jamesz

The economist and the politician

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There has been a small kerfuffle over the appearance of Jonathan Portes, Director of NIESR, at the Treasury Select Committee. Portes was there to discuss NIESR’s latest economic forecasts and encountered unexpectedly aggressive questioning about his political beliefs from one of the Members. Jesse Norman claimed Portes’ statement that the Government’s austerity plans had ‘failed’ relied upon his personal politics. Portes responded that, while his opinions might be politically relevant, they were purely positive economics.

Norman has now clarified on his blog (HT) that he is specifically saying that reaching a conclusion about a policy’s ‘failure’ requires a normative judgment. Regular readers of TVHE will know that we entirely support Mr Norman’s view that policy judgements require normative statements. Given that a normative statement doesn’t have a right or wrong answer, it must at least be influenced by the same set of personal beliefs as a political view. Hence, it may be that knowing somebody’s personal, political view is helpful for interpreting some of their policy judgements. However, there is a spectrum of normative judgements from those that would be agreed with by only people who share one’s specific political views to those that would be agreeable to experts of all political stripes.

In this case it is clear that Portes statement about ‘failure’ referred to two things: the results of a NIESR modelling exercise, and a belief that the UK’s current economic predicament is due to a demand shortage. His conclusions about each require value judgements, but not the sort that would usually generate a political division among serious macroeconomists—which isn’t to say they’re not divided! Norman, despite his protestations, was not seeking to engage in a discussion about whether the specific value judgements were likely to be politically motivated. Rather, he sought to discredit Portes view of gilt rates by casting aspersions upon his independence.

It is episodes such as these that discourage experts from contributing to the policy debate, even when they have much to contribute. That is a great shame. As Antonio Fatas says

…some of what we do as academics is not useful enough for policy makers, and in these circumstances is better to be honest and stay out of the debate. But …one can find answers to those questions after careful thinking and a lot of data analysis.
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policy makers need to choose a number, not a range. [Academics] can be criticized on their assumptions or calculations but not on their willingness to advance the knowledge on an issue of great policy relevance. If any, they should be praised as academics who want to go beyond writing great papers to make those papers useful for policy makers or society at large.

Matt Nolan

Prisoner’s dilemma game justification for state housing

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I’ve been thinking about potential justifications for building a stock of state housing when we have no issues of credit constraints.

Say we have a bunch of people walking around wanting to buy two goods – housing services and non-housing goods and services.  People will, on average, allocate their spending such that the marginal benefit of an extra unit of housing services is equal to the marginal benefit of non-housing services.  This will lead to the appropriate level of housing services being provided, and it is all gravy.

But then say that the benefit of a housing service is actually a function of the quality of the housing service other people are receiving.  So if your neighbour/co-worker builds a big sexy house, you feel you need a bigger house to keep up.  The “marginal benefit” from housing services is higher, so you swap some non-housing goods and services for housing services (building a bigger house) – however, the marginal benefit is only higher because the other persons bigger house imposed a cost on you (making you feel inferior, or reduced the quality of the signal your house was providing regarding how well off you are).  As a result, house sizes are an arms race.

This view of consumption stems from back with people like Veblen, has been written about widely (and are used in modern macro-models), and in recent times has been reiterated by Rogoff and Shiller when discussing issues such as the “housing bubble” in the US.  A common term for this is of course “keeping up with the Joneses”.  An economics term for these sorts of goods is positional goods.

In so far as we see growing house size, and increasing borrowing to fund it, as a type of arms race based on this “positional good” logic we could well end up in a situation where we have “too few” houses that are “too big”.  We cannot rule out that this is in fact a contributor to high house prices and the limited stock of housing in Auckland, in addition to the zoning laws and high cost of subdividing.

Now when looking at this in terms of policy we can say this is really a standard prisoner’s dilemma.  Private value is only being created due to the larger housing being “relative better than” the current  – not because the house itself is bigger.  In that case, each individual sees building a bigger house as a dominant strategy – as if the other people don’t, they feel superior, if the other people involved do they don’t feel inferior.  As a result, everyone builds big houses, even though everyone would be better off with smaller houses and higher non-housing consumption (note this additional point).

Here, state houses may be a mechanism for trying to deal with that – by building a series of similar, smaller, houses at a lower cost.

This is the kicker though – to some people this argument sounds compelling.  To others it sounds horrible, as they genuinely get direct value from a larger house, and the fact that different houses on the street look different.  To buy the PD argument we have to make the case that:

  1. Much of the increase in house size and the variation between houses is due solely to “trying to out do other people”, and not due to actually valuing the additional housing services.
  2. That there are significant enough transaction costs within a community that prevent household near each other “negotiating” about this externality.
  3. That the “externality” itself is large enough to warrant attention.

And even with all that it is not necessarily policy relevant – as if people simply decide to overconsume housing, and lower their own welfare significantly, then we should really be asking why there isn’t more inter-community co-operation rather than arbitrarily throwing money at them.

A more compelling version of this argument would rely on the ideas Robert Frank – where the bidding up of house prices and size is occuring among those who are well off, and is having a negative impact on those with low incomes by also increasing the cost of their housing services!  This is the very issue that everyone is concerned about.  And yet, the data suggests that spending on housing service among the lowest declines relative to income has been declining and relative to incomes those in the lowest declines are spending about the same proportion of their consumer spending on housing …

There are no doubt some things going on in the housing market – but I’m not sure we can use the idea of positional goods to justify building a series of homogenous state houses in of itself.

jamesz

The contributory principle

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In following the debate on pension reform in the UK I’ve heard a lot of people talk about the contributory principle: that what you get from the welfare state should reflect your contribution. Often it’s phrased in terms of the taxes paid throughout one’s lifetime so you hear pensioners complain that they’ve paid taxes all their lives yet now get little in return, while the jobless are paid for doing nothing. Leaving aside the accuracy of those claims, it is curious to me that people think a contributory principle should hold at all!

If one thinks that the services you enjoy should be commensurate with your income—which is highly correlated with your tax liability—then why would you think that the state should do anything other than uphold property rights and resolve some market failures? In that world view there seems to be little reason to support the state taxing you, with all the accompanying deadweight cost, and then in return providing you with services that represent equal value. Far easier to simply leave it to the market, which has the added advantage of preserving peoples’ right to choose their own spending patterns.

Much of the function of the state in providing safety nets and services is not to overcome market failure, but to equitably redistribute wealth. That holds for cornerstones of the public sector, such as health and education, just as much as it does for explicit transfer payments. Inherent in the idea of redistribution is that you do not get back what you put in. If you are wealthy you get back far less, and if you are poor then you get back much more.

Complaining about one’s return on taxes seems to be to be a cover for one of two things: either it’s really a discussion about the scope and size of the welfare state, or it’s a complaint about expectations being unfulfilled. The former is an important debate to have, but it should eb seen for what it is. The latter occurs when the implicit social contract changes and those who acted in reliance on it see their wealth decline as a consequence. That is exactly what is happening with the current debate over pension provisions.

When the social contract is unilaterally changed by the state there are bound to be those who suffer as a consequence. The costs of transition make a good case for some form of temporary relief for those who are affected and unable to make other provisions for themselves. Perhaps the real problem here isn’t that the contributory principle is being abandoned, but that not enough heed is paid to those transition costs and the pensioners whose lives are changed by them.

jamesz

Will macroprudential regulation succeed?

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It is common to hear politicians and financiers these days saying that things are different now. That lessons have been learned. That changes to regulation will ensure that this sort of thing is unlikely to happen again in future. Of course, people say these things after every crisis. Now Vox reports a study that attempts to estimate whether learning actually takes place after a crisis and whether the institutional changes reduce the risk of future crises.

…past occurrence of a banking crisis, on average, does not reduce and may even increase the probability of future crises. … we find no evidence that the history of previous exposure of the banking sector to systemic crisis episodes seem to matter.
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A possible explanation for our failure to detect a learning process from past banking crises is that regulators and policymakers are learning, but at a speed that does not catch up with the dynamic evolution of modern banking. The regulator is frequently preparing to prevent the last crisis, and not the future one.

This hypothesis reminds me a lot of Bruce Schneier’s writing on airline security in the US:

If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we’ve wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-defended targets, and the result is that we’re no safer overall.

Regulation of some financial products may make them more stable, but the regulation will push people to develop new, more profitable products that evade the rules. Have we then made the system any safer? I haven’t followed macroprudential regulation closely enough to know if that’s a problem, but we can only hope that history doesn’t repeat in this case.

Matt Nolan

The case for not cutting

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There is a growing call for rate cuts to the OCR in New Zealand given the high unemployment rate, indications that the September quarter was very weak, and the fact people are pissed off that the weakness in the New Zealand economy has been so persistent!

Now I’m not going to go one way or the other on this – after all I don’t really want to second guess the Reserve Bank.  However, the case for a rate cut appears to be weaker now than it was earlier in the year.

How can I say this?  The unemployment rate is undeniably higher.  Well remember that unemployment is a lagging indicator – usually the economy is well into picking up before we see a sustained drop in this.  You may retort (I know I would) with the hours worked figures, which have been very weak.  Hours worked is usually the first thing to pick up (either with or a bit after productivity) during a recovery.  For this all I can say is that hours worked are not as weak as they appear in the HLFS, but we would need to forecast them picking up soon!

Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves what a RBNZ forecast would need to look like to prevent a cut.  We would need them to first forecast no cut, and then to forecast an economy moving back to it’s “potential” level.  This will then be consistent with a forecast of inflation around the target band.

Why might we believe that the economy is heading back to potential (and without a lift in structural unemployment this would imply a swift drop in the unemployment rate in the coming years as well).:

  1. The lift in house sales and (soon to be) house construction – this rebound in durable good spending and investment tends to lead the economic cycle.  Generally households willingness to get involved in these things tells us that demand in the economy is on the up.
  2. Durable good sales to households have risen (although part of this is to builders and plumbers rather than consumers), and business investment has risen … business investment has dropped off in recent months, as part of the prior spike was “rebuild related”.
  3. A similar rebound in the US – with the prospects for the US picking up, underlying demand for a number of our export commodities (dairy, meat, logs) will firm.  Let’s not forget that the US is a big market for our (likely mismeasured) IT services export industry.  Why mismeasured – well if you know anyone who sell services online, you will know that they often avoid tax or business registration 😉
  4. Signs China has found its feet again
  5. Commodity prices are recovering sizably
  6. Easing bank funding costs.  The growing competition between banks in recent months is likely due to easier access to credit – there are reports this is flowing into businesses, albeit not evenly.
  7. The rebuild is now really getting underway.

This isn’t to rule out cuts – I’m avoiding taking a position here, as I want to save that for clients, and generally avoid upsetting people on the internet right now (what can I say, I’m a bit tired).  All I am saying is that, given the time it takes for a lowering of the cash rate right now to flow into the domestic economy, a rate cut when a lot of indicators have turned up in the last couple of months.

Also remember, if the Bank had been able to foresee what occurred through the middle of this year they would have cut earlier on – but they couldn’t foresee it.  This is not a criticism at all, because the Bank does have incredibly good “on average forecasts”, and as a result their actions can minimise the cost of policy mistakes.   But it does indicate that the Bank’s actions aren’t infallible, and that they should publicly explain what happened when we experience a situation of below target band inflation and rising unemployment to the public – instead of leaving all the commentary up to people who want to undermine them.

jamesz

The difficulty with observing skill

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Skill vs luck:

“There’s a part of our brain that’s called the interpreter,” he says. “It’s designed to make sense of what we’ve seen, to give it a narrative. And we always see causes; so if Person A succeeds where Person B fails, we assume that Person A had some skill that Person B didn’t.

“Even when we know it’s random, we can’t help but see the workings of skill.”
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This hyperactive pattern-detector is likely to be an evolutionary adaptation, says Kahneman: a false positive will generally be less harmful than a false negative, an imagined lion less of a problem than an unnoticed one.

The whole article is interesting, particularly if you’re a sports fan.