Category Archives: Mark Thoma is Indispensable

Reform of Macroeconomics Teaching

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Simon Wren-Lewis writes,

So my first point, which I have made before, is that we can get rid of a lot of stuff that is simply out of date. Like the LM curve (and theories of money demand that go with it). And the Aggregate Demand curve which is derived from it. And Mundell Fleming which is an open economy version of it (and inconsistent with UIP to boot). And the money multiplier (which, apart from being very misleading, is unnecessary if we stop fixing the money supply).

That is fine. But he winds up with this:

So there you have it. Econ 101 with just three basic relationships: an IS curve, a Phillips curve and UIP

Pointer from Mark Thoma. UIP stands for uncovered interest parity, with the impact that a higher interest rate at home is associated with a stronger currency and reduced net exports.

Actually, I do not think that replacing the equations that have gone out of fashion with those that are currently fashionable represents an improvement. Quite possibly, it is worse. As Noah Smith points out, these equations are not empirically verified. They are merely asserted.

I think that macroeconomics ought to be taught as a combination of economic history and history of thought. In that regard, I think that my macro memoir would have some value, although other perspectives also deserve to be included.

Regulatory Arbitrage Uber Alles

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Mark Thoma points to an essay by Dean Baker accusing airbnb, uber, and other services of cashing in on regulatory evasion as opposed to the Internet or other economic fundamentals. Thoma comments,

Agree about the level playing field, but perhaps it will serve as a catalyst for changing regulations that “were originally designed to serve narrow interests and/or have outlived their usefulness”?

Or a catalyst for encouraging the incumbents to act differently. The original low-cost bus services between NY and DC ultimately spurred the legacy bus companies to set up low-cost subsidiaries in order to compete.

In Debt to Social Engineering

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Ryan Avent writes,

What is needed, they argue, is to make debt contracts more flexible, and where possible, replace them with equity. Courts should be able to write down the principal of mortgages as an alternative to foreclosure. They recommend “shared-responsibility mortgages” whose principal would decline along with local house prices. To compensate for the risk of loss, lenders, they reckon, would have to charge a fee equal to 1.4% of the mortgage, or receive 5% of any increase in the value of the property.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. “They” are Mian and Sufi, in House of Debt. Avent argues similarly that student loans should have an equity component.

What these forms of bad debt have in common, in my view, is that they reflect clumsy social engineering. Public policy was based on the idea that getting as many people into home “ownership” with as little money down as possible was a great idea. It was based on the idea of getting as many people into college with student loans as possible.

The problem, therefore, is not that debt contracts are too rigid. The problem is that the social engineers are trying to make too many people into home “owners” and to send too many people to college. Home ownership is meaningful only when people put equity into the homes that they purchase. College is meaningful only if students graduate and do so having learned something (or a least enjoyed the party, but not with taxpayers footing the bill).

As long as we still have these sorts of public policies, monkeying around with the nature of the loan contract is simply doubling down on clumsy social engineering.

Larry Summers on Piketty

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Mark Thoma seems to have provided the first pointer, although others surely will follow.

Summers’ review is the most complete evisceration of Piketty’s economics that has been published to date. But Summers suggests that we sniff the rose, never mind the manure that lies underneath. He writes,

Even in terms of income ratios, the gaps that have opened up between, say, the top .1 percent and the remainder of the top 10 percent are far larger than those that have opened up between the top 10 percent and average income earners. Even if none of Piketty’s theories stands up, the establishment of this fact has transformed political discourse and is a Nobel Prize-worthy contribution.

This is reminiscent of Brad DeLong. It strikes me as intellectual charity driven by ideological sympathy. I encourage everyone reading this blog to do the opposite. Reserve your most charitable interpretations for those whose views disturb you, and adopt the most critical-thinking posture toward those whose views please you.

The bulk of Summers’ review consists of just this sort of critical thinking. Summers writes,

Piketty argues that the economic literature supports his assumption that returns diminish slowly (in technical parlance, that the elasticity of substitution is greater than 1), and so capital’s share rises with capital accumulation. But I think he misreads the literature by conflating gross and net returns to capital. It is plausible that as the capital stock grows, the increment of output produced declines slowly, but there can be no question that depreciation increases proportionally. And it is the return net of depreciation that is relevant for capital accumulation. I know of no study suggesting that measuring output in net terms, the elasticity of substitution is greater than 1, and I know of quite a few suggesting the contrary.

I have not seen this point about the confusion of gross and net return made by anyone else. By DeLong’s standards, that means we should dismiss Summers’ argument. But to my eye, it seems like a powerful criticism. [UPDATE: Oops! A commenter points out that Matt Rognlie had made the exact point about gross and net return.]

Remember the scandal over the Reinhart-Rogoff spreadsheet? This strikes me as considerably worse.

Summers also writes,

Rather than attributing the rising share of profits to the inexorable process of wealth accumulation, most economists would attribute both it and rising inequality to the working out of various forces associated with globalization and technological change.

As in the Smithian theory of inequality.

The Political Economy of Big Banks

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David Cay Johnston reviews All the Presidents’ Bankers, by Nomi Prins. He concludes,

But the banks are only big, not strong. Indeed, the “stress tests” to determine if the banks can withstand another financial shock are designed to test only for minor upsets, rigging the game in favor of the Big Six, which all engage in unsound practices, especially trading in derivatives. They remain big because of bad laws and enablers like Geithner and because politicians desperate for campaign donations listen to the pleas of bank owners more than those of customers. So the bankers live in grand style, lavished with subsidies that cost us more than food stamps for the poor. In return for this largesse, the bankers savage our modest savings.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. To me, Johnston’s rhetoric seems over the top, and if all Prin has to offer is rhetoric and conspiracy-mongering, then I see no need to read her book. Nonetheless, if you ask me about the political economy of big banks in this country, I would say that I believe that their profits come from rent-seeking in general and from the too-big-to-fail subsidy in particular. I think that breaking up the big financial institutions would provide a net public benefit.

However, I would caution you that Fragile by Design, by Calomiris and Haber, offers nearly the opposite perspective. For them, it is America’s historical hostility toward large banks, and the consequent fragmentation of banking, that is the original cause of fragility here. I think Prin would have a hard time arguing, as she apparently attempts to do, that concentrated banking has been a feature of the U.S. for over a century, when banking across state lines was all but impossible up until around 30 years ago. The other point in favor of Calomiris and Haber is the stability of Canadian banks, where the big six have a much higher market share than the big six in the U.S.

Brad DeLong is Uncharitable to Piketty’s Critics

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This is an example of the sort of writing that I think serves only to isolate the left-wing blogosphere. Brad starts out innocently enough:

Piketty’s argument is detailed and complicated. But five points seem particularly salient:

1. A society’s wealth relative to its annual income will grow (or shrink) to a level equal to its net savings rate divided by its growth rate.

2. Time and chance inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small group: call them “the rich.”

…

Pointer from Mark Thoma. Read the whole thing. He then proceeds to heap scorn on Piketty’s critics. He does not cite any criticism of the second point, which is really the heart of the criticism that I have made. I think that many others have criticized point (2), also, but let me just speak for myself.

To reiterate my criticisms:

1. The distinction between capital income and labor income that underlies the forecast for wealth concentration is unrealistic. Most of “labor” income is a return to capital: human capital, social capital, institutional capital, and so on. Much of “capital” income is a return to risk. Brad himself has pointed out that the rate of return on private capital includes a huge risk premium.

2. Several critics (although I believe I was the first) have pointed out that if you believe r is greater than g, then social security is a giant rip-off and should be privatized immediately. Instead, in one of the most disingenuous arguments in the book, Piketty dismisses privatizing social security because of the high risk embedded in capital income. What is disingenuous is that this risk in private investment undermines Piketty’s main thesis.

3. I think it is pretty difficult to reconcile the risk component of investment with a model in which inherited wealth comes to dominate. Instead, given the relatively low rate of return on risk-free assets, my line is that the inheritors shall be meek.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model notwithstanding, it is idiosyncratic risk that makes you rich. People like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg take large idiosyncratic risks that pay off. For wealth to become concentrated into an oligarchy, their heirs will have to invest in ways that outperform future idiosyncratic risk-takers. That strikes me as implausible.

Finally, I have to quote this from DeLong:

To be sure, everyone disagrees with 10-20% of Piketty’s argument, and everyone is unsure about perhaps another 10-20%. But, in both cases, everyone has a different 10-20%. In other words, there is majority agreement that each piece of the book is roughly correct, which means that there is near-consensus that the overall argument of the book is, broadly, right.

If I understand this paragraph, what Brad is saying is that unless a majority of Piketty’s reviewers harp on a particular fault, then there are no faults in the book. That is certainly a charitable approach to assessing someone’s work.

I think that taking the most charitable approach to people with whom you agree and taking the least charitable approach to those with whom you disagree is a path that leads to intellectual isolation.

I’d Connect These Data Points

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1. From Atif Mian and Amir Sufi.

We are now five full years from the end of the recession (if you buy NBER dating). And housing starts are still below any level we’ve seen since the early 1990s!

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

2. Shaila Dawan writes,

Nationally, half of all renters are now spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to a comprehensive Harvard study, up from 38 percent of renters in 2000. In December, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan declared “the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has ever known.”

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

By the way, I saw this coming, and so I made a big investment last year in several companies that own and manage apartments. The performance of these investments was terrible, particularly when compared with the overall market. Go figure.

Brad DeLong on Piketty

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Brad writes,

We have a world in which some eminent economists (Larry Summers) say r1 is too low, and other eminent economists (Thomas Piketty) say r2 is too high…

The difference between r1 and r2 is the risk premium. In a well-functioning market economy with well-functioning financial markets, there are powerful reasons to believe that this risk premium should be small: less than 1%-point per year. The fact the risk premium appears to me to be 7%-points per year today is a powerful evidence of the profound dysfunctionality of our financial markets, and of their failure to do their proper catallactic job. But that is a separate and largely independent discussion: that is a dysfunction of our modern market economy which is different from either the dysfunction feared by Summers or the dysfunction freaked by Piketty. For the moment, simply note that it is perfectly possible for all three of these major dysfunctions to occur together.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. Read the whole thing. The risk-premium solution was also suggested here in a comment by Matt Rognlie.

So far, the left-wing journalistic verdict on Piketty is rapture. Economists, even those inclined to agree with Piketty’s conclusions, seem somewhat unsatisfied with with his treatment of capital and interest.

Simon Wren-Lewis on the Phillips Curve

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He writes,

So we choose a microfoundation because it gives us the aggregate answer suggested by the data, and not because of evidence that this microfoundation is appropriate. We then insist that everything in that model has to be consistent with this microfoundation, and that our model has been built from only thinking about what individual agents do. Have we just replaced ad hoc with post hoc?

Read the whole thing for context. Pointer from Mark Thoma. My comments:

1. My joke is that the Phillips Curve went from being an empirical finding in search of theory to a theory in search of empirical support.

2. Empirically, the only thing of which we can really be sure is that the best predictor of inflation is the lagged dependent variable (this is hardly the only macroeconomic variable to which this applies). After that, the magnitude (and even the sign) of the relationship between wage growth and employment varies quite a bit depending on how you do your specification searching.

3. Once again, let my plug my macro memoir.

Why I Want to Break Up the Big Banks

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Matthew C. Klein writes,

Using the lowest estimates, the big banks can attribute almost a fourth of last year’s profits to taxpayer largess. Higher estimates suggest that almost all of the big banks’ earnings in 2013 were due to subsidies rather than productive activity. The IMF notes that even “these dollar values likely underestimate the true TITF subsidy values” because, among other things, the calculations are based on the assumption that shareholders in bailed-out banks would lose everything, which isn’t usually what happens.

Pointer from Patrick Brennan.

Of course, the NY Fed will tell you that there are terrific economies of scale in banking, and that explains the profits of large banks.

UPDATE: Actually, one economist at the NY Fed, Joao Santos, thinks it’s a too-big-to-fail subsidy.

Using information from bonds issued over the past twenty years, this study finds that the largest banks have a cost advantage vis-à-vis their smaller peers. This cost advantage may not be entirely due to investors’ belief that the largest banks are “too big to fail” because the study also finds that the largest nonbanks, as well as the largest nonfinancial corporations, have a cost advantage relative to their smaller peers. However, a comparison across the three groups reveals that the largest banks have a relatively larger cost advantage vis-à-vis their smaller peers. This difference is consistent with the hypothesis that investors believe the largest banks are “too big to fail.”

Pointer from David Dayen via Mark Thoma.