Dr. King knew that full employment raises the price of prejudice [feedly]

Dr. King knew that full employment raises the price of prejudice
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/dr-king-knew-that-full-employment-raises-the-price-of-prejudice/

There are so many reasons to celebrate the life, work, and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate today. The dimension I like to elevate is Dr. King's profound understanding of the importance of full employment to the opportunities of black Americans. Remember, the full name of the March on Washington was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (my bold). A sign some of the marchers held that day told of a simple but powerful equation: "Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom."

Dr. King's insight was born of the recognition that racial discrimination by employers is costless in slack labor markets. With abundant excess labor, racist employers could handily indulge their prejudices. But when the job market tightens up and stays tight, that strategy becomes increasingly costly until avoiding non-white hires means an inability to meet consumer demand and leaving profits on the table.

In fact, last year, with overall unemployment near a fifty-year low at 3.7 percent (the average for 2019), the black jobless rate was 6.1 percent, its lowest on record, with data going back to the early 1970s. The average black rate since then was twice last year's level, about 12 percent.

We mustn't, of course, overlook the racial context that so motivated King: the 2019 white jobless rate was 3.3 percent, not quite half the black rate, but close to it. As followers of these data know, that ratio has been persistent.

It's common, though incorrect, to suggest that the elevated black/white jobless-rate ratio is a function of educational differences. In fact, as economist Valerie Wilson often emphasizes, racial unemployment gaps persist at each education level. Using BLS data for those 25 and up for 2018, the ratio of black-to-white unemployment is around 1.5-2 across education groups (with lower ratios for those with more education).

Another way to show this persistence—and belie the claim that it's all just about educational attainment—is to imagine that blacks had the same educational attainment as whites. That is, calculate the total black unemployment rate for the 25+ group using white labor force shares by education but black jobless rates. The resulting rate for 2018—5.1 percent—is just slightly below the actual black rate of 5.3 percent. In other words, at least by this simple simulation, even if blacks had white attainments, their unemployment would still be well about whites' 2.9 percent unemployment rate.

Much research has found this gap to be associated with racial discrimination, against which, as Dr. King argued, full employment remains a potent weapon. We thus must ply macro policy get to and stay at full employment for long enough so that those victimized by racial prejudice can get a foothold in the job market. Moreover, in order to push back against last hired, first fired dynamics, we need micro policies to cement these racial gains.

At the macro level, this implies using fiscal and monetary policy to achieve and sustain truly full employment. There's of course been a sharp debate as to what is the lowest unemployment rate consistent with stable prices. Clearly, based on especially inflation (both realized and expected) but also wage data, we're not there yet, and I much endorse Fed Chair Jay Powell's view of being data dependent on this, versus trying to estimate a "natural rate."

If you must have a number, though, the little exercise above suggests that any target that includes black workers is biased up by racial prejudice. If some employers resist hiring workers of color for prejudicial reasons, that says nothing about the correlation between unemployment and inflation. Thus, a simple metric, purged of this racist impulse might be the white rate. Last year, that was 3.3 percent; 2.7 for the 25+ group. Such rates, for the record, are at least a full point below most estimates of the natural rate.

The tight labor market has helped propel an almost 10 percentage point gain in prime-age (25-54) black employment rates (the comparable white rate is up just 4 points). How do we sustain these gains when the inevitable downturn hits?

By liberal [sic] application of fiscal policy designed to keep recent entrants in the job market! Subsidized employment opportunities, including public jobs if, in a deeper recession, private sector employment is not available. Also helpful would be infrastructure projects with local hiring ordinances, as would apprenticeship programs targeting persons of color.

The key is to be driven by King's insight that in slack labor markets, the price of prejudice falls. Yes, the larger project must be to prosecute such illegal practices—that's why we have an EEOC. But while we celebrate Dr. King's legacy, we must acknowledge that his work is far from complete, a fact that is glaringly obvious in the age of Trump. And one way to fight back, as Dr. King taught us, is through the relentless pursuit of racial justice and opportunity through full employment labor markets.

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Chris Dillow: A case for nationalizing pensions [feedly]

A case for nationalizing pensions
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/01/a-case-for-nationalizing-pensions.html

One of the fundamental questions in politics is: what should be done by the state, and what by the private sector? In at least one respect, I suspect that we have the mix wrong because there is a strong case for nationalizing pension provision – stronger, I suspect, than is the case for nationalizing utilities.

I say so because, as I point out in the day job, retirees and those approaching retirement face enormous uncertainties if they are managing their own pension: how long will I live? What will my spending needs be? And what will be investment returns? (Yes, equity returns have been great in recent decades, but we have no assurance whatsoever that the future will resemble the past.)

The state, however, is much better placed than the private sector to bear these risks. It can obviously pool longevity risk. And tax revenues are more stable than investment returns: in the financial crisis they fell only 3.4 per cent peak-to trough whereas MSCI's world index in sterling terms fell eight times as much*. In particular, there is one source of risk to equity returns that the state can pool whereas retirees cannot – distribution risk, the danger of a shift in incomes from profits to wages. This would clobber (pdf) share prices, but not tax revenues.

And then, of course, there are deadweight costs. A private pension fund manager might easily charge a management fee of 0.5 per cent per year. On a £100,000 pension pot invested over 20 years, that can add up to over £20,000. State pensions are cheaper to administer. Fund managers are rich, civil servants are not, That's a clue.

A common objection to a higher state pension is that it is unaffordable. This is nonsense in both fact and theory.

It's nonsense in fact because spending on the UK state pension is projected to stay low. The OBR estimates that spending on pensions and other old-age benefits will rise from around six per cent of GDP now to 7.9 per cent in 2057-58. This would mean the state will spend less then than many European countries do today - among them Germany, which is not noted for fiscal profligacy.

It's nonsense in theory too because, in a closed economy, all pensioners' incomes must come from value-added created by current workers. The question is whether they pay pensioners via the tax system, or via the dividends and interest their employers pay**. For a given level of pensions, the burden is the same – only the name changes.

Granted, private pensions change this calculation by investing overseas and so extracting pensioners' incomes from foreign workers. But the state can do this too. As Eric Lonergan has argued, we could set up a sovereign wealth fund which borrows at current gilt yields (almost minus 2% real) to buy higher yielding assets. Over time, this should give us all a big pension pot.

Even without that, however, we can achieve a sort of creeping nationalization over time by slightly strengthening the triple lock, one of George Osborne's few laudable achievements in office. If we could look forward to a more generous state pension, we'd have less need to buy a private one so the latter would gradually wither.

We should regard the privatization of pensions as an example of how technocratic economic rationality can conflict with the logic of capitalism. Technocratic rationality says there's a case for high state pensions. The logic of capitalism, however, requires that capitalist firms have sources of profits.

Another issue here is of course political risk: can we trust future governments to continue to raise pensions? Doing so requires there to be strong public demand for such a rise so that governments will fear a backlash if they do backslide. In this respect, the British can learn a lot from French protesters against pension cuts. We must regard a high and rising state pension not as a benefit but as an entitlement.

Which brings me to an under-appreciated point. The problem here is not merely one of economic privatization. A feature of modern British capitalism – neoliberalism if you like – has been a form of psychological privatization. What should be regarded as social problems have become individual ones. We see this with a lot of discussion of personal debt and mental health – an insufficient awareness of the social pressures which generate these. The same has happened with pensions. The question: "how can we as a society provide a decent income for older people?" has become: "how can I provide for my pension?" For too many – even the well-informed and affluent – this is too difficult a question.

* Of course, returns on more balanced portfolios were far more stable than equities – especially if they held decent quantities of non-sterling cash. But there are huge uncertainties about future risks and returns to balanced portfolios as well.

** OK, so taxes might deter investment, if they are badly designed. But so too do dividends and interest: high equity returns and bond yields mean a high cost of capital, by definition.

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When it comes to pay, US business leaders are world champs [feedly]

When it comes to pay, US business leaders are world champs
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/when-it-comes-to-pay-us-business-leaders-are-world-champs/

US CEOs not only draw the highest salaries (including bonuses and equity awards, etc.), but they are king of the hill when it comes to lording it over their employees, as illustrated by the high ratio of CEO to worker earnings.

And this record-breaking performance is no one-off.  The share of net wealth held by the top 0.1 percent has been steadily climbing and now rivals that of the bottom 90 percent.

Who cares that wages stagnate, life expectancy falls, economic insecurity grows, social services are gutted in favor of militarism, and climate-generated crises multiply?  Not those at the top, who are doing just fine.

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Josh Bivens: EPI: Yes, David Brooks, there really is a class war [feedly]

Yes, David Brooks, there really is a class war
https://www.epi.org/blog/yes-david-brooks-there-really-is-a-class-war/

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in an article sub-titled "No, Virginia, there is no class war," recently trotted out an old argument about why wage growth has been so sluggish for so many U.S. workers for so long: they're just not very good workers. Specifically, he argues that "wages are still mostly determined by skills and productivity." Ergo, if there is growing inequality in wages, it must be driven by inequality in workers' own productivity.

But the evidence he cites is totally unconvincing on this.

First, he notes that wages for lower-wage workers have recently grown more rapidly than for middle-wage workers. But it's been shown againand again that this is driven in large-part by those states that have raised their minimum wages. It's also been shown that tighter labor markets disproportionately benefit the lowest-paid workers. The argument that changes in relative bargaining power and economic leverage have been the prime mover of wage trends in recent decades is not an argument that wages can never rise, period. When policies change—like minimum wages increase and the Fed allows labor markets to tighten without slamming on the interest rate brakes—good things happen. We just need to change a lot more policies.

Second, he cites a study that looks at wage and productivity growth in high-skill and low-skill industries between 1989 and 2017. The first odd bit of this evidence is that the wage growth he reports the study claims for high and low-skill industries is essentially identical: 26 percent versus 24 percent. The second odd bit is that this means even high-skill industries only gave average annual wage increases of 0.8 percent over that time, even as aggregate productivity grew by almost twice as fast over that time (about 1.4 percent annually). Finally, and most important, using industry-level productivity growth to infer anything about the productivity of individuals working in these industries cannot be done. To put it most simply, productivity growth within an industry can occur because each input used in production gets more productive, or, there is a shift in the mix of inputs. This might sound wonky but I'll explain a bit more in the next paragraph:

This issue of changing the mix of a firm's inputs also nullifies the conclusions he draws from his third and fourth bits of evidence—both of which highlight that there has been growth in the inequality of productivity between firms. Again, changes in a firm's productivity often have nothing to do with individuals' productivity or economy-wide productivity. Take the example of an auto company that once ran the factory cafeteria with its own employees. One day, it decides to fire the cafeteria employees and "rehire" them through a services staffing company. Measured productivity of the auto company will rise—the cafeteria employees didn't make cars and so the firm's output won't change much. But, if the factory cafeteria was a necessary part of the business (say for retaining workers, or at least keeping them onsite during lunch to minimize time away from the assembly line) and must be kept running, then there has been no economy-wide productivity gain that's occurred by spinning off the cafeteria workers into a separate firm. Instead, by throwing the cafeteria workers out of the lead firm, the auto company has reduced these workers' bargaining power and wage declines are likely in their future even as their own productivity has not changed at all.

Finally, we should mention this bit of his column: "Today's successful bosses are doing what they should be doing: increasing productivity, growing their businesses and offering great service."

Does anyone really believe that pay for corporate managers is driven by their personal productivity? Are today's CEOs really that much more productive relative to rank-and-file workers than CEOs were when, say, Microsoft and Apple were founded? CEOs of large public companies made salaries 45 times as large as the pay median workers in their industries in 1989. By 2018, they made 278 times as much. It seems awfully unlikely this was driven entirely by CEOs' own productivity. We know, for example, that CEO pay is largely driven by luck. For example, oil company CEOs receive large pay gains when the global price of oil rises—which they obviously have little control over. And between 2006 and 2015, a study by Ric Marshall and Linda-Eling Lee found that the relationship between CEO pay and what a company's shareholders earned on their investment was negative—meaning that CEOs' pay was not determined by how much they generate in profits.

In its own way, the Brooks column is very useful, highlighting a key political cleavage over what people think drive disparate economic outcomes. Is it simply skills, talent, and hard work, or have institutional and policy changes that disempowered some while protecting others (rule-rigging, to be less polite about it) been the real story? Put me down for the latter view. And it is clear that more and more economists are adopting this view, because it conforms much more tightly to the real-world evidence.

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Joseph Stiglitz: The Truth About the Trump Economy [feedly]

Don't skip this one. 

The Truth About the Trump Economy
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/grim-truth-about-trump-economy-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2020-01

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China Renews Its ‘Belt and Road’ Push for Global Sway [feedly]

For months in Western oriented Asian press, I have been reading about the "defeats" of China's Belt and Road International Development strategic focus. That strategy rests on a different political and economic foundation than those associated with Western neo colonial or colonial patterns.
Apparently not dead at all.

China Renews Its 'Belt and Road' Push for Global Sway
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/business/china-belt-and-road.html

BEIJING — China's big-money push to build ports, rail lines and telecommunications networks around the world — and increase Beijing's political sway in the process — seemed to be running out of gas just a year ago.

Now the program, called the Belt and Road Initiative, has come roaring back. Western officials and companies, for their part, are renewing their warnings that China's gains in business and political clout could come at their expense.

Chinese companies signed Belt and Road contracts worth nearly $128 billion in the first 11 months of last year, according to China's Commerce Ministry, a 41 percent increase over the same period in 2018. The contracts are mostly for construction and equipment by big Chinese companies using Chinese skilled labor and loans from Chinese banks, although the projects often create jobs for local laborers as well.

The latest contracts include a subway system for Belgrade, Serbia; an elevated rail line in Bogotá, Colombia; and a telecommunications data center near Nairobi, Kenya.

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The return of Belt and Road is likely to raise tensions with the United States, which worries that China is building a globe-spanning bloc of nations that will mostly buy Chinese goods and tilt toward China's authoritarian political model. The initiative figures into many of the disputes between the two countries over national security and technology.

The rush of new Belt and Road contracts follows a public pullback by Chinese officials in 2018 after projects in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and elsewhere were criticized by local officials and others as bloated and costly. China argues that since then, it has fine-tuned practices to trim waste.

"We will continue to follow a high-standard, people-centered and sustainable approach to promote high-quality Belt and Road cooperation with partner countries," Xi Jinping, China's top leader, said during a visit to Brazil in November.

Chinese officials have long presented Belt and Road as a chance to give emerging markets the same kind of world-class infrastructure that has helped make China a global economic powerhouse. Under Belt and Road, state-owned Chinese banks typically lend practically all of the money for a construction project to be carried out by Chinese companies. The borrowing countries are then required to repay the money, often with oil or other natural resources.

Officials in the United States and Western Europe have long criticized Belt and Road as predatory, and in recent years, some officials in developing countries began to agree. In 2018, Sri Lanka gave its major port to China after it could not repay loans, while Malaysia halted its own costly Belt and Road projects.

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Chinese leaders began to acknowledge the criticism. Vice Premier Liu He of China publicly raised concerns in early 2018 about heavy lending by Chinese banks, not just for the Belt and Road Initiative.

In the months that followed, Chinese financial regulators clamped down hard on domestic and overseas lending alike. New Belt and Road contracts plummeted, Chinese data showed. China's financial regulators told the country's banks to look twice at further lending to poor countries. Top leaders practically stopped mentioning the program.

But the credit crunch produced a much broader slowing in the Chinese economy in 2018 than expected. Financial regulators reversed course. That has produced a revival of lending for domestic infrastructure projects and for Belt and Road projects alike. Contracts started to be signed in earnest again in the final weeks of 2018, and momentum built through last year.

In recent days, two groups representing Western governments, companies and banks have raised questions about the resurgence of the Belt and Road Initiative.

A report released on Thursday morning by the European Chamber of Commerce in China concluded that Chinese-built telecommunications networks and ports are set up in ways that make it hard for European shipping companies, computer software providers and other businesses to compete.

A survey by the chamber of its members also found that they had been almost completely excluded from bidding on Belt and Road Initiative contracts, which went mostly to Chinese state-owned enterprises.

"It was rather sobering to see that for businesses, it is quite insignificant what we get out of this," said Joerg Wuttke, the chamber's president.

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The Institute of International Finance, a research group in Washington backed mainly by big Western banks, issued a different warning on Monday as part of a broader report on global debt.

The institute's report said that many poor countries in the Belt and Road Initiative now find themselves with sharply increased debt burdens. Many of these countries could barely qualify to borrow money even before they took on the new debt, the report said.

The institute's report also said that 85 percent of Belt and Road projects involved high emissions of greenhouse gases linked to climate change. These projects have included at least 63 coal-fired power plants.

The new reports come after a warning issued last year by European International Contractors, a trade group of construction and engineering companies. The trade group cautioned that loans for Belt and Road Initiative projects tend to carry considerably higher interest rates than those from lending institutions like the World Bank.

The construction industry group, and also the European chamber, said that the costs of Belt and Road Initiative projects are often greatly underestimated so that they can pass muster with Beijing officials. Poor countries then end up paying for cost overruns, they said.

European business groups, which include telecommunications equipment makers, have focused lately on Belt and Road's emphasis on telecommunications. Many developing countries now have national telecom networks built by two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, that have been big participants in the Belt and Road Initiative. Huawei won a contract last spring to build a large telecom data center in Kenya.

The European chamber report said the networks were designed in ways that made it hard for European companies to sell any further hardware or software in these markets. European markets for telecom equipment, by contrast, are often more open, it argued. Huawei, for example, has sought to provide equipment for Germany and Britain.

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Alongside telecommunications, the biggest security concern in the West about the Belt and Road Initiative has involved China's construction or expansion of extensive ports. These ports now ring the Indian Ocean and extend up the west coast of Africa and into the Mediterranean.

The European Chamber report said that European shipping companies, which have ranked among the world's largest since the Middle Ages, increasingly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. The new ports are designed and managed by Chinese state-owned enterprises that are under the same Chinese government agency as Chinese shipbuilders and Chinese shipping companies.

China has contended that economic growth has long suffered in many emerging markets from high transportation costs, and that the construction of new ports can reduce these costs.

Lin Qiqing contributed research from Shanghai.


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Reducing the Health-Care Tax [feedly]

Reducing the Health-Care Tax
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/reducing-the-health-care-tax

Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker
The Washington Post, January 14, 2020

One of most enduring, economically and socially damaging, downright frustrating facts about life in the United States is how expensive health care is here. Not only does U.S. health care cost far more than in other advanced economies, but compared with the nations that spend less, we have worse or equivalent health outcomes. In fact, U.S. life expectancy now lags behind that of all the advanced economies.

An MRI scan that cost $1,400 here went for $450 in Britain and $190 in Holland. Thirty tablets of a drug to reduce the risk of blood clots (Xarelto) cost $380 here, $70 in Britain, $80 in Switzerland and $60 in Holland. Hospital admission for angioplasty is $32,000 here, $15,000 in Australia, $12,000 in Britain, $7,000 in Switzerland, $6,000 in the Netherlands.

Add to those differences the latest outrage in health-care costs: surprise medical billing, when even well-insured patients can wake up from surgery finding that they owe thousands of dollars, because someone treating them while they were unconscious was out of their insurance network.

Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton (a Nobel winner) recently summarized the problem by labeling it an $8,000-a-year annual health-care tax paid by U.S. families. This is the difference in costs between what we pay for health care and what people in other countries pay. As Case put it: "We can brag we have the most expensive health care. We can also now brag that it delivers the worst health of any rich country."

Why call this expense a tax? Well, for one, if you want health coverage, you can't escape it. But even if you don't — and good luck with that — you still can't escape the tax, as both employer- and government-provided health care extract payments through lower paychecks and public financing.

Case and Deaton may be erring on the low side in their $8,000-per-family figure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts per-person spending in the United States at $8,950 a year. That compares with $5,060 in Germany, $3,470 in Canada and just $3,140 in Britain. If we assume a family of three, we would get an annual health-care tax of $11,670 compared with Germany and more than $17,000 compared with the cost of health care in Britain.

How can such differences persist, especially in a service where consumption is so essential to well-being? If ice cream were that much more expensive here, we'd have a lot to squawk about, for sure. But it wouldn't be a matter of life and death.

An obvious, and correct, answer as to why U.S. health care is so expensive is because we do so little, relative to other systems, to control costs. But it's worse than that. We do a fair amount to make health care more expensive.

First, our system of private insurance costs far more than single-payer systems like Canada's, and also more than countries with private but heavily regulated insurers like Germany. OECD data show that as a share of health spending, our administrative costs are three times that of Canada's and twice that of Germany's. Getting our administrative costs closer to those in other countries would require regulating private insurers and expanding public coverage, but it could save us at least 10 percent of our total health-care bill.

Next, we pay twice as much to our health-care providers and for prescription drugs as everyone else. The latter costs us more than $3,000 per family per year. We pay more than twice as much for medical equipment, costing us a bit less than $1,500 per family per year. Doctors and dentists cost us close to an extra $750 per family per year.

One reason for the outsize costs of these inputs to U.S. health care is that government policy protects our providers. When it comes to manufactured goods, like cars and clothes and almost everything on the shelves of Walmart, economists and policymakers push for "free trade" and more competition. But when it comes to health-care providers, these same authorities turn protectionist.

In areas like prescription drugs and medical equipment, this protection is explicit: Manufacturers are granted patent monopolies. The government will arrest anyone who sells protected items in competition with a patent holder.

In the case of doctors, we have maintained or increased barriers that make it difficult for qualified foreign physicians to practice in the United States. We also prevent other health-care professionals, such as physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners, from doing many tasks for which they are entirely competent. There is a similar story with dentists and dental hygienists.

Other countries directly control drug prices. In France, the government determines whether a new drug is an improvement or a copycat, and, if the drug is deemed useful, the government negotiates drug prices with the manufacturers and caps their revenue. When sales exceed the cap, the manufacturer must rebate most of the difference back to the government.

Here in the United States, we give drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers' patent monopolies and allow them to charge whatever they want. We don't even let the government use its massive leverage to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. That's what makes these goods expensive; they're almost always relatively cheap to produce.

This is fixable. It would take regulating costs, reducing reimbursements to providers and increasing competition.

The pharmaceutical industry's rationale for cost-exploding medical patents is that it helps incentivize research and innovation. Without them, it's likely that pharmaceuticals and medical equipment companies would do less speculative research. But it would take a fraction of the savings from reducing such protectionism to replace patent-support research with publicly supported research (for which we already spend $40 billion a year).

In terms of boosting competition, allowing foreign doctors whose training meets our standards to more easily practice medicine here would bring U.S. physicians' pay in line with international standards. Of course, our doctors pay much more for their education than doctors trained elsewhere, so part of this new structure would also require reducing the domestic cost of medical education and alleviating some of the educational debt burden that U.S.-trained doctors have acquired.

Increasing competition would also require using antitrust measures to push back on the pricing power engendered by the consolidation of both hospital groups and medical practices. An analysis by the New York Times of 25 metro areas found that hospital mergers "have essentially banished competition and raised prices for hospital admissions."

Even if we succeed in raising competition and reducing protectionism, health care will still be too expensive for many low- and moderate-income families, many of whom have suffered stagnant incomes in recent decades. Like every other wealthy country, we will need to get on a path to universal coverage. But whatever form that takes, if we can significantly reduce our current health-care tax, the savings will easily be large enough to extend quality, affordable coverage to every American.

---

Jared Bernstein, chief economist to former vice president Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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