Tag Archives: Marginal Revolution

Some Cheery COVID Research Tidbits

16 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by in Pandemic, Public Health, Uncategorized

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Here’s a short list of new or newish research developments, some related to the quest to find COVID treatments. Most of it is good news; some of it is very exciting!

Long-lasting T-cell immunity: this paper in Nature shows that prior exposure to coronaviruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and even the common cold prompt an immune reaction via so-called T-cells that have long memories and are reactive to certain proteins in COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2). The T-cells were detected in both C19-infected and uninfected patients. This comes after discouraging reports that anti-body responses to C19 are short-lived, but T-cells are a different form of acquired immunity. Derek Lowe says the following:

“This makes one think, as many have been wondering, that T-cell driven immunity is perhaps the way to reconcile the apparent paradox between (1) antibody responses that seem to be dropping week by week in convalescent patients but (2) few (if any) reliable reports of actual re-infection. That would be good news indeed.”

The herd immunity threshold (HIT) is much lower than you think: I’ve written about the effect of heterogeneity on the HIT before, here and here. This new paper, by three Oxford zoologists, shows that the existence of a cohort having some form of prior immunity, innate or acquired, reduces the number of infections required to achieve the HIT. For example, if initial transmissibility (R0) is 2.5 and 40% of the population has prior immunity (both reasonable assumptions for many areas), the HIT is as low as 20%, according to the authors’ calculations. That’s when the contagion begins to recede, though the final infected share of the population would be higher. This might explain why new cases and deaths have already plunged in places like Italy, Sweden, and New York, and why protests in NYC did not lead to a new wave of infections, while those in the south appear to have done so.

Seasonal effects: viral loads might be decreasing. From the abstract:

“Severity of COVID-19 in Europe decreased significantly between March and May and the seasonality of COVID-19 is the most likely explanation. Mucosal barrier and mucociliary clearance can significantly decrease viral load and disease progression, and their inactivation by low relative humidity of indoor air might significantly contribute to severity of the disease.”

The BCG vaccine appears to be protective: this is the bacillus Calmette-Guérin tuberculosis vaccine administered in some countries, This finding is not based on clinical trials, so more work is needed.

Is there no margin in plasma? No subsidy? This is the only “bad news” item on my list. It’s widely agreed that blood plasma from recovered C19 patients can be incorporated into an immune globulin drug to inoculate people against the virus. It’s proven safe, but for various reasons no one seems interested. Not the government. Not private companies. Did Trump happen to mention it or something?

C19 doesn’t spread in schools: this German study demonstrates that there is little risk in reopening schools. One of the researchers says:

“Children act more as a brake on infection. Not every infection that reaches them is passed on…. This means that the degree of immunization in the group of study participants is well below 1 per cent and much lower then we expected. This suggests schools have not developed into hotspots.”

Also worth emphasis is that remote learning leaves much to be desired, as acknowledged by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which has recommended that schools reopen for younger children and those with special needs.

Can angiotensin drugs (ACE Inhibitors/ARBs) reduce mortality? This meta-analysis of nine studies finds that these drugs reduce C19 mortality among patients with hypertension. The drugs were also associated with a reduction in severity but not with statistical significance. These results run contrary to initial suspicions, because ACEI/ARB drugs actually “up-regulate” ACE-2 receptors, to which C19 binds. Researchers say the drugs might be working through some other protective channel. This is not a treatment per se, but this should be reassuring if you already take one of these medications.

Tricor appears to clear lung tissue of C19: this research focused on C19’s preference for an environment rich in cholesterol and other fatty acids:

“What they found is that the novel coronavirus prevents the routine burning of carbohydrates, which results in large amounts of fat accumulating inside lung cells – a condition the virus needs to reproduce.”

Tricor reduces those fats, and the researchers claim it is capable of clearing lung tissue of C19 in a matter of days. This was not a clinical trial, however, so more work is needed. Tricor is an FDA approved drug, so it is safe and could be administered “off label” immediately. Tricor is a fibrate; the news with respect to statins and C19 severity is pretty good too! These are not treatments per se, but this should be reassuring if you already take one of these medications.

Hydroxychloroquine works: despite months of carping from media and leftist know-it-all’s dismissing the mere possibility of HCQ as a potential C19 treatment, evidence is accumulating that it is effective in treating early-stage infections after all. The large study conducted by the Henry Ford Health System found that treatment with HCQ early after hospitalization, and with careful monitoring of heart function, cut the death rate in half relative to a control group. Here’s another: an Indian study found that four-plus maintenance doses of HCQ acted as a prophylactic against C19 infection among health care workers, reducing the odds of infection by more than half. An additional piece of evidence is provided by this analysis of a 14-day Swiss ban on the use of HCQ in late May and early June. The ban was associated with a huge leap in the C19 deaths after a lag of less than two weeks. Resumption of HCQ treatment brought C19 deaths down sharply after a similar lag.

Meanwhile, a study in Lancet purporting to show that HCQ was ineffective and posed significant risks to heart health was retracted based on the poor quality of the data.

Remdesivir also cuts death rate: by 62% in a smaller controlled study by the drug maker Gilead Sciences.

Pet ownership might confer some immunity: this one is a little off-beat, and perhaps the research is under-developed, but it is interesting nonetheless!

I owe Instapundit and Marginal Revolution hat tips for several of these items.

Central Planning With AI Will Still Suck

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence, Central Planning, Free markets

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Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) will never make central economic planning a successful reality. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania has written a strong disavowal of AI’s promise in central planning, and on the general difficulty of using ML to design social and economic policies. His paper, “Simple Rules for a Complex World with Artificial Intelligence“, was linked last week by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Note that the author isn’t saying “digital socialism” won’t be attempted. Judging by the attention it’s getting, and given the widespread acceptance of the scientism of central planning, there is no question that future efforts to collectivize will involve “data science” to one degree or another. But Fernández-Villaverde, who is otherwise an expert and proponent of ML in certain applications, is simply saying it won’t work as a curative for the failings of central economic planning — that the “simple rules” of the market will aways produce superior social outcomes.

The connection between central planning and socialism should be obvious. Central planning implies control over the use of resources, and therefore ownership by a central authority, whether or not certain rents are paid as a buy-off to the erstwhile owners of those resources. By “digital socialism”, Fernández-Villaverde means the use of ML to perform the complex tasks of central planning. The hope among its cheerleaders is that adaptive algorithms can discern the optimal allocation of resources within some “big data” representation of resource availability and demands, and that this is possible on an ongoing, dynamic basis.

Fernández-Villaverde makes the case against this fantasy on three fronts or barriers to the use of AI in policy applications: data requirements; the endogeneity of expectations and behavior; and the knowledge problem.

The Data Problem: ML requires large data sets to do anything. And impossibly large data sets are required for ML to perform the task of planning economic activity, even for a small portion of the economy. Today, those data sets do not exist except in certain lines of business. Can they exist more generally, capturing the details of all economic transactions? Can the data remain current? Only at great expense, and ML must be trained to recognize whether data should be discarded as it becomes stale over time due to shifting demographics, tastes, technologies, and other changes in the social and physical environment. 

Policy Change Often Makes the Past Irrelevant: Planning algorithms are subject to the so-called Lucas Critique, a well known principle in macroeconomics named after Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas. The idea is that policy decisions based on observed behavior will change expectations, prompting responses that differ from the earlier observations under the former policy regime. A classic case involves the historical tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Can this tradeoff be exploited by policy? That is, can unemployment be reduced by a policy that increases the rate of inflation (by printing money at a faster rate)? In this case, the Lucas Critique is that once agents expect a higher rate of inflation, they are unlikely to confuse higher prices with a more profitable business environment, so higher employment will not be sustained. If ML is used to “plan” certain outcomes desired by some authority, based on past relationships and transactions, the Lucas Critique implies that things are unlikely to go as planned.  

The Knowledge Problem: Not only are impossibly large data sets required for economic planning with ML, as noted above. To achieve the success of markets in satisfying unlimited wants given scarce resources, the required information is impossible to collect or even to know. This is what Friedrich Hayek called the “knowledge problem”. Just imagine the difficulty of arranging a data feed on the shifting preferences of many different individuals across a huge number of products,  services and they way preference orderings will change across the range of possible prices. The data must have immediacy, not simply a historical record. Add to this the required information on shifting supplies and opportunity costs of resources needed to produce those things. And the detailed technological relationships between production inputs and outputs, including time requirements, and the dynamics of investment in future productive capacity. And don’t forget to consider the variety of risks agents face, their degree of risk aversion, and the ways in which risks can be mitigated or hedged. Many of these things are simply unknowable to a central authority. The information is hopelessly dispersed. The task of collecting even the knowable pieces is massive beyond comprehension.

The market system, however, is able to process all of this information in real time, the knowable and the unknowable, in ways that balance preferences with the true scarcity of resources. No one actor or authority need know it all. It is the invisible hand. Among many other things, it ensures the deployment of ML only where it makes economic sense. Here is Fernández-Villaverde:

“The only reliable method we have found to aggregate those preferences, abilities, and efforts is the market because it aligns, through the price system, incentives with information revelation. The method is not perfect, and the outcomes that come from it are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including ‘digital socialism,’ are worse.”

Later, he says:

“… markets work when we implement simple rules, such as first possession, voluntary exchange, and pacta sunt servanda. This result is not a surprise. We did not come up with these simple rules thanks to an enlightened legislator (or nowadays, a blue-ribbon committee of academics ‘with a plan’). … The simple rules were the product of an evolutionary process. Roman law, the Common law, and Lex mercatoria were bodies of norms that appeared over centuries thanks to the decisions of thousands and thousands of agents.” 

These simple rules represent good private governance. Beyond reputational enforcement, the rules require only trust in the system of property rights and a private or public judicial authority. Successfully replacing private arrangements in favor of a central plan, however intricately calculated via ML, will remain a pipe dream. At best, it would suspend many economic relationships in amber, foregoing the rational adjustments private agents would make as conditions change. And ultimately, the relationships and activities that planning would sanction would be shaped by political whim. It’s a monstrous thing to contemplate — both fruitless and authoritarian.

The Real Minimum Wage Is Always Zero

30 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Living Wage, Minimum Wage

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Min Wage Denmark

A minimum wage study from Denmark reinforces the findings of the Seattle study released this week by economists at the University of Washington. Both studies conclude that increases in the minimum wage have negative effects on low-earners, at least for large increases in wage floors of the type advocated by “living wage” proponents. Alex Tabarrok provided commentary of both studies this week on the Marginal Revolution blog.

The Seattle study found that both employment and hours worked declined substantially among low-wage workers following the city’s minimum wage hikes. This became particularly clear after the most recent increase from $11 to $13 per hour. The average low-wage worker in Seattle lost $125 per month, according to the findings. The study has generally been praised for its detailed data and careful methodology.

The Danish study took advantage of the fact that the minimum wage rises by 40% on a worker’s 18th birthday. The chart above pretty much boils down the results. Employment drops by a third at age 18. Even worse, Tabarrok notes that after one year, 40% of workers who lose their jobs at age 18 are still unemployed, while 75% of those who keep their jobs at 18 are still employed. The fate of these two groups is likely driven by a gap in talent and skills, and that gap can only expand as the least-skilled are idled.

The minimum wage is a misguided policy that hurts those who can least afford it: low-wage, low-skilled workers. Firms forced to adjust to the higher mandated wage are worse off as well, not to mention their customers, who are likely to face higher prices and degraded service levels. Even those who remain employed at the minimum wage might suffer under less generous job perks and working conditions. Today, large increases in the wage floor can be expected to bring premature automation of jobs.

In the real world, workers of low skill vary tremendously in their actual ability, prior training and discipline to perform in a structured environment. Many of these individuals simply cannot add value over and above the legal wage. Some are simply incapable of understanding the demands of arriving on time and delivering effort over the course of a work day. Hiring firms cannot easily discern these differences up-front from social cues. They might try, however, which could lead to decisions that are unfair to some individuals. An even higher minimum wage makes these decisions all the more difficult and risky, and forecloses opportunities to a broader swath of low-skilled workers, consigning them to dependency on family or the state.

The minimum wage has always had appeal as an exclusionary tactic by higher-paid union workers. Cowed by its ostensible first-order effects on worker incomes, the left latched onto it as a fundamentally just policy. The negative second-order effects are predictable however. The economic evidence has been piling up, while methodological flaws in an earlier, prominent study finding the opposite in the 1990s have been exposed. As a policy, the minimum wage is unjust in its effects on the incomes of low-skilled workers and on their ability to gain valuable work experience, and on businesses attempting to deliver value to their customers.

Note: I believe Don Boudreaux should be credited with the phrase used in the title of this post, which I’m sure I’ve quoted before. For more background on minimum wage effects, see these earlier posts on Sacred Cow Chips. There are 20 posts with that tag, and some are more focused on the minimum wage than others, so keep scrolling!

Embracing the Robots

03 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Automation, Labor Markets, Technology

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Machines have always been regarded with suspicion as a potential threat to the livelihood of workers. That is still the case, despite the demonstrated power of machines make life easier and goods cheaper. Today, the automation of jobs in manufacturing and even service jobs has raised new alarm about the future of human labor, and the prospect of a broad deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) has made the situation seem much scarier. Even the technologists of Silicon Valley have taken a keen interest in promoting policies like the Universal Basic Income (UBI) to cushion the loss of jobs they expect their inventions to precipitate. The UBI is an idea discussed in last Sunday’s post on Sacred Cow Chips. In addition to the reasons for rejecting that policy cited in that post, however, we should question the premise that automation and AI are unambiguously job killing.

The same stories of future joblessness have been told for over two centuries, and they have been wrong every time. The vulnerability in our popular psyche with respect to automation is four-fold: 1) the belief that we compete with machines, rather than collaborate with them; 2) our perpetual inability to anticipate the new and unforeseeable opportunities that arise as technology is deployed; 3) our tendency to undervalue new technologies for the freedoms they create for higher-order pursuits; and 4) the heavy discount we apply to the ability of workers and markets to anticipate and adjust to changes in market conditions.

Despite the technological upheavals of the past, employment has not only risen over time, but real wages have as well. Matt Ridley writes of just how wrong the dire predictions of machine-for-human substitution have been. He also disputes the notion that “this time it’s different”:

“The argument that artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment is as unpersuasive as the argument that threshing machines, machine tools, dishwashers or computers would cause mass unemployment. These technologies simply free people to do other things and fulfill other needs. And they make people more productive, which increases their ability to buy other forms of labour. ‘The bogeyman of automation consumes worrying capacity that should be saved for real problems,’ scoffed the economist Herbert Simon in the 1960s.“

As Ridley notes, the process of substituting capital for labor has been more or less continuous over the past 250 years, and there are now more jobs, and at far higher wages, than ever. Automation has generally involved replacement of strictly manual labor, but it has always required collaboration with human labor to one degree or another.

The tools and machines we use in performing all kinds of manual tasks become ever-more sophisticated, and while they change the human role in performing those tasks, the tasks themselves largely remain or are replaced by new, higher-order tasks. Will the combination of automation and AI change that? Will it make human labor obsolete? Call me an AI skeptic, but I do not believe it will have broad enough applicability to obviate a human role in the production of goods and services. We will perform tasks much better and faster, and AI will create new and more rewarding forms of human-machine collaboration.

Tyler Cowen believes that AI and  automation will bring powerful benefits in the long run, but he raises the specter of a transition to widespread automation involving a lengthy period of high unemployment and depressed wages. Cowen points to a 70-year period for England, beginning in 1760, covering the start of the industrial revolution. He reports one estimate that real wages rose just 22% during this transition, and that gains in real wages were not sustained until the 1830s. Evidently, Cowen views more recent automation of factories as another stage of the “great stagnation” phenomenon he has emphasized. Some commenters on Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution, insist that estimates of real wages from the early stages of the industrial revolution are basically junk. Others note that the population of England doubled during that period, which likely depressed wages.

David Henderson does not buy into Cowans’ pessimism about transition costs. For one thing, a longer perspective on the industrial revolution would undoubtedly show that average growth in the income of workers was dismal or nonexistent prior to 1760. Henderson also notes that Cowen hedges his description of the evidence of wage stagnation during that era. It should also be mentioned the share of the U.S. work force engaged in agricultural production was 40% in 1900, but is only 2% today, and the rapid transition away from farm jobs in the first half of the 20th century did not itself lead to mass unemployment nor declining wages (HT: Russ Roberts). Cowen cites more recent data on stagnant median income, but Henderson warns that even recent inflation adjustments are fraught with difficulties, that average household size has changed, and that immigration, by adding households and bringing labor market competition, has had at least some depressing effect on the U.S. median wage.

Even positive long-run effects and a smooth transition in the aggregate won’t matter much to any individual whose job is easily automated. There is no doubt that some individuals will fall on hard times, and finding new work might require a lengthy search, accepting lower pay, or retraining. Can something be done to ease the transition? This point is addressed by Don Boudreaux in another context in “Transition Problems and Costs“. Specifically, Boudreaux’s post is about transitions made necessary by changing patterns of international trade, but his points are relevant to this discussion. Most fundamentally, we should not assume that the state must have a role in easing those transitions. We don’t reflexively call for aid when workers of a particular firm lose their jobs because a competitor captures a greater share of the market, nor when consumers decide they don’t like their product. In the end, these are private problems that can and should be solved privately. However, the state certainly should take a role in improving the function of markets such that unemployed resources are absorbed more readily:

“Getting rid of, or at least reducing, occupational licensing will certainly help laid-off workers transition to new jobs. Ditto for reducing taxes, regulations, and zoning restrictions – many of which discourage entrepreneurs from starting new firms and from expanding existing ones. While much ‘worker transitioning’ involves workers moving to where jobs are, much of it also involves – and could involve even more – businesses and jobs moving to where available workers are.“

Boudreaux also notes that workers should never be treated as passive victims. They are quite capable of acting on their own behalf. They often act out of risk avoidance to save their funds against the advent of a job loss, invest in retraining, and seek out new opportunities. There is no question, however, that many workers will need new skills in an economy shaped by increasing automation and AI. This article discusses some private initiatives that can help close the so-called “skills gap”.

Crucially, government should not accelerate the process of automation beyond its natural pace. That means markets and prices must be allowed to play their natural role in directing resources to their highest-valued uses. Unfortunately, government often interferes with that process by imposing employment regulations and wage controls — i.e., the minimum wage. Increasingly, we are seeing that many jobs performed by low-skilled workers can be automated, and the expense of automation becomes more worthwhile as the cost of labor is inflated to artificial levels by government mandate. That point was emphasized in a 2015 post on Sacred Cow Chips entitled “Automate No Job Before Its Time“.

Another past post on Sacred Cow Chips called “Robots and Tradeoffs” covered several ways in which we will adjust to a more automated economy, none of which will require the intrusive hand of government. One certainty is that humans will always value human service, even when a robot is more efficient, so there will be always be opportunities for work. There will also be ways in which humans can compete with machines (or collaborate more effectively) via human augmentation. Moreover, we should not discount the potential for the ownership of machines to become more widely dispersed over time, mitigating the feared impact of automation on the distribution of income. The diffusion of specific technologies become more widespread as their costs decline. That phenomenon has unfolded rapidly with wireless technology, particularly the hardware and software necessary to make productive use of the wireless internet. The same is likely to occur with 3-D printing and other advances. For example, robots are increasingly entering consumer markets, and there is no reason to believe that the same downward cost pressures won’t allow them to be used in home production or small-scale business applications. The ability to leverage technology will require learning, but web-enabled instruction is becoming increasingly accessible as well.

Can the ownership of productive technologies become sufficiently widespread to assure a broad distribution of rewards? It’s possible that cost reductions will allow that to happen, but broadening the ownership of capital might require new saving constructs as well. That might involve cooperative ownership of capital by associations of private parties engaged in diverse lines of business. Stable family structures can also play a role in promoting saving.

It is often said that automation and AI will mean an end to scarcity. If that were the case, the implications for labor would be beside the point. Why would anyone care about jobs in a world without want? Of course, work might be done purely for pleasure, but that would make “labor” economically indistinguishable from leisure. Reaching that point would mean a prolonged process of falling prices, lifting real wages on a pace matching increases in productivity. But in a world without scarcity, prices must be zero, and that will never happen. Human wants are unlimited and resources are finite. We’ll use resources more productively, but we will always find new wants. And if prices are positive, including the cost of capital, it is certain that demands for labor will remain.

Rainfall, Individualism and Income

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Capitalism, Collectivism

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Highly variable rainfall in a country is associated with less individualistic attitudes, according to a provocative paper by economist Lewis Davis (HT: Marginal Revolution). He leverages this relationship to estimate a positive impact of individual responsibility on economic development. Both results are potentially important, if somewhat controversial. Davis admits that he confronted a number of measurement issues and methodological complexities.

Davis notes that the variability of rainfall creates agricultural risk. He posits that countries having to deal with such recurrent, exogenous risks tend to develop institutions that might allow risk to be shared more broadly. In other words, such uncontrollable events as droughts, destructive flooding and uneven agricultural output lead to a social tendency toward collectivism, which is also reflected in the attitudes of individual citizens. He first builds a mathematical economic model with that implication:

“… the model predicts the equilibrium level of collective responsibility will be greater where nature is more capricious.“

Davis finds that the relationship holds up empirically using cross-country data on rainfall and surveys of social attitudes. His real interest, however, is to exploit that relationship to obtain estimates of the impact of individual responsibility on economic development. The complication he grapples with is that more favorable survey ratings of individual responsibility are themselves a function of economic development, so causation runs both ways. To tackle this problem, he uses rainfall variability to create an empirical “instrument” based on survey measures of individual responsibility, and in turn uses the exogenous variation in the instrument to explain differences in per capita income. Controls are used in the fitted equations for other social and economic factors. Again, he finds that his instrument for individual responsibility is positively related to income.

Another way to summarize Davis’ results is that natural risks are associated with greater acceptance of collectivism, but collectivist attitudes are associated with lower income levels. The empirical finding of a preference for heavy reliance on the state to insure against common risks is fascinating and it comports with the theory that the government has a legitimate role in the provision of public goods, social risk mitigation being among them. One should not place too much faith in the state as a reliable problem solver, however, or as an engine of economic growth. After all, there is a good reason for the second result: an economy dominated by the public sector is doomed to long-term decline. Individual initiative and capitalism, on the other hand, are more reliable in producing long-term economic gains and ending poverty, even when the rain is spotty. General prosperity might be more difficult to achieve when the weather is fickle, but prosperity is a much better cushion against risk than government.

Mobility, Safety Nets & Sticky Webs

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Big Government, Welfare State

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We’re unlikely to reduce the share of the U.S. population living in economic dependency under the current policy regime. So many aspects of tax law, regulation and aid programs are designed as if to perpetuate or perhaps even worsen the situation. I’ve discussed this topic before on Sacred Cow Chips in “Degrees of Poverty and the Social Safety Trap“, and “Minority Politics and the Redistributionist Honey Trap“.

Many supporters of aggressive anti-poverty efforts take umbrage at any suggestion that government aid might discourage the poor from engaging in productive activities. They imagine an implication that the poor are “lazy”, perfidious or otherwise undeserving of assistance. Whether that is a misunderstanding or merely rhetorical bite-back, the fact is that it is rational to respond to incentives and there is no shame in doing so. Unfortunately, many assistance programs contain incentive traps or income “cliffs” that discourage work effort. This applies to food stamps, rent subsidies, Obamacare subsidies, and many more of the 120+ federal aid programs and other state and local programs.

Here’s a new example from a research abstract posted at Marginal Revolution: The Medicaid expansion had very negative effects on labor force participation. The funding for Medicaid expansion at the state level was authorized by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — aka Obamacare, but only about half the states went along with it. From the abstract:

“I find a significant negative relationship between Medicaid expansion and labor force participation, in which expanding Medicaid is associated with 1.5 to 3 percentage point drop in labor force participation.“

The direction of impact is hardly unique, and as Tyler Cowen notes at the link:

“Work is good for most people, and it is even better for their future selves, and their future children too.“

The negative impact of Obamacare is more massive than the estimate above might suggest. Veronique de Rugy at Reason.com discusses how “Federal Programs Keep People Poor“. While most of her article is about the negative impact of high marginal tax rates on the employment prospects of the poor, she also recalls an ugly CBO estimate of the ACA’s impact:

“In 2014, the Congressional Budget Office—Congress’ official fiscal scorekeeper—revised its original estimate to report that because of the law, by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work will have exited the labor force.“

There are several different channels through which the negative effects of the ACA operate: Small employers are incented to limit their hiring and the hours of employees, and federal subsidies (and sometimes state benefits) are available to individuals only so long as they remain below certain income thresholds. Again, this is typical of many government aid programs (the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) being an exception). More from de Rugy:

“When the government takes away a person’s benefits as his income goes up, it has the same effect as a direct tax. And remember, when you tax something, you usually get less of it. That means these programs can actually hinder income mobility: In order to continue receiving their government cash, individuals are forced to limit the amount they earn. Thus, they have an incentive not to try to climb the income ladder by putting in extra hours or signing up for job training and educational programs.“

Mises Wire recently carried a reprint of an essay by the great Henry Hazlitt, “How To Cure Poverty“. The gist of Hazlitt’s argument is that government largess simply cannot create wealth for society, but only diminish it. The mere process of redistributing the current “pie” consumes resources, but that is minor compared to the future reduction in the size of the pie brought on by the terrible incentives inherent in income taxation and many government benefit programs:

“The problem of curing poverty is difficult and two-sided. It is to mitigate the penalties of misfortune and failure without undermining the incentives to effort and success. … The way to cure poverty is … through … the adoption of a system of private property, freer trade, free markets, and free enterprise. It was largely because we adopted this system more fully than any other country that we became the most productive and hence the richest nation on the face of the globe. Through this system more has been done to wipe out poverty in the last two centuries than in all previous history.“

Harvard professors Edward Glaeser and Andrei Schleifer have written about “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate“, which posits that redistributive policies that are harmful to constituents can be rewarding to politicians. The paper deals with policies that encourage emigration of affluent voters away from cities, but which nevertheless reward politicians by increasing the proportion of their political base in the remaining constituency. It seems to apply very well to many major cities in the U.S. However, it certainly applies more broadly, across states and nations, when affluent people and their capital are mobile while the less affluent are not, especially when benefits are at stake. It’s no secret that promises of benefits are often attractive to voters in the short run, even if they are harmful and unsustainable in the long run.

The welfare state appears to have helped to sustain many of the poor at an improved standard of living after accounting for benefits, or it has prevented them from falling into “deep poverty”. However, it hasn’t succeeded in lifting the poor out of dependency on the state. Pre-benefit poverty rates are about the same as they were the late 1960s. In addition, Christopher Jencks observes that the “Very Poor” have in fact become poorer. That’s discussed in his review of “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer. Jencks presents statistics showing that those in the lowest two percentiles of the income distribution have suffered a fairly sharp decline in income since 1999. Many of these extremely poor individuals do not avail themselves of benefits for which they could qualify. In addition, the EITC requires earned income. A job loss is a wage loss and, if it goes on, a loss of EITC benefits. Unfortunately, work requirements are more difficult to meet in the presence of wage floors and other distortions imposed by heavy-handed regulation.

A guaranteed national income has become a hot topic recently. Michael Tanner weighs in on “The Pros and Cons…” of such a program. There are many things to like about the idea inasmuch as it could sweep away many of the wasteful programs piled upon each other over the years. It is possible to construct a sliding-scale guarantee that would retain positive incentives for all, as Milton Friedman demonstrated years ago with his negative income tax concept. However, as Tanner points out, there are many details to work out, and the benefits of the switch would depend upon the incentive structure built into the guarantee. As a political plaything, it could still be dangerous to the health of the economy and an impediment to income mobility. Don Boudreaux has registered objections to a guaranteed income, one of which is based on strengthening the wrongheaded argument that we derive all rights from government. Even more interesting is David Henderson’s take on a basic income guarantee. He finds that the budgetary impact of a $10,000 guarantee would equate to a 30% increase in government spending, and that assumes that it replaces all other assistance programs! Henderson also discusses the public choice aspects of income guarantees, as well as moral objections, and he concludes that there are strong reasons to reject the idea on libertarian grounds.

The economy is riddled with too many subsidies, penalties and bad incentives that distort the behavior of various groups. The well-to-do often benefit from subsidies that are every bit as distortionary as those inherent in many public assistance programs. They should all be swept away to restore a dynamic economy with the potential to lift even more out of poverty. There could be a role for a guaranteed income on the grounds that it is better than what we’ve got. But we should recall the words of Hazlitt, who reminded us that we’ve come so far on the strength of property rights, private initiative, and free trade. Left unfettered, those things can take us much farther than the ugly pairing of beneficence and coercion of the government behemoth.

 

Seeding the Grapes of Graft

23 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by in Big Government, rent seeking

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Government-Bounty-Hunter

Are you investing in graft and rent-seeking activity without knowing it? Is a significant share of your saving channeled into sectors that profit from political influence over politicians, regulators and government planners? Maybe it’s no surprise, and you knew all along that your capital backs firms who manipulate the political system to extract resources beyond what they can earn through honest production. You have an interest in the success of the rent seekers, and you might well get a tax benefit to go along with it!

All this is almost certainly true if your savings are in a 401k, an IRA, a public or private pension fund, or in publicly-traded stocks. These sources of investor funding are dominated by firms that rent seek…. an indication of just how far the cancer of corporatism has gone toward completely subverting free market capitalism. It can be turned back only by ending the symbiosis between industry and government and encouraging real competition in markets.

This question of investing in rent seekers is raised by Guy Rolnik at Pro-Market (the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business):

“Put another way, are we facing an economic model in which tens of millions of Americans’ pensions are relying on the ability of companies to extract rents from consumers and taxpayers?“

Rolnik’s emphasis is primarily on mergers and acquisitions, industrial concentration, diminished competition, and monopoly profits extracted by the surviving entities. As Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution notes, “The Number of Publicy Traded Firms Has Halved” in the past 20 years. At the same time, the trend in business startups has been decidedly negative. While I strongly believe in the benefits of a healthy market for corporate control, these trends are a sign that the rent seekers and their enablers in government are gaining an upper hand.

Monopoly must be condoned if there are natural barriers to entry in a market, but such monopolists are generally subject to regulation of price and service levels (complex issues in their own right). If there are other legitimate economic barriers to entry such as differentiated products and strong brand reputations, there is no reason for concern, as those are signs of value creation. And given the private freedom to innovate and compete, there is little reason to suspect that above-normal profits can persist in the long run, as new risk-takers are ultimately drawn into the mix. That is how a healthy economy works and how prices direct resources to the highest-valued uses.

Rent seekers, on the other hand, always have one of the following objectives:

Government Protection: Increased concentration in an industry is a concern if there are artificial barriers to entry. One sure way to protect a market is to enlist the government’s help in locking it down. This happens in a variety of ways: tariffs and other restrictions on foreign goods, patent protection, restrictions on entry into geographic markets, implicit government guarantees against risk (too big to fail), union labor laws, and complex regulatory rules and compliance costs that small competitors can’t afford. The upshot is that if we want more competition in markets, we must reduce the size of the administrative state.

Subsidies: Another aspect of rent seeking is the quest for taxpayer subsidies. These are often channeled into politically-favored activities that can’t be sustained otherwise, and the recipients are always politically-favored firms with friends in high places. This is privilege! Look no further than the renewable energy industry to see that politically-favored, subsidized, and uneconomic activities tend to be dominated by firms with political connections. Naturally, good rent-seekers have an affinity for central planning and its plentiful opportunities for graft. With big-government control of resources you get big-time rent seeking.

Contracts: Government largess also means that big contracts are there to be won across a range of industries: construction, defense, transportation equipment, office supplies, computing, accounting and legal services and almost anything else. Because these purchases are made by an entity that uses other people’s money, incentives for efficiency are weak. And while private firms may compete for these contracts, there is no question that political connections play an important role. As government assumes control of more resources, more favorable rent-seeking opportunities always appear.

Influencing public policy is a game that is much easier for large firms to play. Moreover, the revolving door between government and industry is most active among strong players. This is not to say that large corporations don’t engage in many productive activities. They often excel in their areas of specialization and therefore earn profits that are economically legitimate. However, when government is involved as a buyer, subsidizer or regulator, the rewards are not as strongly related to productive effort. These rewards include above-normal profits, a more dominant market position, a long-term pipeline of taxpayer funding, the prestige of running a large operation with armies of highly-skilled employees engaged in compliance activities, and prestigious appointments for officers. Some of these gains from graft are shared by investors… and that’s probably you.

For society, the implications of channeling saving into rent-seeking activities are unambiguously negative. To say it differently, the private return to rent seeking exceeds the social return, and the latter is negative. Successful rent seekers artificially boost their equity returns and may simultaneously undermine returns to smaller competitors. The outcomes entail restraint of trade and misallocation of resources on a massive scale. The public-sector largess that makes it all possible gives us high rates of taxation, which retard incentives to work, save and invest. If taxes aren’t enough to cover the bloat, our central bank (the Fed) is not shy about monetizing government debt, which distorts interest rates, inflates asset prices and  inflates the prices of goods. In the aggregate, these things warp the usual tradeoff between risk and return and worsen society’s provision for the future.

How should you feel about all this? And your portfolio? As an investor, you might not have much choice. It’s not your fault, so take your private returns where you can find them. Some firms swear off rent seeking of any kind, like Koch Industries, but it is not publicly traded. You could invest in a business of your own, but know that you might compete at a disadvantage to rent seekers in the same industry. Most of all, you should vote for lower subsidies, less regulation and less government!

Hamburger Nation: An Administrative Nightmare

04 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by in Big Government, Judicial Branch, Legislative Branch, Regulation

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nanny-state

By what authority do unelected bureaucrats in administrative agencies increasingly make laws, enforce those laws and adjudicate violations? The fact that all of these activities take place within the executive branch of government appears to be an obvious contradiction of the separation of powers required by the first three articles of the Constitution, the principle of “Rule By Consent” of the governed, and protections of individual liberty. In a strong sense, the regulatory apparatus has grown so unwieldy that the powers routinely exercised by administrative agencies today seem beyond even the reach of elected executives. The rules promulgated by this “fourth branch” of government are essentially extralegal, a point discussed at length in Philip Hamburger’s “Is Administrative Law Unlawful“. He has also explained these issues at the Volokh Conspiracy blog in “Extralegal power, delegation, and necessity“, and “The Constitution’s repudiation of extralegal power“.

Hamburger examines the assertion that rule-making must be delegated by Congress to administrative agencies because legislation cannot reasonably be expected to address the many details and complexities encountered in the implementation of new laws. Yet this is a delegation of legislative power. Once delegated, this power has a way of metastasizing at the whim of agency apparatchiks, if not at the direction of the chief executive. If you should want to protest an administrative ruling, your first stop will not be a normal court of law, but an administrative review board or a court run by the agency itself! You’ll be well advised to hire an administrative attorney to represent you. Eventually, and at greater expense, an adverse decision can be appealed to the judicial branch proper.

This adds up to a dangerous lack of accountability and power. Marginal Revolution points out that critics of Hamburger’s book overlook the potential for harm that could be done by a “vindictive” president. But we should not lose sight of the fact that bureaucrats themselves, at any level, can be vindictive, as the IRS targeting scandal has shown. But that is only one motive for abuse of power; another motive may be more pervasive: the ability to reward those in a position to promote the self-interests of those who populate the administrative state. These are dangers that are endemic to big government. In a post entitled “Are Government Regulators More Virtuous than Everyone Else” (No!), Ivan Carrino highlights the weakness of arguments like those made by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller in “Phishing For Phools“, who call for greater government regulation on the grounds that consumers are vulnerable to manipulation by businesses. Carrino says:

“One can’t help but notice the central contradiction in this analysis. On the one hand, it is assumed that markets fail because of ‘normal human weakness.’ On the other hand, it is assumed that regulation, which must necessarily be implemented by human beings with equal or greater ‘weaknesses,’ will somehow solve the problem.

Akerlof and Shiller simultaneously demonize human beings who operate in the private sector while idealizing human beings who operate in the public sector.“

Glenn Reynolds has been a prominent critic of the administrative state. As a consequence of the vast and growing body of regulatory rules, it’s become increasingly difficult for individuals, acting on their own or as businesspeople, to know whether they are in acting in violation of administrative law. Reynolds discusses regulatory crime and over-criminalization in “You May Be Breaking The Law Right Now“, and in his great paper “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime” (free download).

Hamburger’s main position is that law should be made by elected representatives, not by bureaucrats who lack direct accountability to voters. Ilya Somin believes that with time, Hamburger will have great influence on legal theorists in this regard. He compares Hamburger’s insights on administrative law to Richard Epstein’s work on takings. Epstein insisted that “almost all regulations that restrict property rights should be considered ‘takings’ that require compensation under the Fifth Amendment.” Somin notes that Epstein’s position, despite harsh criticism from certain quarters, has influenced legal thinking in a dramatic way over the years.

What’s to be done? Can a line reasonably be drawn between constitutional legislative power and delegated rule-making authority? Somin is skeptical that absolute restrictions on lawmaking by the administrative state are practical, in the sense that there will always be details that cannot be addressed in enabling legislation. Others have suggested practical paths forward: Joseph Postell attempts to give a roadmap in “From Administrative State to Constitutional Government“. A recent Glenn Reynolds op-ed, “Blow Up The Administrative State“, gives a qualified defense of Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s proposed amendments to the Constitution. Among other things, Abbot proposes to:

“–Prohibit administrative agencies … from creating federal law.
  –Prohibit administrative agencies … from preempting state law.
  –Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when … officials overstep their bounds.
  –Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a federal law or regulation.”

I would add that administrative review and adjudication should be independent of the agencies themselves. Also, Representative Mia Love (R-UT) has proposed legislation that would restrict Congress to bills focused on points directly related to a single issue (i.e., no omnibus bills), which would help to check the growth of the administrative state.

All of these measures seem consistent with Hamburger’s views. Reynolds is fully cognizant of the dangers of a constitutional convention. Nevertheless, he recognizes that Abbot’s proposals would impose harder limits on the size of government, and defends them in colorful fashion:

“A smaller government would mean fewer phony-baloney jobs for college graduates with few marketable skills but demonstrated political loyalty. It would mean fewer opportunities for tax dollars to be directed to people and entities with close ties to people in power. It would mean less ability to engage in social engineering and ‘nudges’ aimed at what are all-too-often seen as those dumb rubes in flyover country. The smaller the government, the fewer the opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement — and graft and self-aggrandizement are what our political class is all about.“

For further reading, Michael Ramsey at The Originalism Blog posts links to several other essays by Hamburger at The Volokh Conspiracy, where he acted as a guest-blogger.

 

 

 

Medicaid and Value Mislaid

12 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in Obamacare

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Medicaid-Agency-Cartoon

A new paper on the MIT Econ department web site finds that the “welfare benefit to recipients from Medicaid per dollar of government spending range from $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework ….” Those estimates are from “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment” by Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo F.P. Luttmer (Hat Tips: Marginal Revolution, John Crawford). A major share of the increase in the number of insured individuals under Obamacare stems from Medicaid enrollments, so the efficacy of the program is of great interest as the nation considers possible changes to the health care law.

The value of Medicaid to recipients is low in part because the coverage is incremental to the uncompensated medical care they would have received without coverage. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that if “… Medicaid recipients had to pay the government’s average cost of Medicaid, they would rather be uninsured.” That’s why I think some of the commentary on this result is a little unfair, such as the way it’s presented by Megan McArdle. There are clearly other reasons why Medicaid receives a low valuation by recipients, however. For example, the authors find that the program entails substantial costs of moral hazard, which may mean that recipients are in poor health relative to reimbursement levels, take risks that they would avoid in the absence of coverage, or simply over-utilize services for which they would be unwilling to pay, even if the cash were made directly available. While it doesn’t receive much focus from the authors, low reimbursement rates discourage providers from accepting Medicaid patients. That would certainly reduce one’s willingness to pay for the coverage.

Finkelstein, Hendren and Luttmer estimate that 40% to 80% of Medicaid’s welfare value derives from “a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world.” The transfers go to providers who, in the absence of Medicaid coverage, would offer “implicit insurance” in the form of uncompensated care. As noted above, that’s a good thing. Providers should be compensated rather than relied upon as a charities, though there are strong indications that compensation is inadequate.

The authors also estimate the value of Medicaid as a “redistribution tool” relative to the earned income tax credit (EITC). At best, they find that recipients would slightly prefer Medicaid cuts to equivalent reductions in the EITC (though the comparison suffers from some conceptual shortcomings). Unsurprisingly, the outcome depends upon how highly the “transfers” to health care providers are valued by enrollees. So the program seems to do poorly in the eyes of recipients, who would likely prefer outright transfers of cash. I would speculate that many recipients would prefer a voucher with which they could purchase coverage levels of their choice, retaining any excess not spent.

The “Value of Medicaid” study suggests that the program is unsuccessful in delivering value to recipients and taxpayers. Obamacare reform should include fundamental changes to the Medicaid program, measures that restore individual choice and the private market for health coverage, and provisions to increase competition in the health care and insurance markets. Eliminating prohibitions on the sale of health insurance across state lines would be a good start. Reforms should also combat excessive regulation of health care providers, such as eliminating the electronic health records mandate and reforming the inflexible system of compensation based on relative value units. Market-oriented reforms and competition can reduce costs and make health care more affordable, aiding in the delivery of greater benefits to all segments of society.

Can Water Markets Drive the Nuts From California?

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Price Mechanism, Secondary Markets, Shortage

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Water Use CA

Leaders in California seem determined to deal with the state’s water shortage in the least effective and most intrusive ways possible. Governor Jerry Brown has ordered such “bold”, yet ultimately weak, actions as restricting urban water usage, fines on “water wasters”, and xeriscaping of public property. The plan includes additional state intrusions such as rebates for high-efficiency appliances, bans on certain types of faucets, toilets and residential lawn irrigation systems, and more rigorous monitoring of water use, which could ultimately include shower time. A $1 billion state investment in wastewater recycling and desalinization plants is also planned, and pundits advocate other huge projects such as new reservoirs. These efforts are costly, but they are also beguiling to politicians seeking the appearance of positive action.

Overlooked is a straightforward and relatively costless way to achieve effective conservation and relief from the shortage: use the price mechanism! This simple approach encourages conservation in many large and small ways that are beyond the  discernment of government planners. Obviously, it can also address the profligacy of certain agricultural uses. A market mechanism is the one sure way to find the most rational price for water, and it is sorely needed in the face of such a significant shortage.

The misallocation of water rights in California is truly staggering, as demonstrated by the graphic at the top of this post, which is from a post at Marginal Revolution (originally from Mother Jones):

“… as farmers are watering their almonds, San Diego is investing in an energy-intensive billion-dollar desalination plant which will produce water at a much higher cost than the price the farmer are paying. That is a massive and costly misallocation of water. … In short, we are spending thousands of dollars worth of water to grow hundreds of dollars worth of almonds and that is truly nuts.”

The Mises Daily blog makes the same point in an article entitled, “Drought and the Failure of Big Government in California“.

“When crops like pecans, which are native to Louisiana where it rains over fifty inches per year, are being grown in central California, we will have to ask ourselves if there is true comparative advantage at work here, or if the industry is really sitting upon a shaky foundation of government-subsidized and -allocated resources.

The rhetoric that’s coming out of the growers, of course, is that California growers are essential to the American food supply. Some will even suggest that it’s a national security issue. Without California growers, we’re told, we’ll all starve in case of foreign embargo. … But let’s not kid ourselves. North America is in approximately zero danger of having too little farmland for staple crops.” [Emphasis added.]

Last month, my post “Scarcity, Scarcity Everywhere, And Water Pricing Stinks” addressed the mispricing of water and the promise of marketable use permits for water conservation. Details may vary, but in this sort of arrangement, residential, industrial and agricultural users would receive a base assignment of water rights at a relatively low, uniform price. The base assignment can be a function of historical usage. A secondary market then allows consumers and other users to purchase additional use permits or to sell permits exceeding their own usage:

“The price of water on the secondary market will rise to the point at which users no longer perceive a benefit to marginal flows of water above cost. A higher price encourages voluntary conservation in two ways: it is a direct cash cost of use above one’s base water rights, and it is an opportunity cost of foregoing the sale of permits on water use up to the base assignment. Those best-prepared to conserve can sell excess rights to those least prepared to conserve.”

Price incentives and their power for conservation are discussed in this post at Marginal Revolution. Market pricing is the single-most effective method of fostering sustainable patterns of resource use. Increasingly scarce conditions naturally lead to higher prices, which both discourage excessive use and create incentives for investments in reuse and other efficiencies. Yet politicians are highly averse to the idea of pricing resources rationally via the market. Instead, as exemplified by Governor Brown’s restrictions, they promulgate a seemingly endless series of measures that play on “green guilt” without adequate consideration of alternatives.

A colorful example of this misguided philosophy is the low-flow toilet, as described in this post entitled “Americans Destroyed Indoor Plumbing“. Mandatory recycling presents a classic case of conflicting policy goals: another sacred cow of environmental dogma, it increases water use in California because containers must be washed before they go to the curb. And there are other conflicting environmental goals, such as an effort to protect the Delta Smelt in San Francisco Bay by diverting over 300 billion gallons of water away from the Central Valley.

Meanwhile, big government Republicans are thumping their chests over their self-described success in planning for water needs in Arizona. This consists of infrastructure projects that capture runoff and store water in underground reservoirs, which are fine as far as they go (and, if available, better than above-ground storage subject to evaporation). However, these projects involve considerable public expense, and they have not prevented the imposition of mandatory conservation requirements. It should also be mentioned that current drought conditions in Arizona are mild compared to California. The point here is that market-oriented pricing and conservation reduces the need for such costly projects and intrusions. Administered water prices are expected to rise in Arizona, and they probably should. But it’s noteworthy that the last link, a summary of what is purported to be a careful study of water pricing issues, makes no mention of trade in water use permits and market pricing. As Glenn Reynolds might say, unlike big infrastructure and intrusive regulations, market-oriented policies and efficient pricing may not entice politicians with sufficient opportunities for graft.