergence has emerged in the interest rates of advanced market economies, between the US and UK on one hand and the euro-zone and Japan on the other.

He produces a chart showing that the ten-year bond rate is about 150 basis points higher in the U.S. and the UK than it is in Germany or Japan. Years ago, Jeff Frankel adapted the Dornbusch overshooting model to say that this sort of thing would imply that the dollar and the pound are expected to fall about 1.5 percent per year for those ten years. This would make those currencies about 15 percent overvalued relative to the “long-run equilibrium,” it that is what we can call the exchange rate expected 10 years from now.

Note that in the short run, interest rate differentials and expected currency movements are tied together by covered interest parity. If I can earn 1.5 percent more on U.S. one-year securities than on one-year German securities, and the futures market were to offer me a one-year dollar/euro contract that assumes no depreciation of the dollar, then I have an arbitrage play of shorting German one-year securities and buying American ones, while buying euros in the futures market to eliminate currency risk.

On a ten-year basis, it tends to be harder to cover your currency risk. So there is, at best, uncovered interest parity.

Compared with 100 Years Ago

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Timothy Taylor pulls some nuggets from an article by Carol Leon Boyd in the Monthly Labor Review.

BLS reported about 23,000 industrial deaths in 1913 among a workforce of 38 million, equivalent to a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. In contrast, the most recent data on overall occupational fatalities show a rate of 3.3 deaths per 100,000 workers.

That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in GDP growth rate statistics.

There is much more at the link.

Timothy Taylor and Russ Roberts

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Self-recommending.

Taylor says,

it just seems to me that often when people talk about growth, the first thing they talk about is not the role of the private sector or firms. They talk about how the government can give us growth, through tax cuts or spending increases or the Federal Reserve. When they talk about fairness and justice, they don’t talk about the government doing that. They talk about how companies ought to provide fairness and justice in wages and health care and benefits and all sorts of things. So it seems to me that our social conversation about those things is topsy turvy.

Bureaucratic Rump-Covering

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Timothy Taylor points to a report by a new bureaucracy, the Office of Financial Research. Taylor writes,

The report emphasizes three main risks facing the US economy: 1) credit risks for US nonfinancial businesses and emerging markets; 2) the behaviors encouraged by the ongoing environment of low interest rates; and 3) situations in which financial markets are not resilient, as manifested in shortages of liquidity, run and fire-sale risks, and other areas.

There is a difference between actionable intelligence and bureaucratic CYA. If somebody says, “we are seeing a lot of chatter laately among these four terror cells. We had better watch these individuals closely,” that is actionable. If somebody says, “there is a risk that in the current climate terrorists will attempt a major attack,” that is not actionable, it is just CYA.

Reading Taylor’s post, I doubt that there is anything actionable in the OFR report. If the OFR had existed in 2006, we would have been told that the high level of house prices posed a potential risk. Which everyone already knew. They just did not have actionable intelligence about the state of the portfolios of key players, like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Freddie and Fannie.

James Poterba on the Mortgage Interest Deduction

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He says,

the real place where the tax code provides a subsidy for owner-occupied housing is not by allowing mortgage deductibility, because if you or I were to borrow to buy other assets — for instance, if we bought a portfolio of stocks and we borrowed to do that — we’d be able to deduct the interest on that asset purchase, too. If we bought a rental property, we could deduct the interest we paid on the debt we incurred in that context. What we don’t get taxed on under the current income tax system is the income flow that we effectively earn from our owner-occupied house, what some people would call the imputed income or the imputed rent on the house. The simple comparison is that if you buy an apartment building and rent it out, and you buy a home and you live in it, the income from the apartment building would be taxable income, but the “income” from living in your home — the rent you pay to yourself — is never taxed. This is the core tax distortion in the housing market: the tax-free rental flow from being your own landlord.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor. The interview covers other topics, all interesting.

He goes on to say that it is unlikely that people would accept being taxed on a made-up number representing this “rental flow from being your own landlord.” However, people do accept being taxed on the appraised value of their property, which is arguably also a made-up number. It seems to me that you could tax homeowners on a made-up “appraised rental value” just as easily. Or just tax them a percent of the appraised value, as is done now.

Let’s go with the notion that the goal is to tax owner-occupied and investment property identically. Then my thought is you should just exempt landlords from paying tax on their rental income. But I find the whole notion of how the tax system should and should not work to give me a headache. Even if you start with the idea of a consumption tax, do you want to include the use of housing as consumption? Presumably you do, and then you are right back into these conundrums of rental vs. owner-occupied, are you not?

Regulation and Financial Complexity

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CFTC Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo said,

At the heart of the 2008 financial crisis was the inability of regulators to assess and quantify the counterparty credit risk of large banks and swap dealers. The legislative solution was to establish swap data repositories (SDRs) under the Dodd-Frank Act. Although much hard work and effort has gone into establishing SDRs and supplying them with swaps data, seven years after the financial crisis the SDRs still cannot provide regulators with an accurate picture of bank counterparty credit risk in global markets. That is because international regulators have not yet harmonized global reporting protocols and data fields across international jurisdictions. Certain provisions of Dodd-Frank actually hinder such harmonization, despite widespread bipartisan legislative support for their correction over the past two Congresses.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor. Read the whole speech, which is wide-ranging and thought-provoking. Among other topics, Giancarlo discusses the significance of blockchain and the outsized role of the Fed in key securities markets due to its enlarged balance sheet.

My view is that the financial market is a complex, adaptive system, and attempts to reduce systemic risk will backfire. Several years ago, I focused on the discrepancy between knowledge and power. Regulators seek more and more power, and at times they get it. But what they really lack, and will never possess, is the information needed to understand market processes well enough to be able to predict the ultimate effect of regulation on behavior. That information is dispersed, so that no one individual or regulatory body can obtain it.