The Living Wage campaign is wrong-footing the right

I’ve long taken an interest in the Living Wage campaign, both as an opponent of their ultimate goal but also as an admirer of their strategy. Their aim, I believe, is the statutory enforcement of a ‘Living Wage’, which would effectively mean a pretty hefty hiking of the National Minimum Wage across the country. Though well intended, this is a bad idea: we would need a lot of evidence to discard the Econ 101 principle that price floors cause oversupplies, which in the case of labour we refer to as ‘unemployment’ and the evidence is, at best, divided.

But the Living Wage Foundation (and the LW campaign in general) has been far too canny to call for this outright. Instead, they have focused on getting big firms like Goldman Sachs to voluntarily sign up to pay their workers at least a Living Wage.

This isn’t hugely significant in financial terms: it's fair to assume that most employees and contractors at firms like Goldman Sachs were already earning above the Living Wage before they signed up. A jump from the NMW to the London Living Wage is very significant from the point of view of the individual employee (an extra £100/week for someone on 40 hours a week) but not too significant from the point of view of an employer like Goldman Sachs.

For these firms, signing up to pay a Living Wage may be a relatively cheap PR move. Or, to go back to that Econ 101 point: what these firms are paying for is not just the cleaning, but the image boost that comes from paying all of their their employees well. It’s possible that they’ve reduced employee breaks or labour hours, as often happens when the minimum wage is raised, but who knows.

I'm very pleased that Goldman Sachs is paying its cleaners more. I'd be pleased if more firms spent more of their marketing budgets on cash transfers to low-income workers in this way. But, as they say on the internet, the obvious point is obvious: even if Goldman can afford to pay a small number of its workers more to improve its image, firms in a less financially secure position may not be able to increase wages without bringing on the negative side effects previously mentioned. And, again pretty obviously, such PR only works if there are other firms that do not pay their workers a Living Wage.

The other interesting thing that the Living Wage Foundation has done is focus on government contractors – usually cleaners – who earn less than a Living Wage. Again, I don’t really mind this – there are reasonably good arguments that the government should set pay for civil servants as competitively as possible, but when it comes to cleaners earning a pittance, who really cares? As 'wastes' of taxpayer money go, this is hard to get worked up about.

This is all interesting to me because it puts free marketeers in an extraordinarily difficult position. Say nothing and the case for the Living Wage appears to be unopposable – perhaps allowing it to gain enough credibility that eventually it seems completely obvious that it should be legislated for. Go up against them, and we’re in the bizarre position of at least appearing argue against a private firm voluntarily paying its workers more because of consumer pressure. Isn’t that exactly what the market is supposed to do?

Low pay is a serious problem that will probably get worse before it gets better. We on the right do have our own answers: Tim Worstall has pointed out again and again that not taxing minimum wage workers would effectively give them a Living Wage. And reform of the welfare system to subsidise wages (perhaps through a Negative Income Tax) would be a very market-friendly way of helping the poor. But these don’t seem to have gained much traction as specific alternatives to raising the minimum wage. I'm left feeling quite glum: a voluntary Living Wage is basically a good thing, but a mandatory one would be terrible. Is there anything we can do to oppose one without seeming to oppose the other? I'm not sure.

The Negative Income Tax and Basic Income are pretty much the same thing

I’ve been talking about the Negative Income Tax lately, and equating it with the idea of a Basic Income. I think most of the policies’ respective advocates would deny that they’re the same policy. In this post I’m going to outline why that’s incorrect and I’m happy to say that they’re basically the same thing. For the uninitiated, a Negative Income Tax is a form of welfare that replaces most existing welfare schemes with a single payment that supplements the income of the unemployed and low-paid. The payment is withdrawn as your earnings increase, ideally at a gradual enough rate that increasing your earnings (and hence reducing leisure time) is always worthwhile.

An example: a £5,000 basic payment at a 50% marginal withdrawal rate (this means that for every additional pound earned, the worker will receive 50p less in NIT payments). Someone with an income of zero would receive an NIT payment of £5,000, or just under £100/week. If they took a job that paid £5,000/year, they would receive a top-up of £2,500/year; that paid £7,500, a top-up of £1,250/year. Once they reached £10,000/year, they would receive nothing in NIT.

This idea was supported by Milton Friedman, among others, and has a reasonably strong pedigree on the right. Even libertarians who object to income redistribution in principle usually concede that a Negative Income Tax is the least bad form of welfare, because it is administratively simple and perverts incentives less than most welfare schemes. It is particularly appealing to many liberals and libertarians because it is unpaternalistic.

A Basic Income, on the other hand, is usually conceived as a flat payment to everybody irrespective of circumstance. This leads to a very big problem: assuming it replaces most forms of welfare as an NIT does, a basic income high enough for unemployed workers to subsist on would simply not be affordable to pay to everyone. A policy that ideally would be designed to help the poor ends up being a very expensive subsidy to people who do not need extra money.

Advocates of the Basic Income recognize this, and their solution is typically to use the tax system to ‘claw back’ the payment from relatively high earners. So everyone gets the money, but it is withdrawn according to earnings.

In practice, that’s more or less the same as a Negative Income Tax – the only difference is whether the withdrawal takes place at the ‘front’ of the payment (as with the NIT), or the ‘end’ (as with the Basic Income). Strange as it may seem, the policies advocated by Milton Friedman and the Green Party are the same in all but the technical detail.

But even if there is a surprising amount of agreement in terms of the kind of welfare we’d like to see, the detail may be more difficult to agree on. How much should a ‘basic income’ be? When should it begin to be withdrawn, and at what rate?

Questions like this are, I think, likely to be where what breaks up this (unholy?) alliance. But maybe not. Traditional policies like the minimum wage probably do more harm than good, and, rightfully, the question of how to improve the lives of the low paid does not seem to be going away. It will take compromise, but in the Negative Income Tax / Basic Income, we may have an answer.

Why Labour's rent controls will do more harm than good

Now that we have more detail, Labour’s new ‘rent control’ policy is not quite as bad as I'd initially feared. Instead of the old school price ceilings that destroyed parts of New York City, Labour are proposing ‘second-generation rent controls’, which limit the ability of landlords to renegotiate rents during tenancies, and ‘make three-year tenancies the norm’.

The real-world effects of this are likely to be that expected rent increases over the three-year lease will be priced in to the starting rent, so it’s unlikely to actually make anyone better off unless there’s an unexpected increase in rents. If rents fall below expectations, this would hurt tenants.

Since landlords are bound within tenancy agreements, rises in rents are likely to be sharper than they currently are for new tenants. This means that housing mobility is likely to be reduced – tenants locked in to a relatively low rent will find it more costly than they otherwise would to move. This is very important: it looks as if lowered housing mobility causes higher unemployment, because people are less able to move to find new jobs.

Rent controls of any kind are likely to decrease the supply and quality of available housing. ‘Second-generation’ controls are less tight and so less harmful than classical rent controls, but as Hopi Sen has pointed out, the German experience does not seem encouraging. There, rents have risen far more quickly over the past decade than they have in Britain, as new construction has slowed.

There is also evidence to suggest that second-generation rent controls have a similarly negative impact on housing quality as classical rent controls. A 1985 study by the Richmond Fed found that controlled housing units were 7.1% lower in quality in 1974, and 13.5% lower in 1977, pointing to a cumulative negative effect. If classical rent controls are only worse than bombing, second-generation controls may be close to petty vandalism.

One interesting aspect of this announcement is that it may affect supply now, as would-be investors in new housing are discouraged by the prospect of stricter controls on their investment. If the measures are actually brought in – crossing the rent control Rubicon – an expectation of tighter controls may reduce supply even more.

It’s not clear what mechanism Labour is proposing to make three-year tenancies ‘the norm’, but it’s hard to imagine any effective measure that would not end up hurting tenants who want shorter leases. This probably means young people.

As we say virtually every day, the best way to reduce the cost of housing is to build more. Labour’s proposals seem counter-productive, but they’re nothing compared to the harm caused by the planning system.

We recently learned that more of Surrey is covered by golf courses than by houses. Rolling the green belt out even a bit – by, say, a mile outside London – would create space for hundreds of thousands of new homes, relieving pressure on existing housing stock, reducing rents and – a nice bonus – creating lots of jobs and adding a few percentage points on to GDP growth. We can dream.

Bleeding heart libertarianism and British politics

I have a chapter in a new publication by Liberal Reform, the classical liberal movement within the Lib Dems, in which I make the case that non-libertarians and libertarians may find a surprising amount of common ground if they put their differences of opinion about wealth and income redistribution aside. (Unfortunately, you have to sign up to Liberal Reform's mailing list to read that piece. You use my email address to login instead: sam at adamsmith dot org)

Basically, the chapter is an attempt to sketch out a British political economy of Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, the movement that has sprung up around American philosophers like Matt Zwolinski. The main areas I identify are immigration reform, drugs legalization and 'modern mercantilism' (a broad term for corporate and middle-class welfare).

I do think there's a lot of common ground between libertarians and people on the left, but for a serious dialogue to work I propose that libertarians shift their focus from opposition to wealth and income redistribution to a single-minded focus on the regulatory apparatus of the state:

I suggest that libertarians concerned with the plight of the poor should abandon their opposition to wealth redistribution in practice and focus instead on the regulatory state, where we have a much greater degree of certainty about the harm caused. For libertarians who wonder if they are BHLs, the question might be: If libertarian institutions existed and serious, significant poverty persisted, would state action be justified in acting to relieve at least some of that suffering, if we had a pretty good reason for thinking that that action would work?

I think that it would, and if you have a serious commitment to welfare so should you. The only problem should be an empirical one, which I cannot say is strong enough to reject all wealth redistribution. While I am extremely confident about the benefits of liberalising planning to allow new homes to be constructed in the UK, I feel less confident about saying that all redistribution is harmful.

So I propose a compromise: a ‘libertarian welfarism’. This might see us reform tax credits and the welfare system into a combination of universal basic income and a ’negative income tax’ that acts as a top-up to people’s wages, adjusted to give a little more to people in low-income jobs and the unemployed. The details of this approach to income redistribution are not important for now: what matters is the idea of a simple, cash-based redistributive mechanism. I find myself very comfortable with this kind of redistribution; other libertarians will be less so. But perhaps they could accept it as the cost they have to pay to persuade others about the other, much more important, things they have to say.

I expect many people to find this kind of thinking quite outrageous, but to me the really strong arguments for libertarianism are based on our beliefs about ignorance and incentives, not justice, so they should only preclude redistribution of wealth as a matter of pragmatism. There's no intrinsic reason you can't combine those ideas with "left-wing" beliefs about what a good world looks like any less than they can be combined with "right-wing" beliefs about the kind of world we watnt. I don't know if libertarians will ever be able to have the same influence on the left that we've had on the right, but it's worth a try.

Don't hate the players, hate the game

I usually agree with Mark Littlewood, Director-General of the IEA, so I was surprised by his piece in the Mail on Sunday this weekend. Mark proposes a public register of everyone claiming benefits of any kind – pensions, disability living allowance, jobseeker’s allowance, and so on. This strikes me as a very bad idea indeed.

Mark’s aim is to increase public awareness of benefits claimants who are receiving much more in benefits than most people would think reasonable. This, he hopes, will increase the public’s appetite for welfare cuts. Actually, I think people overestimate how much money individual people on benefits get, but the proposals are undesirable for other reasons.

Mark says that “This wouldn’t be a matter of ‘naming and shaming’ anyone. After all, if you are legally entitled to a particular benefit, what is there to be ashamed about? Anyone ashamed to claim money from the State maybe shouldn’t be claiming it.”

In my experience, most unemployed people are profoundly ashamed of being unemployed. Removing their privacy, exposing them to gossiping neighbours and their children to bullying classmates, will just make that even worse.

And Jobseeker’s Allowance only accounts for a small proportion of the welfare budget. These proposals would also include people on disability benefits for socially stigmatized mental illnesses and physical disabilities that they would like to keep private.

Mark says that Britons “are far too reasonable to start taking up pitchforks and burning torches and assaulting imagined benefit cheats.” I am less sure. This is, of course, the same country that saw a paediatrician being hounded by vandals who confused the word “paediatrician” with “paedophile”.

These proposals would humiliate people on benefits and rob them of their privacy. They don’t deserve it. Many (probably most) of them are dependent on welfare because of the state itself, and it is senseless to make their lives even more difficult instead of tackling the real causes of their poverty.

If you think that unemployment is largely caused by government mismanagement of the economy, it makes no sense to humiliate people for being out of work. If you think that government welfare has crowded out private charity, you shouldn’t blame people forced to rely on government disability benefits. If you blame planning regulations for the high cost of housing, you should focus on those regulations before you cut off the money that mitigates the problem for a few poor people.

I wish the only problem today was the government’s unwillingness to cut spending. In fact, that spending usually exists to relieve much bigger problems that can’t be found on the Treasury balance sheet. Often, those problems are state-made.

To me, this is one of the key messages that ‘bleeding heart’ libertarians need to get across to other free marketeers. Cutting back the state is a bit like a game of Jenga – if you blithely pull away the supports that people rely on before you take away the causes of that reliance, you’ll only end up making things worse.

What kinds of inequality should we be worried about?

Most political theorists are egalitarians of some sort. While I personally find Derek Parfit's argument in "Equality and Priority"—that egalitarianism sometimes says making others worse off without making anyone better off is good in one way, or even required—extremely convincing, and hence call myself a "prioritarian", I have trouble dealing with the arguments in Michael Huemer's "Against Equality and Priority". Nevertheless, I am very sympathetic to the basic claims of luck egalitarianism, i.e. that those advantages in life that are down to pure luck are undeserved. Combined with the fact that others are in desperate need, there is a strong case for redistribution before other complicating factors are brought in. But even egalitarians should (and often do) favour wealth or income inequality in the three following cases.

1. When inequalities come about as a result of different levels of effort. Some people are born with vast natural talents (e.g. Wilt Chamberlain) while others are not, or their talents are not in such high demand by the market. Some are born to dedicated, loving parents while others are raised in far less supportive environments. No one could claim they bear most of the responsibility for their genes or upbringing. But even if we could even out the differences in income or wealth due to different upbringings and talents, we'd want to leave in the differences from different levels of work. This is because leisure can be seen as a form of income, as it adds to utility. To give those who take more leisure the same money income as those who take less would be subverting equality, rather than enforcing it.

2. When inequalities derive from differences in job satisfaction or riskiness. People who do more dangerous jobs are paid more. This is exactly what economists would expect; extra money compensates the worker for the extra risk of injury or death. But it's also what we should want. A more satisfying, less risky job (like teaching or creating art) should pay lower by justice, and this is one of the really good and egalitarian elements of the market economy. This ties in with the previous point as one extremely undesirable element of certain high-paying jobs is the extreme hours they demand. If typically people's willingness to do extra hours begins to decline at an accelerating rate, we would expect high hours occupations—in a just, egalitarian system—to be paid disproportionately well.

3. When inequalities are necessary, due to the infirmities of current human nature, to produce a greater total pot to help the needy. A prominent element of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, the book that kick-started the recent era of social justice theorising, was the difference principle, the idea that inequality in society should only be as much as is necessary to make the worst-off person as well off as possible. But driving inequality any narrower would harm the worst-off and would thus be unacceptable. Of course, as G.A. Cohen shows in "Incentives, Inequality and Community" and his book Rescuing Justice and Equality, this isn't a demand of justice—it's just a practical consideration when we have the welfare of the badly-off in mind. But in the real world pragmatic considerations are often appropriate, and it may well be that certain inequalities in a given society can be practically justified on these grounds.

The really interesting question is this: how much of the inequality in real-world capitalist societies is down to these three legitimate sources, and how much is down to undeserved luck?  The key difference between 'bleeding heart' libertarians and traditional left-wingers may come down to this crucial (empirical?) question.

Budget 2013: The good, the bad and the ugly

It’s not saying much, but this was George Osborne’s best budget yet. These tax cuts are long overdue, though they are not significant enough to solve Britain’s growth problem. Cutting taxes for businesses will stimulate investment and job creation, and reducing the tax burden for low- and middle-income earners will make life easier for them.

But government spending is still rising by £20bn this year. The government’s plans to meddle in the housing market are staggeringly misjudged, and we risk repeating exactly the same policy mistake that led to the US subprime mortgage bubble. And we’re still going to be borrowing £108bn this year – that’s £295m a day, every day, with no end in sight.

The Good

Personal allowance raised to £10,000 by 2014. Income taxes are smothering workers. The taxman takes more than 30p out of every pound earned by low- and middle-income workers above the personal allowance. Raising the personal allowance to £10,000 ahead of schedule is a significant step to reducing the tax burden for low- and middle-income workers, and creates the tantalising prospect of the personal allowance being pegged to the minimum wage rate in 2015.

Corporation tax to be cut to 20% by 2015. At last, an encouragingly bold tax cut for business. The corporation tax rate will be falling from 28% to 24% this April, then from 24% to 21% next year, and finally from 21% to 20% in 2015. Although this does indeed put Britain ahead of other ‘major economies’, small countries like Ireland (which has a corporation tax rate of just 12.5%) will still be able to outcompete Britain in attracting investment from multinational corporations.

Employers’ national insurance bills cut by £2,000 for every firm. Employers' NICs are a direct tax on jobs, so tax relief should allow some businesses to take on extra employees. The cut will have the most pronounced impact on micro-businesses, 450,000 of which will reportedly be taken out of tax altogether.

Beer duty to be cut by 1p, and the ‘beer duty escalator’ to be scrapped. Two weeks ago the government was pushing for minimum alcohol pricing, and now it’s cutting the price of beer. It might not be cutting duty by much, but it’s a welcome change after years of miserable, anti-poor paternalism. And scrapping the outrageous ‘beer duty escalator’ is long overdue. No Chancellor should be able to pretend that a tax hike is out of their hands.

The Bad

The Bank of England’s 2% inflation target to stay in place. Inflation targeting has failed. It creates invisible excess inflation during boom periods (by keeping prices rising by 2% when prices should be falling because of productivity gains) and cannot offset changes in velocity in bust periods, leading to secondary deflations that amplify the damage caused by the initial bust. An alternative, rules-based system (such as an NGDP target based on a futures market instead of the discretion of the Monetary Policy Committee) would be a much less harmful mandate for the Bank of England. Mark Carney had indicated that he was sympathetic to this kind of reform. By giving up the chance to rethink British monetary policy, the Chancellor has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

20% tax relief on childcare vouchers up to £6,000 per child from 2015. Expensive childcare is a consequence of the costly regulations, such as mandatory maximum children-to-staff ratios (3:1 for under-5s and 1:1 for infants under one year old). If the government wants to make childcare more affordable, cutting these sorts of regulations back would be a better place to start than using taxpayers’ money to pay for childcare for parents earning up to £300,000/year.

Tax avoidance and evasion measures aimed at recouping £3bn in unpaid taxes. Tax avoidance is a legal and legitimate response to the perverse incentives of a complex tax code created by politicians trying to exempt a pet project or special interest that they favour. Tax evasion, too, is a rational response to high taxes and is only possible because of the complications in our tax code. The best way to reduce evasion is to simplify the tax code, not to persecute people taking advantages of a corrupt system.

£3bn extra for new projects every year from 2015-16 until 2020, totalling £15bn. Capital spending projects are always popular with politicians who want to leave a expensive railway line, bridge or motorway as a legacy, but there is a long history of infrastructure projects doing little help their flagging economies. Barack Obama’s $800bn stimulus package, launched in 2009, focused on ‘shovel-ready’ projects and did virtually nothing, as did successive Japanese stimulus programmes in the 1990s and 2000s. Any extra money from spending cuts should be given back to the private sector through tax cuts, where it can do the most good.

…and the Ugly

Bank guarantees to underpin £130bn of new mortgage lending for three years from 2014. Apparently the Treasury has not learned the lesson of 2008: injecting taxpayer money into the housing sector will simply inflate prices, distorting price signals and stoking the housing bubble that already seems to be growing in the housing sector. Houses are expensive because supply is restricted by the planning system. Instead of throwing money at the problem and driving prices up even more, the government should have the courage to liberalize planning to allow more development, including on green belt land.

Government ministers picking winners. Fiddling with tax breaks for specific industries is a mug’s game. There is no way the government can know which industries to promote, and these projects inevitably collapse into a mess of overcomplicated grant schemes and politics-driven bailouts of failing firms. Only consumers can pick winners.

Government spending is still rising. Despite all the talk of cuts, the government will still be spending £761bn this year, nearly £20bn more than last year. By leaving healthcare alone and failing to carry out the big structural reforms needed to reduce social security spending, the government  is not matching its rhetoric on spending with the action needed. We’re still going to be borrowing £108bn this year – that’s £295m a day, every day, with no end to the borrowing in sight.