Economic Nonsense: 24. Strong laws are needed to curb the activity of speculators
The villains of the piece change as the economy changes. At one time it was money-lenders, then corn merchants. In modern times speculators are up there with bankers in popular dislike. Speculators are commonly perceived as people who add nothing to a product, and often as people who profit from the hardships endured by others. They are seen to buy cheap in the hope that the price will rise, then sell at a profit without having added to or improved whatever it was they speculated on. In fact speculators often provide a useful service. They can take the burden of risk that others might find difficult to deal with. The speculator who buys a farmer's crop in advance gives the farmer the certainty of a price. Farming is an unpredictable activity, and the market price when the crop I harvested might be higher or lower than that agreed price. The speculator hopes it will be higher and takes the chance, but the farmer prefers the certainty of a known price that enables him to plan his affairs.
When speculators buy or sell commodities hoping to profit from price changes, they dampen some of the fluctuations. If they bet on a future shortage, they will buy now in the hope of selling for a higher price. If enough of them do it, the effect of buying now is to raise the price now, signalling to users to curtail their use, and to producers to bring out more supply. The same happens in reverse if they bet on a future glut by selling.
Businesses that sell to other countries face the uncertainty of not knowing what their goods might fetch in foreign currencies at the time of their delivery. They can smooth this by buying or selling currencies in advance from speculators prepared to take a punt on future changes in exchange rates.
The invisible service that speculation adds to goods is risk management. It is a valuable service, but because people cannot see it, they see it as money for nothing. Always there will be populist politicians prepared to trade on their resentment and propose tough laws to curb an essential service that helps markets to work more efficiently.
Economic Nonsense: 23. Too much economic effort is wasted on branding and advertising
People tend to say this because they cannot see any value added by branding and advertising, assuming therefore that the resources put into them must add to the costs of items without adding to their value. It is true that branding and advertising cost money, but not true that they have no value. Both convey information that is important to consumers. Advertising is used to make customers aware that the product or service is available, and to indicate how it differs from similar products or services available from rival producers. It is an essential part of competition, and it is competition which keeps producers anxious to keep quality high and prices low. Advertising can tell potential customers details of both price and quality making them able to choose between rival offerings. It can serve to remind customers that the product is out there and available.
Branding serves to reassure people about quality. Companies take good care to protect the reputation of their brands because they know that their ability to sell goods depends on how people perceive them. When analysts calculate the value or a company, they include a price they estimate to be the worth of its brands.
Brands do more that that. Companies use them to convey an image that people might want to be part of. The boy who buys Nike trainers acquires more than the shoes. He acquires the knowledge of their quality, and the feeling he gets by being seen to be one of the circle of Nike wearers. He might gain the thrill of being seen to be cool and stylish, a person of discrimination and taste. Scotch malt whisky is branded in India as an aspirational drink, so young Indians determined to make good can drink it and feel they are part of a group that is on the way up. Long after the whisky has gone, they might remember and savour that feeling. These intangibles are among the most durable of consumer goods, and it is branding and advertising that attach them to the product.
We're all in favour of the empowerment of women, however....
It is rather necessary to get things the right way around. This following quotation gets it the wrong way around:
There is a plethora of data which demonstrates that women’s economic participation grows economies, creates jobs and builds inclusive prosperity.
Actually, there is no evidence of that at all. What there is is a great deal of evidence of a correlation between an advancing economy and greater, leading to equal, rights for women. But as we all know, correlation and causation are not the same thing.
We maintain that the causation actually works the other way around. It is an advancing economy that leads to greater rights, leading to that equality, for women.
To take two very basic examples. The aim and pupose of life, assuming Darwin was right, is to have grandchildren. It wasn't that long ago (and is still true in the more benighted parts of the world) that a woman would need to have 6 to 8 children in order to be able to have some reasonable guarantee (absent some dreadful plague that carried them all off) that grandchildren would arrive. In turn this meant spending almost all of fertile adult life either pregnant or suckling: and even after that not a great deal of time for anything else. Once child mortality fell, as blessedly it has done for us and is doing for the more benighted, then the number of children necessary falls and so therefore does fertility. Freeing up that time for that greater equality and so on.
Secondly, consider a poor economy. It is, almost by definition, one reliant upon human and animal power. And women are, we've all noted, rather lacking in that muscle power as compared to men. Thus that traditional division of labour between the sexes. One sex does the heavy lifting out in the money economy, the other does the just as difficult, just as boring, but physically lighter work in the household. Once we move on from muscle power to machine that greater economic equality is actually possible: and it happens.
Telling women in a subsistence agricultural economy about empowerment is therefore a bit of a swiz. What is necessary is to get out of being a subsistence agricultural economy and the empowerment will naturally follow.
There's no doubt that there's a correlation between this capitalist/free market economic growth and women's empowerment. It's just that it's the growth that causes the empowerment, not the other way around.
All the more reason to support that economic growth of course, for we all most assuredly desire the empowerment.
Economic Nonsense: 22. Only by understanding the causes of poverty can we act to reduce it
This assertion is nonsense because it erroneously supposes that poverty has causes; in fact it is the lack of poverty that has causes. Poverty is, alas, the default condition. It is what happens when you do nothing. Anyone who wants to experience poverty has only to do nothing for a year. If they survive that long, they will be poor, poor because they have not done the things it takes to create wealth. Poverty has unfortunately been the lot of most of humankind for most of its existence. First by hunting and gathering, then by agriculture and animal husbandry, people have lived on the edge of survival, always striving to obtain their food supply. If they had a few bad days at hunting, or a bad harvest at farming, poverty would come, bringing malnutrition and death with it.
At some stage people developed trade, exchanging goods with other, sometimes distant peoples. They learned how to specialize and to generate wealth. With the Industrial Revolution our ability to do this multiplied enormously. Wealth was created on an unprecedented scale, and for most people in the richer countries extreme poverty has become a thing of the past.
Other nations that have followed the same route have achieved similar progress themselves. Only in the past few decades has wealth been multiplied in poorer countries. First Japan became rich, then the 'tiger' economies of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Following them have been countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, and most dramatically of all, the giants of India and China, lifting over a billion people out of poverty.
To move out of poverty takes trade, specialization, investment and infrastructure. It takes stable property rights, clear titles to land, efficient and honest courts, and governments that are neither predatory nor rapacious. These are the conditions under which people find space to improve their lot and to create wealth. Failure to achieve a reasonable measure of these will keep a country in poverty. Poverty is not caused by things people do, but by things they fail to do.
There's no tradeoff between 'quality' and quantity of kids
One of the key elements of human capital theory is the idea of a trade-off between having more, lower 'quality' kids and fewer higher 'quality' kids. That is: having more children and having less money to spend on their education, healthcare and so on, leaving them with less human capital (anything that makes their labour more valuable), or having fewer kids and having more money for all those things. You can have two high-achievers or ten low-achievers, the theory would go.
We know there was a demographic transition first in Northwest Europe then in all developed countries and even now some developing countries. This saw fertility crash down to where it stands now—only about replacement value (and much lower in some places like Japan and Russia). One theory holds that this explains part of the industrial revolution: parents have fewer kids but invest more in the ones they do have, leading to more smart tinkerers, scientists, skilled workers and so on—and faster growth and more wealth.
A new paper from two of my favourite economic historians, Gregory Clark of UC Davis, and his regular co-author Neil Cummins (I blogged on some of his other work earlier) of the LSE, tackles this question by looking at the mindblowingly productive surnames database they have already mined to effectively overturn the entirety of existing social mobility research.
The paper, entitled "The Child Quality-Quantity Tradeoff, England, 1750-1879: Is a Fundamental Component of the Economic Theory of Growth Missing?" (pdf, excerpts), fits into the usual Clark/Cummins mould. It's well-written, clear, filled with hugely interesting tidbits, and it overturns popular but flawed views. Here they argue that the Industrial Revolution and gigantic rise in wealth and living standards since the 1700s (or even the 1600s) cannot be down to a quality-quantity trade-off in kids because kids in bigger families had life outcomes indistinguishable from kids in smaller families.
A child quantity/quality tradeoff has been a central to economic theorizing about modern growth. Yet the evidence for this tradeoff is surprisingly limited. Measuring the tradeoff in the modern era is difficult because family size is chosen endogenously, and family size is negatively associated with unmeasured aspects of family “quality.” England 1770-1880 offers an opportunity to measure this tradeoff in the first modern economy. In this period there was little association between family sizes and family “quality”, and if anything this association was positive.
Also completed family size was largely randomly determined, varying in our sample from 1 to 18. We find no effect of family size on educational attainment, longevity, or child mortality. Child wealth at death declines with family size, but this effect disappears with grandchildren. The switch in England in the Industrial Revolution to faster growth rates thus seems to owe nothing to declining family size.
This isn't quite true for wealth, as they say; spreading inheritances among 10 siblings meant less for those 10 than if they had been five or two. But by the next generation (grandchildren of the original parents) this difference evaporated entirely. Isn't this a surprising fact when people claim that the children of the rich turn out rich because of the cash they inherit? It's just very very hard to pass wealth on through human capital investments (this seems to be one of the key truths of economics).
Most economics papers are not worth reading the whole way through but here I would definitely recommend it.
Economic Nonsense: 21. Inheritance tax is needed to prevent some having an unfair start in life
This question carries the assumption that life is some sort of race in which we are all struggling to outdo everyone else. Life is not like that. We are not racing against others because we all have different characters and different goals. There is a different finish line for each of us. Even the pace at which we choose to pursue our goals varies with the character of individuals. One widely-held aim of parents is to give their children a decent life, even a better life than they had themselves. Many put effort into achieving this; it seems to be a natural and widespread aim. When society prevents them from passing on their assets to their children after death, they often find other ways of achieving that aim. This can take the form of using influence to place their children in comfortable jobs. It can be done by transferring the assets while they are still alive. It can lead people to set up complex trust schemes beyond the reach of the taxman.
Inheritance Tax is taxing money that has already been taxed when it was earned. The provision parents worked to make for their children, paying tax as they did so, is now taxed again, removing part of their incentive to create wealth in the process. For many recipients, the bequest comes as a lump sum when they are already established and probably own their home. It is thus available for investment or to start a business. Taxing it greatly reduces these possibilities. The capital pools built up by a family business such as a shop, for example, can be dissipated on death by Inheritance Tax, with a consequent economic loss to society, a loss that impacts employees and customers.
People are not equal and cannot be made so. They are differently talented. Some are genetically equipped to develop athletic prowess if they work at it. For others it might be music or mathematics. The notion that 'fairness' requires they should all have equal chances sits ill with what life is actually like. We should not be trying to impose an equality that does not fit, but on extending to everyone the opportunity to better their lives.
Economic Nonsense: 20. Only government intervention can address the gender pay gap
There was a gender pay gap when the work required physical strength. This is because men are, on average, physically stronger than women. They are more capable of hauling a plough or heaving a sack of coal. When work meant physical labour for the most part, men were economically worth more. They were not intrinsically worth more, it was just that, on average, their labour could add more value than that of a woman. They were paid higher wages because of this. As physical labour has been made easier by machines, and desk jobs and service industries have become more significant employers than heavy industry, the labour of women has been more equal to that of men, and their pay has risen accordingly. In Britain today there is no significant gender pay gap. Women in their 20s earn a little more than their male counterparts.
There is a pay gap as they grow older, but this is a maternity pay gap, not a gender pay gap. Women who take time out of their careers to have and raise children earn less over the years than those who do not. This is for most of them an option they have chosen to exercise. Most do it because they want to, trading the higher salary that might otherwise result for the greater satisfaction and happiness engendered by starting a family. As they take time out of work, they mount the promotion ladder more slowly than their counterparts who make uninterrupted progress.
It is very important when looking at the statistics on this to compare like with like, that is to compare full-time employment with full-time employment. Some women prefer part time jobs because they offer better opportunities to achieve the balance between work and family that they seek. Part time jobs tend to pay less than full time employment, creating the erroneous impression that women are being paid less for the same type of work and the same amount of it. They have chosen a lifestyle that pays less because they prefer to have children be a part of it.
Adam Smith: also right about watches
In Book One of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes:
The diminution of price has . . . been most remarkable in those manufactures of which the materials are the coarse metals. A better movement of a watch, that about the middle of the last century could have been bought for twenty pounds, may now perhaps be had for twenty shillings.
He is looking at a particular industry to verify his claim that there had been sustained productivity movements over time. And it also functions as a nice argument in two economic history debates: whether sustained productivity improvements came first with the Industrial Revolution; and whether productivity was centred around a few key industries (coal, cotton) or was a more general phenom.
A new paper from Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, entitled "Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution" (pdf) looks into the values people gave to the police when their watches were stolen, and finds that prices trended down steadily, consistent with rising productivity. Indeed, assuming quality trended up too, the numbers they get are pretty close to Smith's.
To test whether watch prices had been falling steadily and steeply since the late seventeenth century we use the records of over 3,200 criminal trials at the Old Bailey court in London from 1685 to 1810. Owners of stolen goods gave the value of the items they had lost, and, because watches were frequently stolen, we can reliably track how their value changed through time.
Contemporaries divided watches into two categories, utilitarian silver or metal watches; and more expensive gold ones. Adjusting for inflation, the price of each type of watch falls steadily by 1.3 per cent per year, equivalent to a fall of 75 per cent over a century.
If we assume modest rises in the quality in silver watches, so that a watch at the 75th percentile in the 1710s was equivalent to one of median quality in the 1770s, we find an annual fall in real prices of 2 per cent or 87 per cent over a century, not far from what Adam Smith suggests.
Most of the cost of a silver watch was the labour involved in cutting, filing and assembling the parts, so we can gauge the rise of labour productivity in watch making by comparing how the price of a watch fell relative to nominal wages. During the period 1680–1810 real wages were roughly constant so this rise in labour productivity is similar to the fall in real prices of watches.
I find the whole area very interesting and fruitful. And, as ever, it's nice to see Smith's educated conjectures backed up by hard data.
Economic Nonsense: 19. Corporation tax is paid by businesses
It is always attractive to the political classes to impose taxes on business so that people can benefit from the spending this makes possible. Corporation Tax is one of these whose name suggests that it is paid by corporations. Many people suppose that this involves taking money from companies and transferring it via government into services for ordinary people. They suppose that corporations just shrug and accept the loss in profits this involves. This is a naïve myth. The tax levied by government is part of the price that people, not companies, pay. When you buy beer the price of your pint includes the tax the brewer has to pay to government. When you buy whisky it is even more, about 80% of the nominal price. The same is true for petrol and other fuels. VAT is included in what you are charged for goods and services.
The point is that Corporation Tax is paid by people, not by corporations. The tax that companies are charged forms part of their costs, and is reflected in the costs of producing their goods and services. Studies show that about three-fifths of the impact of Corporation Tax falls on the workers, reducing the wages they could otherwise be paid. Of the remainder, some falls on shareholders by way of reduced dividends, making it harder for the firm to attract capital to create more jobs. Some falls on customers, passed on to them in the form of higher prices, which lower demand for the firm's products.
Corporation tax thus acts to curb economic activity, hits growth, and makes people poorer than they would otherwise have been.
If firms tried to absorb the tax without passing it on in lower wages and increased prices, as some critics suggest they could, they would become less profitable and less attractive to investors, who would in turn respond by investing somewhere else instead.
Economic Nonsense: 18. Capitalism is disreputable because it is based on greed
This is a misinterpretation. Capitalism is based not on greed but on the legitimate aspiration of people to better their lives. Adam Smith spoke of "The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition," and of course it applies equally to women. It is this desire to better their circumstances that leads people to forego present consumption in order to achieve greater returns in the future. They invest in order to increase their wealth. That investment supplies funds to companies and provides the capital which they turn to advantage for the benefit of their investors. This is not greed; it is one of the most benign things that people have done. Far from showing greed to the detriment of others, it gains its returns by providing the goods and services that people want and need at prices they are prepared to pay. It is based not on selfish greed but on co-operation to mutual advantage. The investors make it possible for consumers to satisfy their wants, and they themselves make gains in the process.
Capitalism is benign because it is based on trade, and every act of trade is an exercise in co-operation in which people exchange what they have for what they prefer. Capitalism has to be social; that is how it works. Greed is selfish, not social.
The desire of people to better their lives is part of what it means to be human. We do not adapt to the environment as other animals do; we adapt the environment, and we do it in ways that are calculated to improve our lot. We seek greater security, greater command of the essentials of a decent and acceptable life. Capitalism is the most efficacious way we have yet found of achieving these objectives.