Category Archives: Growth Causes and Consequences

Innovation Predictions

Posted on by

Nouriel Roubini writes,

A patient in New York or London may have his MRI sent digitally to, say, Bangalore, where a highly skilled radiologist reads the scan. However, that highly skilled radiologist in Bangalore may only be paid a quarter of what a New York radiologist would earn for reading tests.

It raises the question: how long before a computer can read those images faster, better, and cheaper than that Bangalore radiologist can?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

That sounds like a fair point. In general, however, I think that the forecasts for game-changing innovation made by Roubini and others are too aggressive. I do not share his enthusiasm for MOOCs, as you know.

For another bullish-on-robots, bearish-on-humans take, consider William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone:

If you doubt the march of worker-replacing technology, look at Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer. It employs more than one million workers in China. In 2011, the company installed 10,000 robots, called Foxbots. Today, the company is installing them at a rate of 30,000 per year. Each robot costs about $20,000 and is used to perform routine jobs such as spraying, welding, and assembly. On June 26, 2013, Terry Gou, Foxconn’s CEO, told his annual meeting that “We have over one million workers. In the future we will add one million robotic workers.” This means, of course, that the company will avoid hiring those next million human workers.

Read the whole thing.

Frankly, I think that the biggest game-changer over the next fifteen years will be virtual/augmented reality that makes meetings among people from remote locations effective. If it comes off, it will reduce the significance of innovations in transportation, such as self-driving cars. It will also provide a platform for higher productivity in the New Commanding Heights of health care and education.

Here, let me make some predictions of when innovations will be well established (meaning that they have changed everyday life for many people), and I hope I do not err by being too aggressive.

Year Innovation
2020 Computer diagnosis based on lab results and other data
2025 Virtual/augmented reality enables people in remote locations to have meetings that feel “live”
2030 Food manufactured using bio-engineering rather than slaughtered or harvested
2040 Cures for all major diseases except cancer
2040 Personalized, computer-based education instead of classrooms
2045 Cure for cancer
? Fossil fuels overtaken as energy source by solar and/or nuclear power
? Medicines or implants that ensure high intelligence and conscientiousness
?? Drexler’s vision for nanotechnology, driving the cost of physical goods to near zero

As for the issue of human obsolescence, I do think that we will see a trend toward more and more leisure. This will raise all sorts of questions of who deserves to have what provided for them. Right now, we say that people aged 67 or so deserve Social Security and Medicare. And people who can command only low wages (already obsolete in some sense?) deserve Medicaid and food stamps. And kids who can get in deserve the leisure aspects of college. My guess is that we will struggle quite a bit over the next forty years to adapt the social bargain concerning leisure.

Attitudes Toward Risk and Growth

Posted on by

Michael Hanlon writes,

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more. In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I think that the problem goes beyond rational risk aversion. One of the findings in behavioral economics is that people exhibit loss aversion. That is, they will avoid rational risks because they regret losses much more than they enjoy gains. It seems probably to me that government agencies exhibit at least as much loss aversion as do individuals.

David Beckworth on Productivity Measurement

Posted on by

He writes,

Has productivity growth in consumption really been flat since the early 1970s? No meaningful gains at all? This does not pass the smell test, yet this is one of the best TFP measures. This suggest there are big measurement problems in consumption production. And I suspect they can be traced to the service sector. I suspect if these measurement problems were fixed there would be less support for secular stagnation (and maybe for the Great Stagnation view too).

Actually, he wrote that some time ago, and he then quoted himself.

Put it this way. We do not have reliable measures of real GDP. Tell me how to measure output in health care, education, financial services, etc.

We do not have reliable measures of labor input. Tell me how to measure human capital. Tell me how to distinguish labor used in production from labor used to build organizational capital.

Labor productivity is the ratio of these two unmeasurables. Labor productivity growth is the percent change in those two unmeasurables. Economist John Fernald runs statistical algorithms on the moving average of this percent change in order to arrive at “breaks” in productivity trends. He makes the point (like Beckworth, I attended this conference) that measurement error ought to behave smoothly, so that the broken trends that he fits to the data should be indicating real change. But at that same conference, Steve Oliner showed that a measure of productivity in the computer industry shows a decline because the government statisticians were using an approach to tracking prices that may have been accurate in 2001 but greatly under-estimated price declines (and hence under-estimated productivity) by the end of that decade. Steve argued for humility in any claim to measure or forecast productivity trends, and I think that is an important take-away from the conference.

Central Planning, Capital Regulations, and the Risk Premium

Posted on by

Per Kurowski writes,

current credit-risk-weighted capital (equity) requirements for banks, allow banks to hold government debt and loans to the AAAristocracy against much less equity than when financing “risky” small businesses and entrepreneurs, and so that is de facto what you get.

Risk-based capital regulations may or may not help regulators manage bank risk. (I argued here that the results were quite the opposite.) But they certainly affect the allocation of capital.

Many economists say that there is a huge demand for risk-free assets, as if this were a puzzle. Why is the “free market” so risk averse? Well, the government tells banks that they can earn a higher return on equity holding what the government defines as risk-free assets. AAA mortgage securities, Greek sovereign debt, whatever.

Kurowski’s post reminds me that financial regulation serves to allocate capital, and capital allocation by government can be thought of as central planning. There is a major socialist calculation problem involved. Moreover, there is a tarbaby problem. As the capital regulations produce perverse outcomes, policy makers look for policies to correct the outcomes, and these policies lead to other perverse outcomes, etc.

Michael Mandel and Megan McArdle on Regulation

Posted on by

He writes,

even the most regulation-minded can see how the accumulation of well-intentioned rules can have a pervasive and negative effect on innovation. One useful analogy is that of a small child idly tossing pebbles in a stream. One or two or even ten pebbles won’t make an obvious difference in the flow of the stream. Yet, accumulating gradually over the years, thousands of pebbles can make an effective dam. Or to put it into technology terms, asking a software developer to add one more feature or requirement to a program may seem like a small and innocuous request. Yet enough such ‘minor’ requests turns a simple task into a bloated, ungainly, and bug-ridden piece of code that may be virtually unusable.

She writes,

Framing the problem as “bad regulations” misses the real problem with the system: even good regulations are now so expensive, in complexity points, that they are probably not worth passing.

Great minds and all that.

My solution, of course, is principles-based regulation. Instead of hard-and-fast rules promulgated by agencies, which as they multiply become more complex and incoherent, we would have a few clear principles articulated by Congress. Common-law precedent would fill in the specifics, and the evolution of this common law would not necessarily be toward greater complexity and incoherence.

I do not expect to convince doubters of the superiority of principles-based regulation a priori. All I ask is that we try it with some field of regulation. Incidentally, the FTC has in fact done some experimenting along these lines, particularly in the area of truth in advertising, reportedly with some success.

Incidentally, Mandel is with me on the need to do something about the FDA. He writes,

The problem is that the FDA interprets the “safety and efficacy” standard as meaning at least as safe and clinically efficacious as anything on the market currently. That immediately rules out an innovation that is safe, much cheaper, but not as efficacious as best medical practice. So if the FDA had been in charge of the phone or computer markets at the time, early mobile phones and personal computers would have not been approved for sale because they provided inferior quality to existing products.

Technological Obsolescence of Labor

Posted on by

Timothy Taylor writes,

when I run into people who are concerned that technology is about to decimate U.S. jobs, I sometimes bring up the 1964 report. The usual response is to dismiss the 1964 experience very quickly, on the grounds that the current combination of information and communications technology, along with advanced in robotics, represent a totally different situation than in 1964. It’s of course true that modern technologies differ from those of a half-century ago, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is how an economy and a workforce makes a transition when new technologies arrive. It is a fact that technological shocks have been happening for decades, and that the U.S. economy has been adapting to them. The adaptations have not involved a steadily rising upward trend of unemployment over the decades, but they have involved the dislocations of industries falling and rising in different locations, and a continual pressure for workers to have higher skill levels.

Suppose we make some simple assumptions:

1. Leisure is a normal good.
2. Skills are heterogeneous and adapt slowly to changes in technology.

The prediction I would make is that we would see a lot more leisure. For those whose skill adaptation is adequate, that leisure will take the form of earlier retirement, later entry into the work force, or shorter hours. For those whose skill adaptation is inadequate, that leisure will show up as unemployment or reluctant withdrawal from the labor force.

I think that if you look only at males in isolation, you will see this in the data. That is, men are working much less than they used to. For some men, this leisure is very welcome, but for others it is not. In that sense, I think that we should look at the fears of the early 1960s not as quaint errors but instead as fairly well borne out.

For women, the story since the 1960s is different. In the economy as a whole, the share of labor devoted to preparing food, washing clothes, and cleaning house has gone down. Also, a higher share of the remaining work in these areas is coming from the market, via restaurants and cleaning services, rather than from unpaid female labor. The upshot is that, from the 1960s to about 2000, we saw a continuation of the trend for women to increase their share of market work and reduce their non-market labor. So, while men were increasing their leisure, women were increasing their market work. Combining men and women, you would not see a decline in market work.

It seems that around 2000, the trend for more market work by women reached its peak, making the trend toward technological unemployment more visible. From now on, what was happening to men before will be what happens to the total labor force. That is, leisure will go up, and some of it will be less than voluntary.

I might suggest also that the distribution of leisure is becoming increasingly distorted by the welfare state. Some people have too much leisure, in part because implicit tax rates for low-skilled workers are high, and in part because we over-subsidize leisure among healthy seniors. Some people have less leisure than they might otherwise enjoy, in part because they are working to support those with too much leisure.

William Galston’s Growth Proposals

Posted on by

He writes,

Here’s a simple, easily administered proposal along these lines: a five-year reduction in Social Security payroll rates — by 3 percentage points during the first three years, phasing down to 2 points in the fourth year and 1 point in the fifth. (General revenues would fill the gap in the Social Security trust fund, protecting current and future beneficiaries.) A Joint Economic Committee report on the effects of the 2012 payroll tax cut suggests that the proposed five-year reduction could increase growth by 0.75 percent during each of the first three years while increasing net jobs by 600,000 annually during that period.

I have been advocating cuts in the payroll tax for six years.

And here is another interesting proposal:

If everybody were required either to purchase insurance against the possibility of nursing home care or to save for that eventuality, states could be relieved of the long-term care burdens for which they now pay in the Medicaid program.

Is Demography (Economic) Destiny?

Posted on by

The Economist blog writes,

An ageing population could hold down growth and interest rates through several channels. The most direct is through the supply of labour. An economy’s potential output depends on the number of workers and their productivity. In both Germany and Japan, the working-age population has been shrinking for more than a decade, and the rate of decline will accelerate in coming years (see chart). Britain’s potential workforce will stop growing in coming decades; America’s will grow at barely a third of the 0.9% rate that prevailed from 2000 to 2013.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Along seemingly similar lines, Karl Smith writes,

It’s no accident that this phenomenon appeared in Japan first. As its population began to stagnate well before the rest of the industrialized world, investors found themselves with loads of capital, a dearth of workers, and repayment terms they could not meet.

First, think about this in the absence of inter-generational transfer schemes like Social Security.

1. If people live longer than they used to, then they either have to produce more (probably by retiring later) or consume less.

2. If birth rates decline, then you let capital depreciate faster than it would otherwise. Think of an economy where the only capital goods are houses that stay in good condition for fifty years. When birth rates are rising, you need to keep using some houses longer than fifty years, even though they no longer are in good condition. When birth rates are falling, you can take some houses out of service before fifty years, even though they still are in good condition.

This seems quite straightforward to me, and it is does not suggest that demographic changes should be highly disruptive. I am not persuaded by just-so stories about Japan. One can conjure many such stories. For example, maybe Japan slowed down because its corporatist approach to capital allocation was only effective for a decade or two.

Steve Teles Hearts the Koch Brothers

Posted on by

He writes,

It may be impossible to organize a broad, deeply mobilized grassroots coalition against upward-redistributing rent seeking. But in most cases, equaling the manpower and resources of the rent-seekers isn’t necessary — just making sure that there is someone on the other side can make a big difference. Perhaps perversely, it may be that the only answer to the problem is for the wealthy themselves to bankroll organizations that would change the political calculus that makes acceding to the demands of rent-seekers logical for politicians.

Which is what the Koch brothers do. And I could also give a shout-out to the Tea Party members of Congress, who are much more reliably hostile to wealthy interest groups than are either the Democrats or the Republican establishment.

Knowing Teles, I don’t think that he had the Koch brothers or the Tea Party in mind as solutions to the problem of crony capitalism. But I they do fit his model.

Teles is a contributor to the Cato growth forum. Another contributor, Derek Khanna, writes

One could imagine a benefit to having emerging companies pay less in taxes to help foster creative destruction; instead, U.S. policy is the opposite. Big companies have enough loopholes and lobbyists to ensure that they rarely pay the actual corporate income tax rate. The only companies that pay our full corporate income tax rate, the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world, are new companies.

Both Teles and Khanna cite patent and copyright policy as skewed in favor of special interests.

Martin Baily Interviews Robert Solow

Posted on by

Solow says,

The French automobile industry, much to my surprise, turned out to be more capital intensive than the American automobile industry. So it was not that either. The MGI studies instead traced these differences in productivity to organizational differences, to the way tasks were allocated within a firm or a division—essentially, to failures in managerial decisions.

I would note that if this is the case, then it is possible that high executive pay reflects a productivity differential. Of course, if French auto executives are paid as much as American executives, that would spoil my argument.

Solow has a different take:

An interesting conclusion to me was that international trade serves a purpose beyond exploiting comparative advantage. It exposes high-level managers in various countries to a little fright. And fright turns out to be an important motivation.

Pointer from Timothy Taylor. The whole interview is interesting.