Chart of the week: Eurozone unemployment keeps rising

Summary: Euro area unemployment rose to an all-time high of 12.2% in April

What the chart shows: The chart shows unemployment as a percentage of the labour force in the 17 countries sharing the single currency

Why is the chart important: Unemployment is a lagging, not a leading indicator. This means that it is an effect, not a cause of economic developments. However, it is an important indicator that highlights the amount of spare capacity – slack – in an economy. Rising unemployment is also an indicator of below-par growth. The concern in the euro area is that the continued absence of growth and hence continued rising unemployment will exacerbate social tensions. The euro, allegedly an instrument for greater unity in Europe, is instead forcing the continent apart.

Happy 290th Birthday Adam Smith!

Had Adam Smith somehow survived until today, he would be 290 years old, having been born on 5th June 1723. The economist, now adorning the £20 note and credited with founding the modern discipline of economics (or political economy as it was known earlier) was originally renowned as a moral philosopher for his widely respected Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Go here to see Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (economists at George Mason University) explain why he was the greatest economist of all time.

Go here for Adam Smith Institute Director Dr. Eamonn Butler's The Condensed Wealth of Nations (and the Incredibly Condensed Theory of Moral Sentiments).

23 Things We're Telling You About Capitalism XXI

The 21 st thing is that a larger government actually makes economies more flexible: thus we should have larger governments in order to increase the necessary flexibility of the economy. And if the first part were true then the second part might indeed follow: only it isn't, at least not in the sense that Chang means it.

As part of his argument there's one thing that Chang does which is really very naughty indeed. He compares the growth rates of various European countries to that of the US. And he divides the growth rates into two periods: early 1950s to late 70s, late 70s to now (or what was now when he wrote a couple of years ago). He's right that the European economies, with their larger state sectors, grew more quickly than the US did in the earlier period. Hence the claim that larger government can mean more economic growth. Except, well, there's just one thing missing from this calculation: the Wermacht. As the perceptive will have noticed the German Army did have something of a European tour in the years immediately preceeding the early 50s. And the destruction of getting them to go home again was considerable: something which did not happen to the US at the time.

Just as we expect a developing country to have a higher growth rate than a developed one, given that copying is easier than being at the technological cutting edge, so we also expect an economy recovering from a total war being fought on its territory to grow faster than one which is not. So while the growth rates are true we cannot use them as proof that larger governments will create more economic growth.

The real problem with Chang's position though is that he confuses two entirely different things. He talks about employment inflexibility: the way in which it's difficult to get fired and thus the workers all feel secure. He also talks about the existence of a decent welfare state: unemployment pay, health care, retraining opportunities and so on. The problem is that he sees these as being equal: both increase the security felt by the workers and thus increase their flexibility. Which is untrue: they work in very different ways indeed.

It is true that a decent welfare state does lead to greater flexibility in the economy. The workers (and everyone else in fact) will be less stuck in their ways if they know that a change in the economy does not mean destitution. But job security works entirely the other way around: those who are too secure in their jobs won't accept any change at all. Thus reducing the necessary flexibility of the economy.

The reason that this becomes important is because Chang points to the Nordics as evidence of his assertion that you can still have decent economic growth with a large government sector: indeed that it increases growth to have a large such sector. But the very success of the Nordics argues against all of the other strictures about free markets and capitalism that he wants us to understand and adopt. For it is true that they do have large and generous welfare benefits: the unemployment pay, the retraining and so on. They also have decent economic growth. But what they don't have is the sort of regulation, planning and government intervention into the economy that Chang proposes. Look behind the tax numbers (necessary to pay for those benefits) in the economic freedom index and look instead at everything else. They have less regulation of markets than we do, greater economic freedom than even the US, less intervention into capitalism than just about anyone other than Hong Kong. Which is what makes the places work of course: as Scott Sumner is fond of pointing out, Denmark might well be the most classically liberal economy on the planet underneath that welfare state.

All of which I admit I find rather amusing. It is true that the Nordics are nice places to live, despite those crippling tax rates (almost all of which are tumbling down). It is indeed true that they've had very decent economic growth over the years and decades. It's entirely true that they have a lavish social insurance system. But those economies work precisely because they ignore, do absolutely the opposite of, everything else that Chang proposes a government should do to an economy. They're more free market and capitalist than even the US: which is why they work. Indeed, it's probably true to say that the only way in which you can have a social safety net like they have is if you allow capitalism and markets to let rip: how else can you possibly afford to pay for it all?

23 Things We're Telling You About Capitalism XX

For our twentieth outing we're told that equality of opportunity isn't enough: we must also have a deliberate and planned levelling of outcome in order to produce a truly just society. Chang manages to reach this position by confusing inequality with insufficiency: something not unknown over there to the left of us. But I'm afraid that this is an incorrect conclusion for the two things really are very different indeed.

Fortunately Chang is agreeable to the idea that entirely equal rewards for very different efforts doesn't actually work. There has to be, unlike Maoist China, some connection between the work put in and the relative rewards taken out. Which is true: but that's not quite right even there. For the truth is that we shouldn't really be caring at all about the efforts that is being put in. We are not Puritans, we do not think that work for its own sake is good. Indeed, I myself am very much an Anti-Puritan in this sense. I care not a tittle nor a jot how much work someone puts in to make their money: they're going to get some of mine according to the value that they produce for me. And that's also how it should be on the macro scale, in the entire economy. If, just as an example, Eddie Izzard finds it takes mere moments to think up a joke which has millions laughing for hours then good luck to him. It's not the effort put in that matters, it's the value he's created that does. Ditto with, say, the miner digging up tantalum to make our mobile phones. None of us gives a hoot whether it takes him 30 seconds or ten hours: the value is in the capacitors in the phones and that's what we're paying for.

That rewards should be commensurate with effort is a corollary of the fallacious labour theory of value. Rather than Adam Smith's much more correct theory of the value in consumption. With this correction we can move on. Now that we accept that it is the value produced for consumption by others which should determine income and reward, not the effort put into that production.

Where Chang does go wrong is in his insistence that true equality of opportunity isn't enough. He uses the example of a poor black child in South Africa: the schools are terrible, the teachers barely literate, in what sense can we say that he has equality of opportunity with his witer and richer fellow countrymen? He doesn't, of course. equality of opportunity would mean at least comparably good schools. Chang then compares this to the UK say, where a poor child won't have perhaps the same self-confidence as his richer contemporaries. Nor the same luxuries in his home life. All of which might well be true. Then comes the sleight of hand: this inequality of opportunity requires that parental incomes thus be equalised in some manner. Which is, I have to admit, an interesting use of the "it's all for the children" argument.

But it's an incorrect argument: equality of opportunity does not require equal incomes: it requires sufficient incomes. Sufficient to be clothed, fed, housed, warm and so on: sure, it needs all of those. But making sure that everyone has a sufficient income for their children to be provided with these necessary things is very different from insisting that incomes must be more equal. It might be a valid argument for some redistribution even, to ensure those sufficient incomes, but not for more equality of incomes as a specific goal. Imagine, just as a made up number, that it requires £5,000 a year to provide a child with a sufficiency of these things. If all children have that amount available for their care then we do have equality of opportunity in this education and life success sense: that other children have £40,000 a year lavished upon them does increase inequality but does not cause a reduction in opportunity.

That slide from having to reduce inequality to provide equality of opportunity just doesn't work I'm afraid. And given that we want reward to be tied to the value produced for others to consume, the evident and obvious truth that some do, with varying levels of effort, produce very much more value than others means that we're just entirely happy with inequality of reward: as long as we do have that equality of opportunity.

A question for market monetarists

Market monetarism, as propagated most prominently by Scott Sumner's (excellent) blog The Money Illusion, argues that recessions come about due to a collapse in demand. This is a problem because prices cannot adjust downwards quickly. Instead of a costly adjustment period we can simply boost demand by announcing a target and credibly committing to do the necessary quantitative easing (buying gilts to inject money in the system) to achieve that target.

This makes a lot of sense. Markets are finding it hard to clear; we boost AD to put the situation back where it was; now markets find it easier to clear. But lots of the best market monetarists, including Scott, Lars Christensen and many others, argue that right now what we need is more stimulus, because the economy is still in a bad shape, and it is still due to a shortfall of demand.

Last Tuesday Professor George Selgin delivered an extremely interesting lecture at the Adam Smith Institute making the case for productivity driven deflation. He said he agreed with the market monetarists that there is "bad deflation"—the sort that means nominal rigidities stop markets from clearing—but there is also "good deflation", from productivity improvements—and this is not associated with unemployment, stagnant or falling GDP, or any other cyclical issue.

After the talk I quizzed him on whether he agreed with the market monetarists that even though the ideal is a rule-based system, as opposed to the current discretionary way policy is set, right now the best discretionary policy is more easing, because that's probably what the ideal rule would require.

Prof. Selgin disagreed, arguing that we didn't need easier policy, and if you look at the graph above there's at least apparent reason to agree with him. Nominal GDP—aggregate demand—is not only well above its pre-recession peak in the US, but is growing at an apparently steady rate, roughly in line with its long-term trend. If the high unemployment in the US is down to insufficient demand combined with nominal rigidities then why hasn't a long period of higher-than-pre-crisis demand brought unemployment back down.

According to Selgin, policy uncertainty and pro-cyclical strictness in enforcing regulations (particularly risk-weighted lending rules that rate Greek bonds as zero but loans to small business at 100%) are holding firms back from investing their cash piles in capital and it is this that is stopping the robust recovery. He made the point very convincingly and despite trying hard to argue against it I couldn't find a good reason to disagree, except that I hadn't seen a good measure of the importance of these two factors so it was hard for me to compute how big their influence really was.

But many market monetarists—along with New Keynesians and most others—seem very sure that insufficient demand is the overriding factor holding back recovery, in the US as much as the EU, UK and Japan (where NGDP growth is further below trend). So my very genuine question is: upon what arguments and/or evidence do they rest this belief?

23 Things We're Telling You About Capitalism XIX

Our nineteenth thing is that of course planning's lovely: so much so that the collapse of communism isn't to be taken all that seriously., Yes, OK, so the central planning of the entire economy isn't all that good an idea (although Chang, almost ludicrously, believes that it did work in the early days. Someone should point out to him that the 5 year plans reduced economic growth from the NEP days: to say nothing about losing 8 million Ukrainian peasants by happenstance along the way.) but still there's a place for the very clever people in government to direct what everyone else thinks about making, buying and selling.

And even if that isn't true firms plan their activities, we've got lots of firms, so we must have lots of planning: and indeed we do have lots of planning.

The problem with this is that he's mixing and matching in a way that isn't really viable. Firms do indeed plan: but their plans are then subject to examination through competition with the plans of all the other firms. You know, that marketplace thing. Planning is thus preparatory to the test of whether the planning has worked. With government planning we don't then get that test: for governments don't then subject, or at least limit as much as they can, the exposure of their plans to said market. You can see this quite clearly in the current arguments about renewables and fracking for shale gas. The DECC has its plan, we'll all shiver in the gloom of solar powered (in England!) lights so therefore no one must be allowed to drill for shale which would upset that plan. Yes, I know they've said that it will be allowed to go ahead: but have you looked at the limits they've put on earthquakes? 0.5 on the Richter Scale was the last I saw: that's about the shock of the cat jumping off the bookcase next door*. A deliberate attempt to stifle an innovation that would ruin the government's plans. This is something that private sector companies don't get to do: which is why the results from private sector planning work out so much better. Someone else can indeed derail them, to the consumers' benefit, by having a different and better plan.

If you like, the market is where plans compete to see which is the best one. Government planning doesn't enter that competition so we never do find out quite how bad those government plans are. We just end up not quite as rich as we thought we were going to be or should be.

Chang also talks about how governments plan a lot of the R&D these days: or at least pay for it and thus presumably have some sort of plan about what they're going to spend it on. He also notes that the Soviets were pretty good at invention of spiffy things but this didn't seem to feed though into making said consumers any better off. He should read his William Baumol to see the connection between these points.

Baumol defines invention as the, well, invention of new and spiffy things. He makes the point that the Soviets did do satellites first. Indeed, either sort of system, planned or market, seems to be about the same at invention as the other. However, innovation is the getting of interesting things stemming from those inventions into the hands of consumers in a shape and form they desire. Either to do things with or to develop further to do other things with. And there the planned system is appalling and only market economies have ever really proven to be any good at all at it. The Soviets could make tanks alright but hot water tanks were beyond them (quite literally, the Soviet housing system didn't have them).

Which is really very much the same point as the one above. Markets provide the test to see what an invention might be used for, who is going to innovate with it. Further, given that we're talking also about capitalism here, that part of the system provides the incentive to risk the money to find out about one or other innovation. Which is why innovation is indeed driven forward on capitalist and market based societies and not in planned ones. OK, so governments pay for a lot of the R&D. So what? That's not the important part of the system: innovation is, not invention.

Which brings me back to hot water tanks. The Soviet system operated on district hot water heating plants. Hot water piped into the radiators and bathrooms of the whole urban area. From a planning point of view is looked quite efficient: but as it turned out it's not what the consumer actually wanted. As soon as the old system fell one of the most popular additions to a Russian apartment was an individual hot water system: the type of tank that the Soviets, the planners, didn't even know was wanted rather than the ones they knew how to build but which the market sniffed out almost immediately it was allowed to.

And that, in the end, is why planning is inferior to markets. Because planning will provide what the planners think the people want, or should want, or even what the planners think they should have. Markets allow the consumer to do the demanding of what they do want.

*Hyperbole alert. Update: I have now been told that it's actually 3,000 cats jumping off a 2 metre bookcase. No, really, it is, assuming perfectly inelastic cats. And it's also happening half a mile away.....

23 Things We're Telling You About Capitalism XVIII

Chang's eighteenth is the regulation can sometimes be good for business, even if business doesn't think so, therefore we should not rail against the regulation of business. This is certainly true to some extent: regulations against trading while insolvent are most certainly helpful to clearing out the deadwood of zombie enterprises from the economy, to the benefit of all other businesses. But that isn't of course, quite what Chang means. His meaning rather is that a benevolent government will stop business doing things that might be extremely worthwhile in the short term but will have bad long term effects. An example of his is that companies in poor countries should be barred from importing old technologies. As this could lock them into a sub-optimal development path, perhaps they should be forced into importing more expensive, more up to date, technology even at that short term cost.

This is an argument to which there are a number of answers. The first and most obvious being, well, what evidence do we have that any random group of bureaucrats or politicians are capable of recognising a technology, let alone an appropriate one? This isn't a skill that is notable in the currently advanced economies after all: vide any and all governmental computing projects. We'll not dwell too long on the way in which in currently poor countries what is an appropriate technology, or supplier of, tends to be influenced by how fine the new car of the licensing bureaucrat's mistress is either. Nor who paid for it. And a third objection would of course be what the hell's it got to do with the government what technology a private company installs?

But this is Chang's point of course: that it is indeed the government's business whether I use (in my current project) wet or dry gravitational separation and that there is indeed a bureaucrat or politician somewhere who knows the answer. I think not: and no doubt I am near blasphemous given that my basic project is to recreate a process that the Socialist Government of this country I'm in closed down in 1952.

What Chang's insistence is missing though is that we've only actually got one process that reveals to us whether a technology is appropriate or not: that's its interaction with the rest of the world through the free market. As before, we are uncertain about the future. We simply do not know what future conditions are going to be. The only method we have of dealing with that uncertainty is to try lots of things and see what does survive in the conditions that happen. Which really does mean that we cannot centrally plan what we do, detail which technologies who should use from the Ministeriums, simply because that will not allow enough variety.

There's a possibility of redemption in this comment of Chang's:

The story of GM teaches us some salutary lessons about the potential conflicts between corporate and national interests - what is good for a company, how important it may be, may not be good for the country.

This is most certainly true: but Chang then manages to get it entirely the wrong way around. Leave aside the now ritual complaint that we shouldn't be talking about the country, or the nation, but the economy, which is a very different thing. Chang avers that government planning and co-management of those large firms like GM will help them to survive in the long term. Which is entirely true, large firms can indeed co-manage government to aid in ensuring the survival of them. The way they do this is by manipulating the desire of the politicians and the bureaucrats to regulate. The burden of regulation is much easier for a large firm to carry than the same burden is for the small and snappy competitor chasing at its heels. Regulation thus becomes a wall keeping out that free market competition which is the gale behind capitalism's creative destruction.

And that's really what is wrong with the idea of extensive regulation of industry. That it is actually bad for the economy in and of itself as it protects the corporate dinosaurs who can manipulate it at the expense of new competitors and the consumers.

Another way of putting this: even if all of those who implemented regulation were the omniscient philosopher kings that Chang assumes inhabit our ministries (rather than the bumblers who do), regulation is still bad for the economy as a whole over time. For regulation protects the incumbents. And the important thing we know about this capitalist and market system is that advances come not from incumbents developing but from their being replaced. It is market entrance and exit that drives the system, not the development of the current market players. Thus a system of regulation such as Chang proposes, one that protects the incumbents at the expense of the newcomers is going to be bad for the economy in the longer term. Even, dare I say it, for the nation.

Chart of the week: Italian banking system balance sheet

Summary: The Italian banking system’s balance sheet is expanding – this could be good news

What the chart shows: The chart shows the change in the size of the consolidated balance sheet of Italian and German MFIs, set to an index of September 20081=100

Why is the chart important: The bulk of banks’ assets are loans to the public, corporate or household sectors. The bulk of their assets are deposits held by the non-bank private sector. These make up most of what we refer to as ‘money’ (cash is actually quite irrelevant). If banks’ balance sheets are shrinking, the amount of money (and credit) in the economy are probably also shrinking. This is bad news for economic growth. Expanding bank balance sheets usually mean the stock of money is growing and there is scope for more lending. Although the Italian economy is currently very weak, the expanding bank balance sheets therefore hold out at least the hope of a possible improvement.

Chart and comments provided by Stein Brothers (UK) www.steinbrothers.co.uk

23 Things We're Telling You About Capitalism XVII

In Thing 17 Chang tells us that the current preoccupation with extending access to higher education is grossly wrong. It might well be true that more people should enjoy three years at the gleaming spires (and in the modern world, the booze, babes or boys to choice) and we are indeed in a richer world so why not? We do expect to take some portion of our ever increasing wealth in more leisure and there's no reason at all why this shouldn't be three years at the start of working life rather than more days off during it or more years of senescence after it. But if we think that more of this higher education is going to make us all richer then we're simply wrong. In this argument Chang is absolutely and completely correct.

Even the blind Haplorrhini gets a banana sometimes.

As Chang points out, Tony Blair might have caught the zeitgeist with his mantra of "education, education, education", but there's absolutely no evidence at all to show that he was right. Countries with higher further education rates do not have richer economies, ones growing more strongly, ones with higher technologies. There just isn't, in the actual data, any correlation at all with wealth and university education. Indeed, there's the suggestion that going above the 10-15% of da youf going off to uni is wasteful: we just end up in a signalling game rather than actually teaching anyone anything that's useful in terms of working life.That 10-15% that Switzerland had until recently and we had historically.

Given that so very little of what we're ever actually taught at university is ever used in a job (other than teaching the next cohort through uni) this shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise.

We might also muse on the fact that Chang's book has been very popular among the Guardianista classes. Haven't seen any of them mentioning this point though. Funny that.

I would take issue with only one of his points.

"What really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation's ability to organise individuals into enterprises with high productivity".

I would replace national and nation there with economics and economy. For the nation state isn't actually the determinant of that ability to organise into such enterprises with high productivity. Indeed, one of the major points we can make about the UK is that absolutely it isn't.

London, The City at least, is organised into a global economy that connects Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and a number of other lesser international legal, financial and banking centres. London is also the richest of the EU statistical units (ie, not nation states, next level down). Cornwall, parts of the North, the bin ends of Wales and Scotland, are some of the poorest such regions in the EU. It is the ability of an economy to organise high productivity, not the ability of a nation to do so, which is important.

Perhaps you might think this a trivial distinction. But if we keep on getting all national about these things then we'll become both nationalist and statist. Which is very much the point we shouldn't be taking from this. If such high productivity can be organised across national boundaries, without national governments doing the planning or the regulating, then we know that the creation of those high productivity enterprises is not dependent upon the nation or the State, don't we? Nor even that "helping hand" of government.

Tax Freedom Day has finally arrived

As of June 2024, this is out of date. Please refer to Tax Freedom Day 2024 for the updated statistics.

Tax Freedom Day—the day when the average UK resident finishes paying George Osborne and begins putting money in her own pocket—is finally upon us.

After 150 days of sending all our money to the Treasury, we can earn for ourselves over the rest of the year.

The ASI's Director, Dr Eamonn Butler, says “Tax Freedom Day, which the Adam Smith Institute has been calculating for 25 years, is the plainest way to show what the tax burden really is. That is why the Treasury hates it. They of course want to conceal how much tax we pay, which is why they are so keen on stealth taxes.”

“But we put in every tax, including stealth taxes – income tax, national insurance, council tax, excise duties, air passenger taxes, fuel and vehicle taxes and all the rest – and show just how long the average person has to work to pay their share of them all. The stark truth is that this burden costs us all 150 days of hard labour every year. That's not how long a rich person has to work – it is the time the average person must labour for the tax collectors.”

“In the Middle Ages a serf only had to work four months of the year for the feudal landlord, whereas in modern Britain people have to toil five months for Osborne’s tax gatherers.”

“An increasing number of economists believe that Britain's taxes are too high and are choking off recovery. Some politicians say they need to keep taxes high in order to balance the government's books. But the trouble with governments is that they always spend everything they raise in tax – and then as much more as they can get away with through borrowing. Just as the rest of us have had to cut back, so should the government. The UK economy would be a lot healthier for it.”

Steve Baker, Conservative MP and member of the executive of the 1922 committee, adds: “Many congratulations to the Adam Smith Institute for once again revealing the shocking truth about taxes and overspending. This doomsday machine of deficit spending, debt and currency debasement will eventually blow up and there is no kindness in pretending otherwise. Politicians who are serious about the prosperity of our country and the wellbeing of the poorest within it should take note.”

For more information see our press release or our Tax Freedom Day page.