Mainstream macroeconomics—pandemic edition

Right now, the United States is mired in an economic depression, the Pandemic Depression, not dissimilar to what happened in the 1930s and again after the crash of 2007-08.

Real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product contracted by an annual rate of 31.7 percent in the second quarter of 2020 (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and at least 27 million American workers are currently unemployed (counting workers continuing to receive some kind of unemployment benefits, according to my own calculations).* By all accounts—from both macroeconomic data and anecdotes reported in the media—the current situation is an economic and social disaster equivalent to what the United States went through during the first and second Great Depressions.

The question is, does mainstream macroeconomics have anything to offer in terms of insights about the causes of the current crises or what should be done to solve them?

Many readers are, I’m sure, skeptical, given the abysmal track record of mainstream macroeconomic thinking in the United States. Going back just a bit more than a decade, to the Second Great Depression, it’s clear that mainstream macroeconomists failed on all counts: they didn’t predict the crash; they didn’t even include the possibility of such a crash within their basic theory or models; and they certainly didn’t know what to do once the crash occurred.

Can they do any better with the current depression?

The example I want to use was recently posted by Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, the author of the best-selling macroeconomics textbook on the market. I know it’s not the most sophisticated (or, if you prefer, technical or detailed) discussion out there but it does matter: next year, thousands upon thousands of students will receive their basic training in mainstream macroeconomic theory and its application to the Pandemic Depression from Mankiw’s text.

It should come as no surprise that Mankiw uses the macroeconomic model—of aggregate demand and supply—he has so laboriously built up over the course of many chapters to examine what he calls “the economic downturn of 2020.” His basic argument is that, first, aggregate demand declined (shifting to the left, from AD1 to AD2) due to a decline in the velocity of money (one of the exogenous variables that, in mainstream moderls, determines aggregate demand), and second, the long-run aggregate supply curve declines (shifts left, from LRAS1 to LRAS2), while the short-run aggregate supply curve (SRAS) stays the same. The result is a decline in output (the left-facing arrow at the bottom of the diagram).

This is all pretty straightforward stuff. Except: Mankiw wants to argue that it’s the “natural level of output” as represented by the long-run aggregate supply curve, not the perfectly elastic (or horizontal) short-run aggregate supply curve, that shifts to the left. Huh?

His only explanation is that

When a pandemic strikes and many businesses are temporarily closed, aggregate demand falls because people are staying at home rather than spending at those businesses. Because those businesses cannot produce goods and services, the economy’s potential output, as reflected in the LRAS curve, falls as well. The economy moves from point A to point B.

The problem is, there’s nothing in the way Mankiw has derived the long-run aggregate supply curve—from given resources (land, labor, and capital) and technology—that has changed. Instead, the shutdown of many businesses merely means that there’s enormous excess capacity in the economy. The “natural rate of output”—the level of output corresponding to the “natural level of unemployment”—remains as it was.

But Mankiw is trapped by his own model. The benefit of analyzing the current depression in terms of a shift in the long-run aggregate supply curve is that, as soon as the shutdown is lifted, the supply curve shifts back to the right and the economy moves back to its old long-run equilibrium. Problem solved!

And if the long-run aggregate supply curve doesn’t shift back to the right? Well, then, U.S. capitalism has in fact destroyed its resources—especially labor power—and the economy doesn’t recover, at least anytime soon.

Moreover, if he’d shifted the short-run aggregate supply curve (up in the diagram), well, then we’re in the land of inflation—with the price level rising—an even more severe decline in economic activity (smaller than B), and no return to long-run equilibrium. But prices are not, in general rising, which is why he uses the horizontal short-run aggregate supply curve in the first place (to reflect fixed prices, the result of monopoly enterprises).

Not only is Mankiw trapped by the logic of his own model. His analysis—both the model and the accompanying text—leaves out much of what is interesting and important about the Pandemic Depression.

We’ve seen, for example, that U.S. stock markets, after an initial downturn, have soared to new record highs, even as national output declines and unemployment reached numbers of workers not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. That doesn’t even warrant a mention in Mankiw’s analysis—which involves a discussion of assistance to workers and small businesses but nothing about the trillions of dollars available to the Treasury and Federal Reserve to bailout large corporations, keep credit flowing, and boost equity markets.

But there’s an even larger problem in Mankiw’s basic model: all downturns, whether recession or depressions, are the result of “accidents.”

Some surprise event shifts aggregate supply or aggregate demand, reducing production and employment. Policymakers are eager to return the economy to normal levels of production and employment as quickly as possible.

And the Pandemic Depression? Well, according to Mankiw, it was “by design.” But the distinction is meaningless: in all cases, the downturn occurs because of something outside the model—by some kind of “shock.”

So, capitalism itself is absolved. In Mankiw’s model, and in mainstream macroeconomics more generally, there’s nothing in capitalism itself—how profit rates behave, what decisions capitalists make, the fragility of the financial sector, obscene levels of inequality, and so on—that causes the economy to collapse.

If we step outside the confines of Mankiw’s model, then we can begin to see how U.S. capitalism, while it did not create the novel coronavirus, certainly produced and exacerbated the destructive effects of the pandemic on the American economy. For example, after decades of neglect of the public healthcare system and attempts to shore up the private provision of healthcare in the United States, the country was ill-prepared to diagnosis and contain the pandemic. Even more, it worsened the already-grotesque inequalities of healthcare—as well as incomes, wealth, and household finances—it had originally created.

That same economic system also left in the hands of private employers—not the government or workers themselves—the decisions of whether to keep workers employed or, as happened across the country, to furlough or lay off tens of millions of their employees. Any to add to the misery: many of the workers who were supposed to be on temporary layoffs are now finding they’ve lost their jobs permanently and are spending more and more time attempting to find new jobs.

None of those pre-existing economic conditions figures in Mankiw’s analysis. They can’t, because they don’t exist within mainstream macroeconomics, which has been studiously constructed precisely to provide a hydraulic model of macroeconomic equilibrium—starting with full employment and price stability, one or another external “shock” that moves the economy away from there, and then automatic mechanisms to return the economy to its original position—on the basis of aggregate demand and aggregate supply.

And that’s how we get Mankiw’s excuse for the Pandemic Depression:

given the circumstances, a large economic downturn was arguably the best outcome that could be achieved.

———

*Millions more workers are either unemployed but not receiving benefits or involuntarily underemployed, working part-time (often with cuts in pay and benefits) when they prefer to be working full-time.

Utopia and healthcare—2

The dystopia of the American healthcare system certainly invites a utopian response—a ruthless criticism as well as a vision of an alternative.

As I showed last week, the left-wing response involves a critique of the conditions and consequences of the capitalist organization of U.S. healthcare and the fashioning of a radical alternative. Single-payer, which uses tax revenues to finance the purchase of adequate healthcare services for everyone, is one possibility. On top of that, it is necessary to expand the diversity of healthcare providers, which would include more democratic, cooperative or worker-owned healthcare enterprises.

That’s how activists, educators, and policymakers informed by heterodox economics can begin to rethink the U.S. healthcare system. What about mainstream economics?

Given the persistent attacks on and attempts to replace Obamacare by Republican legislators—against a “government takeover” of healthcare in the name of “free markets”—one would expect mainstream economists to provide a theoretical justification based on their usual utopianism—of an efficient allocation of scarce resources in an economy characterized by private property and individual decisions in unregulated markets.

However, as it turns out, they can’t. And that’s all because of Kenneth Arrow.

Consider, for example, the 2017 New York Times column by Greg Mankiw.

In Econ 101, students learn that market economies allocate scarce resources based on the forces of supply and demand. In most markets, producers decide how much to offer for sale as they try to maximize profit, and consumers decide how much to buy as they try to achieve the best standard of living they can. Prices adjust to bring supply and demand into balance. Things often work out well, with little role left for government. Hence, Adam Smith’s vaunted “invisible hand.”

Yet the magic of the free market sometimes fails us when it comes to health care.

Mankiw, who is known to celebrate free markets in everything, is forced to allow for an exception when it comes to healthcare. (Fellow mainstream economist John Cochrane, in a sharp riposte, argued that “For once, I think Greg got it wrong.”)

The reason is because, back in 1963, future Nobel Laureate Arrow published “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Mankiw’s column (and the longer treatment for his textbook [pdf]) is basically a restatement of the issues raised by Arrow over a half century ago.

According to Arrow, healthcare is characterized by a set of “special features,” all of which stem from the “prevalence of uncertainty.” These include the following:

• an irregular, unpredictable demand for medical care
• an element of trust in the relationship between patient and provider
• considerable uncertainty as to the quality of the healthcare provided as well as asymmetry of knowledge concerning that quality
• a restricted supply (e.g., because of licensing)
• a combination of price discrimination (e.g., between the insured and uninsured) and price-fixing

In consequence, the healthcare industry cannot be expected to operate along the lines of, or to deliver the same results as, the canonical neoclassical model of perfect competition.

Thus, Arrow concludes,

It is the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable. . .

The logic and limitations of ideal competitive behavior under uncertainty force us to recognize the incomplete description of reality supplied by the impersonal price system.

Neither Arrow nor Mankiw suggests what the alternative is. But it’s clear that, from the perspective of mainstream economics, healthcare cannot be shoehorned into the neoclassical model of perfect competition they use to analyze all other commodities and markets. What we can say is their theory of the economics of healthcare leaves open the possibility of considerable extra-market intervention and regulation.

Healthcare is where the utopianism of neoclassical economics fails.

But then we can ask, where does that utopianism not fail? Why should it hold any better when it comes to other capitalist commodities, such as labor power, money, and land? And, if it does not, then neither the modes of analysis nor the policy conclusions that are central to mainstream economics retain any validity.

In my opinion, that’s why the issue of utopia and healthcare is so important.

Utopia and trade

Donald Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs—on solar panels and washing machines now, and perhaps on steel and aluminum down the line—has once again opened up the war concerning international trade.

It’s not a trade war per se (although Trump’s free-trade opponents have invoked that specter, that the governments of other countries may retaliate with their import duties against U.S.-made products), but a battle over theories of international trade. And those different theories are related to—as they inform and are informed by—different utopian visions.

In one sense, Trump and his supporters are right. Capitalist free trade has destroyed cities, regions, livelihoods, and industries. The international trade deals the United States has signed in recent decades have been rigged for the wealthy and have cheated workers. They are replete with marketing scams, hustles, and shady deals, to the advantage of large corporations and a small group of individuals at the top.

But Trump, like all right-wing populists, as I explained recently, offers a utopian vision that looks backward, conjuring up and then offering a return to a time that is conceived to be better. For Trump, that time is the 1950s, when a much larger share of U.S. workers was employed in manufacturing and American industry successfully competed against businesses in other countries. The turn to import tariffs is a way of invoking that nostalgia, the selective vision of a utopia that was exceptional, in terms of both U.S. and world history, and that conveniently conceals or overlooks many other aspects of that lost time, such as worker exploitation, Jim Crow racism, and widespread patriarchy inside and outside households.

It should come as no surprise that mainstream economists, today and in a tradition that goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, oppose Trump’s tariffs and hold firmly to the gospel of free international trade. Once again, Gregory Mankiw has stepped forward to articulate the neoclassical view (buttressed by classical antecedents) that everyone benefits from free international trade:

Ricardo used England and Portugal as an example. Even if Portugal was better than England at producing both wine and cloth, if Portugal had a larger advantage in wine production, Portugal should export wine and import cloth. Both nations would end up better off.

The same principle applies to people. Given his athletic prowess, Roger Federer may be able to mow his lawn faster than anyone else. But that does not mean he should mow his own lawn. The advantage he has playing tennis is far greater than he has mowing lawns. So, according to Ricardo (and common sense), Mr. Federer should hire a lawn service and spend more time on the court.

That’s the basis of neoclassical utopianism—the gains from trade: when international trade is unregulated, and every country specializes according to its comparative advantage, more commodities can be produced at a lower cost and as a result average living standards around the world are improved.

Like Mankiw, most mainstream economists, who are the only ones represented in the IGM Economic Experts panel, oppose import tariffs (as seen in the chart above) and celebrate the utopianism of free international trade.

That’s true even among mainstream economists who have argued that, in reality, the causes and consequences of international trade may not coincide with the rosy picture produced within the usual textbook versions of neoclassical economic theory.

For example, Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work demonstrating that the relative advantages most neoclassical economists take as given are in fact products of history. Thus, it is possible for countries to enhance their trade advantages (through creating internal economies of scale) by regulating international trade. But Krugman was also quick to belittle “a steady drumbeat of warnings about the threat that low-wage imports pose to U.S. living standards” and, then, in his first New York Times column, to denounce the critics of the World Trade Organization.

A few years later Paul Samuelson, widely recognized as the dean of modern mainstream economics, published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in which he challenged the presumed universal benefits of free trade. It is quite possible, Samuelson argued, that if enough higher-paying jobs were lost by American workers to outsourcing, then the gains from the cheaper prices may not compensate for the losses in U.S. purchasing power. In other words, the low wages at the big-box stores do not necessarily make up for their bargain prices. And then Samuelson was immediately taken to task by other mainstream economists, most notably Jagdish Bhagwati (along with his coauthors, Arvind Panagariya and T.N. Srinivasan [pdf]), who argued that “that outsourcing is fundamentally just a trade phenomenon [and] leads to gains from trade.”

Finally, Dani Rodrick, the mainstream economist who has been most critical of the role his colleagues have played as “cheerleaders” for capitalist globalization, still defends the standard models of international trade:

It has long been an unspoken rule of public engagement for economists that they should champion trade and not dwell too much on the fine print. This has produced a curious situation. The standard models of trade with which economists work typically yield sharp distributional effects: income losses by certain groups of producers or worker categories are the flip side of the “gains from trade.” And economists have long known that market failures – including poorly functioning labor markets, credit market imperfections, knowledge or environmental externalities, and monopolies – can interfere with reaping those gains.

But Rodrick, like Krugman, Samuelson, and other mainstream economists who have identified problems with the story told by Mankiw, Bhagwati, and other free-traders—who have “consistently minimized distributional concerns” and “overstated the magnitude of aggregate gains from trade deals”—still holds to the neoclassical utopianism that, with “all of the necessary distinctions and caveats,” more international trade can and should be promoted. Thus, as Rodrick argued just last week,

If our economic rules empower corporations and financial interests excessively, then the correct response is to rewrite those rules — at home as well as abroad. If trade agreements serve mainly to reshuffle income to capital and corporations, the answer is to rebalance them to make them friendlier to labor and society at large.

The goal is to make sure everyone, not just “corporations and financial interests,” benefits from international trade.

But recent criticisms of trade deals from within mainstream economics still don’t include the possibility that capitalism itself, with or without free international trade and multinational trade agreements, however the rules are written, privileges one class over another. Capital gains at the expense of workers because it is able to extract a surplus for literally doing nothing. That kind of social theft occurs—both when international trade is regulated and controlled and when it is allowed to operate free of any such interventions.

That’s why Karl Marx ironically came out in support of free trade in his famous speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels at its public meeting of 9 January 1848:

If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.

Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.

One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.

Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

That’s because Marx’s critique of political economy embodied a utopian horizon radically different from the utopianism of classical and neoclassical economics. He sought to transform economic and social institutions in order to eliminate capitalist exploitation. And if free trade was the quickest way of getting to the point when workers revolted and changed the system, then he would vote against protectionism and in favor of free trade.

As it turns out, as Friedrich Engels explained forty years later, both protectionism and free trade serve, in different ways, to produce more capitalist producers and thus to produce more wage-laborers. In our own time, Trump’s protective tariffs may do that in the United States, just as free trade has accomplished that in other countries that have increased their exports to the United States.

But neither protectionism nor free trade can succeed in undoing the “elephant curve” of global inequality, which in recent decades has shifted the fortunes of workers in the United States and Western Europe and those in “emerging” countries and still left all of them falling further and further behind the top 1 percent in their own countries and globally.

Reversing that trend is a goal, a utopian horizon, worth fighting for.

Trumponomist

According to recent news reports, Kevin Hassett, the State Farm James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture at the American Enterprise Institute (no, I didn’t make that up), will soon be named the head of Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Yes, that Kevin Hassett, the one who in 1999 predicted the Down Jones Industrial Average would rise to 36,000 within a few years.

Except, of course, it didn’t. Not by a long shot. The average did reach a record high of 11,750.28 in January 2000, but after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, it steadily fell, reaching a low of 7,286 in October 2002. Although it recovered to a new record high of 14,164 in October 2007, it crashed back to the vicinity of 6,500 by the early months of 2009. And, even today, almost two decades later, it’s only just cracked the 20,000 barrier.

But, no matter, mainstream economists and pundits—like Greg Mankiw, Noah Smith, and Tim Worstall—think Hassett is a great choice.

Perhaps, in addition to his Dow book, they want to place the rest of Hassett’s writings on an altar.

Like Hassett’s claim (which I discuss here) that “lowering corporate taxes is the only real cure for wage stagnation among American workers.”

Or his other major claim (which I discuss here), that poverty and inequality in the United States are merely figments of our imagination.

Let’s focus on that last claim. As regular readers of this blog know, income inequality—whether measured in terms of fractiles (e.g., the 1 percent versus everyone else) or classes (e.g., profits and wages)—has been increasing for decades now. But for conservative economists like Hassett (who was an economic adviser to Mitt Romney before being a candidate to join the Trump team), inequality has not been growing and poor people are actually much better off than they and the rest of us normally think. What they do then is substitute consumption for income and argue that consumption inequality has actually not been growing.

So, what’s the big problem?

But even in terms of consumption they’re wrong. As Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst, Luigi Pistaferri have shown, once you correct for the measurement errors in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (which Hassett and his coauthor, Aparna Mathur, don’t do), and bring in other sources of consumption information (including the well-regarded Panel Study of Income Dynamics), consumption inequality has increased substantially in recent decades—more or less at the same rate as inequality in the distribution of income.

Overall, our results suggest that there has been a substantial rise in consumption and leisure inequality within the U.S. during the last 30 years. The rise in income inequality translated to an increase in actual well-being inequality during this time period because consumption inequality also increased.

And, remember, that doesn’t take into account other forms of inequality, such as the increase in the unequal distribution of wealth, which has exploded in recent decades. The poor and pretty much everyone else—the 90 percent—are being left behind.

It’s the spectacular grab for income, consumption, and wealth by the small group at the top that Hassett and the new administration will be trying to protect.

Economism—or vulgar economics

In discussing the textbook treatment of the minimum wage, James Kwak provides a perfect example of how contemporary mainstream economics “can be more misleading than it is helpful.”

Kwak refers to the problem as “economism.”* For me, borrowing from a different tradition, it is a case of “vulgar economics.”

The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case. According to economism, a pair of supply and demand curves proves that a minimum wage increases unemployment and hurts exactly the low-wage workers it is supposed to help. The argument goes like this: Low-skilled labor is bought and sold in a market, just like any good or service, and its price should be set by supply and demand. A minimum wage, however, upsets this happy equilibrium because it sets a price floor in the market for labor. If it is below the natural wage rate, then nothing changes. But if the minimum (say, $7.25 an hour) is above the natural wage (say, $6 per hour), it distorts the market. More people want jobs at $7.25 than at $6, but companies want to hire fewer employees. The result: more unemployment. The people who are still employed are better off, because they are being paid more for the same work; their gain is exactly balanced by their employers’ loss. But society as a whole is worse off, as transactions that would have benefited both buyers and suppliers of labor will not occur because of the minimum wage. These are jobs that someone would have been willing to do for less than $6 per hour and for which some company would have been willing to pay more than $6 per hour. Now those jobs are gone, as well as the goods and services that they would have produced.

That’s exactly the argument presented by Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw in his best-selling textbook Principles of Microeconomics. He uses neoclassical economic theory to distinguish (as in the figure above) a “free labor market,” where the market is in equilibrium and there is full employment, and a “labor market with a binding minimum wage,” where there is a surplus of labor or unemployment. In the latter, at a minimum wage above the equilibrium wage, the quantity demanded of labor (by employers) is less than the quantity supplied of labor (by workers). Thus, in his view,

the minimum wage raises the incomes of those workers who have jobs, but it lowers the incomes of workers who cannot find jobs.

Mankiw then supplements his discussion of the negative effects of the minimum wage by asserting it “has it greatest impact on the market for teenage labor.” Low wages, he argues, are appropriate for such workers because they “are among the least skilled and least experienced members of the labor force.”**

Only after presenting the model of unemployment created by a minimum wage and focusing on teenage workers does Mankiw admit that the minimum wage “is a frequent topic of debate” among economists, who “are about evenly divided on the issue.”***

Nowhere does Mankiw discuss the history of the minimum wage nor the determinants of either the supply of or demand for workers who are forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work for a wage at or below the minimum wage. He is thus content, like many nineteenth-century economists, to “interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations.”

That is the very definition, in our own time, of vulgar economics.

 

*I hesitate to use Kwak’s term economism because, in my view, it signifies something different: the reduction of all social phenomena, in the first or last instance, to the economy (or some part thereof, such as the relations or forces of production). In other words, economism is an economic determinism—the positing of some kind of economic essence. The irony, of course, is that neoclassical economics represents an essentialism but of a different sort: it reduces all economic and social phenomena to a given human nature. Neoclassical economics is therefore a theoretical humanism.

**Later, he adds that such teenagers are “from middle-class homes working at part-time jobs for extra spending money.” Even less reason, then, to worry about such low-wage workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, minimum-wage workers do tend to be young. But they’re not just teenagers. In 2015, more than 2.5 million workers in the United States received wages at or below the federal minimum wage (3.3 percent of the labor force), of whom 1.4 million were 25 years or older (2.2 percent of the labor force).

***The 2006 survey Mankiw refers to was conducted only among members of the American Economic Association, the main organization of mainstream economists in the United States. It is interesting that the minimum wage is one of the few issues on which there was no consensus, even among mainstream economists. About 38 percent wanted it increased, while 47 percent wanted it eliminated entirely.

Markets and Brotherly Love

The stock-in-trade of neoclassical economists, like Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, is that free markets are the most efficient way of allocating scarce resources. Therefore, they spend a great deal of time celebrating free markets, and criticizing any kind of regulation of or intervention into markets.

Rent control is a good example, one that is taught to thousands of undergraduate students every semester. According to Mankiw, when governments establish price ceilings on rental housing, they cause a shortage of rental units. In the short run (as in the chart on the left above), when the supply of rental housing is fixed, the shortage may be relatively small. But in the long run (as in the chart on the right above), when both the supply of and the demand for rental housing are more “elastic” (that is, more sensitive to changes in price), the shortage grows.

When rent control creates shortages and waiting lists, landlords lose their incentive to respond to tenants’ concerns. Why should a landlord spend money to maintain and improve the property when people are waiting to get in as it is? In the end, tenants get lower rents, but they also get lower-quality housing. . .

In a free market, the price of housing adjusts to eliminate the shortages that give rise to undesirable landlord behavior.

That’s the world according to neoclassical economic theory. And in reality?

 

source

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love—aka the nation’s poorest big city, and among the most racially segregated—according to Caitlin McCabe [ht: ja], “is increasingly becoming a renter’s haven.”

But what happens when too many renters, many of them higher-income, flood the market?

In cities such as Philadelphia, lower-income residents feel the squeeze. And it could be getting worse for them

A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows that, as a result of gentrification, Philadelphia lost one-fifth of its low-cost rental-housing stock—more than 23,000 units renting for $750 a month or less—between 2000 and 2014.

Even more, the study found, the affordable housing that remains in the city is in danger, too—

since 20 percent of the city’s federally subsidized rental units will see their affordability restriction periods expire within the next five years. Of these rental units, more than 2,300 are in gentrifying neighborhoods.

source

The short-term result of gentrification and the loss of low-cost rental housing is that Philadelphia is now the fifteenth-most-expensive rental city in the nation, with a median rent (for a one-bedroom apartment) of $1,400. In the long run, the shrinking stock of affordable housing leaves lower-income renters saddled with higher rent burdens, greater financial distress, and insecure housing arrangements, which combine to reinforce residential patterns that are already highly segregated by income and socioeconomic status.

As the Philadelphia Fed explains,

The pockets of gentrification in Philadelphia appear to reinforce these patterns in several ways. First, gentrifying neighborhoods become less accessible to lower-income movers, limiting their housing search to more distressed and less central neighborhoods. Vulnerable residents who remain in these upgrading neighborhoods often face higher housing costs and are less likely to see improvements in their financial health. In addition, vulnerable residents in neighborhoods that are in more advanced stages of gentrification may even become more likely to move out of these neighborhoods. Each of these consequences of gentrification reflects the impact of increasingly burdensome housing costs, driven by losses of both low-cost rental units and units with subsidized affordability.

The market for rental housing in Philadelphia is increasingly becoming a neoclassical economist’s dream—but a nightmare for low-income renters in the City of Brotherly Love.

Voters aren’t buying what mainstream economists are selling

Mainstream economists, such as Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, celebrate international trade (including outsourcing, which they argue is just another form of international trade) at every opportunity. But right now, voters—especially in the United States and the United Kingdom—aren’t buying what mainstream economists are selling. They are (as I’ve argued here, here, and here) ignoring the so-called experts.

That rejection clearly disturbs Mankiw, who just adds fuel to the fire by arguing that the more education people acquire the more they will eventually come around to his view. The implication, of course, is that being against free trade is a sign of ignorance.

We all know that Mankiw and his mainstream colleagues have spent an enormous amount of time and effort—in abstract modeling and lending their support to trade agreements, in the classroom, research, and the public arena—extolling the benefits of more international trade.

But it’s clear, not only from the Brexit vote and the rhetoric on both sides of the current U.S. presidential campaigns, but also from a survey earlier this year by Bloomberg, that many people remain opposed to free international trade: 65 percent favor restrictions on imported goods to protect American jobs, 44 percent think NAFTA has been bad for the U.S. economy, and 82 percent are willing to pay more for U.S.-made goods.

Clearly, mainstream economists’ campaign hasn’t worked. So, Mankiw turns to the research of two political scientists, Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz (pdf and pdf) to find what he wants: anti-trade sentiments are positively correlated with isolationism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism and negatively with level of education. So, in his view,

there is reason for optimism. As society slowly becomes more educated from generation to generation, the general public’s attitudes toward globalization should move toward the experts’.

What I find interesting in Mansfield and Mutz’s research is actually something quite different: people’s attitudes toward international trade (including outsourcing) are not determined by narrow self-interest (such as their job skills or the industry within which they work) but, rather, by the “collective impact that trade policy has on the nation” (what they refer to as a “sociotropic influence,” because of the tendency to rely on collective-level information rather than personal experience).

That result is important because it suggests both mainstream economists and the general public, who may be and often are using very different representations of the economy, have an equally global view of the impact of international trade. Both groups are referring to and forming their judgements based on the nation as a whole. However, while mainstream economists tend to celebrate international trade based on the idea that the nation as a whole benefits (because of the efficient allocation of resources, cheaper imports, and so on), everyday economists may be emphasizing the fact that their nation is internally divided. Thus, in their view, many of their fellow citizens have been negatively affected by international trade and the only real beneficiaries are their employers. So, they continue to be critical of free trade and international trade agreements (such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership).

As I see it, more education won’t eliminate that critical view—as long as trade agreements are enacted within a profoundly unequal society and workers have no say in designing the policies that govern international trade.

Fear the economics textbook

My long-time friend Stephen T. Ziliak is doing great things with students at Roosevelt University, including teaching an introduction to economics based on the Grapes of Wrath and Theories of Justice, whence the video above.

Here is an excerpt from the lyrics:

Readin’ Greg Mankiw,
Queue the conservative man’s view
Supply, demand, invisible hand too
Following these Ten Commandments he hands to you
Hey kids, you understand what Econ really can do?
These ain’t the pearly gates, Mr. Mankiw
Just preachin’ on profit and Max U
But where’s the vertical mobility?
Masses are enslaved in poverty
Millions for your fat pockets see
This poverty of nations ain’t so efficient
Mainstream economists are mentally deficient
Monotonous lectures despite student resistance
What works on the Blackboard but not with existence
Your crackpot theories plot all the wrong axes
If you are the state we-Uber-killin’ all your taxis

Noah’s (free trade) ark

I don’t often agree with Noah Smith. And we’re certainly not on the same side when it comes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which, as Timothy B. Lee explains, is really a deal that benefits only “a few well-connected interest groups”). But Smith does offer a useful reminder that Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw offers a case for free trade “that, even on its own merits, might be bogus.”

Maybe people are perfectly smart and rational enough to understand the David Ricardo idea, and also smart enough to understand something else that economists have known for 200 years — international trade doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone within a country.

That’s right — trade creates winners and losers. Econ 101 says that the winners outnumber the losers in dollar terms, but not necessarily in people terms — if the richest 1 percent of Americans gain $1 billion from a trade agreement and the other 99 percent lose $900 million, then Ricardo’s theory says the country benefited overall. That outcome is perfectly consistent with Econ 101.

Smith is right: even in the world of classical and neoclassical economics, it is quite possible to demonstrate that free trade can—and often does—create more losers than winners.

But that’s just the beginning of the problems with the story free-traders like Mankiw and Smith try to make. Because it’s also the case, as I’ve tried to explain before (such as here and here), that the mainstream case for free trade is based on an extraordinary set of assumptions (such as full employment, the absence of externalities, no economies of scale, and so on).

And, to top it off, mainstream economists persist with the false argument that it is countries that are engaged in international trade, as if the United States and Japan (or, since the usual theorems can be generalized beyond the two countries used in the standard equations and diagrams, whatever n-dimensional set of countries one wants) decide to buy and sell and goods and services produced in the other country.

The fact is, countries don’t make those decisions. Corporations do. Capitalist enterprises decide to buy and sell commodities from and to capitalist enterprises located in other countries, or to shift (without any trade whatsoever, since it takes place within firms) goods and services from one of their subsidiaries in one country to the subsidiary in another country. That’s how international trade takes place (and thus how goods and services show up on the current account). And the rest of us, without any say in the matter, go into stores to purchase commodities regardless of where they were produced or what the domestic or international content of those commodities is.

That’s the real story of international trade (and of agreements like the TPP) the Mankiws and Smiths of the world never tell— hoping that the rest of us will march, two by two, onto their free-trade ark.

Picking on Piketty

 

I didn’t attend the most recent American Economic Association/Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in Boston. But, according to Chuck Collins, several sessions focused on the sensation of French economist Thomas Piketty and his 2014 book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

As an outsider to academic economics, I was struck by just how compartmentalized and smug the field appears. At one point, [Gregory] Mankiw even put up a slide, “Is Wealth Inequality a Problem?” Any economist who ventures across the disciplinary ramparts will, of course, find a veritable genre of research on the dangerous impacts of extreme inequality.

We now have over two decades of powerful evidence that details how these inequalities are making us sick, undermining our democracy, slowing traditional measures of economic growth, and turning our political system into a plutocracy.

Mankiw, at another point in his presentation, had still more embarrassing comments to make. Piketty, he intoned, must “hate the rich.” Piketty’s financial success with his best-selling book, Mankiw added, just might lead to self-loathing.

These clearly well-rehearsed quips, aimed at knee-capping the humble French economist, fell flat. Mankiw’s presentation, entitled “R > G, so what?,” came across as little more than an apologia for concentrated wealth.

And Piketty’s response?

Piketty’s one poke back at the nitpickers came in response to their unanimous support for a progressive consumption tax as an alternative to any other progressive income or wealth tax. “We know something about billionaire consumption,” Piketty observed, “but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics.”