What’s wealth got to do with it?

In a recent article in The Intercept, Jon Schwarz [ht: db] arrives at a perfectly reasonable conclusion—but, unfortunately, he makes a real hash of the data concerning changes in wealth ownership in the United States.

Schwarz starts with the fact that the total amount of wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population has doubled since the first quarter of 2020 (in other words, during the pandemic). He then takes issue with the idea that economic growth needs to be slowed (for example, by the Fed’s raising of interest-rates) in order to help the poorest who presumably have been most hurt by inflation. And his conclusion?

According to the actual numbers, these are good times for many, many Americans in the poorer 50 percent. That doesn’t mean that millions aren’t struggling, but the financial prospects for most were even worse in the past in a lower-inflation world, a situation that did not excite the warm concern of the corporate media. What we should concentrate on now is keeping the streak going, not bludgeoning the workforce into submission.

I agree, at least in part: what policymakers are attempting to do (in a move supported by mainstream economists, large corporations, and the top 1 percent) is to bludgeon workers into submission. And there’s no reason to do so, especially when other policies—such as regulating prices, raising taxes on the rich, and imposing windfall profits taxes on large corporations—exist.

As for the rest of Schwarz’s argument, there are serious problems.

Let’s start with the idea that, in his view, these are good times for many Americans in the poorest 50 percent. This is based entirely on recent data concerning the net worth of those at the bottom has risen.

As is evident in the chart above, Schwarz’s claim about the rising wealth of the bottom 50 percent (the blue line) is in fact correct. It has been going up in absolute terms for more than a decade (since 2011), and it has gone up particularly quickly in the past two years.

Here’s the problem: the rising net worth of the bottom 50 percent is almost entirely due to the increase in housing prices (which therefore raises the net worth of those who own houses). But that doesn’t say anything about how well-off they are. They don’t get any extra income from those higher-priced homes. They therefore can’t purchase more or better commodities. And they can’t sell their homes to buy other ones because the other ones will also have increased in price.

So, that part of Schwarz’s argument doesn’t hold water. An increase in net worth based on higher housing prices doesn’t improve the well-being of those in the bottom 50 percent.

There’s nothing to rest his case on in terms of the absolute amount of wealth. What about in relative terms?

As it turns out, the increase in the net worth of the bottom 50 percent (again, the blue line in the chart immediately above) does lead to an increase in its share of total net worth—but only by 1 percent point, from 1.8 percent to 2.8 percent. It’s still below the share it had two decades ago. It only looks like an improvement because the share had fallen so low (to 0.3 percent, in 2011).

And compared to the top 1 percent (the red line in the chart)? The gulf between their respective shares has actually risen in the past two years. As of the first quarter of 2022, the share of total worth of the top 1 percent was 31.9 percent compared to the tiny (2.8-percent) share of the bottom 50 percent.

So, the bottom 50 percent is no better off in terms of net worth either in absolute or relative terms. In fact, against what Schwarz argues, the last several years have in fact been an economic disaster for the bottom half of U.S. households. Whatever improvement they’ve seen in terms of net worth is a chimeric dream.

I want to make one final point about the issue of net worth, which is often treated synonymously with wealth (including by Schwarz). As I argued above, whatever tiny bit of wealth those at the bottom have is almost entirely in the form of their houses. They don’t own any real wealth—call it financial or business wealth—of the sort that would allow them to have any role in making decisions about their economy.*

The top 1 percent do in fact have such a role, because they are able to convert their share of the surplus into real wealth, which allows them both to get more distributions of the surplus (through, for example, their ownership of equity shares in businesses) and to make the decisions (through their positions within those businesses, the financing of political campaigns, and the like) that do determine the trajectory of the economy and economic policy-making.

I’m entirely on Schwarz’s side in terms of opposing the current bludgeoning of workers on behalf of the 1 percent. But the better argument, it seems to me, is not to say that things should continue as before because the poorest households in the United States were better off, but to show that American workers have increasingly been beaten down, in both absolute and relative terms, precisely because of the pandemic and the profoundly unequal terms of the economic recovery.

Enough is enough. We have to adopt alternative economic policies in the short term, policies that don’t transfer all the costs of inflation-fighting onto the backs of workers. And then imagine and create a radically different form of economic organization moving forward.

———

*As I showed back in 2018, the top 1 percent owned almost two thirds of the financial or business wealth, while the bottom 90 percent (not just the poorest 50 percent) had only six percent.

Inflation, wages, and profits

Inflation continues to run hot—and now, finally, the debate about inflation is heating up.

On one side of the debate are mainstream economists and lobbyists for big business, the people Lydia DePillis refers to as having a simple mantra: “Supply and demand, Economics 101.” In their view, inflation is caused by supply and demand in the labor market, which is allowing workers’ wages to increase at an unsustainable rate (a story that, as I showed in April, has no validity), and supply and demand in the economy as a whole, with too much money chasing too few goods.

Simple, straightforward, and. . .wrong.

Fortunately, there’s another side to the debate, with heterodox economists and progressive activists arguing that increasingly dominant corporations are taking advantage of the current situation (the pandemic, disruptions in global supply-chains, the war in Ukraine, and so on) to jack up prices and rake in even higher profits than they’ve been able to do in recent times.

Josh Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute, has offered two arguments that challenge the mainstream story: First, while “It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. . .the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.” Second, inflation can’t simply be the result of macroeconomic overheating. That would suggest, at this point in a classic economic recovery, that profits should be shrinking and the labor share of income should be rising. As Biven notes, “The fact that the exact opposite pattern has happened so far in the recovery should cast much doubt on inflation expectations rooted simply in claims of macroeconomic overheating.”*

So, we have dramatically different analyses of the causes of the current inflation, and of course two very different strategies for combatting inflation. The mainstream policy (as I also wrote about in April) is to slow the rate of growth of the economy (for example, by raising interest rates) and increase the level of unemployment, thus slowing the rate of increase of both wages and prices. And the alternative? Bivens supports a temporary excess profits tax. Other possibilities—which, alas, are not yet being raised in the debate—include price controls (especially on commodities that make up workers’ wage bundles), government provisioning of basic wage goods (including, for example, baby formula), and subsidies to workers (which, while they wouldn’t necessarily lower inflation, would at least make it easier for workers to maintain their current standard of living).

What we’re witnessing, then, is an important debate about the causes and consequences of inflation. But, as DePillis understands, the debate is about much more than that: “The real disagreement is over whether higher profits are natural and good.“

In the end, that’s what all key debates in economics are about. Profits are the most contentious issue in economics precisely because the analysis of profits reflects both a theory and ethics about two things: whether capitalists deserve the profits they capture and what they can and should do with those profits. For example, profits can be theorized as a return to capital (and therefore natural and fair, as in mainstream economics) or they are the result of price-gouging (and therefore social and unfair, as in Bivens’s theory of corporate power).**

Similarly, capitalists can be seen as investing their profits (and therefore making their firms and the economy as a whole more productive, with everyone benefitting) or they can distribute a significant portion of their profits toward other uses (such as pursuing mergers and acquisitions, engaging in stock buybacks, and offering higher dividends, which do nothing to increase productivity but instead lead to more corporate concentration and make the distribution of income and wealth even more unequal).

Mainstream economists and capitalists have long sought to convince us that profits are both natural and good. In other words, when it comes to corporate profits and escalating charges of “greedflation,” they prefer to see, hear, and say no evil. The rest of us know what’s actually going on—that corporations are taking advantage of current conditions to raise prices, both to increase their profits and to lower workers’ real wages. We also know that traditional attempts to contain inflation through monetary policy will hurt workers but not their employers or the tiny group that sits at the top of the economic pyramid.

It’s clear then: the debate about inflation is actually a debate about profits. And the debate about profits is, in the end, a debate about capitalism. The sooner we recognize that, the better off we’ll all be.

———

*Even the Wall Street Journal admits that the wage share is not in fact growing: “The labor share of national output is roughly where it was before the pandemic.” Moreover, the current situation represents just a continuation of the trend of recent decades: “Over the last two decades. . .the share of U.S. income that goes to labor has fallen, despite periods of low unemployment.”

**Corporate profits can also be theorized as the result of exploitation (and thus a different kind of social determination and unfairness, as in Marxian theory).

Inflation and the case of the missing profits

Everyone knows that inflation in the United States is increasing. Anyone who has read the news, or for that matter has gone shopping lately. Prices are rising at the fastest rate in decades. The Consumer Price Index rose 8.6 percent in March, which is the highest rate of increase since December 1981 (when it was 8.9 percent).

Clearly, inflation is hurting lots of people—especially the elderly living on fixed incomes and workers whose wages aren’t keeping up the price increases. No mystery there.

The only real mystery is, what’s causing the current inflation? That’s where things gets interesting.

To listen to or read mainstream economists the answer to the whodunnit is workers’ wages. They’re going up too fast, because the level of unemployment is too low and their employers are forced to pay them higher wages. As a result, corporations are compelled to raise their prices. Therefore, something has to be done (like increasing interest rates) to slow down the economy and force more workers into the Reserve Army of the Underemployed and Unemployed.*

That’s exactly how Paul Krugman sees things:

The U.S. economy still looks overheated. Rising wages are a good thing, but right now they’re rising at an unsustainable pace. . .

This excess wage growth probably won’t recede until the demand for workers falls back into line with the available supply, which probably — I hate to say this — means that we need to see unemployment tick up at least a bit.

The amazing thing about Krugman’s story, and that of most mainstream economists, is there’s not a single word about profits. Corporate profits are entirely missing from their story. Inflation is only caused by workers’ wages, not the surplus raked in by U.S. corporations. Which is pretty amazing, given the numbers.

A quick look at the chart at the top of the post shows what’s been going on in the U.S. economy. Workers’ wages (the red line in the chart, the hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory workers) rose during 2021 at an annual average rate of less than 5 percent (ranging from 2.8 percent in the second quarter to 6.4 percent in the final quarter).

And profits? Well, they’ve been growing at astounding rates, magnitudes more than wages. Corporate profits (the light green line) rose during 2021 at an average rate of 40 percent, and the profits of nonfinancial corporations (the dark green line) expanded by even more: 69 percent!

Hmmm. . .

The fact that profits are entirely missing from the mainstream story about inflation reveals a fundamental problem within mainstream economic theories. On one hand, in their macroeconomics, wages and not profits are always the culprit. That’s because they only have a labor market, and not a capital market (much less a profit rate or, for that matter, a rate of surplus-value), when they analyze fluctuations in prices and output. It’s as if corporate profits are only a residual—what is left over in the difference between wages and wage-driven prices. On the other hand, in their microeconomics, profits represent the return to capital, and thus a key component of commodity prices as well as the driver of economic growth.

Such “capital fetishism” means that profits as the return to a thing, capital, play an important role in the mainstream theory of value but then disappear entirely in the macroeconomic story about inflation.

It’s therefore a problem in the basic theories of mainstream economics. And it’s a problem when it comes to their economic policies: anything and everything must be done to keep workers’ wages in check, and (without ever mentioning them) to safeguard corporate profits.

The fact is, once we solve the mystery of the missing profits we can actually tackle the problem of inflation. But neither mainstream economists nor the leaders of corporate America are going to like what we come up with.

___

*The Federal Reserve is suggesting that it can raise interest rates to get prices down “without causing a recession.” In fact, according to research from the investment bank Piper Sandler, the Fed raised rates to combat inflation nine different times during the past 60 years, and on eight of those occasions a recession occurred not long after.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

“Never have corporate profits outgrown employee compensation so clearly and for so long”

Those aren’t my words. The quotation that forms the title of this post is from a recent Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis blog post.

And they’re important to keep in mind in light of the news coverage (e.g., by the New York Times) of last week’s Labor Department report on hiring and unemployment. Yes, 250 thousand jobs were added in the U.S. economy last month and average earnings did rise by 0.2 percent and are up 3.1 percent over the past year.

But. . .

The rate of growth of American workers’ wages (the blue line in the chart above) is only a hair above the increase in consumer prices (the red line). So, for all intents and purposes, real wages remain stagnant.

Meanwhile, the profits captured by American corporations continue to grow, reaching new record highs.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the labor share of national income (the light blue line in the chart above) remains below its pre-crash level (and much lower than any earlier year in postwar history), while the share of national income that is distributed to wealthy households in the form of dividends (the light green line) is still much higher than it’s been throughout the postwar period.

Never have corporate profits and dividends outgrown workers’ wages so clearly and for so long. And the political party dominating all three branches of the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to make sure that trend continues.

That’s the proper context for the latest jobs report—and for tomorrow’s elections across America.

“Don’t class warfare me”

Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal is no class warrior. Far from it. But after Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow spent considerable time during a recent interview celebrating the latest statistics about economic growth, jobs, and wages and minimizing the effects of the trade tariffs, Ryssdal was encouraged to challenge him:

Ryssdal: Look, sir, really with all respect that’s easy for you to say sitting here on the second floor of the West Wing of the White House.

Kudlow: Now, don’t class warfare me or anything like that.

OK, let’s not class warfare him. Let’s just do some simple calculations. In June, hourly wages (for production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector) rose at an annual rate of 2.7 percent. Prices (as measured by the Consumer Price Index) rose at an annual rate of 2.8 percent. That means real wages—workers’ purchasing power—actually declined, by 0.1 percent.

As is clear from the chart above, even as hourly wages (the grey line) have been growing by 2.2 to 2.7 percent since Trump was inaugurated, inflation (the red line) has also been rising, by 2.5 to 2.8 percent. The result is that the rate of growth of real wages (the blue line), which started in negative territory, is still in negative.

So, a year and a half after Trump took office, lots of conventional economic numbers look good: GDP growth, corporate profits, the stock market, the unemployment rate, and so on all point in a positive direction. Now, it’s a stretch to call it the Trump Bump, since it’s basically a continuation of the recovery that preceded his election. But we can let Trump and Kudlow revel in those numbers, which improve the fortunes of a small group of large corporations and wealthy individuals at the top.

However, it’s the rate of growth of real wages that affects the majority of Americans—and it indicates what can only be called a Trump Slump.

Put the two together and it sounds like class warfare to me. And it’s being directed not at but from the West Wing of the West House.

 

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

  

Beyond the trinity formula

John Hatgioannides, Marika Karanassou, and Hector Sala are absolutely right: mainstream macroeconomists and policymakers never venture beyond the “holy trinity” of economic growth, inflation, and unemployment.* Everything else, including the distribution of income and wealth, is relegated to the fringes.

This problem, while always serious, has been magnified in recent decades as inequality has grown to obscene levels, particularly in the United States. The labor share (the blue line in the chart above) has been falling since 1960 and, in the past decade and a half, it dropped an astounding 10.2 percent. Meanwhile, the share of income captured by the top 1 percent (the red line in the chart) has soared, rising from 10.5 percent in 1976 to 19.6 percent in 2014.

In order to rectify the problem, Hatgioannides, Karanassou, and Sala propose to bring inequality in from the margins as the “missing fourth statistic.”

They focus particular attention on inequality in relation to tax contributions. But they do so in the manner that departs from the usual discussion, which leaves the discussion at absolute income tax contributions (such as the share of income taxes paid by each economic group). Those are the numbers we often hear or read, which seek to show how progressive the U.S. tax system is. For example, according to the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).

Instead, Hatgioannides, Karanassou, and Sala concentrate on the ratio of the average income tax per given income group divided by the percentage of national income captured by the same income group (what they call the Effective Income Tax contribution), whence they calculate an inequality index (the Fiscal Inequality Coefficient).

What the Fiscal Inequality Coefficient shows is the relative contribution of filling the fiscal coffers for different pairs of income groups.

In the figure above, they plot the Fiscal Inequality Coefficient based on income shares (they also report a related index based on wealth), of the bottom 90 percent versus the top 10 percent, the bottom 99 percent versus the top 1 percent, and the bottom 99.9 percent versus the top 0.1 percent for 1962, 1980, 1995, 2010, and 2014.

Thus, for example, the Fiscal Inequality Coefficient based on income shares remains relatively constant for all pairs for years 1962 and 1980 but increases significantly by 2010—with the bottom 90 percent effectively contributing 6.5 times more than the top 10 percent, the bottom 99 percent 21.4 times more than the top 1 percent, and the bottom 99.9 percent effectively contributing 89.7 times more than the top 0.1 percent.**

Clearly, the relative income tax burden for those at the top has fallen over time, demonstrating that the U.S. tax system has become less, not more, progressive.

And the authors’ conclusion?

In the current era of fiscal consolidation should the rich be taxed more? Our evidence suggests unequivocally yes.

 

*Their paper is discussed in the Guardian by Larry Elliott. The submitted version of their article is available here.

**The results are even more dramatic if one calculates the Fiscal Inequality Coefficient based on household wealth shares: in 2010, the Bottom 99.9 percent contributed 208.9 times more than the Top 0.1 percent, nearly four times more than what it was in 1980!

The real mystery

Neil Irwin would like us to believe there’s a mystery surrounding the U.S. economy. But it’s not what one might expect:

The real mystery. . .isn’t why wages are rising so slowly, but why they’re rising so fast.

Really?!

In Irwin’s model, workers’ wages should rise at the same rate as productivity combined with inflation. And he’s worried that wages are rising faster than that right now.

Except they’re not. And they haven’t been for decades.

As is clear from the chart at the top of the post, the change in workers’ wages (hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers) has often surpased the rate of growth of per capita output (GDP per capita) for long periods of time. But when we add in inflation (according to the Consumer Price Index), only rarely in recent decades have wages surpassed the sum of output and price changes (during some months of some recessions). In general, workers’ wages have fallen short—in many cases, by 4 and 5 percentage points.

And that’s been going on for decades, which is why the labor share of national income has been falling. Workers produce more, prices go up, and wages rise by much less.

Even recently, after a short period when wages were rising faster than productivity plus inflation (from the second quarter of 2015 to the third quarter of 2016), that trend has continued. In the first quarter of 2017, when wages rose at an annual rate of 2.4 percent, the rate of growth of output per capita and inflation was higher, at 3.9 percent.

For Irwin, as for most mainstream economists, the real mystery is why productivity has been growing so slowly—because they cling to the idea that everyone, including workers, will benefit if only they could find some way to boost productivity.

But that ship sailed long ago. Workers’ wages haven’t matched the growth of the value workers produce for decades. And there’s no reason to expect that trend to change in the foreseeable future—not when employers can get away with paying workers as little as possible.

As I see it, the real mystery is why Irwin and mainstream economists continue to hold to the myth that workers will benefit from rising productivity.

It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes (or, if you prefer, Kurt Wallander) to figure out that, if they continue to focus on productivity and its supposed benefits, they can try to keep things just as they are right now.

But the rest of us know the existing economic institutions have failed—and failed miserably for decades now—and that radically new ways of organizing the economy have to be imagined and enacted.