A rotting fruit that does not give vent to its own demand?

Given we seem to be stuck in fairly heady economic times it seems worthwhile to me to put out another post on the subject of employment, labour force growth and unemployment. In this post I am going to revisit the question of labour supply and demand and then take a closer look at the related issues of structural unemployment and the rotting skills (hysteresis) and dependency thesis  that has gained so much popularity in policy circles since mid 90s.

In a former post I mentioned the surge in labour supply during the 70s and 80s yet the graph I produced was a little underwhelming because it took a look at the underlying demographic growth of potential labour supply and not actual labour supply.  So this time I have have subtracted total labour force growth from total employment growth. Again, a positive reading indicates demand growth is outstripping supply growth and thus a decrease in the unemployment rate.  The inverse is that a negative reading says labour supply growth is greater than labour demand growth and thus leads to an increase in the unemployment rate. Here is the graph:

This is fairly sobering stuff.  The jobs boom of the 60s gave way to the deluge in the labour supply of 70s from which the employment market not to mention the welfare state has never fully recovered.  All that talk in the 90s about the need to reform UI/EI was not really about workers gaming the system it was about a welfare state that could not and would not provide the kind of insurance necessary to cover an over 70 % participation rate in which workers were more likely to be unemployed.  The graph below shows just how ugly it can get.

Clearly the deluge in the labour supply 70s had profound impact on long term unemployment which amounted not to an institutionally determined behavioural switch in workers propensity to work but rather a structural shift in the labour supply curve sans an equally profound shift in the demand curve for labour.  We know for example that for two decades, from the late 70s to late 90s, that real wages were stagnant indicating a loss in the bargaining power of Canadian workers. Yet despite the loss in wage bargaining traction, demand for labour was not forthcoming until the dot com and later housing booms of the late 90s and 2000s.  At the end of the day it was the bubble economies which finally, and fictitiously managed to work through the supply boom of the 70s.

If there is any doubt that demand for labour is the most important determinant of structural unemployment rates we need only look south to our American cousins.  In the graph below I have plotted US long term unemployment rates along side the Canadian rates.

Despite or because of higher US productivity during the 2000s the US had already begun to move towards higher levels of structural unemployment than Canada during the early 2000s something not seen since the mid 70s.  Clearly the severity of the last recession in US accounts for most of the difference in long term unemployment rates.  I have not seen any research which argues that the US has a significantly more generous unemployment insurance system than Canada.

The popular myth promulgated throughout 90s was that structural rates were high because they were high.  In the literature this is called hysteresis.  The basic idea is that the longer  a worker is unemployed the less employable they become because their skills degrade like a piece of fresh fruit on the kitchen table.  The hysteresis argument was used in turn to argue for more restricted access to EI and lower benefits to encourage workers to get back to work before their skills rotted.  This all had the air populist plausibility particularly when combined with the trend toward increasingly individualistic explanations for collective social problems in the social sciences especially economics.  But whatever the strange brew of populist folk wisdom–that workers prefer the dole to working–and academic fads the problem is, as the graph above demonstrates, high structural unemployment and hysteresis seem to magically disappear when there is strong demand for labour.  And that demand, as the graph above also suggests, is determined by the general health of the macro economy and has nothing particularly to do with the supply characteristics of labour.

To put a fine point on the argument what needs to be demanded of the purveyors of the hysteresis hypothesis is just what reversed the rotting of workers’ skills that magically made them employable after 1991-92.  Was there a steady increase in the funding of retraining programs for example?  And what about the US what was going on after 2001 did the Skills of US labour all of sudden just start rotting?

The alternative narrative to the rotting skills / lazy labour thesis is that the 70s was a period of structural realignment in which secular period of decreased GDP per capita growth set in matched by a deluge of labour supply.  The 80s and 90s were thus periods of adjustment to this new reality.  The UK the US and Canada were early supply side reformers which consciously sought to re-enforce the punitive logic of capitalist labour markets in order to assure price stability (tame inflation) and break workers bargaining power.  In other words, neoliberal macro-policy, despite protestations to the contrary, had nothing much to with solving the problem of long term and high structural rates of unemployment.  It was a feature not a glitch that the solution to that problem would have to wait until the supply side reforms delivered up their magic via a tsunami of consumer credit and control fraud serving up a ponzi economy that could approach something close to what could be called full employment.

As this report from the BLS (p.23 A-12) demonstrates long term structural unemployment has gotten worse in the US not better since 2009.  Most sober economists will concede that this has everything to do with the health of the US economy.  But it will not be long before the rotting skills thesis is floated into the stream of policy discourse as a cover for the fact that like with the financial sector the solution is to kick the problem down the road and blame the victims along the way.

*Note that Stats Can defines long term unemployment as 1 year + whereas the BLS defines it as 27 months weeks +.  By using 6 months + which conforms to the format of the data reported by the OECD I have more less deployed the BLS definition.

Never count on economists to defend the public interest

This is something that should always be kept in mind in economic policy discussions: most economists are pro-Market, not pro-Public Interest.

It is especially important to keep this in mind when we read commentary such as this, in which an economist from one of Canada’s smaller economics departments conflates being pro-market with being in the public interest.

This point is sometimes hard to see, especially since many economists hold to the deeply ingrained syllogism that being pro-market is straightforwardly being in the public interest.

But they are a lobby group like any other, and cannot be relied upon to defend the general public interest.*

Economists, particularly academic economists (and like all academics), rely on, for their social status, research funding and a quiet concious, having the public view them as working in the public interest. And given the majority of economists are true believers in the “market” that inevitably gets conflated with being in the public interest

Cloaking oneself as being in the public interest is of course one of the oldest rhetorical stances to take since like wearing the national flag it clearly puts the speaker in the role of the hero and casts those being spoken against in the role of the villains. This is all the more easy to to do when the terms of conversation are being articulated in fuzzy, ill defined concepts such as the “public interest” and “pro-market”. When an economist uses those terms they have very exotic definitions in mind that most lay people would not readily grasp. Perhaps I am being too charitable: I can’t, in fact, find a definition of the public interest in any my economics text-books.

The public interest is a rather fuzzy notion. We can perhaps all agree that it has something to do with public goods but that just raises the thorny issue of what is and what is not a public good. In any case the argument at least has to be made that a specific policy is in the public good and why. Just standing around hands waiving in the air mindlessly chanting pro-market rhetoric like “free trade” or deregulation does not really cut the mustard.

Indeed after a generation of pro-market policies like financial liberalization and deregulation with cascading financial crises of increasingly damaging intensity culminating in the Great Financial Crisis that was 2007 and from which no advanced capitalist economy has yet to emerge; in which whole nations like Iceland, Greece and Ireland were raised; in which untold millions of workers were put and remain out of work; and as a consequence a massive hole was blown in public finances around the world, it should be clear that pro-market policies are not always or even in the majority of cases un-problematically in the public good to say the very least.

Notice that even if you are want to argue that it was bad government regulation in the US which caused the Great Financial Crisis the fact is that decades of financial liberalization and deregulation (pro-market policies) directly led to the formation of global investment and insurance markets which made sure that a “made in the USA” problem had serious global consequences. And it is not just that economists did not foresee these negative consequences they actually argued in favour of these policies on the grounds that such a crisis was less likely to occur and that the consequences would be less severe in the event that it did occur because these pro-market policies allowed risk to be more evenly spread. So much for theory.

That a pro-market economist is given a national soap-box on which to conflate being Pro-market with being in the Public Interest does not bode well for the Public Interest.

* The first four paragraphs are an inverted paraphrase of the linked commentary. I apologize to my readers for reproducing a very clichéd prose style.

What can eutectics teach us about public policy and economic policy?

Yes you read that right Eutectics.  Sounds exotic but it isn’t.  I first came across the term back when I could think of nothing other than clay, fire and glaze.  Back then my public high school had a very good ceramics program and very good textbooks.  The little working knowledge (as in applied) I have in chemistry comes from that initial inspiration.

Ceramic glazes are a rather complicated affair and one of the first things you learn is that if you take a series of minerals / metals with “melting” points above 1280 Celsius (applies to lower temperatures too) and combine them they will not necessarily “melt” above 1280 C.  The world melt here is put in quotes because glazes are actually supercooled liquids which are solid at room temperature but unlike their metallic friends do not have a definite melting point (alloy can and do have the same properties).

What has this to do with public policy and and economic policy in particular? Often in public policy discourse we act as though it is an additive process.  Policy X is good policy policy Y, is a good policy, and policy Z is a good policy.  Let us adopt all three policies.  Implicit here is the idea that in combination the three policies will make us three times (or sum) better-off.  mainstream economics can get at this bit via the distinction between rival and complimentary goods but more often than not it just takes and adding up approach.  Free trade is good, deregulation is good, corporate income tax cuts are good, and exchange liberalization is good.  Therefore lets have all four!

Then poof there goes Iceland, Ireland, not to mention the sundry Eastern European us too crowd.

Each policy was supposed to deliver a more flexible nimble and therefore more robust to shock macro-economy.  But in fact together they produced a more brittle and fragile macro-economy.  My hypothesis is simply this: something like eutectic chemistry is a work here.  Each policy has a specific a melting point above 1280 C but when combined in to a policy a paradigm (like a glaze) their melting point is actually lower.

That challenge for those in the policy sciences is to study the complex of public policies as if they are glazes rather than as a series of singular goods that stack.

In anticipation of critiques I will say that I think eutectic effects are different from compositional fallacies and externalities. Properly understood public policy is more like chemistry: add sodium bicarbonate (policy Y) to copper sulphate (problem A) with some H2O (policy X) and you get copper carbonate.  Pretty simple stuff:

No. 7: Austerity Forever

Economic austerity has been the constant of my life. Since the age of political awakening austerity has been the order of my age. Back in the early eighties school children as young as 8 were having the term economic austerity explained to them by their school teachers in British Columbia. At that time it meant no more subsidised hot dog days, and the beginning of cost recovery for all non-essential educational activities like day trips into Vancouver to the planetarium. Chilliwack Central was a largely working class elementary school at that time with a large contingent of children who today we would say lived in poverty. Back in those days there was still enough social solidarity kicking around that the end of subsidised hot dog days and the beginning of cost recovery did not mean the end of hot dogs and field trips for the poor children. Between the teachers and the parents ways were found to share out austerity in a more egalitarian manner.

By the end of eighties and the early nineties we were once again officially practising austerity. Yet by that time full cost recovery for non-educationally essential activities had already been implemented: poor kids simply did not join the senior-high ski-club. Austerity looked more like going through the curriculum and deciding which classes were non-essential like art, photography, metal shop etc., and then implementing user fees such that if you did not have cash you could not take the class. To my knowledge there were no mechanisms in place to make sure that poor working class students had access to art or shop classes for that matter. I am told that after I graduated, some years later, these classes were simply cut out of the offerings altogether.

Indeed since becoming concious, it seems that the political economy of late capitalism has been characterised by a permanent austerity in the public space. The latest economic crisis, caused by the elite of capitalism, aka, finance, has become just another opportunity to practice more austerity in the public space. The irony here is that thirty years of austerity is, as is starting to become understood and accepted, one of the leading candidates for the contradiction at the heart of neoliberalism as an accumulation and growth strategy. I will let Mark Blyth take it from here.

No. 8: We got effeciency here

For some I know this will seem a little too low on the list, but it is low because it really is low. When you are trapped inside GET (general equilibrium theory) reality is your enemy. Inside GET everything is tranquil–like a heroin addict after the needle is in and the payload delivered. In this exotic den of opium everything is tractable (well no really, Nash cooked this dream off like a poet in the night). Take a brave step away and not all that starts well ends well–and here we are not just talking about aggregation problems.

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) not only claimed that financial markets were narrowly efficient as in they embodied all the relevant information and said information was conveyed in usably due time, but, also, that following Hayek such information was superior to any information that could be gathered and thus regulated by a central authority.

The outside play here was that ay attempt to regulate financial markets was doomed to failure because market participants would necessarily have at their disposal timely and thus superior information than public regulators. This argument got pushed so far that it was even argued that self regulation by private individuals would be superior as private actors would have better information. This logic of course suffered from a begging the question problem as in: if information is rapidly disseminated by market actors why can’t the state access that information and evolve policy and regulations in lock-step? That is to say, if information is efficiently conveyed why can’t regulators access and then use this information to regulate.

Two defences are available to the apostles of EMH. The first would argue that because the state is not a direct player in markets it in fact does not have access to this information. This is likely true, but the problem is that such a defence invites government participation in financial markets precisely so it can monitor and regulate the industry. YET, this conclusion is exactly the one EMH was designed to trounce. EMH was above all about the capacity of markets to auto-regulate. Why after all is the state needed when private markets are already efficient.

The second, and preferred, line of defence is then the argument that markets were efficient but the quality of the information was bad and that in time markets self corrected via what layman have come to call the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Here the GFC is painted not as a crisis but an updating from poor information to good and is thus a confirmation of the EMF.

This second line of defence of course suffers from the obvious wrinkle that it boils down to the proposition that markets get things hopelessly wrong and that they can do so for such a prolonged period of time that the whole economy (not just finance) gets sucked into the vortex of ignorance. Presented as such the second line of defence is rather effervescent. For if the updating process takes such a long time and is capable of spreading bad information across a whole host of different markets from housing through to food and energy then the case for government regulation would seem strong.

But alas no! No because we only need to default back to defence one which is that the state does not have any better information than markets. But this only begs the question about the role of the state not just in terms of the regulator but in terms of a participant. In principle there is nothing that stops the state from becoming a significant player in financial markets: taking in information and then asking prudential third party questions.

In a nutshell those who would defend EMH via the second stratagem did so to avoid increased state involvement but then they have to defer to stratagem one in order to salvo the second. But stratagem one begs the question.

None of this is gainsaid by the obvious blooper that calling something efficient which demands that entire economies suffer the pain of “updating” is incredibly glib. Auto-regulation ought to imply smooth processes of adjustment. IF what EMH boils down to is that good information is turbulent which is eventually self-correcting after long period of pain then we really are back to the debates which raged before and after the Second World War.

My bet is this: Diamond and Fama will never win the Swedish bank prize but many economists will retain the ontological model in the back of their heads and demand no less from their graduate students.

A pity really.

Rowe V Krugman V reality

Personally I think blood sports are pornographic. Krugman is a persistent pessimist on the future track of US growth. Nick Rowe (the boat) is dipping his oar formally on the optimistic edge of the ram. But surprisingly for apparently Keynesian reasons. Me I am going to err on the side of Krugman’s pessimism because I do not think individuals think like this nor do I think they are homogeneous like this:

Since the actual natural rate has not changed, and since the market rate set by the Fed has not changed, you might think that no individual will want to change his desired savings or investment. But, because each individual (falsely) thinks that the natural rate has increased, relative to the market rate, each individual thinks that every other individual will increase desired investment and reduce desired saving. So each individual expects the Wicksellian/Keynesian cumulative process will cause rising prices and output. And this is what causes each individual to increase his own desired investment and reduce his own desired saving. And so there is a Wicksellian/Keynesian cumulative process of rising prices and output.

Keynesian or not.

Ideological Capture and the Death of the Functionalist Capitalist State

Marx and Engles once famously quipped in an obscure text somewhere that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In modern theory this economistic and functionalist rendering of the state has been widely rejected for reasons I will not bother to outline here.

As a first cut theory of the modern capitalist state I, however, had always thought it was rather an astute observation. Business owners have collective needs they can not or will not independently provide and yet require these goods and services in order to conduct their affairs. They need independent courts to police and enforce private contracts, they eventually figure out they need a common currency, a reliable system of roads etc, etc. The solution to this collective action problem is the state. Indeed much of the history of liberalism can be read as a conversation about what the proper functions of the state ought to be and how to protect it from being hijacked by the popular classes to provide for their collective needs. That is why in that same obscure text Marx and Engles called for the extension of the vote to non-property owning individuals. What a Radical Idea!

What strikes me, however, about the latest wave of austerity sweeping through the advanced capitalist zone is the degree to which the state is failing to act as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. When you read Keynes’ General Theory it is palatable the degree to which he was frustrated by the state’s failure to do its job and save the capitalist class from itself. In our contemporary period of growing myopathy economists like Paul Krugman seem gobsmacked on an almost daily basis at the failure of the present administration in the US to act accordingly. What Paul and many others do not seem to be able to figure out is why?

I think the failure of the state to act as the committee for managing the general affairs of the capitalist class is rather simple: both the bourgeoisie and its representatives—politicians—have been consumed by the ideology they have been selling.

Neoliberalism was about making the world a better place to be a capitalist. As such, it was also about getting citizens to internalize the needs of business as their own. Everyone and every institution were asked, prior to making any practical suggestions to ask themselves what would a business person do? So successful was the campaign to get citizens across the world to internalize the needs of capital that even the elites ended up drinking the cool-aid they sold. Put differently neoliberalism moved from being the Noble Lie to the prize winning Noble Truth.

I am going to coin a new term here and call this phenomenon “ideological capture”; which no doubt, in the case of the US is reinforced by an almost complete “regulatory capture.” Indeed so complete has this ideological capture been that it appears as though instead of individual states acting on behalf of the collective needs of the entire bourgeoisie individual states are rather acting as the executive of a single capitalist firm and viewing the societies they govern as one giant business enterprise. This in train is leading to a whole host of jumbled thinking not the least of which is the package of compositional fallacies and outright contradictions masquerading as fiscal prudence.

In another post perhaps I will take the time to catalogue them all. But of course all of this is a rather moot point. Even if the managers of the capitalist enterprise called the modern state woke up and decided that they would save capitalism from and for the capitalists it is not at all clear how they would do it. Let us say for argument sake I agree with people like Krugman and think that fiscal expansion across the capitalist zone coupled with a real effort on the coordination on international imbalances—as opposed to the bizarre spectacle that was the G20 meeting in Korea—would go some way to stop the haemorrhaging. The fact remains the neoliberal growth model is a failed experiment. A reset back to 2005 will not do the trick; nor 1996; nor 1985; nor 1976; nor the summer of 68.

There are in fact three resets and not one that have to be pulled-off. To meaningfully deal with international imbalances we are going to have to deal with both the class and the environmental imbalances (that was euphemistically put). These are all massive problems with very politically complex solutions to be worked out. Neoliberalism has served to hyper accelerate all three imbalances and there is nothing I am seeing from the Very Respectable People (VRP) like Krugman that betrays any sense of what is really required. To make matters worse VRP are on the outside of the debate which gives a good indication of just how far off is a meaningful consideration of the immensity of the tasks at hand given they are only one quarter of the way there and sitting on the benches.

Marx and Engles quipped somewhere in an obscure text second only in obscurity to the Bible that Capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Some good irony then that the state is busy performing this historical mission that was once bequeathed to the working class.

Extend and pretend

It is bad when the most pertinent of commentaries gets no response. What is ironic here is that at the micro level banks are telling their public stop pretending we are not extending even though they face near zero costs or in the case of the US negative costs.

You leave out an important scenario: in a zero interest rate environment, no bank is bad. This is why otherwise insolvent banks like Bank of America or Citi can stay solvent. It doesn’t matter the proportion of non-performing loans on the asset side as long as its cost of funds is minimal. Banks are thus engaged in a race with time to capture a positive return to recapitalize before interest rates rise.

Posted by: Guillaume | November 08, 2010 at 10:48 PM

Yep extend and pretend. That is the future but it is not as yet the present.

Getting radical about Canadian debt levels and servicing facilities: Let Canadians tap on the window of the Bank of Canada

There has been some considerable ink spilled over Canadian consumer debt to income ratios (I am not providing the links; that is why god invented google). I am one of these rare (in the aggregate but not rare) Canadians which has a debt to income ration of around 70%. The down side, for both me and my creditors, is that none of it is secured. So I made an appointment with a bank representative to see if there was some way to consolidate all the different unsecured debt into a nice little package with a fixed (low) interest rate and fixed payment schedule with the agreement that I would cancel all but my banks credit card which is unencumbered. The answer was yes it is possible but the interest rate is going tobe on average higher than the different rates on all my debt. About half my debt is at 5.5% the other half at 10% and the consolidation loan was the high end of 9%. All this, in an environment in which the central bank rate is 1%.

That is an 8% spread. If the government really wants to get debt to income ratios down and does not want serious deleterious effects on aggregate demand then it should empower the BOC to offer consolidation loans at 1.5% with the proviso that they are structured over a maximum of 5 years and no consumer credit lines can be taken up by the borrower for the term of the consolidation loan. Further, to back stop against the plaint that these are unsecured, the legislation can be past that effectively secures them. Here is how: take them out of bankruptcy provisions and empower revenue Canada to pursue payments via forfeiture of all tax credits until the balance is paid in full.

So what is the benefit to Canadians? The ability to individually deleverage without killing aggregate demand. This of course is far too pragmatic so it has no chance between two hockey sticks an E and two Ls of getting traction. But it does suggest that there are still some non-revolutionary options left on the table .

Of course we could always just wait for bankruptcy provisions to solve the problem and or a long protracted period of reduced aggregate domestic demand.

The United States gets Sid Hatfield back: Sheriff tells banks to FO

I do not know how many of you have been following the criminality in the foreclosure sector south of the line but I have for several months via the blog Naked Capitalism which has been doing intense coverage for some time.

This story broke on CNBC:

CHICAGO – Two of the largest U.S. mortgage servicers have said they will resume home foreclosures, but a big-city sheriff has news for them: he won’t enforce their foreclosure evictions.

The sheriff for Cook County, Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago, said on Tuesday he will not enforce foreclosure evictions for Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase and Co. and GMAC Mortgage/Ally Financial until they prove those foreclosures were handled “properly and legally.”

Bank of America, the largest U.S. mortgage servicer, and GMAC, on Monday both announced rollbacks from their foreclosure moratoriums.

The announcement by Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart comes after weeks of damaging accusations of shoddy paperwork that may have caused some people to be illegally evicted from their homes.

“I can’t possibly be expected to evict people from their homes when the banks themselves can’t say for sure everything was done properly,” Dart said in the statement.

“I need some kind of assurance that we aren’t evicting families based on fraudulent behavior by the banks. Until that happens, I can’t in good conscience keep carrying out evictions involving these banks,” he added.

This is a massive development. You know it is bad, beyond bad stinks in fact to the high heavens when the local sheriff tells the big boys to fuck-off. It made me think of Sid Hatfield and the Matewan Massacre.

This could indeed be the turning point.