Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 386
March 13, 2013
*Why Growth Matters*
That is the new book by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. I reviewed the slightly earlier UK/India version briefly and very favorably here, and next month it will be out under this new title in the U.S. The subtitle is How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and Lessons for Other Developing Countries. It is no surprise that they did not keep the India title — India’s Tryst with Destiny — for the US market. Who wants to read about India per se? Who knows what a tryst is?
The overtime boom
The last time U.S. factory workers put in longer weeks than they averaged in February, Rosie the Riveter was on the assembly line and American GIs were fighting Nazis in Europe.
All those extra hours helped to drive five straight months of manufacturing growth in the U.S., racking up 52,000 new factory jobs, according to Labor Department data. That includes 14,000 positions in February alone.
Good news of course, but there is a dark lining to the cloud. I take the heavy reliance on overtime to be another sign of labor market polarization, and of low employer demand for a large number of the unemployed.
The story is here, hat tip goes to this chain.
Addendum: As Matt Yglesias reports, retail sales are strongly up too.
Can we agree that…(more on fiscal policy, and hurdle rates)
Ryan Avent puts forward some propositions on fiscal policy that he hopes we can agree on (I agree with most of them, dissenting on the multiplier discussion by wanting explicit time horizon considerations, the overall importance given by multiple mentions of ZLB, and being confused but not disagreeing with the wording of the first part of #13). And in general I am supportive of such attempts to find common ground.
I wish, however, to add to the list. I wish to nominate a few more items, noting that this does not exhaust my wish list. Here goes:
1. Debt-financed government spending must eventually be paid off and the estimated deadweight loss of taxation is at least twenty percent. That immediately puts a hurdle rate of twenty percent or more on projects, even when real borrowing rates are very low.
2. Private companies, when making investment decisions, often use hurdle rates as high as twenty or thirty percent, even when their cost of capital is much lower. Often it is believed this is to constrain overeager empire builders, or “cowboys.” For sure, the agency problems in the public sector differ considerably from those in the private sector, but arguably there should be a “cowboy premium” for the public sector as well, even if that premium should be lower for the public sector.
3. The real risk of public sector investment is not measured by the borrowing rate, but rather by the covariance of the value of public sector outputs with a very broad notion of the market portfolio. I call this the Jensen premium, since Michael Jensen first outlined this argument clearly.
This is all standard stuff, none of it is like reading the “he said, she said” debates over the proper size of the fiscal policy multiplier.
To do some adding up, we have twenty percent plus the cowboy premium plus the Jensen premium. Plus of course the real time preference rate, if that should be positive too. It is hard to get a good sense of the size of the cowboy and Jensen premia but still we are running clearly over twenty percent, perhaps a good deal over twenty percent.
I also believe (more controversially, this point is not consensus) that the cowboy premium is considerably higher for debt-financed expenditures, relative to balanced budget expenditures.
Now let’s come to my complaint (which is not directed against Ryan). I have read dozens — or is it now hundreds? — of blog posts arguing that low borrowing rates make for a very strong case for fiscal policy. I do not often if ever see these posts admit that the hurdle rate for government investment still can be quite high and still is likely quite high. I do not see these posts discussing the DWL of taxation, the cowboy effect, or the Jensen effect. I see only the mention of a very low borrowing rate.
Of course you should adjust the social costs of the project downward to the extent it is mobilizing specific unemployed physical resources (which is quite distinct from the existence of a low borrowing rate per se; for one thing, it is easy to have projects which reshuffle resources and a low borrowing rate, plus the crowding out may come on the labor side). I see this point about unemployed resources mentioned many, many times, though not with the proper caveats, and I see the points about hurdle rates hardly mentioned at all. And note by the way that the DWL of taxation premium should be applied to all upfront pecuniary costs, whether or not they are true social costs.
Addendum: Brad DeLong comments. His #1, if I understand it properly, confuses “spending at all” with “taxing vs. borrowing” calculations. #2 ignores agency problems and #3 assumes a rather definite view on the understanding of risk. You will note that my post is quite agnostic on the size of #2 and #3 in any case.
March 12, 2013
Further assorted links
1. Resource mobility in Japan.
2. The culture that is New York; “You likely wouldn’t have sex with someone who took you to the wrong restaurant (or at least wouldn’t be happy about it).”
3. Bryan Caplan on the minimum wage.
4. Vivek Wadhwa on the great stagnation.
5. I favor the campus right to a guinea pig.
Good sentences about John Stuart Mill
He was so bewildered by his lack of books that he even began sleeping late, once not getting up till nine o’clock. One of the daughters [in Toulouse] pitying his plight gave him Legendre’s Geometry. He dissected it eagerly, although its muddled thinking on Ratio took away a good deal of its merits as an elementary work. The confusion in the house grew worse; a dog went mad and terrorized the servants. To John’s orderly mind the Benthams seemed to live in a state of constant uproar. They were always interrupting him for other things. He was never left to himself. They took him to see peasant dances…
That is from Michael St.John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill.
Sentences of interest
People whose results were closer to the fatal cut-off point of p=0.05 were less likely to share their data.
That is from Robert Trivers, about psychologists, source here.
You are fairly predictable, perhaps
The new article is “Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior,” by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. Here is the abstract:
We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.
For the pointer I thank Brandon Robison.
What is your long Kindle book?
Everyone should have a long book on their Kindle that they otherwise would never read. Then, when you don’t feel like starting a whole new book on your Kindle, you dig into a small piece of your long book. And stop. As the years pass, you may eventually finish your long book (or not).
The long book on my Kindle is John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion. It’s impressive. I don’t agree with Calvin, either theologically or temperamentally, but he is an extremely sharp thinker and writer, too often neglected for his extreme “Calvinism.”
After three years, I’m about eighteen percent finished. And someday I hope to read more works by Calvin, although not someday anytime soon.
What is the long book on your Kindle?
Addendum: Kevin Drum comments.
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