Sunday, April 29, 2018

Data Workers of the World Unite

Data Workers of the World Unite

 

Editors' note: In advance of next week's panel discussion "Radical Markets and the Captured Economy" at the Stigler Center, we offer this extract from chapter 5 of Weyl and Posner's Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

 

Many aspects of the story we have told [in previous chapters] are unique to present technology and the norms that have developed around the Internet. However, the idea that monopsonistic power created by technologies with strong economies of scale would lead to undercompensated labor and thus retard both economic development and equality is not a new one. It is one of the classic themes of economic history and the central idea of the most famous economic historian of them all, Karl Marx.

 

A central intellectual aim of Marx's 1867 first volume of Das Kapital was to explain why the wealth and well-being of proletarians (workers without property) had, as of the mid-nineteenth century, improved so little since the end of feudalism.1) Marx claimed to identify a necessary tendency of capitalists to "exploit" workers by holding their wages below the value they generated. Marx argued that these labor practices created what his collaborator Friedrich Engels called a "reserve army of the labor" (that is, a class of unemployed) whose even more squalid condition would persuade workers to do anything to maintain their jobs.2)

 

As economist John Roemer showed, Marx's conclusions are extremely unlikely to prevail if employers compete for workers.3) However, they are exactly what one would anticipate in a world where capitalists conspired with each other, or had sufficient unilateral power, to hold down wages. Beatrice and Sydney Webb, a dynamic pair of late nineteenth-century British Radicals, advocated collective bargaining by workers, arguing that it would make production more efficient by raising wages above the levels that drove workers out of the labor force.4) John Kenneth Galbraith, the mid-twentieth-century American economist […], hailed unions as a necessary form of "countervailing power" required to balance the power of monopsonists.5)

 

This view has been partly vindicated by the research of subsequent economists. Economic historian Robert C. Allen shows that prior to the emergence of unions, British wages during the early process of industrialization hardly advanced at all despite improvements in technology.6) Once unions managed to counter the monopsony power of British industrialists, not only did wages quickly increase, but the pace of overall productivity radically accelerated. Economists David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, and Suresh Naidu believe that the breaking of monopsony power through labor unions, government labor regulation, minimum wages, and other reforms was critical to the further acceleration of productivity.7) Beyond their role in collective bargaining, unions served other functions that helped support the "Fordist" mode of assembly line–based production that prevailed in the twentieth century: they screened and guaranteed the quality of the work produced by their workers and helped them learn the skills required by a rapidly changing work environment.

 

To be sure, many other things were happening at the same time, making it difficult to trace clear lines of historical causation. Unions also brought many inefficiencies and rigidities, caused strikes, and may themselves have accumulated significant market power. The hostility they attracted and the extent to which they became inflexible and outmoded has led to their decline in the last several decades.

 

Yet even as unions have declined, some of the conditions we describe above have important resemblance to the conditions that helped stimulate their growth and benefits. The monopsony power of siren servers, we have argued, may be holding down wages for data laborers at 0 (or more precisely at the value of the services and entertainment these laborers derive from using digital services). This may suppress the productivity of the digital economy by reducing the quality and quantity of data and contribute to the maldistribution of gains from AI technologies. An individual data worker lacks bargaining power, so she cannot credibly threaten to withdraw her data from Facebook or Google unless she receives a fair reward.

 

Furthermore, to realize the gains from data as labor, data workers will need some organization to vet them, ensure they provide quality data, and help them navigate the complexities of digital systems without overburdening their time. These triple roles, of collective bargaining, quality certification, and career development, are exactly the roles unions played during the Industrial Age.

 

[The] triple roles, of collective bargaining, quality certification, and career development, are exactly the roles unions played during the Industrial Age. It may be time for "data workers of the world (to) unite" into a "data labor movement."

It may be time for "data workers of the world (to) unite" into a "data labor movement."8) A striking feature of the data labor market is that it is an international market, one that is almost completely unaffected by borders and government regulation. Once people awaken to their role as data laborers—obtain a "class consciousness," if you will—organizations (sort of like unions) may emerge to supply data laborers with the means to engage in collective action. Imagine, for example, a data labor union that solicited members—the data laborers—by promising them higher payments for their data. Once the union obtained a critical mass, it could approach Facebook or Google and threaten a "strike" (also, effectively, a boycott because data laborers are simultaneously consumers of Facebook's and Google's services). The technical details would be complex, but we can imagine a range of possible approaches.

 

The union could simply call on its members to stop using Facebook or Google for a day if the companies do not negotiate. A more complicated approach could involve routing data labor through platforms set up by the union, so that the union could disrupt the supply of data if and when the Internet companies on the other side refused to pay reasonable wages. A Facebook user would reach her Facebook account through the union's platform, so that the union could enforce collective action among users by shutting down the account or providing limited access to the account for the duration of the strike. At present, an Internet Service Provider could organize such an action, though it would need to structure itself as a labor union to avoid antitrust charges.

 

The very network effects that entrench digital monopolies would work against them in this scenario: it would be embarrassing to break a Facebook strike if all your friends were striking on the same day.

It seems to us that these unions could be effective. Unlike traditional unions, they combine labor stoppages and consumer boycotts—because, as noted, data laborers are simultaneously consumers. During a strike, Facebook would lose not only access to data (on the labor side) but access to ad revenues (on the consumer side). It's as if autoworkers could pressure GM or Ford not only by stopping production but also by refusing to purchase cars. Also unlike traditional unions, which must struggle to maintain solidarity during strikes, the data unions could enforce the "picket line" electronically. Furthermore, the very network effects that entrench digital monopolies would work against them in this scenario: it would be embarrassing to break a Facebook strike if all your friends were striking on the same day.

 

Finally, a data labor union might help foster digital competition by breaking the stranglehold on data of a few of the most powerful siren servers. The unions might find it optimal to share data between many different digital companies, rather than causing it to accumulate in one place. Of course, there are downsides as well—data unions, like traditional unions, might abuse their authority. However, we believe that at the present time, in light of the absence of any market—Radical or otherwise—in data labor, the gains exceed the losses.

 

Eric A. Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. His many books include The Twilight of Human Rights Law and Climate Change Justice (Princeton).

 

E. Glen Weyl is principal researcher at Microsoft and visiting senior research scholar in economics and law at Yale University.

 

Disclaimer: The ProMarket blog is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Blog Policy.  



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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Krugman: Trumps war on the poor

Trump's War on the Poor

Paul Krugman


America hasn't always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like the collection of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price, Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default assumption should be that there's something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team.

Still, we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are their policy decisions. Ben Carson's insistence on spending taxpayer funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.

And this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich; this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.'s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.

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That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care.

Even the administration's de facto financial deregulation — its systematic gutting of consumer financial protection — should be seen largely as an attack on the least well off, since poor families and less educated workers are the most likely victims of exploitative bankers.

The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why.

Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it's hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts. Moreover, there's good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don't: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance.

For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn't just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance.

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The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.

What about the idea that anti-poverty programs create a "poverty trap," reducing the incentive for people to work their way to a better life? That's a very popular notion on the right. But the reality is that there are very few Americans getting food stampsor Medicaid who could and should be working but aren't.

It's true that some calculations indicate that means-tested programs — programs available only to those with sufficiently low incomes — can create disincentives for working and earning. But the evidence suggests that while safety net programs have some adverse effect on incentives, it's a much smaller effect than many policymakers believe.

Furthermore, we could reduce those disincentives by making programs more generous, not less — providing more aid to the near-poor rather than less aid to the poor. Somehow, conservatives never seem to consider that option.

So what's really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren't punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times reported, "Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a term he regards as derogatory." And I guess you can see where that comes from. After all, he's a self-made man who can't attribute any of his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.

Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?--
John Case
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CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST:Inequality in US Life Expectancy

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Blog: CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST
Post: Inequality in US Life Expectancy
Link: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2018/04/inequality-in-us-life-expectancy.html

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Trump Plan to Raise Minimum Rents Would Put Nearly a Million Children at Risk of Homelessness [feedly]

Trump Plan to Raise Minimum Rents Would Put Nearly a Million Children at Risk of Homelessness
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-plan-to-raise-minimum-rents-would-put-nearly-a-million-children-at-risk-of-homelessness-0


Under President Trump's proposal to raise rents by up to $1,800 a year on the poorest households receiving federal rental assistance — virtually all of which have annual incomes of less than $7,000 — roughly 1.7 million people (including nearly 1 million children) would face eviction, hardship, and homelessness.

The proposal would raise rents on people receiving rental assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in several different ways. One is by raising the "minimum rent" for assisted households. Currently, assisted households generally must pay 30 percent of their income for rent. Public housing agencies, however, may require households to pay a minimum rent of up to $50 per month, and households in Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance pay a minimum rent of $25 per month — even if that exceeds 30 percent of their income. The Trump proposal would raise the monthly minimum rent for any household with an adult younger than 65 who is not considered disabled to at least $152 and make it mandatory. That would triple the rent for affected households now paying a $50 minimum. (The proposal would set the minimum rent at $50 for households where all members are 65 or older or have a disability, including in the supportive housing programs for the elderly and people with disabilities, which now have no minimum rent.)

The $152 minimum rent proposal would affect only the poorest people receiving federal rental assistance, raising rents on some 1.7 million people, including 970,000 children. The number of children in severe poverty has grown substantially since the mid-90s, in part because the safety net's erosion for families with children has left many such families with little or no income when they're jobless. Many of the other affected adults have been homeless or may have physical or mental health conditions, or limited education, that make it difficult to find or sustain employment.

The typical affected household is a mother with two children with an annual income of $2,400 — just $200 per month. After paying rent under this proposal, the family would have only $48 for necessities like clothing, personal care items, diapers, or school supplies, as well as food or medical needs that aren't met by other assistance.

87 Percent of People Affected by Trump Minimum Rent Proposal Are in Families with Children

 

While affected families may be eligible for hardship exemptions from having to pay the higher minimum rent, very few assisted families receive such exemptions in practice. Households have to request an exemption, but eligible households may not know that exemptions are available or how to apply if the housing agency doesn't adequately publicize the policy. There's little reason to expect that to change under a higher minimum rent policy, as HUD has not complied with a 2016 congressional directive to certify that existing protections are being enforced.

A $152 mandatory minimum rent would put the lowest-income families and individuals at risk of eviction and even homelessness, which is particularly harmful to children. Rental assistance programs are designed to help low-income families rent decent housing at an affordable cost. This proposal does the exact opposite by raising the rent on the most vulnerable HUD-assisted households.



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Recovery Radio:Recovery Radio -- Progress IS POSSIBLE!

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Recovery is POSSIBLE

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Thursday, April 26, 2018

Roach:America’s Weak Case Against China [feedly]

America's Weak Case Against China
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ustr-section-301-report-biased-by-stephen-s--roach-2018-04

The US Trade Representative appears to have made an ironclad case against China in the so-called Section 301 report issued on March 22. But the report – now widely viewed as evidence justifying the Trump administration's recent tariffs and other punitive measures against China – is wide of the mark in several key areas.

NEW HAVEN – On the surface, United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer appears to have made an ironclad case against China in the so-called Section 301 report issued on March 22. Laid out in a detailed 182-page document (which, with 1,139 footnotes and five appendices, would make any legal team blush with pride), the USTR's indictment of China on charges of unfair trading practices regarding technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation seems both urgent and compelling. It has quickly been accepted as foundational evidence in support of the tariffs and other punitive trade measures that President Donald Trump's administration has initiated against China in recent months. It is powerful ammunition in a potential trade war.


But don't be fooled. The report is wide of the mark in several key areas. First, it accuses China of "forced technology transfer," arguing that US companies must turn over the blueprints of proprietary technologies and operating systems in order to do business in China. This transfer is alleged to take place within the structure of joint-venture arrangements – partnerships with domestic counterparts which China and other countries have long established as models for the growth and expansion of new businesses. Currently, there are more than 8,000 JVs operating in China, compared to a total of over 110,000 JVs and strategic alliances that have been set up around the world since 1990.

Significantly, US and other multinational corporations willingly enter into these legally-negotiated arrangements for commercially sound reasons – not only to establish a toehold in China's rapidly growing domestic markets, but also as a means to improve operating efficiency with a low-cost offshore Chinese platform. Portraying US companies as innocent victims of Chinese pressure is certainly at odds with my own experience as an active participant in Morgan Stanley's joint venture with the China Construction Bank (and a few small minority investors) to establish China International Capital Corporation in 1995.

Yes, as we joined with our partners in creating China's first investment bank, we shared our business practices, proprietary products, and distribution systems. Yet, contrary to the assertions of the USTR, we were hardly forced into these arrangements. We had our own commercial objectives and wanted to build a world-class financial services firm in China. By the time we sold our stake in 2010 – at a rather attractive return to Morgan Stanley shareholders, I might add – CICC was well on its way to attaining those goals.

The second area where the USTR's Section 301 report is problematic is its portrayal of China's focus on outward investment – its "going out" strategy – as a unique state-directed plan aimed at gobbling up newly emerging US companies and their proprietary technologies. In fact, the report devotes more than twice as many pages to charges concerning China's supposed external technology theft via such acquisitions – which are framed as a blatant grab for America's most precious assets – as it does to internal transfers through JVs and alleged unfair licensing practices.

As such, the Made in China 2025 campaign is presented as prima facieevidence of a devious socialist plot to attain global dominance in the great industries of the future: autonomous vehicles, high-speed rail, advanced information technologies and machine tools, exotic new materials, biopharma and sophisticated medical products, as well as new power sources and advanced agricultural equipment.


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Never mind that industrial policies are a time-tested strategy for developing countries seeking to avoid the dreaded middle-income trap by shifting from imported to indigenous innovation. China is accused by the USTR of sponsoring a unique strain of state-directed, heavily subsidized industrial policy unfairly aimed at snatching competitive supremacy from free and open market-based systems like the US, which are supposedly playing by different rules.

Yet even developed countries have relied on industrial policy to achieve national economic and competitive objectives. It was central to Japan's so-called planned rational development state, which underpinned its rapid growth in the 1970s and the 1980s. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry perfected the art of state-subsidized credit allocation and tariffs to protect Japan's sunrise industries, an effort that was matched by Germany's equally impressive Wirtschaftswunder, augmented by strong support for the Mittelstand of small and medium-size enterprises.

And, of course, it was US President Dwight Eisenhower who in 1961 drew attention to America's powerful military-industrial complex as the linchpin of state-sponsored, taxpayer-funded innovation in the US. NASA-related spinoffs, the Internet, GPS, breakthroughs in semiconductors, nuclear power, imaging technology, pharmaceutical innovations, and more: all are important and highly visible manifestations of industrial policy the American way. The US simply does it though its federal defense budget – where outlays of close to $700 billion this year are more than the combined total earmarked for defense in China, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.

Yes, the USTR is entirely correct in underscoring the role that innovation plays in shaping any country's future. But to claim that China alone relies on industrial policy as a means toward this end is the height of hypocrisy.

Cyber-espionage is the third leg of the stool in the USTR's case against China. In this area, there can be no mistaking the evidence underscoring the role played by China's People's Liberation Army as a major actor in cyber intrusions directed at US commercial interests. These problems were, in fact, so serious that President Barack Obama presented top-secret evidence of state-sponsored computer hacking to President Xi in September 2015. Since then, most reports point to a reduction in Chinese incursions. Unfortunately, the evidence cited in the USTR report in support of cyber-related trade violations largely predates that confrontation.

In short, the USTR's seemingly impressive Section 301 report is a biased political document that has further inflamed anti-China sentiment in the US. As a result, Chinese-sponsored intellectual property theft is now taken as a given by an America that increasingly sees itself as a victim. Yes, like the rest of us, the Chinese are tough competitors, and they don't always play by the rules. For that, they need to be held accountable. But the case made by the USTR is an embarrassing symptom of a scapegoat mentality that has turned America into a nation of whiners.

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Time for ‘Trickle Along’ Economics? Inequality in Motion and the Lewis model of Economic Development [feedly]

Time for 'Trickle Along' Economics? Inequality in Motion and the Lewis model of Economic Development
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/25/04/2018/time-trickle-along-economics-inequality-motion-and-lewis-model-economic-development

ESRC GPID Director and Global Policy's Deputy Executive Editor, Andy Sumner, continues the discussion of a model of economic development from the 1950s and shows how it understands inequality in a different way.

Arthur Lewis outlined one of the best-known models of economic development. Although sixty years old in its earliest iteration, the model remains relevant today to developing countries.

The Lewis model provides an ideal type or a heuristic device for thinking about economic development as structural transformation with an emphasis on labour, which is the factor of production abundant in developing countries.

Lewis argued that the driver of economic development – capital accumulation – was a sectoral movement of workers from the 'traditional' or 'subsistence' sector to the 'modern' of capitalist sector. The former, the traditional sector was characterized by Lewis as low productivity, low wage and with widespread disguised unemployment. The latter, the modern or capitalist sector was characterized by higher productivity and higher wages.

Workers move over time from traditional to the modern or capitalist sector and the capture of labour productivity gains  to capitalists as profits are the source of growth via reinvestment. Here's how Lewis put it himself:

The key to the process is the use which is made of the capitalist surplus. In so far as this is reinvested in creating new capital, the capitalist sector expands, taking more people into capitalist employment out of the subsistence sector. The surplus is then larger still, capital formation is still greater, and so the process continues until the surplus labour disappears.

At first glance it might appear Lewis ignored inequality. That is not the case though. Lewis has a specific take on inequality dynamics during the process of economic development.

For starters, Lewis (1954, p. 147) certainly highlighted the visibility of inequality, noting that inequality between,

the few highly westernized, trousered, natives, educated in western universities, speaking western languages, and glorying Beethoven, Mill, Marx, or Einstein, and the great mass of their countrymen who live in quite other worlds.

Lewis also wrote on horizontal inequality in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity.

It was his focus on economic development itself that was first and foremost but within that he had a different take on inequality.

Lewis discussed inequality in several ways during economic development.

First, in terms of the functional distribution of income between capital and labour rather than household or individual inequality as that was central to his model of economic development: A rise in the share of capital drives growth but does not necessarily imply a change in the within-labour share so individual inequality need not necessarily rise. If there were a larger share of profits in national income this would mean more resources for investment.

However, Lewis noted the tendency for individual inequality to increase in the process:

[t]he central fact of economic development is that the distribution of incomes is altered in favour of the saving class . . . All that the workers get out of the expansion is that more of them are employed at a wage above the subsistence earnings.

When the Lewis turning point is reached and surplus labour is exhausted wages would rise and the functional distribution of income would move in favour of labour.

In other works, Lewis presents an explicit framework to consider this relationship between growth and distribution directly, noting as a starting point that,

growth takes place in [modern sectors], surrounded by traditional activities . . . Development must be inegalitarian because it does not start in every part of an economy at the same time. Somebody develops a mine,and employs a thousand people. Or farmers in one province start planting cocoa, which will grow only in 10% of the country. Or the Green Revolution arrives, to benefit those farmers who have plenty of rain or access to irrigation, while offering nothing to the other 50% in drier regions (p. 26).

However, Lewis said public policy should 'discipline' the 'capitalist class' to ensure more equitable development. The role of the state was also important because if inequality were to rise public policy intervention is needed because,

the Gini coefficient may actually show a rise in inequality, since the share of national output accruing to the bottom 50 per cent may fall . . . To tax its developed sectors and subsidise its underdeveloped sectors is one of the most powerful ways that a government can use to ensure the benefits of development . . . The moral for policy makers is of course not to rely on trickle down to benefit the traditional sector, but to attack the problems of that sector directly.

This is the second take on inequality: inequality between and within modern and traditional sectors. Lewis discusses the relationship between economic development and distribution as one based on within and between sector inequality. He argues that the growth of the modern sector has good and bad impacts on the traditional sector:

Notably, the [modern] may enrich the traditional sector by buying commodities and services from it; providing employment to those in the traditional sector; sending remittances; selling goods and services cheaper; and by developing infrastructure, public goods and, through an example of new ideas and institutions, the enclave sector can modernize the traditional sector. Whether development leads to widening inequality depends, he argued on whether the enclave is able to respond to the new economic opportunities (e.g. price changes or the demand for labour). In short, inegalitarian development is not the failure of 'trickle down' vertically from rich to poor but the failure to trickle along or spread horizontally the benefits froenclave to traditional sectors.

Again, the role of the state is highlighted by Lewis who posited that distribution in the enclave depends on the pattern of growth and a set of factors, many of which are 'susceptible to public control', notably the distribution of property, economic structure (in terms of firm size and the capital intensity of production and dependence on foreign resources) and the speed of growth which has the potential to alter 'the relative quantities of the factors of production, and the derived demands, and therefore the distribution of income'.

Further, the traditional sector may see income stagnate because the enclave may be predatory (e.g. driving people off their land); products may compete with traditional trades; the wage rate in the enclave may be too high and raise the price of labour above its marginal productivity; because of geographical polarization (the enclave attracts 'best brains' and capital); because population growth accelerates due to improved public health reducing the death rate; and/or excessive migration from the countryside.

What did Lewis conclude?

Lewis argued for a policy of 'trickle along' to address inequality through public policy. He noted that whether the modern sector enriches or not the traditional sector 'probably depends most on whether the government coerces or helps the traditional sector, and on the nature of the enclaves' (meaning the modern sector).

In short, broad-based economic development requires, counter-intuitively, highly activist policy in the traditional sectors – generally, but not always, rural and agricultural policy, and public investments to constrain the divergence between and within the traditional and modern sectors.

 

 

 

Andy Sumner is a Reader in International Development in the Department of International Development, King's College London. He is Director of the ESRC Global Poverty & Inequality Dynamics (GPID) Research Network. 



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