On why I just love the latest Oxfam report

You'll have seen the stories about this latest Oxfam report all over the place. The bottom 50% of the world has the same wealth as the top 85 people etc. This is presented as if it's an obviously bad thing and yet I cannot quite bring myself to agree with that conclusion. Here's the list of evidence they compile:

Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.

• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.

• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years. •

The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

OK, let us just, for the sake or argument, accept all of that as being true.

So, what else has been going on in the world over this same 30 odd years of excessive neoliberalism? Actually, no, let's just look at one other thing the Oxfam reports tates first:

Some economic inequality is essential to drive growth and progress, rewarding those with talent, hard earned skills, and the ambition to innovate and take entrepreneurial risks.

OK, so let's also take that as being true, just for the sake of argument. So, what has been the effect of the world moving in the direction Oxfam describes it as having done?

Well, we've had the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in hte history of our entire species, as I've noted here passim ad nauseam. We've also had global inequality falling even while in country inequality rises. So we could certainly make a case that we've got the right amount of inequality to drive that growth and progress that we actually desire.

For we do want the poor to become richer, don't we? We want hundreds of millions, nay billions, to climb up out of historical peasant destitution and into the bourgeois pleasures of three squares a day and a change of clothes? And if inequality is, per se, a problem then we'd like it to be reduced globally and not just within some arbitrary lines on the map that make up nations?

So, erm, it would appear that the very things that Oxfam are complaining about are producing exactly the goal that we at least desire and Oxfam should at least be considering desirable.

Which leaves us with only one question left. Just why are they complaining about this?

Gary Becker on bureaucracies

It's rather comforting to find one of your own heartlfelt prejudices backed up by a man with a Nobel, as I do here with Gary Becker's thoughts on the existence of bureaucracies:

Whether an organization is “efficient” cannot be defined in any absolute sense, but only relative to feasible alternatives. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that a large bureaucratic organization is efficient if it manages to thrive in a competitive sector; that is, a sector with easy entry of organizations with different decision-making structures. For if potential entrants were more efficient than the bureaucratic organizations, they would enter the sector and out-compete the bureaucracies.

Banks, oil companies, and manufacturers of large building equipment, to take a few examples, are in industries without major artificial restrictions on entry of competitors. Large bureaucratic firms, such as Caterpillar, JPMorgan Chase, and Exxon, persist profitably in these industries, sometimes alongside much smaller firms, like small banks, small equipment companies, and wildcat oil drillers that are generally more nimble. The persistence of these large bureaucratic companies suggests that their net advantages, taking into account their greater rigidity, are sufficiently great to enable them to survive the competition of smaller and more flexible firms. This is an application of the “Survival Principle” approach to efficiency developed decades ago by the Nobel economist George Stigler (see his article, “The Economies of Scale”, Journal of Law and Economics, October, 1958).

We might want to make sure that these firms are not using size in order to influence the regulatory environment, thereby gaining rents of course. But yes, this is a point I have made here several times, that as long as we have a market in organisations then we don't have to worry too much about which type of organisation is doing whatever job.

We can also extend this a little by thinking of Coase's "Theory of the Firm" where he points out that whether something is done by a firm, rather than a network of contracts (and by extension, by a firm, a bureaucracy or whatever) shouldn't particularly bother us. For, given the technology available at that time and place we'd expect competition to give us the most efficient method of performing that task. The organisational form therefore becomes a function of the technology available, market competition being the thing that adjusts such organisations.

Make sure we have ease of entry into a sector and we can pretty much leave the rest of it alone.

We're still left with the problem of why there's only one government at any time of course but that's a rather more intractable problem. Perhaps best solved by making sure that we've ease of exit from its clutches.

Bubbles and balloons

Quite a few people criticised the title of my last post — There was no British housing bubble — on the basis that, even if there was no overconstruction of housing (and thus no Austrian-style distortion in the structure of production), there was a bubble in the sense that prices rose rapidly, and so on.

But is this right? I suppose it depends on what you mean by a 'bubble'. As far as I can tell, there are at least three different meanings of the word 'bubble':

1. A speculative bubble, like the Beanie Baby craze. As Arnold Kling put it recently, "If investors who are buying the asset have estimates of the discounted present value of the income from that asset that imply a negative real return, then it is a bubble."
2. An Austrian-style bubble that distorts the real economy by incentivising production in an area where much of the demand is illusory (typically created by credit expansion, according to the Austrians).
3. A government-created rise in price above 'real' (or endogenous) factors.

Take the third kind of bubble, which I think is what we are currently seeing in the British housing market. A ban on the construction of new houses would cause the price of housing to rise significantly, for instance (and this isn't a million miles away from current government policy). Though the government policy is probably very harmful, given that it exists it is perfectly rational for markets to drive the price up, and that price should stay up for as long as the political factors dictate. The policy might be crazy, but the market's reaction isn't.

Let's take a look at historical UK house prices (in real terms).

Clearly, prices were above trend in the 2000s and then fell after 2008, but compared to the early 1990s prices are still extremely high. I'm willing to believe that quite a bit of that rise was a type-1 or type-2 bubble, but unless you think we're still in the midst of that kind of bubble (which could pop at any time), it's not the whole story and doesn't even seem to be most of the story. (As some commenters have pointed out, some aspects of this price increase were likely attributable to foolish financial wizardry, probably driven by regulation.)

More likely, that rise in house prices since the 1990s, since it is still high, is a type-3 bubble — a sensible reaction by markets to foolish government policies constraining the construction of new homes. I can't explain why this rise only took place in the 1990s (population growth and decreases in household sizes may explain this, but I don't know), but unless you're saying that right now markets are wrong and you know better, that rise doesn't seem like the sort of unsustainable bubble that leads to sudden crashes.

Type-3 bubbles are different to type-1 and -2 bubbles in that they do not run the risk of sudden crashes. A type-3 bubble is created by government fiat and it can only be undone by government fiat. This difference is sufficiently great that I suggest a new term for type-3 bubbles: "balloons". A term like that might communicate the fact that prices have been blown up by human agency and, unlike bubbles, require an active popping or disinflating before they go away.

There was no British housing bubble

Marcus Nunes graphed the Housing Stock to Population ratio in the US recently, showing that housing reached something like a steady-state in the US from the mid-1980s onwards. As Philip Stephens says, “The constructing in US housing was exactly what was needed to maintain the housing-population ratio in the face of increased population growth. You cannot have an “unsustainable boom” without oversupply.”

This is what the UK looked like over this period (my thanks to Daniel Knowles for the data):

The long-term trend (black dotted line) is attributable to the tendency in recent decades to smaller households, but what’s interesting is that, not only was there no spike in the run-up to 2008, the growth of dwellings over population actually fell below the trend. This is not what we would expect to see if there had been a bubble in housing production.

Dwellings data is a little bit unreliable, though – splitting a house into two flats creates an extra dwelling – so it might be better to look at the amount of new houses that were actually built. Here’s a chart showing the number of residential construction permits granted over the past forty years:

And here’s the ratio of new residential construction permits over population across the same period:

These charts show that housing construction was actually well below historical levels in the 1990s and 2000s, both in absolute terms and relative to population. It is difficult to see how someone could claim that the 2008 bust was caused by too many resources flowing toward housing and subsequently needing time to reallocate if there was no bubble in housing to begin with.

What this suggests is that the Austrian story about the crisis may be wrong in the UK (and, if Nunes’s graphs are right, the US as well). The Hayek-Mises story of boom and bust is not just about rises in the price of housing: it is about malinvestments, or distortions to the structure of production, that come about when relative prices are distorted by credit expansion.

What did cause the crisis? Jeffrey Friedman has shown that bank regulation (most notably, the Basel accords) was one of the major factors that led to the financial crisis, and Robert Hetzel has outlined a convincing theory that central bankers’ tightening of monetary policy in early-to-mid 2008 was the overriding cause of the world’s economic collapse. There is also the possibility that financial investment in the housing market was a simple error.

I was once convinced that the Mises-Hayek story about the boom and bust was true, but the evidence does not seem to bear this out.

Update: A lot of people seem to be implying that Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) means: Easy money -> high prices ("bubble") -> bubble burst, people lose money. This is incorrect. ABCT relies on distortions to the structure of production (that is, the "real" economy) which have to be liquidated over a period of time following the point at which it becomes clear that they are not good investments. If a 'bubble' just meant that people had lost money it would not cause a long-running recession, it would just mean that overnight a lot of people had lost money (like a stock market crash). The reason the recession takes time according to the ABCT is that resources have been invested in a sector where price signals take a considerable amount of time to adjust after a credit-induced malinvestment bubble and so it takes a while for people to determine which investments are 'mal'.

In short: There may have been a price bubble in British housing market, but there was not the production bubble that ABCT predicts.

PS: I am interested in seeing these data for countries like Ireland and Spain, where the Austrian story may be more valid. It is also possible, as Anton Howes has pointed out, that a regional breakdown would show that there were bubble-like expansions in housing supply in certain parts of the UK, which the country-wide figures hide. If you have these data please let me know, either in the comments or by emailing me at sam@old.adamsmith.org.

Comment: Minimum wage increase will hurt the poor

Commenting on the Chancellor's backing for an above-inflation rise in the National Minimum Wage, the Adam Smith Institute's Research Director Sam Bowman said:

"A minimum wage increase will hurt the poor, particularly young people and vulnerable groups like migrant workers. Most of the empirical economic evidence has found that increases in the minimum wage cause increases in unemployment. The evidence also suggests that minimum wage increases lead to slower job creation for low-skilled workers.

"Minimum wage work is usually a stepping-stone to something better where employees can acquire human capital. There is also evidence to suggest that minimum wages stop young workers from acquiring the skills that allow them to get better jobs in the long run, so today’s increase could have far-reaching harmful effects by keeping people in low-paid jobs.

"One way to actually help low-income workers would be to raise the income tax and National Insurance threshold to the current minimum wage level, which would give these workers a take-home pay equivalent to a minimum wage. That would require spending cuts or tax rises elsewhere, but it would be a responsible and effective way to improve the lot of the working poor that would carry none of the unemployment risks that this minimum wage increase does – in fact, it would create jobs.

"Increasing the minimum wage runs an indefensibly high risk of creating more unemployment and harming the people that supporters of the increase want to help. Even if the immediate impact is not large, this increase will lead to a long-run decline in job creation and standards for Britain's poorest workers. It will hurt the very people it is supposed to help."

For further comment please email media@old.adamsmith.org.

Low rates doesn't mean low rates

I got called up last Wednesday to ask if anyone at the Adam Smith Institute would go on the Daily Politics to explain why the Bank of England should raise its base rate (not exactly in those words). The producer was familiar with common free market ideas that argue that artificially low interest rates are blowing up a housing bubble which will later burst. I had to try to explain to the producer why I both agree and disagree with these sentiments: low interest rates do underlie economic limbo, but raising the base rate is not a solution and may produce yet lower real interest rates where it matters—throughout the economy.

The problem comes from the dual use, in the popular economic press, and even by top economists, of the term "interest rates" to mean both the stance of monetary policy and the cost of borrowing. This is understandable because during the Great Moderation of 1992-2008 all the world's most important macroeconomic authorities attempted to control the overall economy through adjusting one or a small number of key interest rates to achieve a consumer price inflation (CPI) target. At the same time, we are familiar with interest rates through our normal life: on loans, mortgages, savings, credit cards and so on. But acting as though the Bank of England directly controls these rates when it adjusts policy seriously obfuscates how the macroeconomy works and contributes to a lot of sloppy thinking.

Whereas the Federal Reserve has always used a form of quantitative easing (QE) to adjust a market interest rate—the Federal Funds Rate—the Bank of England has typically adjusted its base rate, which it calls Bank Rate, instead (updated). Bank Rate is the flat (nominal) interest rate it charges commercial banks for short term funding, and pays on their excess reserves. This sets a lower bound on overnight commercial lending, since it is always an option to lend or borrow money at Bank Rate, and therefore it is included in some market contracts, like tracker variable rate mortgages. The current UK base rate is 0.5%, a nominal number which translates to a negative real rate, but secured loans charge more like 3% in nominal terms, unsecured loans 8%, and credit cards 10%.

So we've established that the Bank of England sets a lower bound on interest rates with its Bank Rate. And we've also established that Bank Rate affects some other rates directly, principally tracker mortgages. We might also expect it to affect other rates in the economy—for example a cut will "ripple out" through the economy, because all other things being equal, it is now cheaper for banks to borrow from the BoE and they will thus be more willing to do so. Economists call this the liquidity effect. They will thus be more willing to lend cheaply and less willing to borrow from savers. So one effect of lowering the Bank Rate is to directly lower some rates, put a lower lower bound on others, and make others cheaper.

However there is an opposed reaction. Lowering Bank Rate doesn't just make loans cheaper, but it increases demand. It does so by injecting extra money into the economy (from the extra loans), but more importantly by signalling to markets that it intends demand to grow faster and that it is willing to take measures (such as further lowering Bank Rate or boosting the money supply through a QE programme) to make sure this happens. This is why stock markets react so strongly to a (policy) interest rate cut—all businesses are worth a bit more because they expect higher total revenues over their future.

But if firms expect higher demand in the future they will in turn demand more investment funds to put into projects to service that demand. This means that cutting the BoE's base rate puts pressure on effective market interest rates in both directions. It is an empirical question which direction the overall effect goes in—but this means that the simple coincidence of low real effective interest rates out in the economy and a low, by historical terms, Bank Rate, shows nothing. It could be that the best way to raise interest rates out there in the economy is to cut the Bank's base rate, or, since it can't go much further now, print money to raise inflation (which would ceteris paribus cut the rate in real terms). Look at the graph above for an illustration of how the Fed's changes in their QE programme (the red line) and their Federal Funds rate (the dark blue line) don't produce big shifts in (real) market interest rates like corporate bond returns and 30-year mortgages.

So my view on low interest rates is complicated. I think the Bank should get out of the business of setting rates altogether, and vary the size of the monetary base to control nominal income in the economy. But if the Bank is going to use rates as its key policy tool, it shouldn't raise them when a recovery hasn't quite taken hold—it's uncertain whether it'll raise market interest rates, but it will certainly choke off the demand we need for solid growth.

Bank bonuses and bogus arguments

Here I go again, defending bankers. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Well, it's more than a hobby than a job because the banks don't even pay me to do it.

It's bonus time once more, that time of year when the unpleasant politics of envy erupts after the peace and goodwill of the holiday season. This time, RBS wants to pay bonuses more than 200% of staff salaries. That of course requires the permission of its shareholders – principally, the UK Government in the form of Chancellor George Osborne. Such bonuses are "inappropriate" say many political critics, particularly when "ordinary families are struggling with the cost of living."

But bonuses are a very sensible way to pay people in a volatile sector. In an economy that is growing, as the UK's is now, banking business is great. There are company mergers and acquisitions to do, investments to be placed, and all the rest. In a stuttering economy, business is disastrous. So banks have a system that rewards key people on the basis of results. That is a lot better than scrapping bonuses, raising salaries instead (which is what would happen), and then having to lay people off (and lose their expertise) where you hit a rough patch. With a bonus system, you just pay them less and they hang on, in the hope and expectation that things will improve.

It should not be up to MPs – and MEPs in Brussels, Strasbourg, or wherever they have decanted to this week – to decide how much bankers should be paid. They are hardly icons of virtue on the pay and expenses front themselves. Most of them don't even understand the sector. If bonus caps are to "reduce risk taking", then why did MEPs cap fund managers, who don't take anything like the risks that bankers do.

Bank bonuses are already heavily restricted. Rules introduced in 2010 cut the amount that could be paid in cash, and spread the pay-out time over 3-5 years. So people today get more of their bonus in shares - which means that the long-term health of their company is dearer to their hearts than any one-off "quick profit."

Let us not forget that after New York, London is the world's leading services centre. The sector brings in about £60bn in tax every year, more than 10% of the government's entire budget. We need it to succeed, and retain talent – which means paying them world market rates. That's what we do with footballers – John Terry is paid £6.7m a year, Wayne Rooney is on £15.1m and Steven Gerrard picks up £7.2m and got an MBE too. But football clubs are very small businesses compared to banks. Though a world footballing brand, Manchester United's capitalization is just £2.47bn; the market capitalization of RBS is seventeen times bigger, at £41.8bn. Should we be surprised if star performers in RBS are paid seventeen times what Rooney earns? But in fact we baulk when they are paid fifteen times less.

There is a problem with banking, but it is not bonuses. It is the lack of competition. The main UK banks can literally be counted on one hand: HSBC, Lloyds (which includes Bank of Scotland), RBS (which inlcudes NatWest), Barclays and Standard Chartered - though the latter operates mainly overseas. Lack of competition means customers get a worse service at a higher price, and providers can indeed overpay themselves. In a competitive market, anyone over-rewarding their staff would go out of business. So let's not try to guess what the "right" remuneration is for bankers. Let's open the sector to competition – which means scaling back the regulation on new entrants – and let the market do the job for us.

In a gift economy we'll all still be getting richer even as GDP stays the same

It's a fairly standard observation these days that economic growth isn't as fast today as it was in the decades immediately post WWII. Quite why is always a bit of a puzzle: obviously, immediately post WWII Europe was nowhere near the technology limit so catch up growth was possible. And as China is showing us today catch up growth can indeed be faster than when you are trying to figure out how to invent the new stuff not just copy the old. There are myriad other speculations as to cause as well but one that is obviously in part responsible is that we've had a rise in the non-payment part of the economy more recently. All that open source and collaborative stuff being done in software for example.

This is an interesting paper that tries to put some numbers on the value of just one of those projects, the Apache server suite:

Is that a lot of Apache? Standard principles of GDP measurement compare a free good to the pricing for its closest substitute, which comes from Microsoft’s server products. Using this approach, Frank and I estimate that use of Apache potentially accounts for somewhere between $2 billion and $12 billion in the United States. Apache’s advanced functionality provides reasons to think the estimate tends toward the higher number, but, as yet, standard methods can’t settle on a single number. Is that a lot? That equates to between 1.3 percent and 8.7 percent of the stock of prepackaged software in private fixed investment in the United States. That looks like a lot to me, especially for one piece of software.

In comparison to a $15 trillion economy that's not much: but it is indeed something all the same. And there are many such projects as well where we're all getting good use out of things that we're not having to pay for.

And those numbers are also a gross underestimate. For what they've done is valued Apache at what it would cost to get the same services from the paid for alternative (one of Microsoft's bits of kit). But of course that alternative is made cheaper by the fact that there is this free competition to it. And that's not all either: we're still grossly undervaluing the contribution being made.

For the true addition to the wealth of nations is in fact the use value that we get out of whatever it is: as with Smith's definition of the labour theory of value of course. And I think that's where our economic statistics are misleading us: I think there's far more wealth being enjoyed these days than is actually being counted in the cash transactions that flow around the economy. Apache, MySQL, Google's search engine, these are part of it yes. But think of the fall in telecoms prices in recent decades: the effect of these is that the economy is shrinking but does anyone really think that we are poorer as a result of being able to make a transatlantic phone call without requiring a second mortgage?

As so often occurs to me I think at least part of what we're observing is a function of our not measuring what's happening very well.

Adam Smith and the solution to the Easterlin Paradox

We have yet another attempt to solve the Easterlin Paradox. This one telling us that actually, it's not just that everyone getting richer doesn't make us all more happy, it's that everyone getting richer makes us all more unhappy. It's really not something that I find all that persuasive.

Those with long memories will recall that I have touched upon this subject before. And I've claimed that the mistake that is being made here is that people are looking at levels of incomes. Whereas, given what we know of human psychology (things like loss aversion and so on) what we actually ought to be looking at is changes in incomes. Rising incomes make people happier: falling incomes make them less happy. The link to levels of wealth is simply that the currently rich countries have had rising incomes for a couple of centuries or so. What's slightly confused me as I make this point is that I can't find anyone else making it and I didn't understand why.

Until, of course, I opened the good book for a bit of a reread:

It deserves to be remarked, perhaps, that it is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.

Adam Smith got there a couple of centuries before either I or Easterlin. It is the changes in incomes that produce the happiness, not the levels.

Ah well, worth being reminded in 2014, as I have been in previous years, that I am capable of coming up with good ideas just as I am of coming up with original ones. We're still on the hunt for that one that is both of them at the same time of course.

Thomas Piketty's latest bright idea

You're going to hear a great deal about Thomas Piketty's latest bright idea in this coming year. And remember when you do that I pointed out this inconvenient fact first. If he's right then the entire story we've been told about inequality reductions and changes over the past century is wrong. And there's something very important about that story being wrong.

Piketty's basic claim is that he's found the two golden rules that explain wealth inequality (and do note that it is wealth, not income, that he's talking about). They are:

The wars and depressions between 1914 and 1950 dragged the wealthy back to earth. Wars brought physical destruction of capital, nationalisation, taxation and inflation, while the Great Depression destroyed fortunes through capital losses and bankruptcy. Yet capital has been rebuilt, and the owners of capital have prospered once more. From the 1970s the ratio of wealth to income has grown along with income inequality, and levels of wealth concentration are approaching those of the pre-war era.

Mr Piketty describes these trends through what he calls two “fundamental laws of capitalism”. The first explains variations in capital’s share of income (as opposed to the share going to wages). It is a simple accounting identity: at all times, capital’s share is equal to the rate of return on capital multiplied by the total stock of wealth as a share of GDP. The rate of return is the sum of all income flowing to capital—rents, dividends and profits—as a percentage of the value of all capital.

The second law is more a rough rule of thumb: over long periods and under the right circumstances the stock of capital, as a percentage of national income, should approach the ratio of the national-savings rate to the economic growth rate. With a savings rate of 8% (roughly that of the American economy) and GDP growth of 2%, wealth should rise to 400% of annual output, for example, while a drop in long-run growth to 1% would push up expected wealth to 800% of GDP. Whether this is a “law” or not, the important point is that a lower growth rate is conducive to higher concentrations of wealth.

In Mr Piketty’s narrative, rapid growth—from large productivity gains or a growing population—is a force for economic convergence. Prior wealth casts less of an economic and political shadow over the new income generated each year. And population growth is a critical component of economic growth, accounting for about half of average global GDP growth between 1700 and 2012. America’s breakneck population and GDP growth in the 19th century eroded the power of old fortunes while throwing up a steady supply of new ones.

Leave aside for a moment whether these things are true (I have some doubts: Piketty has a habit of not looking at consumption inequality which is the thing we might actually be worried about). Just assume that they are for a moment.

Our first reaction therefore would be that if we desire less inequality then we must have faster growth. We must therefore have a supply side revolution, tearing down much of the bureaucratic state that limits said growth. Excellent.

But perhaps people don't want to do that: so, what could we do about this rising inequality? Well, we'll get the usual litany, won't we? Strengthen unions, redistribute more, higher inheritance taxation and so on. The argument will be that after all, as the usual story goes, these are the things that reduced wealth inequality before so they will again.

Ah, but that story doesn't work. For look at what Piketty is actually saying: the reduction in inequality wasn't as a result of unions, taxation, minimum wages or redistribution. It was simply that growth was faster than the increase in old wealth. So we cannot point to those supposedly tried and trusted methods of reducing inequality. For the very research that tells us that inequality is going to keep rising is the very same research that tells us that those methods didn't reduce it last time around.

This obvious point is one that's not going to register with anyone at all unfortunately. Even though it is also true as well as being obvious. Everyone to the left of us (which is, to be fair, quite a large number of people) is going to entirely ignore this uncomfortable point. Their very proof that wealth inequality is going to increase will also be the very proof that the standard prescriptions for reducing wealth inequality don't work.