Deflation in the Eurozone is not good deflation

ASI Senior Fellow Anthony J. Evans has a very good new piece on the Cobden Centre blog. First he notes how Austrian economists have been able to say interesting things about deflation that others have missed:

As inflation rates continue to fall across the Eurozone one might expect Austrian economists to rejoice. After all, inflation reduces our purchasing power and acts as a hidden form of taxation. Failure to control inflation caused some of the greatest social and political disturbances of the twentieth century, and attempts to centrally plan the monetary system are destined to failure. George Selgin’s “Less than Zero” is the seminal account of how deflation can be beneficial, and why central banks should be willing to tolerate it.

But he goes on to point out that this 'good deflation' is typified by rising real incomes, as it has come through productivity improvements. If we don't see rising real incomes, then we're not seeing good deflation. If we are seeing bad deflation then we risk sustained recession and depression, as inflexible wages are forced to bear the burden of adjustment:

Austrians are loathe to advocate monetary activism and for good reason. But the goal of monetary policy is not inactivism, but neutrality. The issue comes down to the costs of adjustment. If aggregate demand remains at 1% then people will adjust their expectations, prices will adjust, and output will return to normal. During the Great Depression Hayek advocated this path, even though he recognised that prices take time to adjust, and whilst they do so unemployment would rise. His reasoning was that increasing the load on price adjustments will increase their flexibility. In a time of chronic wage and price inflexibility it was a moment to bust the unions. However he later came round to the idea that those costs were too high. The collateral damage of using a downturn to put more emphasis on nominal wage adjustments was unfair. For the mass unemployed, nominal wage rigidities isn’t their fault. So instead of placing the burden on wage adjustments, central banks have the option of maintaining a certain level of total income. This avoids the necessity of a nominal wage adjustment, in part because inflation allows real wages to adjust.

The whole piece is very good, and consonant with what I have been trying to say since the third dip of the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

Small steps towards a much better world

Changing policy, ideology, popular opinion, media narratives and so on can be very hard. Changing social norms and culture is even more difficult. Thus, when a small technological innovation comes along that can substantially improve things, even in a small area, it really lifts my heart as it seems 'easy' and 'free'. A recent example is the introduction of tablet computers to Florida restaurant inspections (according to a new paper in The RAND Journal of Economics). Getting rid of corruption, making people more conscientious and diligent and designing incentive systems that improve things are all very hard, and that's why we at the ASI often make the case for tried and true robust mechanisms. But the paper, from authors Ginger Zhe Jin and Jungmin Lee found that this tiny change made a sizeable difference:

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors of about 1,000 potential violations that may be checked for. Using inspection records from July 2003 to June 2009, we find that the adoption of PDA led to 11% more detected violations and subsequently, restaurants may have gradually increased their compliance efforts. We also find that PDA use is significantly correlated with a reduction in restaurant-related foodborne disease outbreaks.

Enjoy a chart of the finding below, and a full pdf of the working paper here.

Isn't this an interesting little finding about drugs?

Isn't this an interesting little assertion from one of the government's own reports?

Decriminalising drugs would have little effect on the number of people abusing illegal substances, a highly controversial Home Office report has said. ... The report – which sources said had caused “panic” within the Home Office – said: “There are indications that decriminalisation can reduce the burden on criminal justice systems.

“It is not clear that decriminalisation has an impact on levels of drug use.

"The disparity in drug use trends and criminal justice statistics between countries with similar approaches, and the lack of any clear correlation between the ‘toughness’ of an approach and levels of drug use demonstrates the complexity of the issue."

The point being, and this can be readily verified by anyone with even the most modest experience of social life in Britain, that all those who want to consume drugs are currently easily able to find the drugs they wish to consume. Meaning that the illegality isn't particularly affecting the availability of supply. Thus decriminalisation seems like a good idea as it's not going to lead to half the population toking itself into a stupor.

However, that decriminalisation isn't enough as we've mentioned around here before. For the major danger of drugs comes not from they themselves, but from the fact that purity and concentration are, given that they are illegal products, entirely unknown to the user. Overdosing is thus depressingly commonplace, as are all sorts of diseases and illnesses from the admixtures. Thus we need to be thinking very seriously about legalisation: not just decriminalisation of small amounts for personal use but the legalisation of supply and production. For that is how we would get brands, reliant upon their quality and consistency, and also get a transparent supply network that can be checked for quality.

It's not just the criminality of taking drugs that is causing our current problems, it's the illegality of supply as well.

What Robert Peston gets wrong about QE

I don't usually read Robert Peston, now the BBC's economics editor, but I came across this piece he wrote for their website on the end of the ongoing US quantitative easing (QE) programme. Here he makes the case, overall, that even though QE did not cause hyperinflation (yet!) it could still prove 'toxic' because it 'inflates the price of assets beyond what could be justified by the underlying strength of the economy'. Basically every line of the piece includes something that I could dispute, but I will try and focus on the most important issues. The first problem is that Peston takes a hardline 'creditist' view that not only is QE mainly supposed to help the economy through raising debt/lending, but by raising it in specific, centrally-planned areas (e.g. housing). When we find that QE barely affected lending, it seems to Peston that it failed. But QE does not raise lending to raise economic activity—QE raises economic activity through other channels, which may lead to more lending depending on the preferences of firms and households.

In his 2013 paper 'Was there ever a bank lending channel?' Nobel prizewinner Eugene Fama puts paid to this view. He points out that financial firms hold portfolios of real assets based on their preferences and their guesses about the future. QE can only change these preferences and guesses indirectly, by changing nominal or real variables in the economy. For example, extra QE might reduce the chance of a financial collapse, making riskier assets less unattractive. But when central banks buy bonds investors find themselves holding portfolios not exactly in line with their preferences and they 'rebalance' towards holding the balance of assets they want: cash, equities, bonds, gilts and so on. This is predicted by our basic expected-profit-maximising model and reliably seen in the empirical data too. It's good because it implies that monetary policy can work towards neutrality.

This doesn't mean Peston is right to be sceptical about the benefits of QE. QE has worked—according to a recent Bank of England paper buying gilts worth 1% of GDP led to .16% extra real GDP and .3% extra inflation in the UK (2009-2013), with even better results for the USA. The point is that it works through other channels—principally by convincing markets that the central bank is serious about trying to achieve its inflation target or even go above its inflation target when times are particularly hard. This is not an isolated result.

The second issue is that Peston claims QE isn't money creation:

Because what has been really striking about QE is that it was popularly dubbed as money creation, but it hasn't really been that. If it had been proper money creation, with cash going into the pockets of people or the coffers of businesses, it might have sparked serious and substantial increases in economic activity, which would have led to much bigger investment in real productive capital. And in those circumstances, the underlying growth rate of the UK and US economies might have increased meaningfully.

But in today's economy, especially in the UK and Europe, money creation is much more about how much commercial banks lend than how many bonds are bought from investors by central banks. The connection between QE and either the supply of bank credit or the demand for bank credit is tenuous.

That is not to say there is no connection. But the evidence of the UK, for example, is that £375bn of quantitative easing did nothing to stop banks shrinking their balance sheets: banks had a too-powerful incentive to shrink and strengthen themselves after the great crash of 2008; businesses and consumers were too fed up to borrow, even with the stimulus of cheap credit.

This is extremely misleading and confused. He suggests that printing cash and handing it out would boost the 'underlying' growth rate, which is nonsense—the 'underlying' growth rate is driven by supply-side factors. He claims that money creation is identical with credit creation, when they are separate things, and he has already pointed out that creating money doesn't always lead to more credit. We have already seen how credit is not the way QE affects growth, despite what economic journalists like Peston seem to unendingly tell us. Indeed, it seems quite clear that the great recession caused the credit crunch, rather than the other way round.

His ending few paragraphs are yet stranger:

But the fundamental problem with QE is that the money created by central banks leaked out all over the place, and ended up having all sorts of unexpected and unwanted effects. When launched it was billed as a big, bold and imaginative way of restarting the global economy after the 2008 crash. It probably helped prevent the Great Recession being deeper and longer. But by inflating the price of assets beyond what could be justified by the underlying strength of the economy, it may sown the seeds of the next great markets disaster.

It's not clear at all why Peston thinks that QE would inflate asset prices beyond what could be justified. I've written at length about this before. The money a trader gets from selling a gilt to the Bank of England is completely fungible with all their other money. There is no reason to expect they will put this money in an envelope and save it for a special occasion. They try and hold the same portfolio of assets as they did before. Through various channels (including equity prices -> investment) QE raises inflation and real GDP and surprise surprise these are exactly the things that asset prices should care about.

Now Screening: A tragic drama of the London Living Wage

After months of campaigning, no less than 13 strikes and support from the likes of Ken Loach and Eric Cantona, Brixton Ritzy Picturehouse cinema staff have finally secured a commitment to be paid the London Living Wage.

Unfortunately, this means that a quarter of the payroll is now facing the sack:

Picturehouse Cinemas said that the cost of increasing basic wages at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton to £8.80 an hour would be absorbed by reducing the number of staff by at least 20, with a redundancy programme starting next month.

Two management posts will be axed along with eight supervisors, three technical staff and other front-of-house workers from its workforce of 93.

Naturally, Owen Jones has some insight into the situation:

The message appears transparent: if you fight for a living wage and workers’ rights, then you face the sack. Or we will crush you if you dare to stand up for yourselves.

In fact, the message is even more clear than this. If wages are set higher than it is productive or profitable to do so, the firm will have to account for the cost in other ways. We often talk about the unintended consequences of things like price controls and wage demands, but in this case the consequence of such a pay rise was pretty damn clear. As the Picturehouse explains:

During the negotiation process it was discussed that the amount of income available to distribute to staff would not be increasing, and that the consequence of such levels of increase to pay rates would be fewer people with more highly paid jobs.

The Ritzy previously paid staff £7.53 an hour with a £1/hr customer satisfaction bonus—far higher than the National Minimum Wage of £6.31, whilst union pay negotiators pointed out the Ritzy staff do actually like working there. This makes the idea that job cuts are bitter, tit-for-tat 'payback' seem rather perverse. Indeed, to make something sound so heartless and threatening when it is basically Econ 101 is bordering on the petulant.

 In a perfect world low pay simply would not be an issue. In the meantime if employers can afford to give the LLW (or can benefit enough from the PR!), then fantastic. But paying 93 staff £8.80 an hour is no small commitment, and unfortunately pushing company policy in one direction all too often means something's got to give elsewhere.

Whilst the effects of a National Minimum Wage aren't always easy to spot, this is a concrete example of the London Living Wage actively putting Londoners out of a living. In personal experience Ritzy employees are friendly, intelligent and helpful, but sadly that's no guarantee of them getting another job. And if unions continue to push for the LLW in such an aggressive manner, this is unlikely to be the only casualty.

Curzon cinemas have just announced that they will pay their staff the LLW, even though it is loss-making. They say they hope that the cost will become self-financing through the better quality of work which paying people more will achieve. It will be interesting to see if that's the case.  In any case—grab the popcorn, this show's going to get interesting...

From the Annals of Bad Research: rock stars die younger

Around here we're all culturally savvy enough to have heard of the 27 Club: the list of those rocks stars who have died or drink, drugs, suicide etc at the age of 27. We've always taken this to be a rather cheery finding: that if you give some 18 year old all the money, booze, drugs, success and sex they could possibly want then it still takes them 9 years to kill themselves through overindulgence. Rather puts into perspective the prodnoses complaining about our having a second glass of sherry before dinner. However, we've just had the release of a report indicating that popular musicians do indeed die younger, on average, than the general population. And thi8s really should be included in our compendious volume, The Annals of Bad Research. For the contention is that the average age at death of rock and roll, rock and pop, stars is lower than that of the general population. But as Chris Snowden points out, we cannot actually know that:

You see the problem here, I expect. Rock stars didn't exist until the 1950s and since many of them are still alive, we don't know what their average age of death is. It wouldn't be at all surprising if they die earlier on average, but the graph above tells us very little about whether this is so. When Chuck Berry (aged 88), Jerry Lee Lewis (aged 79) and Little Richard (aged 81) pop their clogs, the average is going to go up, especially if they keep breathing for another twenty years.

And, who knows? They might. Perhaps the higher risk when young is counter-balanced by the boost to longevity of having lots of money and the best healthcare in old age?

Be that as it may, you clearly can't work out the average lifespan of a rock star until at least the first generation of rock stars are dead.

Quite: you can only work out the average age of death of any particular cohort when all of that particular cohort are dead. If you try to do it before that has happened then you'll be counting all of those who die young but not all of those who don't: meaning that what you've actually calculated is the average age at death of those who die young. And, you know, people who die younger die younger isn't really all that amazing of a research finding.

Breaking news: Paul Ehrlich still wrong about population

There's a story floating around about how new studies show that even if there's another world war, or some mass pandemic, the human population of the world is going to keep on rising. That's true, for most of those who are going to have children in the coming decades are already alive and we've a reasonable enough idea of how many children each of them is likely to have. The bit that caught my eye though is that the paper is edited by Paul Ehrlich. That's usually a sign that there's going to be something wrong with it. And so there is:

Amoral wars and global pandemics aside, the only humane way to reduce the size of the human population is to encourage lower per capita fertility. This lowering has been happening in general for decades (27, 28), a result mainly of higher levels of education and empowerment of women in the developed world, the rising affluence of developing nations, and the one-child policy of China (29–32). Despite this change, environmental conditions have worsened globally because of the overcompensating effects of rising affluence-linked population and consumption rates (3, 18).

It's that "despite" that grates. For while female education and empowerment are indeed correlates of lower fertility, they are not the causes. It is that rise in affluence that is behind all of the three. In a subsistence economy there is no spare capacity to educate anyone, let alone women. And a subsistence economy is also going to be a human and animal powered one, an economy in which there's not going to be much empowerment of the physically weaker sex. It's only when a society gets richer that we can all start, male and female alike, using that attribute that makes humans different, our brains, as we leave the heavy labour to the machines. and it's also that greater wealth that leads to the falls in child mortality, the education of women, those correlates of falling fertility.

That is, Paul Ehrlich is still getting the drivers of human population numbers wrong.  Not that we should be too hard on him: probably a bit late in his career for a fundamental rethink, isn't it?

Size might not matter but age definitely does

It’s ironic that politicians are so obsessed with creating jobs, given that many interventions – such as employers’ national insurance contributions and a politically determined minimum wage – achieve the diametric opposite. Yet it remains a key metric for determining political success and failure, and it drives much that passes for entrepreneurship and enterprise policy. When it comes to job creation there is a debate about whether small or large businesses contribute more. Those representing small businesses can claim that micro businesses account for around 95% of all private sector companies, while those representing large businesses can counter that despite making up less than 0.1 per cent of the total private sector stock, large businesses account for more than half of all turnover and more than 40% of UK private sector employment.

It’s a complicated debate. Nesta research suggests a small proportion of businesses are responsible for the majority of job growth, with the data showing that “just 7% of businesses are responsible for half of the jobs created between 2007 and 2010.”

Elsewhere, Nesta suggests focussing government resources on supporting what was then “the vital 6%” . But it isn’t obvious that this is the right conclusion from the data. It’s entirely possible that current polices are limiting the size of this so-called vital 6% job-creating companies. If this were the case, instead of focussing on those businesses and sectors already succeeding, the right policy would be the exact opposite: focusing on increasing that 6% figure by targeting companies not in the 6%.

Although the ideal ratio of small to large businesses might be indeterminable, we do know one thing. Size might not matter but age definitely does: we want new businesses. As the Kaufman Foundation explains: “Policymakers often think of small business as the employment engine of the economy. But when it comes to job-creating power, it is not the size of the business that matters as much as it is the age.”

Therefore, politicians and policymakers should want the entrepreneurial process to happen quickly; they should want to make sure regulations don’t inhibit the process of business creation and destruction; they should, to paraphrase the lean startup, want entrepreneurs to start fast, grow fast and fail fast.

Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.

Slow economic growth is the new normal apparently

So Gavyn Davies tells us over in the Financial Times:

The results (Graph 1) show an extremely persistent slowdown in long run growth rates since the 1970s, not a sudden decline after 2008. This looks more persistent for the G7 as a whole than it does for individual countries, where there is more variation in the pattern through time.

Averaged across the G7, the slowdown can be traced to trend declines in both population growth and (especially) labour productivity growth, which together have resulted in a halving in long run GDP growth from over 4 per cent in 1970 to 2 per cent now.

Obviously, for the sake of our grandchildren, we'd like to work out why there has been this growth slowdown. Fortunately, there's an answer to that:

But run the numbers yourself–and prepare for a shock. If the U.S. economy had grown an extra 2% per year since 1949, 2014′s GDP would be about $58 trillion, not $17 trillion. So says a study called “Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth,” published in 2013 by the Journal of Economic Growth. More than taxes, it’s been runaway federal regulation that’s crimped U.S. growth by the year and utterly smashed it over two generations.

A version of that paper can be found here.

No one is saying that there's not a case for regulation: there's always a case for every regulation, obviously. There's also a smaller class of regulations where the case made for it is valid: where it's worth whatever growth we give up in having the regulation in order to avoid whatever peril it is that the regulation protects us from.

But this doesn't mean that all regulations have a valid case in their favour: and one darn good reason against many of them is that we're giving up too much economic growth as a result of the cumulative impact of all of those regulations.

If we want swifter economic growth, something we do want for the sake of those grandkiddies, then we do need to cut back on the regulatory state. Hopefully before all growth at all gets strangled by the ever growing thickets of them.

David Cameron vs feminism

Today there was a minor kerfuffle about the Prime Minister’s refusal to wear a t-shirt that says “This is what a feminist looks like” after Elle, a women’s magazine, asked him to do so for a marketing campaign. Elle had a go at Cameron, saying that “It should be simple. Do you believe that men and women are equal? Do you believe men and women should have the same rights? The same opportunities? Yes? Then you are a feminist.”

Well, that sounds pretty reasonable! I don’t see how anyone could object to that. But the plot thickens later on. All these unobjectionable, bland claims apparently relate to quite specific public policy issues, like unequal pay and political representation for women. According to Elle, we need feminism because "for every £1 a man earns in the UK, a woman earns 80p. Women make up only 35% of senior managers in the UK and an estimated 30,000 women a year lose their jobs as a result of pregnancy-related discrimination. In politics, fewer than one in four MPs is a woman, and there are only five women in the cabinet out of 22 ministers".

In other words, we need feminism so we can do something about very specific issues (presumably in specific ways, since the Fawcett Society is involved which has specific policies to address all these things).

This sounds to me like a ‘motte and bailey’ argument. Scott Alexander explains in more detail in part two of this excellent essay here (if you have the time, read that, not this). The name come from medieval times, when a ‘motte’ was a defensible castle surrounded by a profitable village called the ‘bailey’. Everyone would work out in the bailey until they got attacked and had to retreat to the safety of the motte.

A motte and bailey argument starts off by defining itself in very defensible way. “Feminism means thinking that men and women should be treated equally.” That’s the safe, defensible motte.

It then extends that reasonable-seeming claim to all sorts of controversial claims – unequal political representation demands all-women shortlists; unequal pay demands more invasive laws to equalise pay between men and women. That’s the bailey where the actual (political or cultural) advancements can be made.

Let’s say you attack the bailey by saying that you're not a feminist because you think the policies advocated by feminists are bad, or the problems they identify are not even problems at all. Maybe you find, as Ben recently has, that “if you control for background (i.e. skills and talent) and exit (i.e. women staying in the workforce) women earn more than men and get more aggressively promoted than men”, which implies that the claims made by feminists about unequal pay needing new laws are simply incorrect.

Feminism may also be wrong about many other things, such as claims about men and women’s brains being biologically the same or the pervasiveness of a ‘rape culture’. These are substantive elements of what feminists define as feminism, and they may be right or wrong. It’s legitimate (albeit quite possibly mistaken) to think these claims are wrong, and hence to decline to wear a 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirt.

But do that and many feminists will retreat into the defensible motte, as Elle have today. David Cameron doesn’t think men and women should be equal! David Cameron doesn’t think men and women should have the same rights! Feminism is very simple!

This is dishonest and manipulative. And an open society requires honesty in political discourse. David Cameron is often accused of pandering to fashion. He deserves credit for refusing to do so this time.