Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 122

The Pol Antràs manuscript on *Global Production*

The subtitle of the book is Firms, Contracts, and Trade Structure.  Here is one interesting bit of many:

…in that same year [2011] the share of intrafirm trade reached a record 89.6 percent for U.S. imports from Western Sahara. Leaving aside communist dictatorships and disputed territories, and focusing on the 50 largest exporters to the U.S., Figure 1.3 illustrates that the share of intrafirm trade still varies significantly across countries, ranging from a mere 2.4 percent for Bangladesh to an astonishing 88.5 percent for Ireland.

In that paragraph you can think of “intrafirm trade” as basically standing in for multinationals.  One motivation for this book is that a lot of earlier theories focus on international trade across firms and governments, when in fact much of what goes in is intra-firm and thus requires some more subtle theories.  Chapter two of the book is an excellent introduction to how international trade theory has shifted from an emphasis on countries or sectors to individual business firms, a significant advance.  A Nobel Prize for Marc Melitz and Antràs is by no means out of the question someday.

The manuscript itself is here (pdf), some data files are here.  His home page is here.

Very good sentences

The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.

So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.

Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.

Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.

That is from Ross Douthat, on the general lessons of Rotherham.

Interview with a former Auschwitz prison guard

It is interesting throughout, here is just one bit:

SPIEGEL: What did people talk about?

W.: People weren’t enthused about the leadership. We of course knew and everybody almost felt that it couldn’t end well, that it couldn’t been good when trains were being brought here full of people who were then getting killed. We all had that feeling. But, I mean, when you’re a soldier …

[Commentary] In the personnel files of camp staff members, there are official declarations stating, “I may not cause bodily harm or death to opponents of the state (prisoners).” It also states, “I am aware and I have been informed today that I will be punished by death if I misappropriate Jewish property of any kind.” The SS team at Auschwitz — a camp where the indiscriminate torture, robbing and murder of people was part of everyday life — were required to pledge in advance to do precisely the opposite.

One could view forms like that as a special form of cynicism. Or one could see it as a pseudo-legal facade aimed at covering up the Holocaust. One provision called for “absolute secrecy” to be maintained. In practice, it had no meaning.

The full interview is here.

Assorted links

1. Bill Gates and The Big History Project.

2. The economics of Amazon.

3. Negativity bias sucks.

4. Claudia Sahm now has a blog.

5. Cyranoids.

6. The One I Love is a pretty amazing conceptual movie, with nods to Lem, Albee, Shakespeare, Saramago, and Rod Serling, among others.

The dangers of “cooperation” in a Malthusian world

Sapiens [the new book by Yuval Noah Hariri] devotes large sections to unsparing accounts of the domestication and factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens. This, he contends, has made them some of the most genetically “successful” creatures in history but the most miserable too.

It is an interesting question how much that will prove to be the equilibrium more generally, namely the genetic superiority of slaves because they can reap more external investment.  After all, capital is more productive today than in times past, so evolution might now produce more slaves.  Here is another bit from John Reed’s coverage of the lunch interview with Hariri:

What allowed humans to become history’s most successful species, he [Hariri] argues, was our ability to construct and unify small groups behind certain “fictions” – everything from national legends and organised religion to modern value systems like human rights, and the modern limited liability company with thousands of employees and vast credit lines at its command.

…I tell Harari I like the idea of fiction as the supreme human construct.

That is from the FT’s lunch with Yuval Noah Hariri.  If I recall correctly, I pre-ordered Sapiens from UK Amazon.

Does sterlingisation make sense for Scotland? Or would a separate currency be better?

Angus Armstrong writes:

Sterlingisation appears to offer continuity but in fact much would change. This is the riskiest of all currency arrangements being considered. With a debt burden of more than 80 per cent and projected fiscal deficits, Scotland would have little capacity for independent macroeconomic policy. It would have no capacity to provide emergency liquidity to its financial sector and little scope for a credible deposit insurance scheme (for instance, Panama does not offer deposit insurance).

Financial services are Scotland’s largest export sector. Scotland’s non-oil trade deficit has been around 7 per cent of GDP over the past three years. Therefore, the loss of financial services exports would leave the balance of payments very exposed to declining oil and gas revenues. The fall in general prices and wages to restore competitiveness could be substantial. As we have seen, governments with high debt levels, no control over their currency and external deficits can also need emergency support.

That is from an FT symposium on Scottish currency choices, which is interesting throughout, at least for those of us obsessed with the theory of optimum currency areas.

Euro adoption does not generate much sympathy as an option.  Opinions are mixed on an independent, floating currency.  In the steady state it could work fine, as is the case for Sweden.  I worry about the transition, however, and finding a proper conversion rate for current Scot bank deposits denominated in sterling.

If the expectation is that those deposits will be undervalued in the process of conversion, bank runs may ensue.  Another option is continuing uncertainty about future monetary policy for New Scot Lanarks, combined with prices which are slow to adjust to the new medium of account.  In fact pricing in terms of English pounds might remain the dominant practice for years.  In that case exactly what kind of monetary policy promise is the new Scot central bank making in the first place?  Everything is priced in terms of pounds, and the New Scot Lanark floats against the pound in a meaningless fashion.  Who should want to hold the New Scot Lanark in the first place?  Won’t any combination of announced conversion rates/monetary policy reaction functions involve some risk of a weak Scot currency and thus again ex ante bank runs?

Even Ronald MacDonald, who favors the independent currency option, wrote this in the symposium:

The currency is likely to be very volatile in any transition period and this would have implications for trade. However, the macroeconomic benefits of a separate currency clearly vastly outweigh the microeconomic costs, although the transition period is likely to be very painful.

I guess we’ll know soon enough how they vote.

The agricultural origins of time preference

Here is a new paper by Galor and Özak, highly speculative of course:

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of long-term orientation across societies. In particular, exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of suitable crops for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the research establishes that agro-climatic characteristics in the pre-industrial era that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, triggered selection and learning processes that had a persistent positive effect on the prevalence of long-term orientation in the contemporary era.

Didn’t Irving Fisher once say something like this?  My view in contrast is that virtually everyone has a high rate of time preference, but some (wise) people can act like low time preference individuals by choosing the proper perceived rewards and benefits, for instance by courting approval from others for saving or waiting.  It may just be pretense, but who cares?  It is not unusual to see the same person switch rapidly from high time preference to low time preference modes of thought and behavior, and this to me suggests it is all about perceptions, environment, expectations, peer effects, and other social factors, rather than genes.  In other words, choose your framing wisely.

More broadly, there is a “brute fact” that one bunch of societies have a lot of correlated positive features, and another group of societies do not.  I don’t think we’ve gotten very far beyond that brute fact in terms of what we can infer from that distribution.

The original pointer to the article is from www.bookforum.com.

Assorted links

1. The hair transplant robot.

2. Greg Clark on immigration and inequality.

3. Peter Thiel disagrees with you.

4. Is pretesting useful?

5. What price guaranteed Ivy League admission?

6. The Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.

7. New RAND corporation study on medical innovation (pdf).

8. Are there superforecasters who can predict the future?

9. Adam Smith and the romance novel.

America facts of the day

A longer-term perspective shows that the median American family income has declined about 12.4 per cent since the peak in 2004…

There is also this:

For a brief time, the Midwest was the best-off region but median incomes there have fallen by a staggering 23 per cent since 2001…

Median net worth is down forty percent from its peak (“we’re not as wealthy as we thought we were”), yet the top three percent has done quite well.  And in case you are thrilled about the recent economic recovery:

The most striking finding is that the median American family earned 5 per cent less in 2013 than in 2010 after inflation even though the average American family took home 4 per cent more.

None of this is especially new, but these are the latest numbers and it is remarkable how much they confirm some of the more pessimistic readings of recent American history.

From Matthew C. Klein at FTAlphaville, there is more here.

Will a basic minimum income go up and up in a democracy?

Noahpinion writes:

But if you have one big, high-profile redistribution program, you can get enough popular support to overcome the concentrated opposition of the rich people footing the bill. As an example, look at the minimum wage, which gets big popular support. The Democrats can go back to the minimum wage again and again as a populist issue.

But that’s not true for the whole array of redistribution programs we currently have. If the Democrats want to increase the strength of the safety net as a whole, they have to mount a populist campaign for each one of its components. That’s hard to do. So a lot of the components of the safety net get left behind, or killed by Republicans when no one is looking.

Such a fate would never befall a Basic Income. It would be in the spotlight all the time.

In fact, by endorsing Basic Income, libertarians are walking right into a trap. Anti-redistributionists’ great fear has always been that the masses will use the power of majority rule to simply vote themselves more money. As things stand, the fragmentation of our redistribution programs makes it easier for the anti-redistributionists to punch holes in the safety net. If the fragmented system were replaced with one universal, high-profile program, the result would be a huge political gift to redistributionists.

My view is not the same.  I say we have so many small, distributed anti-poverty initiatives because no one of them was ever so popular, for better or worse.  That is also why we don’t have a Basic Income.

But let’s say a historical accident swept Basic Income proponents into power for a term and they passed that legislation.  Over time those income transfers would prove larger, more visible, and they would at least appear superficially more anti-work than the public stomach for them.  I predict they would be restricted along a number of possible dimensions, starting with (partial) work requirements for the able-bodied.

Under most plausible assumptions about the Basic Income level, most people would not be recipients, nor would they expect to be potential net gainers from the program.   And in general voters put much more importance on common sense notions of “desert” than do economists.  So I think the “why send money to people who aren’t working?” intuition will crowd out the “I want to think of myself as someone who helps other people” feeling.

So, unlike Noah, I don’t think the political future of a Basic Income would be especially strong.