Thursday, January 29, 2009

Government Spending Is No Free Lunch

Now the Democrats are peddling voodoo economics.
Back in the 1980s, many commentators ridiculed as voodoo economics the extreme supply-side view that across-the-board cuts in income-tax rates might raise overall tax revenues. Now we have the extreme demand-side view that the so-called "multiplier" effect of government spending on economic output is greater than one -- Team Obama is reportedly using a number around 1.5.

To think about what this means, first assume that the multiplier was 1.0. In this case, an increase by one unit in government purchases and, thereby, in the aggregate demand for goods would lead to an increase by one unit in real gross domestic product (GDP). Thus, the added public goods are essentially free to society. If the government buys another airplane or bridge, the economy's total output expands by enough to create the airplane or bridge without requiring a cut in anyone's consumption or investment.

The explanation for this magic is that idle resources -- unemployed labor and capital -- are put to work to produce the added goods and services.

If the multiplier is greater than 1.0, as is apparently assumed by Team Obama, the process is even more wonderful. In this case, real GDP rises by more than the increase in government purchases. Thus, in addition to the free airplane or bridge, we also have more goods and services left over to raise private consumption or investment. In this scenario, the added government spending is a good idea even if the bridge goes to nowhere, or if public employees are just filling useless holes. Of course, if this mechanism is genuine, one might ask why the government should stop with only $1 trillion of added purchases.

What's the flaw? The theory (a simple Keynesian macroeconomic model) implicitly assumes that the government is better than the private market at marshaling idle resources to produce useful stuff. Unemployed labor and capital can be utilized at essentially zero social cost, but the private market is somehow unable to figure any of this out. In other words, there is something wrong with the price system.

John Maynard Keynes thought that the problem lay with wages and prices that were stuck at excessive levels. But this problem could be readily fixed by expansionary monetary policy, enough of which will mean that wages and prices do not have to fall. So, something deeper must be involved -- but economists have not come up with explanations, such as incomplete information, for multipliers above one.

A much more plausible starting point is a multiplier of zero. In this case, the GDP is given, and a rise in government purchases requires an equal fall in the total of other parts of GDP -- consumption, investment and net exports. In other words, the social cost of one unit of additional government purchases is one.

This approach is the one usually applied to cost-benefit analyses of public projects. In particular, the value of the project (counting, say, the whole flow of future benefits from a bridge or a road) has to justify the social cost. I think this perspective, not the supposed macroeconomic benefits from fiscal stimulus, is the right one to apply to the many new and expanded government programs that we are likely to see this year and next.

What do the data show about multipliers? Because it is not easy to separate movements in government purchases from overall business fluctuations, the best evidence comes from large changes in military purchases that are driven by shifts in war and peace. A particularly good experiment is the massive expansion of U.S. defense expenditures during World War II. The usual Keynesian view is that the World War II fiscal expansion provided the stimulus that finally got us out of the Great Depression. Thus, I think that most macroeconomists would regard this case as a fair one for seeing whether a large multiplier ever exists.

I have estimated that World War II raised U.S. defense expenditures by $540 billion (1996 dollars) per year at the peak in 1943-44, amounting to 44% of real GDP. I also estimated that the war raised real GDP by $430 billion per year in 1943-44. Thus, the multiplier was 0.8 (430/540). The other way to put this is that the war lowered components of GDP aside from military purchases. The main declines were in private investment, nonmilitary parts of government purchases, and net exports -- personal consumer expenditure changed little. Wartime production siphoned off resources from other economic uses -- there was a dampener, rather than a multiplier.

We can consider similarly three other U.S. wartime experiences -- World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War -- although the magnitudes of the added defense expenditures were much smaller in comparison to GDP. Combining the evidence with that of World War II (which gets a lot of the weight because the added government spending is so large in that case) yields an overall estimate of the multiplier of 0.8 -- the same value as before. (These estimates were published last year in my book, "Macroeconomics, a Modern Approach.")

There are reasons to believe that the war-based multiplier of 0.8 substantially overstates the multiplier that applies to peacetime government purchases. For one thing, people would expect the added wartime outlays to be partly temporary (so that consumer demand would not fall a lot). Second, the use of the military draft in wartime has a direct, coercive effect on total employment. Finally, the U.S. economy was already growing rapidly after 1933 (aside from the 1938 recession), and it is probably unfair to ascribe all of the rapid GDP growth from 1941 to 1945 to the added military outlays. In any event, when I attempted to estimate directly the multiplier associated with peacetime government purchases, I got a number insignificantly different from zero.

As we all know, we are in the middle of what will likely be the worst U.S. economic contraction since the 1930s. In this context and from the history of the Great Depression, I can understand various attempts to prop up the financial system. These efforts, akin to avoiding bank runs in prior periods, recognize that the social consequences of credit-market decisions extend well beyond the individuals and businesses making the decisions.

But, in terms of fiscal-stimulus proposals, it would be unfortunate if the best Team Obama can offer is an unvarnished version of Keynes's 1936 "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money." The financial crisis and possible depression do not invalidate everything we have learned about macroeconomics since 1936.

Much more focus should be on incentives for people and businesses to invest, produce and work. On the tax side, we should avoid programs that throw money at people and emphasize instead reductions in marginal income-tax rates -- especially where these rates are already high and fall on capital income. Eliminating the federal corporate income tax would be brilliant. On the spending side, the main point is that we should not be considering massive public-works programs that do not pass muster from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis. Just as in the 1980s, when extreme supply-side views on tax cuts were unjustified, it is wrong now to think that added government spending is free.

Mr. Barro is an economics professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Economists, ideology, and stimulus

By Paul Krugman
Mark Thoma and Brad DeLong are both, in slightly different ways, perturbed by the state of debate over fiscal stimulus. So am I. This has not been one of the profession’s finest hours.
There are certainly legitimate arguments against spending-based fiscal stimulus. You can worry about the burden of debt; you can argue that the government will spend money so badly that the jobs created are not worth having; and I’m sure there are other arguments worth taking seriously.

What’s been disturbing, however, is the parade of first-rate economists making totally non-serious arguments against fiscal expansion. You’ve got John Taylor arguing for permanent tax cuts as a response to temporary shocks, apparently oblivious to the logical problems. You’ve got John Cochrane going all Andrew-Mellon-liquidationist on us. You’ve got Eugene Fama reinventing the long-discredited Treasury View. You’ve got Gary Becker apparently unaware that monetary policy has hit the zero lower bound. And you’ve got Greg Mankiw — well, I don’t know what Greg actually believes, he just seems to be approvingly linking to anyone opposed to stimulus, regardless of the quality of their argument.

Needless to say, everyone I’ve mentioned is politically conservative. That’s their right: economists are citizens too. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that all of them have decided on political grounds that they don’t want a spending-based fiscal stimulus — and that these political considerations have led them to drop their usual quality-control standards when it comes to economic analysis.

Has there been any comparable outbreak of mass bad economics from good liberal economists? I can’t think of one, although maybe that’s my own politics showing. In any case, what’s happening now is pretty disturbing.

Fiscal Stimulus, Fiscal Inflation, or Fiscal Fallacies?

By John H. Cochrane
Myron S. Scholes Professor of Finance
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
john.cochrane@chicagobooth.edu
“Fiscal stimulus” is the proposition that by borrowing money and spending it, the government can raise the overall state of the economy, raising output and lowering unemployment. Can it work? Do the arguments for it make any sense? If so, does the economy suffer from the ailments that fiscal stimulus can cure?

One form of “fiscal stimulus” clearly can increase aggregate demand. If the government prints up money and drops it from helicopters, this action counts as fiscal stimulus, since the money counts as a transfer payment. In practice, our Treasury would borrow the money, and use it for tax rebates, subsidies, bailouts, or any of the many ways that our government sends people checks. Then the Federal Reserve would buy up the debt with newly created money. The result is the same: A trillion dollars more money in private hands, just as if it had been printed and dropped by helicopters. People naturally don’t want to sit on a trillion dollars of extra cash. They spend it, first creating demand for goods and services, and ultimately inflation.

This is perhaps the only prediction that it utterly uncontroversial among economists. It is a standard last-resort economic prescription to avoid a deflation.

Conventional monetary policy just exchanges treasury debt for money, without increasing the overall supply of money and debt. Whatever arguments there are that this action might affect overall demand for goods and services vanish when interest rates are near zero as they are now. Now, Treasury debt and money are nearly perfect substitutes. To inflate, the government needs to increase the overall quantity of government debt, not alter its composition.

To inflate, the government also has to make it clear that it will not pay back new debt. If we expect that debt or money will be retired with future taxes, then there is no great incentive to go out and spend to get rid of either. Only if it’s clear the debt or money will soon be inflated away does it make sense for people to try to get rid of money or debt now, and go out and buy.

Is that the “fiscal stimulus” that the Obama economic team is arguing for? It’s quite possible. The Obama economic team has not announced a clear schedule of future spending controls or tax increases that can pay off the new debt, and the Federal Reserve has already more than doubled the money supply and is widely announcing its intention to do much more. (We don’t need to see higher tax rates, we need to see higher revenues or lower spending. A plan for higher rates can choke off growth implying lower revenues.) On the other hand, they have not announced the opposite, a determined intention to inflate rather than pay off the debt, which would give the maximum inflationary demand punch.

In any case, let us hope this is not the plan. Just because a little demand goose followed by inflation is possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The inflation that will result from a trillion dollars of money permanently dropped on the economy, and the real economic dislocation of such a major inflation, is frightful to contemplate.

So let’s ask the harder question. Let’s think of a “fiscal stimulus” in which the government borrows money and spends it, but with the clear plan that the debt will eventually be repaid with future taxes, not just by printing money. Can this kind of stimulus work, and if so how?

Three fallacies

Most fiscal stimulus arguments suffer from three basic fallacies.

First, if money is not going to be printed, it has to come from somewhere. If the government borrows a dollar from you, that is a dollar that you do not spend, or that you do not lend to a company to spend on new investment. Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both1 . This is just accounting, and does not need a complex argument about “crowding out.”

Second, investment is “spending” every bit as much as consumption. Fiscal stimulus advocates want money spent on consumption, not saved. They evaluate past stimulus programs by whether people who got stimulus money spent it on consumption goods rather save it. But the economy overall does not care if you buy a car, or if you lend money to a company that buys a forklift.

Third, people must ignore the fact that the government will raise future taxes to pay back the debt. If you know your taxes will go up in the future, the right thing to do with a stimulus check is to buy government bonds so you can pay those higher taxes. Now the net effect of fiscal stimulus is exactly zero, except to raise future tax distortions. The classic arguments for fiscal stimulus presume that the government can systematically fool people.

The central question is whether fiscal stimulus can do anything to raise the level of output. The question is not whether the “multiplier” exceeds one – whether deficit spending raises output by more than the value of that spending. The baseline question is whether the multiplier exceeds zero.2

A cure should have something to do with the diagnosis. The classic argument for fiscal stimulus presumes that the central cause of our current economic problems is this: We, the people and our government, are not doing nearly enough borrowing and spending on consumer goods. The government must step in force us all to borrow and spend more. This diagnosis is tragically comic once said aloud.

Credit markets

A much more plausible diagnosis of our current troubles is staring us in the face: credit markets. The institutions that channel your and my savings into consumer and business borrowing are not working. Banks are in trouble, and more importantly the much larger markets for securitized debt seem really broken. New issues of securitized debt have dropped to next to nothing, unless they are guaranteed by the Federal Government. Savings is going to low-interest Treasuries and guaranteed agency debt, yet consumers and businesses who need credit face a small supply at very high prices.3

Imagine by analogy that several major refineries had blown up. There would be tankers full of oil sitting in the harbor, and oil prices would be low, yet there little gasoline would be available and high gas prices would be high. Stimulating people to drive around would not revive gas sales. Borrowing gasoline and using it on infrastructure projects would be worse. The right policy action would obviously be to run whatever government or military refineries could be cobbled together on short notice at full speed, and focus on rebuilding the private ones.

The former step is exactly what the Federal Reserve’s many charmingly acronymed facilities are doing, to the tune of over a trillion and a half dollars. Together, the Treasury and Fed issuing huge amounts of Government debt, and they are turning around and lending the proceeds to consumers and businesses. This basic idea makes sense, though there is plenty to worry about in the details.

An unconventional potential defense of fiscal stimulus lurks in this story. If the Treasury borrows and the Government uses the proceeds for investment, then the government is in some sense acting as the missing intermediary. The focus on investment spending in the Obama plan reflects some of this thinking, though investment is an anathema to the traditional Keynesian insistence that stimulus be channeled to consumption spending. However, this is a poor argument, since stimulus “investment” spending is on much different projects than the private sector would have funded. Fiscal stimulus investments make fuel oil, not gasoline. Moreover, the extra issues of Treasury debt will largely come from the few dollars that are flowing from savings to private investment, just what the “credit crunch” does not need. To “intermediate,” additional government borrowing would have to come out of consumption. People would have to be attracted to postponing a trillion dollars of consumption by slightly higher treasury yields.

A monetary argument for fiscal stimulus, logically consistent but unpersuasive

My first fallacy was “where does the money come from?” Well, suppose the Government could borrow money from people or banks who are pathologically sitting on cash, but are willing to take Treasury debt instead. Suppose the government could direct that money to people who are willing to keep spending it on consumption or lend it to companies who will spend it on investment goods. Then overall demand for goods and services could increase, as overall demand for money decreases. This is the argument for fiscal stimulus because “the banks are sitting on reserves and won’t lend them out” or “liquidity trap.”

In this analysis, fiscal stimulus a roundabout way of avoiding monetary policy. If money demand increases dramatically but money supply does not, we get a recession and deflation. If we want to hold two months of purchases as money rather than one months’s worth, and if the government does not increase the money supply, then the price of goods and services must fall until the money we do have covers two months of expenditure. People try to get more money by spending less on goods and services, so until prices fall, we get a recession. This is a common and sensible analysis of the early stages of the great depression. Demand for money skyrocketed, but the Fed was unwilling or, under the Gold standard, unable, to increase supply.

This is not a convincing analysis of the present situation however. We may have the high money demand, but we do not face any constraints on supply. Yes, money holdings have jumped spectacularly. Bank excess reserves in particular (essentially checking accounts that banks hold at the Federal Reserve) have increased from $2 billion in August to $847 billion in January. However, our Federal Reserve can create as much more money as anyone might desire and more. There is about $10 Trillion of Treasury debt still outstanding. The Fed can buy it. There are trillions more of high quality agency, private debt, and foreign debt outstanding. The Fed can buy that too. We do not need to send a blank check to, say, Illinois’ beloved Governor Blagojevich to spend on “shovel-ready” projects, in an attempt to reduce overall money demand. If money demand-induced deflation is the problem, money supply is the answer.

Some people say “you can’t run monetary policy with interest rates near zero.” This is false. The fact of low interest rates does not stop the Fed from simply buying trillions of debt and thereby introducing trillions of cash dollars into the economy. Our Federal Reserve understands this fact with crystal clarity. It calls this step “quantitative easing.” If Fed ignorance of this possibility was the problem in 1932, that problem does not face us now.

A demand for all Treasury debt—a convincing diagnosis, but is fiscal stimulus the answer?

This monetary story also does not ring true. Yes, banks are racking up huge reserves. But do they really care at all whether they hold reserves, which now earn interest, or whether they hold short-term and highly liquid treasury bills, earning almost exactly the same interest rate? More deeply, is the central source of our current economic slump that we – people, banks, etc.—want to hold a lot more money and a lot less Treasury debt, that we are unhappy with the split in our holdings of government securities between short-term Treasury debt and money?

No. People and institutions clearly want to hold lots more US government debt overall, and money and treasury bills are nearly perfect substitutes at near-zero interest rates. People are trying to shift their portfolios out of stocks and especially out of anything with a whiff of credit risk, and into cash or Treasuries. We see this desire in the dramatically high interest rates, and correspondingly low prices, for any debt – jumbo mortgages, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, securitized debt -- that has even a small chance of default and no government guarantee, and the low interest rates and very high prices for government bonds and government-guaranteed debt. People are also trying (finally) to save more, but they want to do so in the form of safe, government debt or government guaranteed debt.

To an economist, it seems that the private sector has become much more averse to holding risks. When risk aversion rises there is a “flight to quality” in portfolios and an “increase in precautionary savings” in spending decisions. A good part of this increased risk aversion is simply in the way people feel – after large losses, people naturally retrench. Part of this change also comes from the failures of many of the institutions that help the economy to spread risk optimally, the “broken refinery” in the credit markets I alluded to earlier. People might be willing psychologically to hold more risks, but you can’t ask them to suddenly hold directly rather complex securities that they are used to holding through intermediaries, so those securities will languish just as if people were simply risk averse.4

If you read carefully, this is the consensus diagnosis of the second main cause of the current recession. Keynesians say that “consumption demand” has fallen, and “investment demand” has fallen, therefore “aggregate demand” has fallen and must be made up by “government demand.” Superficially, this analysis sounds incoherent, because you can’t demand less consumption unless you demand more investment, and vice versa – you have to spend income on something. The statement seems to violate arithmetic (a “budget constraint” to economists). But in fact you can, with given income, consume less and invest less, if you hold more government debt including money. “Aggregate demand” is nothing more than the flip side of “demand for government debt and money.” And while a “decline in consumption or investment demand” seems to come out of the blue as “animal spirits,” I think we can sense a good reason why we are all trying to hold more government debt and money.

This second ingredient is important to understanding our recession. If we just had a credit crunch, we would expect to see stagflation – lower quantities sold, but upward pressure on prices. A credit crunch, like a broken refinery is a “supply shock.” Since we are seeing lower quantities sold and easing inflation, we must also be seeing a “demand shock,” and we need to understand its source.

The bottom line, then, is that people want to hold more of both money and government debt – and don’t particularly care which. Trying to get it, we are trying to buy less of both consumption and investment goods. Again, this is a deflationary pressure. If the government does nothing, deflationary pressure will remain until goods are so cheap that we have the desired real value of nominal government debt. Until deflation happens, output falls.

What do to? In this analysis, monetary policy is impotent, but not for the usual reason that interest rates are nearly zero. The Fed can arbitrarily exchange Treasury debt for money, and increase the money supply as much as we like. But nobody cares if it does so, since the “flight to liquidity” is equally towards all forms of Government debt. If we want more fruit and less cheese, putting more apples and less oranges in the fruit basket won’t help.

Looking at it this way gives us a logical reason that fiscal stimulus might work. It leaves the private sector with a trillion more dollars of government debt in their pockets. But the Fed’s many facilities also issue government debt and money, which helps to satisfy the demand for government debt. Which is the better path?

The end game

It matters tremendously which path we choose. At some point the crisis will pass, and demand for Treasury debt and money will revert to normal levels. Sooner or later, investors and banks will decide they’re sick of holding $850 billion of reserves and 2% Treasuries when high-rated corporate bonds are going for 9% and tax-free municipal debt is going for 6%. Sooner or later banks will figure out that borrowing deposits at 4% and holding reserves that pay 0.75% is not a good long-term business model. If the resources are not there to unwind our current operations, to quickly retire at least two trillion dollars of newly created debt, a large inflation will result as people dump government debt. If history is any guide, this outcome will unleash economic dislocations on a scale to make our current troubles look like a pleasant memory.

I would be happiest if the Fed and Treasury5 satisfied the large demand for government debt and money by transparently buying or lending against high quality corporate and securitized debt, at market prices. I am happiest of all when they buy newly-issued commercial paper and securitized debt, acting as the missing intermediaries to help address the “credit crunch,” as well as supplying government debt. These actions are easiest to unwind. When investors get sick of holding so much money or government debt, the Government can, in effect, take back in government debt in exchange for this private debt, and probably make a good profit.

Alas, the Fed and Treasury’s current actions are not so clear. The Fed and Treasury are essentially running the world’s largest hedge fund: short treasuries and long a lot of obscure6 credit risk, in Wall Street parlance. Many of the Fed’s assets are inherited from various bailouts. When it’s time to unwind, will these assets be worth anything? It will be worse if the Government overpays. I still hear troublesome talk from the Fed of buying “troubled” assets. Buying $700 billion or so of worthless mortgage securities at inflated prices will not stir a magic liquidity pot to make $10 trillion of them more valuable, but will leave a several-hundred-billion dollar hole in the accounts. “Troubled asset” purchases from banks at above-market values can make those banks look better, but these are simple subsidies to banks shareholders and debt holders at the expense of future taxpayers or inflation. The government is also guaranteeing trillions of dollars of lot of credit. This is no different than writing the “credit default swaps” which made some hedge funds and AIG look good for a while and ultimately collapse. If the government has to make good on any of these guarantees, there will be even less available to unwind all our new credit.

Another potential defense of fiscal stimulus lies in this analysis. If, rather than send out checks, the government invests the money in truly valuable infrastructure, if that infrastructure truly does expand output, and if that expanded output generates additional tax revenues for the government, then Investors will be happy to hold a larger quantity of government debt permanently, because that debt is a claim to a worthwhile stream of future taxes. There is a lot of “if” here.

In sum, the US needs to keep its fiscal powder dry. The Government’s borrowing and taxing ability is limited. When the crisis fades, we will need fiscal resources to unwind a massive increase in government debt. If the debt corresponds to good quality assets, that’s easy. If the debt corresponds to government investments yielding a stream of tax revenue, that’s ok. If the new debt was spent or given away, we’re in more trouble. If the debt will be paid off by higher future tax rates, the economy can be set up for a decade or more of high-tax and low-growth stagnation. If the Fed’s kitty and the Treasury’s taxing power or spending-reduction ability are gone, then we are set up for inflation; essentially a default on the debt. Needless to say, no amount of monetary or interest rate policy – fooling with the split of government debt between money and treasury bills – would stop that inflation. Trading money for debt will do no good when people want to dump both equally.

Some say, “we’re in a crisis, we can’t worry about the long run or inflation.” However, the inflation can happen much sooner than you might expect, and it can happen long before the economy recovers. We are in a credit crisis as well as a fall in aggregate demand. Even with perfectly managed aggregate demand, output will be lower while we rebuild credit markets, and there will be unemployment as people move from building houses to other jobs. We can easily have stagflation of monstrous performance, and it can happen very soon after stimulus spending gets going.

A bit more carefully, the liquidity demand for government debt

Since I’m writing about “fallacies,” I need to spell out this argument more carefully, especially to my fellow economists and “fiscal theorists” in particular.

We seem to see declining “aggregate demand,” meaning that demand for and value of government debt are rising. Why? The value of government debt, including money, is equal to the present value of the primary7 surpluses that the government will run in order to pay off the debt. Nominal debt is stock in the government, a claim to its taxing power. Now, investors have surely not just decided that the US government is going to run huge surpluses any time soon – that the “earnings” of this “stock” are more valuable. Rather, the “flight to quality” surely means that investors are happy with much lower returns, that a “liquidity premium” has lowered the discount rate applied to government debt, and made the same hoped-for surpluses more valuable in current terms.

This refinement is important for my analysis of the Fed and Treasury’s operations. In normal times, if the Government buys a private bond for $100 and issues a Treasury bond worth $100, we should expect no effect on total demand. There is one more treasury bond, but the government has exactly the resources to redeem it with no claim on future taxes. Government debt is no more nor less attractive, so there is no change in “aggregate demand” as people try to hold more or less of it. The same holds for my slight defense of fiscal stimulus: In normal times, borrowing money to invest in a project which will just pay for itself in future tax revenues has no aggregate demand effect since the revenues just pay off the bonds. In normal times, the only way to increase aggregate demand really is to print debt or money the government really does not intend to pay back. For debt purchases to have some effect on aggregate demand, Treasury debt must be in some sense artificially scarce. It must satisfy a need that the corporate bond does not satisfy. I think we’re in that situation: the Government has a unique ability to avoid explicit default, and investors especially value debt with this unique feature. This means that a swap of government for private debt will help to alleviate the decline in “aggregate demand,” even though people understand the debt will not be inflated away.

Taxes, tax rates, and incentives

How can one logically oppose stimulus spending and support stimulus tax breaks? If borrowing and spending doesn’t work, borrowing and lowering taxes shouldn’t work either.

There is one argument for tax reduction. Good economists distinguish taxes from tax rates. Borrowing to “put money in people’s pockets,” say by tax rebates, is exactly as pointless (or inflationary) as borrowing and spending. But lowering the distortions caused by high tax rates can do a lot of good. However, to really do any good, tax rates have to be low and predictable for a long time. Little short term special deals don’t do any good in encouraging people to work, save, and invest. Alas, many of the Republican-inspired tax reductions in the Obama plan are rebates for past activities, which give cash with no change in incentives. Others are means-tested and phase out with higher incomes. From a macroeconomic perspective, these manage the worst of both worlds: They raise the marginal rates that lower incentives to work, save and invest while lowering tax revenues.

Even if we borrow to lower tax rates, we have to raise tax rates in the future to pay back the debt, so any borrowing-financed tax reduction can’t be permanent and thus can’t really have the desired incentive effects. The only real fiscal “stimulus” is to lower tax rates, broadening the base, while at the same time attacking the structural deficits that everyone knows otherwise mean higher tax rates in the future.

The economic “consensus”

This is not fancy economics. Most of my arguments come from simply asking where the money is going to come from, simple arithmetic. Why are so many economists said to support fiscal stimulus? Am I some sort of radical? No, in fact economics, as written in professional journals, taught to graduate students and summarized in their textbooks, abandoned fiscal stimulus long ago.

Keynesians gave up by the 1970s. They saw that fiscal programs took too long to implement. They especially disparaged temporary measures, which would not stimulate the consumption that classic Keynesians thought was important to stimulus. Every undergraduate text has repeated these conclusions for at least 40 years. I learned this view from Dornbusch and Fisher’s undergraduate text, taught by Bob Solow, in the 1970s. Even the optimistic projections by the Obama economic team say that fiscal stimulus will not really kick in for two years, validating the durability of this view.

The equilibrium tradition which took over professional academic economics in the mid-1970s has even less room for fiscal stimulus. Some “equilibrium” analyses do say fiscal stimulus can increase output – but by making us feel poorer, work harder at lower wages, and consume less.8 That’s not what advocates have in mind! A large fiscal program can affect prices, wages, and interest rates with all sorts of interesting general-equilibrium implications, but these analyses haven’t really converged on anything solid, much less the large “multipliers” necessary to make traditional fiscal stimulus attractive.

More deeply, macroeconomics was revolutionized starting in the 1950s, by the realization that what people think about the future is crucial to understanding how policies work today. Milton Friedman started this, pointing out that consumption does not depend statically on today’s income, but on what people expect of the future. People who learn that their jobs are on the line will consume less and save more, even though today’s income may still be good. As I have emphasized, the effects fiscal stimulus will have now depends crucially on whether people expect the new spending to be paid back by future taxes or whether they expect it to be quickly monetized. Classic Keynesian analysis analyzed policies and each time point in isolation. We do not have to agree if expectations are formed “rationally,” all we have to agree is that expectations of the future matter crucially for how people behave today, and the classic Keynesian analysis of fiscal stimulus falls apart.

In textbooks and graduate curriculums across the country, stimulus is presented at best as quaint “history of thought” with no coherent defense that one should believe it in the context of modern economics. (For example, David Romer’s classic graduate text Advanced Macroeconomics) At worst, it is presented as a classic fallacy. (My view of the treatment in Tom Sargent’s,Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory and Sargent and Ljungqvist’s Recursive Macroeconomic Theory).

“New-Keynesian” thought is devoted to defending the importance of monetary policy, and incorporating specific frictions in the equilibrium tradition, not to rescuing the ancient view that fiscal stimulus is important and abandoning that tradition. Mike Woodford’s Magisterial New-Keynesian Opus Interest and Prices has no mention at all of fiscal stimulus. More deeply, new-Keynesian economics is completely devoted to the proposition that expectations of the future matter centrally for how the economy behaves today. Its central thesis is that central bankers must manage expectations, not manage “demand.” It has no room at all for the sort of analysis in which one adds up “consumption” “investment” and “government” demands, without considering alternatives for those demands or expectations of the future, to determine output.

There has been no grand empirical reevaluation either. Empirical work is hard, since governments try fiscal stimulus in bad times. If you bleed to rebalance the humors when you have a cold, empirical work might say that those cured you. Empirical work has to find fiscal stimulus events that were applied randomly, without regard to the state of the economy. Harder still, it has to find stimulus spending that people expected to be paid off rather than inflated away. Most current empirical work does not make this distinction, and therefore is in danger of measuring the slope of the Phillips curve rather than the fiscal multiplier . Finally, empirical work without a plausible mechanism is hard to believe. Even so, doing the best to surmount these problems, nothing in recent empirical work has revised a gloomy opinion of fiscal stimulus.9

Some economists tell me, “Yes, all our models, data, and analysis for the last 40 years say fiscal stimulus doesn’t work, but don’t you really believe it anyway?” This is an astonishing attitude. How can a scientist “believe” something different than what he or she spends a career writing and teaching? At a minimum policy-makers shouldn’t put much weight on such “beliefs,” since they explicitly don’t represent expert scientific inquiry.

Others say that we should have a fiscal stimulus to “give people confidence,” even if we have neither theory nor evidence that it will work. This astonishingly paternalistic argument was tried once with the TARP. Nobody could say how it would work in any way that made sense, but it was supposed to be important do to something grand to give people “confidence.” You see how that worked out. Public prayer would work better and cost a lot less. Seriously, as social scientists, economists don’t have any special expertise to prescribe what intrinsically meaningless gestures will and will not give “confidence,” so there is no reason for anyone to listen to our opinions on that score.

One of the most important things that scholars can do is to explain ignorance. I often say “I don’t know, but I do know with great precision why nobody else knows either.” Medical analogies are all the rage. “The patient is desperately sick, we must do something.” Well, 21st century economics is in many ways still like 18th century medicine. If all the “experts” want to bleed the patient to stimulate the balance of humours, it is valuable to say “that won’t work,” even if you don’t have an instant cure at hand. 90% of good economic policy is, “first, do no harm.”

The bottom line

In sum, there is a plausible diagnosis and a logically consistent argument under which fiscal stimulus could help: We are experiencing a strong portfolio and precautionary demand for government debt, along with a credit crunch. People want to hold less private debt and they want to save, and they want to hold Treasuries, money, or government-guaranteed debt. However, this demand can be satisfied in far greater quantity, much more quickly, much more reversibly, and without the danger of a fiscal collapse and inflation down the road, if the Fed and Treasury were simply to expand their operations of issuing treasury debt and money in exchange for high-quality private debt and especially new securitized debt.

Even this policy is not easy. We do not want the Federal Government to run credit markets forever. The main focus for policy must be on rebuilding the private credit markets. How? The first step is to stop chaotic interventions. Who would buy bank stock, lend long-term, or buy securitized debt, knowing that the government might rewrite the rules at any point? Second, the government must focus on the policy issue, which is making sure new savings can flow to new borrowing, not who takes the hit for old bad loans. Alas, many of our chaotic bailout proposals break both rules. Needless to say, the phones are ringing off the hook in Washington from people who don’t want to take a bath on poor past investments.

Then we can get to the hard work of building a much more transparent, simple and trustworthy credit system. This too is not a simple task, but one that takes a separate analysis.

Fiscal stimulus can be great politics, at least in the short run. The beneficiaries of government largesse know who wrote them a check. The businesses and consumers who end up getting less credit, and the businesses that can’t sell them products, can only blame “the crisis,” and call up their congressmen to get their own stimulus. Roosevelt understood this, and his biggest stimulus came as political support was flagging.10 But President Obama has such widespread support, he doesn’t have to buy votes any time soon.

My analysis is macroeconomic, and does not imply anything about the specific virtues or faults of the Obama team’s spending programs. If it’s a good idea to build roads, build roads. (Keep in mind the many roads to nowhere.) If it’s a good idea for the government to subsidize green technology investment, do it. (Keep in mind that the internet did not spring from industrial policy to improve the Post Office, the word processor did not come from a public-private consortium to rescue the typewriter industry, and that a huge carbon tax is much more likely to spur useful green ideas, and the only way to spur conservation.) The government should borrow to finance worthy projects, whose rate of return is greater than projects the private sector would undertake with the same money, spreading the taxes that pay for them over many years, after making sure its existing spending meets the same cost-benefit tradeoff. Just don’t call it “stimulus,” don’t claim it will solve our current credit problems, “create jobs” on net, or do anything to help the economy in the short run.


Footnotes

1. Gene Fama’s analysis of fiscal stimulus focuses on this point. http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/01/bailouts-and-stimulus-plans.html
2. Robert Barro also thinks zero is the right baseline: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123258618204604599.html.
3. The difference between true and intermediary-induced risk aversion is most important to pure free-marketers. If people are just more risk averse, it’s hard to argue that the government should force them to take risks through their taxes that they are not willing to take directly. If something’s broken, it’s easier to argue for policy response. Most economists however are willing to be paternalistic about high risk aversion and call it a “problem” needing government response.

4. Even this much is not completely obvious; Bank lending has not in fact declined – anecdotes do not add up to data, as Chari et al (2008) point out, and the declining supply and increase in interest rates for risky debt may simply reflect greater risk aversion of investors, discussed below, (a leftward shift in supply), rather than dysfunction in the intermediary markets (a wedge between supply and demand). For example, Wirtz (2009) doesn’t find as much “credit rationing” as you might expect. But this diagnosis is at least a bit more worth pursuing than the last one, and most people buy it, so it’s worth tracing through “what should policy do if there is a credit crunch,” meaning a wedge between supply and demand of risky debt.
Chari, V.V., Lawrence J. Christiano, and Patrick Kehoe, 2008, “Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis working paper 666
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp666.pdf. (Did you guys pay someone for that number?)
Wirtz, Roland A., “Raising the Credit Bar or Getting Clubbed by it?” Fedgazette Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, January 2009 21 (10) 1-7,
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/fedgaz/09-01/cover.pdf
5. Federal Reserve H3 report, January 15 2009, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/Current/
6. This analysis is explained in greater depth in the “fiscal theory of the price level,” see for example the articles in http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/#Fiscal.

I say “Fed and Treasury” because they’re in this together. The current facilities are structured as special-purpose-vehicles. The Treasury owns the equity tranche, using TARP money (the one good use of TARP money I can think of), and the Fed “lends” to the special purpose vehicle, consistent with its legal authority to lend rather than buy securities. While the Fed is proud that this limits its credit risk, from the point of view of policy and taxpayers, the Fed and Treasury together have simply bought securities by issuing Government debt. Other facilities consist of Fed lending money long term, using private debt as collateral. Some of this lending is done as “repurchase agreement” in which the Fed literally does buy the private debt, but the borrower agrees to buy it back. Functionally, these are all very closely related: the private sector gets more Treasury debt and money, the Government gets more private debt and credit risk. And you thought structured finance was dead.

7. Primary surpluses exclude debt payments. Governments dig out of a hole just like we do if and only if they are making payments that exceed the interest charges.

8. No, I’m not making this up. Two examples:
Baxter, Marianne and Robert G. King, 1993, “Fiscal Policy in General Equilibrium,” American Economic Review 83, 315-34;
Edelberg, Wendy, Martin Eichenbaum, and Jonas D. Fischer, “Understanding the Effects of a Shock to Government Purchases,” Review of Economic Dynamics, 2 166-206.
9. A good survey, from Greg Mankiw, who advocates Keynesian thinking as a good rough guide to how “real” models work, but is nonetheless unimpressed: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/12/spending-and-tax-multipliers.html See also Barro’s WSJ oped cited above.
10. See Amity Shlaes’ wonderful The Forgotten Man: A new History of the Great Depression

Animal Spirits Depend on Trust - Robert J. Shiller

The proposed stimulus isn't big enough to restore confidence.
President Obama is urging Congress to pass an $825 billion stimulus package as soon as possible. But even that may not be enough to stabilize the economy, since it fails to take into account the downward spiral of animal spirits that is underway and may continue to worsen.

The term "animal spirits," popularized by John Maynard Keynes in his 1936 book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," is related to consumer or business confidence, but it means more than that. It refers also to the sense of trust we have in each other, our sense of fairness in economic dealings, and our sense of the extent of corruption and bad faith. When animal spirits are on ebb, consumers do not want to spend and businesses do not want to make capital expenditures or hire people.

Fiscal policy adjustments are what almost all the pundits and the economic policy advisers have in mind when they say now is the time to pursue Keynesian policies. Especially now, when conventional monetary policy is ineffective, since short-term interest rates on safe assets are close to zero, Keynesian theory would argue that the government should have a fiscal target. If spending would otherwise be less than full employment GDP, the government should put more money into people's pockets.

But lost in the economics textbooks, and all but lost in the thousands of pages of the technical economics literature, is this other message of Keynes regarding why the economy fluctuates as much as it does. Animal spirits offer an explanation for why we get into recessions in the first place -- for why the economy fluctuates as it does. It also gives some hints regarding what we need to do now to get out of the current crisis.

A critical aspect of animal spirits is trust, an emotional state that dismisses doubts about others. In talking about animal spirits, Keynes sought to convey the message that swings in confidence are not always logical. The business cycle is in good part driven by animal spirits. There are good times when people have substantial trust and associated feelings that contribute to an environment of confidence. They make decisions spontaneously. They believe instinctively that they will be successful, and they suspend their suspicions. As long as large groups of people remain trusting, people's somewhat rash, impulsive decision-making is not discovered.

Unfortunately, we have just passed through a period in which confidence was blind. It was not based on rational evidence. The trust in our mortgage and housing markets that drove real-estate prices to unsustainable heights is one of the most dramatic examples of unbridled animal spirits we have ever seen.

Furthermore, while animal spirits have been high over a very long period of time, a whole new system for the granting of credit had been generated. Some 30 or 40 years ago there was much less intermediation in financial markets. But then along came financial innovation and a new financial system, not just in mortgages and housing but throughout the credit system, with complicated strategies of securitization and use of derivatives. The more complex the transaction the more trust is needed to sustain the transaction.

Then too, over the past several decades a vast "shadow" banking sector developed that engaged in the purchase and sale of such securities. To a great extent these traders borrowed short term at low interest rates against collateral of asset-backed securities, of which residential mortgage-backed securities would be just one example. What enabled them to do that? It was the animal spirits. Those who loaned short to the shadow banking sector were confident. They thought they would be repaid. (They also thought they could insure against loss by the purchase of derivatives). They were trusting. But as soon as these lenders lost their confidence they were no longer trusting. It was like a classic bank run, but this time not on the formal banking sector but on those who borrowed short, and loaned long -- on the shadow banking sector. Lenders to the shadow banking sector wanted to be the first not to renew their loans.

The trust in the innovative lending practices was excessive; now that trust is replaced by deep mistrust. The wreckage of formerly towering financial institutions is all around us. Evidence of our overconfidence repeatedly appears in media stories, and thus we are constantly reminded that we were foolish to have been so trusting.

The danger at this point is that if the actions we take are not aggressive enough to have a substantial, visible impact on the economy, then confidence will continue to plummet. The Obama administration estimated its initial $775 billion stimulus package would shave about 1.8% off the unemployment rate from what it would otherwise be. Even so, by the time any package takes full effect the unemployment rate may be substantially higher than it is today.

So what must we do to revive our animal spirits and economic growth? We must be certain that programs to solve the current financial and economic crisis are large enough, and targeted broadly enough, to impact public confidence. Not only do we need a fiscal stimulus significantly greater than the proposal that is currently on the table, government action is also needed to take the place of the credit markets that seemingly worked so well when animal spirits were high. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve not only need a fiscal target, they also need a credit target. This should not be a dollar number, but rather a target for how the credit markets should behave. The goal should be that those who would normally receive credit in times of full employment can once again find it easy to do so, at rates with realistic risk premiums.

There are three ways to restore these credit markets. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been inventive in applying all three methods. The first is the extension of rediscounting. The Fed has invented many different special loan facilities. They have even invented ingenious ways to combine Treasury money to make very large-scale loans while still within the legal requirement that the Fed can only lend against safe collateral when using TARP funds for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which will support consumer, student and small-business loans. But so far the total amount of such rediscounting has been small relative to the size of the credit markets. They need to be much larger.

Second, so far more than $250 billion of government money has been used to recapitalize banks. But just making the banks solvent is not enough. The banks, whose managers are suffering from the same flagging animal spirits as the rest of the economy, will not expand their credit much just because they are more solvent. The banks will only expand if they see profitable opportunities to grant loans and if their fear of failure is diminished. It will take much more than keeping the banks solvent to make them take on the disappeared credit flows.

And, finally, especially in considerably expanding the powers to support the lending of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises have replaced a significant portion of the mortgage markets. But the government should do much more here as well. For example, failed banks might be kept alive longer as bridge banks under government supervision with the purpose of making credit freely available.

The interventions so far have been in the right direction. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been especially inventive and aggressive. But the theory of animal spirits and the loss of confidence tell us that a great deal more still needs to be done. Now is not a time for the timid. To meet our needed fiscal-policy target, the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus should be much greater. And to meet our credit target, the expansion of special loan facilities, recapitalization of banks, and use of government institutions to grant credit where it has dried up must be on a scale great enough to overwhelm further doubts about the economy.

In due course our animal spirits will once again turn positive, but we would rather that happen this year or the next rather than five or 10 years from now. There is only one way to speed this process: greatly expand governmental support of credit markets and pass a much larger fiscal stimulus plan than is now proposed.

Mr. Shiller is professor of economics at Yale University and chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC. His new book, with George Akerlof, "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism," will be published by Princeton next month.

Let the people, not the government, do the spending

By Hafiz Noor Shams
JAN 28 – While the economic outlook around the world gets gloomier by the day, the second fiscal stimulus package seems imminent even as the federal government struggles to spend RM7 billion allocated under the first package.

Even though there is widespread belief that the extra adrenalin jab is urgently needed, reports suggest that the outline of the second stimulus has not yet been written. The evidence? The Finance Minister is asking the public for ideas on how to spend lots of money. If that is so, then this is an opportune time to argue why, for Stimulus Version 2.0, a regime of tax cuts is a better solution than government spending. If the purpose of an economic stimulus is to reduce the impact of an economic downturn, then the package has to satisfy at least two criteria.

First, the lag between the administration, the execution and the effect of the stimulus has to be short. This is to ensure that the stimulus comes at the times when it is most beneficial. That is when the economy is deep in crisis and not when it is already nearing reasonable levels of recovery. Any later, a stimulus will be useless.

Secondly, it has to be widely distributed to the participants of the local economy. An unevenly distributed stimulus will be meaningless in terms of alleviating the sufferings of individuals adversely affected by the downturn. While the economy could, theoretically, show signs of recovery even with an uneven stimulus, it may do little to improve key figures like, for instance, the unemployment rate.

The previous RM5 billion injection by the government into ValueCap – a fund management company active in the equity market – is a case in point where the stimulus is extraordinarily focused.
While the massive injection into ValueCap may save the fund managers, investors and shareholders, it does nothing for the real economy.

The very nature of government spending is such that it is unlikely to achieve both criteria at the same time simply because there is a trade-off between the two.

For a stimulus to act fast, it has to be simply administered on small items without complex distribution methods. Any effort to distribute the spending and, hence, the money, widely will necessarily bog down the execution of the stimulus. A distributed stimulus has to be planned for policymakers have to know where to spend. This information, unfortunately, does not come quickly. Any investigation requires time and an investigation of countrywide magnitude demands a reasonable amount of time for it to be completed.

It is possible that efforts by the Finance Minister to harness the wisdom of the masses is partly to cut short the process of information gathering.

Independent of the quality of information is the question of execution. A widely distributed stimulus, by definition, requires a considerable number of transactions at various levels in the government as well as the economy.

Each transaction itself takes time, especially so when transparent processes, which include open tenders, are applied.

While government spending suffers from the trade-off, tax cuts do not. Tax cuts can be done relatively quicker and are, by nature, more distributed than government spending.

Cuts, especially on transactional taxes on consumer goods like sales tax, can be administered quickly simply because the information required is not a massive as the data required for government spending.

The government could simply announce that sales tax has been reduced to a certain level in a matter of weeks, if not days.

Secondly, a tax cut, especially on sales tax, is more distributed in its effects than any practical government spending. Just imagine how many times a week do each of us make a transaction with sales tax appended to it? How many people do you know pay sales tax on goods and services they consume? Compare that to the number of people you know who may immediately benefit financially from government spending on, say, highways or schools?

The reduction or even total – albeit temporary – removal of sales tax could increase the quantity of goods bought and sold, simply because these become cheaper. There are other taxes that could be cut, like corporate and personal income taxes but these will not take effect as quickly as a sales tax cut. The fastest way to use such cuts is to implement a backdated cut and return the money paid as taxes in 2008 within the next several few weeks or months. This puts the money in the taxpayers’ pockets.

Announcing future cut on those taxes soon is likely to be a game of expectation management. Any reduction of non-transactional taxes on consumer goods must be directed at the lower and middle classes. It has been demonstrated time and again that these groups are the ones most likely to spend instead of save the extra cash they receive.

A large tax cut will, of course, hurt government revenue in times when revenue from petroleum and its by-products may fall short of projections made last year.

This will increase the fiscal deficit. Concerns about deficit, however, are immaterial if the alternative is greater government spending. Whether government revenue shrinks or its expenditure grows, the end result will likely be the same in direction if not in magnitude.

Besides, while RM7 billion pales in comparison with the size of the drop in Malaysian exports of late and is therefore unlikely to counter the full effect of weakened external demand, the path of government spending has been explored.

The first stimulus attacked the demand curve in its first wave. Perhaps it is wise to attack the supply side in its first wave now. Thus, when the first and the second stimuli are combined, a more holistic view is taken.

Finally, for Barisan Nasional, tax cuts would be better for public relations than government spending. The BN-led federal government has been accused of cronyism with government contracts circulating mostly among BN party members. Even in a system that favours the Malays, the general feeling is that only Umno members are benefiting from it while other Malays are left out.

Consider government spending as fiscal stimulus: with its requirement to be executed fast, large spending is likely to bypass many transparent processes, if there is any at all. With an already bad reputation for corruption and waste, the haste of commissioning various stimulus-conscious projects is likely to encourage the public and political rivals of BN to question the methods of awarding contracts and the beneficiaries.

With tax cuts, especially on sales tax on consumer goods, there is no basis for any accusation of cronyism or corruption since the action benefits all consumers.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

A Weightless Economy

A weightless economy
Danny T. Quah, London School of Economics
Source: http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_12/uk/dossier/txt11.htm
Information and communications technology is transforming the world and producing ‘knowledge products’ to which traditional economic principles do not apply
The importance of the weightless economy can be assessed at three levels. We can look at individuals, firms and entire economies.
First people. In 1997, three of the world’s twenty wealthiest individuals were Americans who made their money almost entirely from software. Their total wealth was almost ten times as much that of the three wealthiest Britons involved in more tangible production (real estate, steel, and food). In October 1998, the world’s wealthiest individual (in software) was more than twice as wealthy as the runner-up, who was not in software.
Next turn to firms. As the historical volatility of stock markets powerfully shows, gauging the economic success or failure of individual firms is difficult in general. However, averaging stock market performance over longer time periods and across individual firms in sectors of interest can give a more reliable picture. The five major information and communications technology (ICT) firms that an interested observer would be likely to name are Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Dell, and Cisco. Between them, these firms had market capitalization of $12 billion in 1987. By 1997, their combined capitalization amounted to $600 billion—a fifty-fold increase over less than ten years or annual growth of 45 per cent. Such rapid growth, sustained for such a long stretch of time, is remarkable by comparison with any other economic quantity.
Finally, consider countries. In the United States, the information technology (IT) share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has grown from 4.9 per cent in 1985 to 8.2 per cent in 1997. At the same time, IT prices have fallen dramatically: the real price of computing has, by some measures, been declining by 30 per cent a year for the last two decades. The real price of communications has, similarly, been decreasing at 8 per cent a year for the last seventy years, a halving every eight to nine years. And disk storage capacity has been increasing at 60 per cent a year since 1991, while its nominal price has fallen a hundred-fold. Thus, without even taking into account the potential spillover effects from its increasing the productivity of other industries, the IT sector’s direct contribution to real value produced has been substantial for the world’s leading economy.It may not be surprising that this is happening in the technologically advanced world. However, IT contributes greatly to growth in some of the world’s least developed economies as well. In India, per capita annual income in 1995 was $340: the majority of the population of 900 million lived on less than one dollar a day. At the same time, India hosts a major offshore software centre for the rest of the world. Software production in 1997 was a $2 billion industry, employing 260,000 people. The industry’s revenues have been growing by 50 per cent a year for the last five years, with over 60 per cent generated as export earnings.
The Internet is an important part of the weightless economy. Narrowly, it might be regarded as nothing more than one specific concrete manifestation of progress in information and communications technology. One might then simply say that it is the result of rapid and dramatic technical progress. But Internet technology could well have emerged without a specific application developed for it. Historical examples abound where one side of a market—supply—comes on strong while the other—demand—languishes, with the result that no ongoing development occurs. The fact that an Industrial Revolution did not occur in fourteenth-century China, despite its technological advances—superior to those in the West—attests tragically to that.
A dramatic reduction in transaction costs
But the Internet is not such an example. Radio, a relatively simple, undemanding technology, took forty years to achieve fifty million regular users. The Internet took four. This happened partly because the Internet makes it easier to deliver what participants in the economy have always needed: cheaper and easier exchange, faster dissemination of information, reduced inventories, greater outreach in both supply chain and distribution channels.
But perhaps more telling, this extraordinary growth arises from the fact that the Internet makes possible what previously was impossible. While tangible goods can be sold over the Internet, their actual delivery to the consumer will always be slow and will always eat up transportation costs. By contrast, the Internet can deliver directly weightless-economy goods and services. Health care counseling and education (two large expensive sectors in most advanced economies, where historically productivity growth has been famously low), news, software, music, advertising, video entertainment, securities, banking and other financial services, database access and consulting services can all be provided over the Internet—unlike haircuts and janitorial services. The result will be a dramatic reduction in transaction costs. Productivity will rise in precisely those areas that, traditionally, have seen poor productivity performance.
In the US, the fastest growth in jobs is found precisely in sectors associated with the weightless economy. From 1996 through 2006, the industry with top employment growth is projected to be computer and data-processing services, at 108 per cent. The next fastest-growing industry is expected to be health services, at 68 per cent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that the occupations with fastest employment growth will be database administration, computer services, and computer scientists (118 per cent); computer engineers (109 per cent); systems engineers (103 per cent); and then personal and home care aides (85 per cent). Wages earned in these industries and occupations are also high. In 1997, the average worker in the IT industry earned twice the national average across the private sector.
New rules and logic
All components of the weightless economy can be represented, without loss, as “bitstrings”—sequences of 1s and 0s. (This doesn’t mean they are digital in the sense used in relation to computers. An advertising image is a bitstring, but it is not insightfully viewed as part of computers and computer networks.) Since ideas and knowledge can also be represented in this manner, it is an easy step to identify them with the rest of the weightless economy. To minimize confusion I will call the bitstring pieces of the weightless economy knowledge-products. This emphasizes their symbolic similarity to knowledge but, at the same time, maintains their distinctness. There are three points to bear in mind. First, like knowledge, knowledge-products show infinite expansibility (a term due originally to Thomas Jefferson). They do not get used up, physically. The usefulness of computer software is not reduced the more users run it. Advertising imagery does not diminish in impact the more people view it; indeed, the opposite holds.The same terminology is apt for how a knowledge-product—unlike, say, a typical durable good—disrespects geographical distance. A knowledge-product behaves as if it expands to fill all available space. I can, in London, use a piece of software located on some satellite server encircling the earth while someone else in Stanford, California, does exactly the same, with the identical piece of software. This holds true for any intellectual property or libraries and databases. It does not apply for, say, a chocolate-chip cookie. When someone eats a cookie, it is no more.Second, like knowledge, knowledge-products show superstar dynamics. To understand this, consider first the wheel. Society does not reward reinvention of the wheel, but multiple implementations of (the idea of) a wheel do get properly compensated. However, those multiple instances are fashioned out of hard physical material which the buyer pays for.
Knowledge-products, by contrast, are the idea and implementation rolled in one—multiple implementations require no physical material. For example, the fastest way to appreciate an idea in computer software is to see that software running; the only way to value the contents of a computer database is to access the database itself; the only way to understand a gene sequence is to see it expressed in a lifeform. In short, we cannot distinguish between the product and the idea behind it.
In this context, reproductions of an original knowledge-product should fetch zero price in a well-functioning market. Superstar dynamics refers to this first-(or winner)-takes all characteristic shared by both knowledge and knowledge-products.However, this zero-price property does not say that knowledge-products are valueless: water is essential to human welfare, but its price in modern societies is, for all practical purposes, zero. Bundling water with something else—adding carbonation to water, extracting it from certain distinguished springs, associating it with a powerful advertising image—can, of course, be a rewarding enterprise. Businesses can and do add value, similarly to many knowledge-products in the weightless economy. For example, the value that the Nike shoe company generates is not the raw material in its shoes, but the culture associated with them. The value that the consultancy firm JP Morgan generates by giving away its raw data is not in the data itself but in the bundling of that information with a particular financial perspective—and who better to continue to develop that perspective than JP Morgan itself. For many software companies, rewards don’t lie in the software itself, but the services provided and the organizing of a community of users.
Labs for producing intellectual property
Third, like knowledge, knowledge-products have a chain of production that is irrecoverably intricate and uncertain. Applying more factor inputs in an effort to increase output can be self-defeating. Just as making nine men pregnant for a month fails to produce a new-born baby, throwing more programmers at a software project does not typically make a complete piece of software faster, better, or more reliable. Similarly, financial consulting, a musical composition, or devising the central image in an advertising campaign calls not for many hands, but few. The same dynamic applies with scientific discoveries; many researchers work on the same problem to reach the same discovery simultaneously. These three properties imply that the way businesses operate should change and that appropriate government policies will need to acknowledge those changes. As a first step, one might think of economies comprised entirely of knowledge-products—weightless economies—as being like large laboratories for producing intellectual property broadly defined. The problem is that the systems of intellectual property for organizing patents and copyrights are based on principles and conceptions which no longer apply in the weightless economy. The question is not whether a new set of market rules has emerged, but the ways in which people, governments and firms can respond to them.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Corrected Impact Factor

Measuring Your Worth (Academics Only)
Source: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/12/measuring-your-worth.html

Has Malaysia really eradicated poverty?

Has Malaysia really eradicated poverty?
Unrealistically low poverty line results in rosier statistics
by Jeyakumar Devaraj Aliran Monthly 2004:2
In its article titled “The Mahathir Mystique”, Newsweek, (23 November 2003) terms Malaysia as an Asian success story where “the percentage of Malaysian households that fall below the poverty line has plunged from nearly 50 per cent to an estimated 6 per cent in 2000.” The figures quoted by Newsweek are lifted from Mahathir’s 2004 budget speech in Parliament on 12 September 2003. From the horses’ mouth as they say — but unfortunately some horses have learnt to bluff! The poverty line Generally speaking, the poverty rate can be lowered by two methods. The first is by raising the income of the poorer families to above the poverty line. The second method, and undoubtedly the easier option, is to lower the poverty line itself!
Malaysian household income distribution as quoted in the Eighth Malaysia Plan is pictured in Table 1 — with 75 per cent of Malaysian households earning below RM3,000 per month and 25 per cent of households earning below RM1,000 monthly. The same document (8MP) also specifies the poverty line for Semenanjung Malaysia as RM540 per month for a family of five individuals. Is this a realistic figure? A living wage?
Table 1 - Household Income (RM/month)
More than RM5,000: 9.8%
RM4,001 - RM5,000: 5.5%
RM3,001 - RM4,000: 9.6%
RM2,001 - RM3,000: 17.4%
RM1,001 - RM2,000: 32.7%
RM501 - RM1,001: 20.0%
Less than RM500: 5.0%
Source: Eighth Malaysia Plan.
Can a family of five survive on an income of RM550 per month, given the cost of living in Malaysia today? Where would they live? And can their children go to school? Yet given the government’s definition, they would not be classified as being poor. At a meeting with 60 factory workers in Sg Siput recently, we asked them to suggest a reasonable household budget, and the outcome of that exercise is summarized in Table 2. The participants felt that the cost of buying a house and a small allocation for savings must be part of a balanced family budget. In their opinion, any family with a household budget of below RM1,750 would be facing economic hardship;
A realistic poverty line
Table 2 - Household Expenditure (per month)
House Loan : 400
Marketing: 300
Groceries: 300
School expenses: 200
Motorbike: 150
Medical/Clothes: 100
Festivals/Trips: 100
Light/Water/Phone: 100
Insurance/savings: 100
Total: RM1,750
In Britain and in several other countries in the European Union, the poverty line is defined as one half the average household income. In Malaysia, the average household income is RM3,200 per month. Half this figure would be RM1,600. In other words if we used the definition used in Britain, households earning less than RM1,600 per month would be considered as poor! If RM1,600 per month is taken as the realistic poverty line, then around 50 per cent of Malaysians are poor — see the Income Pyramid overleaf — and this is the level of poverty as quoted by Mahathir for 1970! No one is denying that there has been significant growth in the national economy. Per capita income (Per capita income = total income of the nation for that year divided by the population) has soared from RM1,132 in 1970 to RM13,683 presently! (Incidently, this would work out to an average household income of RM5,534 per month.) However as the income distribution pyramid depicts, the distribution of income in Malaysia is skewed towards the rich, and there is still significant poverty in Malaysia. Perhaps the most incredulous aspect of Malaysia’s poverty statistics is that it hasn’t been challenged by the mainstream media nor by the academicians. Big Brother’s doublespeak (term used by Orwell in his book 1984) apparently rules supreme in Malaysia today!

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Propaganda

Source: http://palestinian.ning.com/video/propaganda-promised-land

Gaza Seen From Paris - Three Simple Proposals

By JEAN BRICMONT and DIANA JOHNSTONE
January 8, 2009

There are surely millions of us, invisible to each other, enraged and powerless as we watch the massacre of Gaza and listen to our media describe it as a "retaliation against terrorism", "Israel’s right to defend itself". We have reached a point where answering the Zionist arguments is both useless and unworthy of humanity. So long as it is recognized that the shells landing on Ashkelon are likely to have been fired by descendants of the inhabitants of that region who were driven out by the Zionists in 1948, talk of peace is a smoke screen for continued Israeli assault on the survivors of that great injustice.

What then is to be done? Yet another dialogue between "moderate" Arabs and "progressive" Israelis? An umpteenth "peace plan" to be ignored? A solemn declaration from the European Union?

All such mainstream gestures are mere distractions from the ongoing strangling of the Palestinian people. But more radical demands are just as futile. The call to create an international tribunal to judge Israeli war criminals, or for an effective intervention by the United Nations or the European Union will accomplish nothing. The real existing international tribunals reflect the relationship of forces in the world, and will never be used against the cherished allies of the United States. It is the relationship of forces itself that must be changed, and this can be done only gradually. It is true that Gaza is a dire emergency, but it is also true that nothing really effective can be done today to stop it, precisely because the patient political work that should have been done before still remains to be undertaken.

On the three modest proposals that follow, two are ideological and one is practical.

1. Get rid of the illusion that Israel is "useful" to the West.

Many people, especially on the left, persist in thinking that Israel is only a pawn in an American capitalist or imperialist strategy to control the Middle East. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel is of no use to anybody or anything but its own fantasies of domination. There is no petroleum in Israel, or Lebanon, or Golan, or Gaza. The so-called wars for oil, in 1991 and 2003, were waged by the United States, with no help from Israel, and in 1991 with the explicit demand from the United States that Israel stay out (because Israel’s participation would have undermined Washington’s Arab coalition). For the pro-Western petro-monarchies and the "moderate" Arab regimes, Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands is a nightmare, which radicalizes much of their populations and threatens their rule. It is Israel, by its absurd policies, that provoked the creation of both Hezbollah and Hamas and that is indirectly responsible for much of the recent growth of "radical Islam".

Moreover, the plain fact is that capitalists as a whole make more money in peace than in war. It is enough to compare the profits made by Western capitalists in China or Vietnam since making peace with those countries, compared to the past, when "Red China" was isolated and the US waged war against Vietnam. The majority of capitalists could not care less which "people" must have Jerusalem as its "eternal capital", and if peace were achieved, they would hasten into the West Bank and Gaza to exploit a qualified work force with few other opportunities.

Finally, any American citizen concerned with the influence of his or her country in the world can see quite clearly that making enemies of a billion Muslims in order to satisfy every murderous whim of Israel is scarcely a rational investment in the future.

Those who consider themselves Marxists are among the first to see in Israel a simple emanation of such general phenomena as capitalism or imperialism (Marx himself was much more cautious on the matter of economic reductionism). But it does no service to the Palestinian people to maintain such fictions – in reality, like it or not, the capitalist system is far too robust to stake its survival on the Jewish occupation of the West Bank, and capitalism has been doing just fine in South Africa since the end of Apartheid.

2. Allow non-Jews to speak their mind about Israel

If support for Israel is not based on economic or strategic interests, why do the political class and the media passively accept whatever Israel does? Many ordinary people may feel unconcerned by what happens in a faraway country. But this does not apply to the West’s leading opinion makers, who never cease criticizing what is wrong with the policies of Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Islam, Serbia, Russia or China. Even unproved rumors and gross exaggerations are repeated with insistence. Only Israel must be treated with kid gloves.

One explanation offered for this special treatment is Western "guilt" for past anti-Semitic persecutions, in particular the horrors inflicted on Jews during the Second World War. It is sometimes pointed out that the Palestinians are in no way responsible for those horrors and should not have to pay the price for crimes committed by others. That is true, but what is almost never said and which is obvious nevertheless, is that the overwhelming majority of French people, Germans or Catholic priests today are just as innocent of what happened during the war as the Palestinians, for the simple reason that they were either born after the war or were children at the time. The notion of collective guilt was already very questionable in 1945, but the idea of transmitting that collective guilt to subsequent generations is quite simply a religious notion. Even if it is said that the Holocaust should not justify Israeli policy, it is striking that the populations who are supposed to feel guilty for what happened (the Germans, the French and the Catholics) are most reticent to speak out.

It is strange that at the very time the Catholic Church renounced the notion of Jews as the people who killed Christ, the notion of the almost universal guilt for killing the Jews began to take over. The discourse on universal guilt for the Holocaust is like religious discourse in general in the way it legitimizes hypocrisy, by shifting responsibility from the real to the imaginary (on the model of "original sin" itself). We are all supposed to feel guilty for crimes committed in the past about which, by definition, we can do nothing. But we need not feel guilty or responsible for crimes being committed right before our eyes by our Israeli or American allies, whom we can hope to influence.

The fact that we are not all guilty of the crimes of the Third Reich is simple and obvious, but needs to be driven home to allow non-Jews to speak up freely about Palestine. As it is, non-Jews who often feel they must leave it to Jews, as the only people who have the "right" to criticize Israel, to defend the Palestinians. But given the relationship of forces between the Jewish critics of Israel, and the influential Zionist organizations claiming to speak for the Jewish people, there is no realistic hope that Jewish voices alone can save the Palestinians.

However, the main reason for the silence is surely not guilt precisely because it is so artificial, but rather fear. Fear of "what will they think", fear of slander and even of being taken to court for "anti-Semitism". If you are not convinced, take a journalist, a politician or a publisher to some spot where nobody is listening and there is no hidden camera or microphone, and ask whether he or she says in public all he or she thinks of Israel in private. And if not, why? Fear of hurting the interests of capitalism? Fear of weakening American imperialism? Fear of interrupting oil deliveries? Or, on the contrary, fear of Zionist organizations and their relentless campaigns?

We have little doubt, after dozens of discussions with such people that the last answer given above is the correct one. People do not say what they think of what calls itself the "Jewish State" for fear of being called anti-Jewish and being identified with the anti-Semites of the past. This sentiment is all the stronger inasmuch as most people who are shocked by Israeli policy are genuinely horrified by what was done to the Jews during the Second World War and are sincerely outraged by anti-Semitism. If one stops to think about it, it is clear that if there existed today, as was the case before 1940, openly anti-Semitic political movements, they would not be so intimidated. But today, not even the French National Front says it is anti-Semitic and whoever criticizes Israel usually starts by denying being anti-Semitic. The fear of being accused of anti-Semitism is deeper than fear of the Zionist lobby, it is fear of losing the respectability that goes with condemnation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as the highest contemporary moral value.

It is imperative to free criticism of Israel from the fear of being falsely accused of "anti-Semitism". The threat of this accusation is an insidious form of moral blackmail that perhaps constitutes the only real potential source of a widespread revival of anti-Jewish resentment.

3. The practical initiatives are summed up in three letters : BDS- Boycott, disinvestment, sanctions

The demand for sanctions is taken up by most pro-Palestinian organizations, but since such measures are the prerogative of states, it is clear that this will not happen soon. Disinvestment measures can be taken by trade unions and churches, on the decision of their members. Other enterprises that collaborate closely with Israel will not change their policy unless they are under public pressure, that is, boycotts. This brings us to the controversial issue of boycotts, not only of Israeli products but also of Israel’s cultural and academic institutions.

This tactic was used against apartheid in South Africa in a very similar situation. Both apartheid and the dispossession of the Palestinians are a late heritage of European colonialism, whose practitioners have a hard time realizing that such forms of domination are no longer acceptable to the world in general and even to public opinion in the West. The racist ideologies underlying both projects are an outrage to the majority of humanity and gives rise to endless hatreds and conflicts. One might even say that Israel is another South Africa, plus exploitation of "the Holocaust" as an excuse.

Any boycott is apt to have innocent victims. In particular, it is said that boycotting Israeli academic institutions would unjustly punish intellectuals who are for peace. Perhaps, but Israel itself readily admits that there are innocent victims in Gaza, whose innocence in no way prevents them from being killed. We do not propose killing anyone. A boycott is a perfectly non-violent act by citizens. It is comparable to conscientious objection or civil disobedience in the face of unjust power. Israel flouts all UN resolutions and our own governments, far from taking measures to oblige Israel to comply, merely reinforce their ties with Israel. We have the right, as citizens, to demand that our own governments respect international law.

What is important about sanctions, especially on the cultural level, is their symbolic value. It is a way of telling our governments that we do not accept their policy of collaboration with a state that has chosen to become an international outlaw.

Some object to a boycott on the grounds that it is opposed by both some progressive Israelis and a certain number of "moderate" Palestinians (but not Palestinian civil society as a whole). But the main question for us is not what they say, but what foreign policy we want for our own countries. The Israeli-Arab conflict is far from being a mere local quarrel and has attained a worldwide significance. It involves the basic issue of respect for international law. A boycott should be defended as a means to protest to our governments in order to force them to change their policy. We have the right to want to be able to travel without shame in the rest of the world. That is reason enough to encourage a boycott.

(A french version of this text is in preparation).

Jean Bricmont teaches physics in Belgium and is a member of the Brussels Tribunal. His book, Humanitarian Imperialism, is published by Monthly Review Press. He can be reached at Jean.mailto:Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at: diana.josto@yahoo.fr