Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 201

Why are so many people still out of work?: the roots of structural unemployment

Here is my latest New York Times column, on structural unemployment.  I think of this piece as considering how aggregate demand, sectoral shift, and structural theories may all be interacting to produce ongoing employment problems.  “Automation” can be throwing some people out of work, even in a world where the theory of comparative advantage holds (more or less), but still this account will be partially parasitic on other accounts of labor market dysfunction.  For reasons related to education, skills, credentialism, and the law, it is harder for some categories of displaced workers to be reabsorbed by labor markets today.

Here are the two paragraphs which interest me the most:

Many of these labor market problems were brought on by the financial crisis and the collapse of market demand. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame on the business cycle. Before the crisis, for example, business executives and owners didn’t always know who their worst workers were, or didn’t want to engage in the disruptive act of rooting out and firing them. So long as sales were brisk, it was easier to let matters lie. But when money ran out, many businesses had to make the tough decisions — and the axes fell. The financial crisis thus accelerated what would have been a much slower process.

Subsequently, some would-be employers seem to have discriminated against workers who were laid off in the crash. These judgments weren’t always fair, but that stigma isn’t easily overcome, because a lot of employers in fact had reason to identify and fire their less productive workers.

Under one alternative view, the inability of the long-term unemployed to find new jobs is still a matter of sticky nominal wages.  With nominal gdp well above its pre-crash peak, I find that implausible for circa 2014.  Besides, these people are unemployed, they don’t have wages to be “sticky” in the first place.

Under a second view, the process of being unemployed has made these individuals less productive.  Under a third view (“ZMP”), these individuals were not very productive to begin with, and the liquidity crisis of the crash led to this information being revealed and then communicated more broadly to labor markets.  I see a combination of the second and third forces as now being in play.  Here is another paragraph from the piece:

A new paper by Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho of Princeton has documented that the nation now appears to have a permanent class of long-term unemployed, who probably can’t be helped much by monetary and fiscal policy. It’s not right to describe these people as “thrown out of work by machines,” because the causes involve complex interactions of technology, education and market demand. Still, many people are finding this new world of work harder to navigate.

Tim Harford suggests the long-term unemployed may be no different from anybody else.  Krugman claims the same.  (Also in this piece he considers weak versions of the theories he is criticizing, does not consider AD-structural interaction, and ignores the evidence presented in pieces such as Krueger’s.)  I think attributing all of this labor market misfortune to luck is unlikely, and it violates standard economic theories of discrimination or for that matter profit maximization.  I do not see many (any?) employers rushing to seek out these workers and build coalitions with them.

There were two classes of workers fired in the great liquidity shortage of 2008-2010.  The first were those revealed to be not very productive or bad for firm morale.  They skew male rather than female, and young rather than old.  The second affected class were workers who simply happened to be doing the wrong thing for shrinking firms: “sorry Joe, we’re not going to be starting a new advertising campaign this year.  We’re letting you go.”

The two groups have ended up lumped together and indeed a superficial glance at their resumes may suggest — for reemployment purposes — that they are observationally equivalent.  This discriminatory outcome is unfair, and it is also inefficient, because some perfectly good workers cannot find suitable jobs.  Still, this form of discrimination gets imposed on the second class of workers only because there really are a large number of workers who fall into the first category.

Here is John Cassidy on the composition of current unemployment.  Here is Glenn Hubbard with some policy ideas.

IP law for Girl Scouts (sentences to ponder)

As STEM fields become increasingly popular, it is important that we teach young people about the incentives and protections available to them through the patent system. IPO Education Foundation is excited about the opportunity to work with the GSCNC and the USPTO to bring the patent system to girls through the IP patch…

There is more here, via Mark Thorson.

Assorted links

1. What is the marginal rate of substitution between dogs and sloths?

2. A robot doctor for space travel?

3. Why higher education will have to change (by the way GMU does quite well by this ROI metric).  And universities and retirement communities: are those the real economies of scope?

4. The anternet.

5. Are the makers of 3-D printers getting a reality check?

Educational markets in everything (a short disquisition on the Tullock paradox)

George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management just announced that it is launching a new masters program in international lobbying.

There is more here, via Peter Metrinko.

Taxation and the distorted allocation of talent

That is a paper from last year by Benjamin B. Lockood, Charles G. Nathanson, and E. Glen Weyl.  The key sentence of the abstract is this:

If higher-paying professions (e.g. finance and management) generate less positive net externalities than lower-paying professions (e.g. public service and education) taxation may enhance efficiency.

In other words, marginal tax rates may be Pigouvian taxes on externality-generating activities.  Note that in this model high elasticities of switching careers, in response to incentives, may motivate progressive taxation rather than militating against it.

The paper does not attempt to derive which are the positive-externality and negative-externality professions, but rather considers some left- and right-wing assumptions about various professions, as well as the views of the authors.

One worry I have about this paper is that it focuses only on the static dimension.  If we believe that investment has higher positive externalities over time than consumption, that militates in favor of leaving resources in the hands of wealthier individuals.

If we consider wage structures within firms, equity norms and stickiness theories predict an excess of wage compression relative to marginal products.  This is what we observe in academia and also scientific research.  High marginal tax rates worsen that problem rather than alleviate it.

Most of all, I think of “fundamental innovation” as the great under-rewarded input.  That doesn’t correspond well to either income levels or descriptions of professions, so maybe those are not the categories this paper should focus upon.  And the number of true innovators may be fairly small, so thinking about typical cases may prove misleading.  If we consult “our feelings” about various professions, we will focus on typical members of that profession and their social contributions, or lack thereof.  An alternative approach is to start by listing the known under-rewarded innovators from the past, noting their distribution in the professions, and then thinking how to reward those professions with the tax system, along the way worrying less about the averages or typical members of those professions.  That path will bring you some very different results, and I think results more favorable to both business and scientific research.

For the pointer to the paper I thank Daniel Frank.

Assorted links

1. Bionic kangaroo.

2. Consumption rituals enhance the flavor of chocolate, lemonade, and carrots.

3. Just an arbitrary observation: to my subjective eye, this married couple looks very happy together.  (And they met through robots.)

4. You can’t tell how smart women are by seeing their static photos.

5. Will driverless cars push us into congestion pricing?

6. Finally someone is disrupting the towel.

7. How to rank your friends? (not recommended)

8. The McDonald’s theory of international conflict, revisited?

A study of limiting HFT

From Philip Delves Broughton:

These advantages were demonstrated in a recent natural experiment set off by Canada’s stock market regulators. In April 2012 they limited the activity of high-frequency traders by increasing the fees on market messages sent by all broker-dealers, such as trades, order submissions and cancellations. This affected high-frequency traders the most, since they issue many more messages than other traders.

The effect, as measured by a group of Canadian academics, was swift and startling. The number of messages sent to the Toronto Stock Exchange dropped by 30 percent, and the bid-ask spread rose by 9 percent, an indicator of lower liquidity and higher transaction costs.

But the effects were not evenly distributed among investors. Retail investors, who tend to place more limit orders — i.e., orders to buy or sell stocks at fixed prices — experienced lower intraday returns. Institutional investors, who placed more market orders, buying and selling at whatever the market price happened to be, did better. In other words, the less high-frequency trading, the worse the small investors did.

…In a paper published last year, Terry Hendershott of Berkeley, Jonathan Brogaard of the University of Washington and Ryan Riordan of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology concluded that, “Over all, HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory price errors, both on average and on the highest volatility days.”

The pdf of the paper is here.  Here is the conclusion of a Charles M. Jones survey paper on HFT (pdf):

Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated, competing markets improve market liquidity, reduce trading costs, and make stock prices more efficient. Better liquidity lowers the cost of equity capital for firms, which is an important positive for the real economy. Minor regulatory tweaks may be in order, but those formulating policy should be especially careful not to reverse the liquidity improvements of thelast twenty years.

There are a variety of significant problems on Wall Street, but this really isn’t one of them.

Going Postal: My First Job

In this article some Nobel prize winners talk about their first jobs and the lessons they learned. One of my first jobs was as a scab.

One summer when I was a teenager, the Canadian postal union workers went on strike and I was hired to deliver the mail. The pay was astounding, something like $25 an hour plus benefits when I was earning $4 an hour as a stock boy. The first day was disorganized and we never got out of the depot where we were supposed to be assigned to a postal station. The second day we were taken in a van to a station but the striking workers rocked and shook the van violently and we barely made it in. The company feared for our safety so we spent the entire day twiddling our thumbs. It was boring sitting around for 8 hours but I was thrilled to head home with $200. The third day we were again trucked to a postal station but there was no mail to deliver and by early afternoon it was clear we were going nowhere and doing nothing. I decided to leave. The guy in charge looked at me incredulously but said it was my call. I slipped out a back door but several burly postal workers saw me and started to chase. I hopped over a fence into, of all places, a graveyard. I ran through the graveyard and eluded a beating. The strike ended the next day. For several years afterwards I collected some kind of pension/overtime benefit.

The summer after that I ran away and joined the circus. I worked selling tickets and cleaning up after the elephants. That was also fun.

I learned a lot from both jobs.

David Brooks on the McCutcheon decision

The Supreme Court just voted to eliminate aggregate contribution limits, here is David’s response:

The McCutcheon decision is a rare win for the parties. It enables party establishments to claw back some of the power that has flowed to donors and “super PACs.” It effectively raises the limits on what party establishments can solicit. It gives party leaders the chance to form joint fund-raising committees they can use to marshal large pools of cash and influence. McCutcheon is a small step back toward a party-centric system.

In their book “Better Parties, Better Government,” Peter J. Wallison and Joel M. Gora propose the best way to reform campaign finance: eliminate the restrictions on political parties to finance the campaigns of their candidates; loosen the limitations on giving to parties; keep the limits on giving to PACs.

Parties are not perfect, Lord knows. But they have broad national outlooks. They foster coalition thinking. They are relatively transparent. They are accountable to voters. They ally with special interests, but they transcend the influence of any one. Strengthened parties will make races more competitive and democracy more legitimate. Strong parties mobilize volunteers and activists and broaden political participation. Unlike super PACs, parties welcome large numbers of people into the political process.

There is more here.  Ray LaRaja makes related points here.

For which political views should a CEO have to resign?

Andrew Sullivan argues Eich should not have been forced to resign from Mozilla for his anti-gay marriage donations, combined with his unwillingness to recant his position.  As a supporter of gay marriage (as of course Sullivan is too), I very much agree.  Like Sullivan, I see such such ideological witch hunts as unjust, counterproductive, and stifling of free discourse.

I see some further economic angles to this dispute.

First, it implies the market share of browsers is fairly arbitrary, and highly subject to potential consumer rebellion.  I can think of other businessmen who have alienated parts of the American public through their political stances, but still their products are bought and there is little talk of deposing them from their leadership roles.  Free products seem especially vulnerable to fluctuations in corporate image, in part because no product has a durable edge on price.  Since more of our economy seems headed in the direction of “free to consumers for direct use,” we might want to start thinking about this tendency a little more carefully and cautiously.  Charging people a positive price liberates you to be less conformist, at least provided you fare well in market competition.

Second, ambitious young people just got more boring.  It wasn’t long ago that opposition to gay marriage was the mainstream position in American society and of course in many places it still is.

Third, let’s say that “recantation” is becoming more important and more potent as a defense mechanism against charges (I’m not sure this is generally true, but it does seem to be true in the Eich case).  That will make people more likely to express their eccentricities in youthful bursts, rather than as a consistent pattern of donations or support over many years.  Consistent support over time is harder to recant, but a single act is easier to write off as a youthful indiscretion.