Coyote Blog

Kevin Drum links to a NY Times article that, mainly through annecdote, seems to be trying to fabricate the "next" consumer crisis, over debit card overdraft fees.  The key chart, containing about all the real non-annecdotal data in the article is below:

I wrote in the comments:

Wow, the NY Times almost fooled me with this chart. Yet again they play games with scale and timeframes to make a point that is not correct. For example, it looks like overdraft fees may have risen faster than transactions, but that is because the overdraft fee revenue chart goes back to 1992 and the transaction chart only goes back to 2000.

If we look at both from 2000, we see overdraft fees on debit cards have gone from $20 billion to $38 billion today, or about a 90% increase. At the same time, dollar amount of purchases on debit cards went from $0.3 trillion to $1.3 trillion (as well as I can read the graph) or an increase of 333%. I understand that there may be a mix shift I am missing - the overdraft numbers include charges for checks as well as NSF fees, but the article does not have the changing mix. This is another topic, but why can't reporters even at the Times include all the numbers you really need to analyze this stuff - don't they try to do these calculations? They have graphs side by side, implying one should compare trends, but they have apples (debit card transaction volume) next to oranges (all overdraft charges, including debit cards but other stuff too) on completely different time scales.

Anyway, by the article's own numbers, the overdraft fee volume has grown 3.5 times slower than transactions, meaning that overdraft fees have dropped from 6.7% to 2.9% of debit card transactions. This shift may be less dramatic if there are mix changes in the fees, but never-the-less, why isn't this good news? The world is never going to make the price of carelessness=0, if for no other reason that the moral hazard would be so large. But the high price on carelessness in this case seems to be reducing the frequency of people being careless (if the price of an overdraft has really gone up as implied anecdotally in the story, then the frequency must be way down -- sure missed that data in the article). We want to raise the price of Co2 to produce less of it - why don't we applaud when we raise the price of carelessness and we get less of it?

With articles about solar prices coming down, and living in Phoenix (one of the best solar sites in America), I yet again have priced out solar for our home.  The short answer is that it makes sense, IF you don't mind reaching into the pockets of all your neighbors.

For this analysis, I will use the prices here.  The $72,167 cost for a 11.76kW system is pretty competitive at $6.13 per watt installed  (this is rated watts, not actual -- see footnote).  The panels themselves can be bought for about $3 per watt, with about $1 a watt for other equipment like inverters and $2 per watt for installation.  Do-it-yourself packages for a similar size system are here and go for around $4-$4.50 per watt.

The solar company estimates that this system in Phoenix will save me$2,779 a year on my electric bill.  I have not checked their math, but I assume they are not under-estimating this number in their marketing literature.  Taking this savings, we get a payback on the installation of about 26 years.   This ignores future electricity price increases, but also ignores the time value of money.  At 8% over 20 years, it has a net present value of  NEGATIVE $41,558.   At the end of the day, this is a terrible return -- in fact a huge value destruction.

But I began this post saying a solar investment might make sense.  How?  Well, that is where your willingness to reach into your neighbor's pocket comes in.  Our solar company estimates the following tax breaks and rebates on the system described above:

• Utility rebate:  $35,280
• State income tax credit: $1,000
• Federal income tax credit:  $21,650

So, in building this $72,167 improvement on my house, I get to use $57,930 of other peoples' money**.  As Steve Martin says in the Jerk:  "That takes the pressure off!"

Like in many other cases, other peoples' money suddenly makes solar a good investment.  Now we are looking at $2,779 a year in savings from a net investment of $14,237, or about a five year payback.    Over 20 years even assuming no inflation and an 8% cost of money that has an NPV of $12,081.

So -- I officially reverse my past conclusions that home solar does not pay.  It can in fact be a good investment -- for you.  For the country, it is a terrible investment.   Your neighbors are contributing $57,930 in subsidies while you receive just $12,081 in benefits.  The remainder, just over $45,000, is a dead-weight loss to the economy.  It is money destroyed by the government.

This is surprisingly like the ethics problem of pulling a lever to get a million dollars but someone you don't know in China dies.  The only difference is that you get $12,000 and someone you don't know loses $58,000.

** Footnote: Yeah, I know, theoretically the utility rebate is a substitute for the capital spending and not a wealth transfer.  But trust me, it's a wealth transfer.  To understand this, we have to shift from rated solar watts to actual capacity in watts.  In Phoenix, one of the best solar sites in the world, panels produce only about 25% of their rated capacity in a day (6 equivalent sun hours per day divided by 24 total hours in a day).  So, on average, a 100 watt panel is producing 25 watts.

This means that by APS paying about $3 per rated watt in rebates, they are paying about $12 per actual watt.  And there is no way this is what they are paying for other capacity.  A typical brand new power plant might be $2-$3.50 per watt.  So at $12, this is clearly a transfer mandated by the PUC, and not a smart substitute for capital expenditure.   Besides, if this payment made economic sense for the utility, there would not be an annual cap on the amount paid out.

As wealth transfers go, this is a particularly egregious one, as it tends to add costs to the electric bills of the poor and middle class so rich folks can build hobby solar systems so they can tell their friends at cocktail parties that they are "green."

Update: All of this is not to say that I am so good a person as to not take the money that is being put at my doorstep.  I'm still thinking about it.

This is awesome, from Carpe Diem:

On a purchasing power parity basis, France, Japan, and Germany would all be the poorest states in the United States, based on per capita GDP.  People on the coasts don't benchmark their education or health care spending against Mississippi, except perhaps to make the case that Mississippi is spending too little.  So why do they benchmark their spending against Germany or France.  Of course we spend more on health care per capita - we spend more than these countries per capita on everything from TV's to cars to movie tickets.

Via Cafe Hayek:

American Postal Workers Union president William Burrus complains that "It is deeply troubling that Journal editors advocate ending the Postal Service's exclusive right to sort and deliver mail.  The Postal Service must remain a public service if we are to honor our nation's commitment to serve every American community "“ large or small, rich or poor, urban or rural "“ at affordable, uniform rates"

My family has  a ranch that is absolutely in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming - it is 30 minutes by dirt road from a town of 2,000.  The USPS delivers mail to a box 3 miles away from the ranch, and does it 3 days a week.  The USPS will not deliver overnight mail.   UPS delivers 6 days a week right to our door, including overnight mail.

The word "uniform" is the key -- what the USPS government protected monopoly buys us is a massive cross-subsidy, where city dwellers subsidize rural communities, Alaska, and Hawaii.   Further, because the USPS knows that these subsidized routes are cost black holes, they tend to cut back on service to try to save money.  The result is that no one is served well, as is often the case when a large cross-subsidy exists -- cities pay more for their mail, and everyone gets worse service.

When insurance covers routine expenses, perverse incentives often follow.  Here is an example I found today shopping for a company to replace my car's windshield -- This sure looks to be an absolutely blatant kickback (image from a glass company website here).

All the pitches on my Google search are like this.  Here is another one:

But here is the winner, at least as far as I got through the google search:

Don't you have to wonder about a $1,000 rebate on a procedure that retails for perhaps $250?

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, but it certainly appears that the glass companies are charging the insurance companies for more than the glass replacement would normally go for in a competitive marketplace, and then splitting the extra money defrauded from the insurance company with the consumer.   Another way of putting it is that in selecting a glass company for an insurance-covered repair, the consumer is acting as an agent for the insurance company, and as such an agent the consumer is taking a monetary inducement from a particular vendor to throw business to that vendor.

Arizona has explicit no-fault legislation banning insurance companies from raising insurance rates due to broken windshields.  I wonder what there is to stop someone, then, from heaving a rock at his/her windshield every other week?  Further, I wonder what stops such offers, which look like blatant kickbacks to me, from being either illegal or prosecuted?  I can only guess that in the weird interest-group-politics that substitute nowadays for ethics that its OK to commit fraud if the little guy is the beneficiary and unloved insurance companies are the victim.

Via Carpe Diem:

Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study.

"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse "” at a minimum "” than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover," said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.

The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.

"By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product," Ohanian said. "His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression."

After the stock market crash, Hoover met with major leaders of industry and cut a deal with them to either maintain or raise wages and institute job-sharing to keep workers employed, at least to some degree, Ohanian found. In response, General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Dupont, International Harvester and many other large firms fell in line, even publicly underscoring their compliance with Hoover's program. Reluctant to lower wages due to Hoover's entreaties, employers in the manufacturing sector responded by reducing the work week and laying off workers. By September 1931, the manufacturing sector was already hurting: Hours clocked by workers had fallen by 20% (see chart above) and employment by 35%.

Wow, its sure lucky we don't have a President today reacting to a recession with profoundly pro-labor policies. Otherwise we might be doing something stupid, like screwing secured creditors in favor of routing value to unions or protecting union health benefits at the cost of everyone else's health care.

The whole "health care rationing" debate is reaching new levels of absurdity.  In part, this is because the very term "rationing" is a confusing misnomer.

So here is what it boils down to:  For every product or service purchase, someone makes a price-value trade-off to determine if that product or service should be purchased for a given price in that particular instance.

One option for making this decision is to have the person who actually will consume the product or service -- and whose money will also be used to complete the transaction -- make this price-value tradeoff.  This is how we make these decisions for just about, um, absolutely everything that gets purchased.  Since it is your money and you are the one who will enjoy whatever is being purchased, it makes sense that you make the decision - is the price worth it?  Do you buy a cheaper substitute?  Do you do without?

A second way to do this would be to have someone who has you specifically in mind make the price value tradeoffs for you.  This might be like your wife volunteering to go out to buy you some new underwear.  While results may be superior for this approach in a few cases (e.g. my wife buying me clothes), in most cases this approach is fraught with information asymmetries that will likely lead to a suboptimal purchase.  Consider, for example, my wife buying me the cheap 28" TV when I had wanted to drop the big bucks on a 60" beauty.

If one were sloppy, he might say that this second approach is the role that exists with insurance companies or is being proposed for the government.  But this isn't the case.  Because these third parties are NOT making the decision with me and/or my personal preferences in mind.  They can't.  While my wife may have an imperfect understanding of my preferences, a government health board has none.

So a third model, and almost certainly the worst in terms of individual satisfaction, is to have a third party make price-value tradeoffs for me only with some notion of average preferences for average people, or worse, with an incentive system that has absolutely nothing to do with my satisfaction at all.  This is clearly the case for the government, and is probably the case for many private insurers today -- though at least in the latter case one could imagine a regulatory regime that allowed for much more competition and a range of offerings with different service levels and pricing, such that I was more likely to find a pairing close to my preferences than I would in a one-size-fits-no-one government regime.

Skeptics worry that such a range of choices would not exist under private competition, but in fact it does in every single market where the government allows it.  Take grocery stores, since the President of Whole Foods has come into so much criticism from government health care promoters.  The choices in grocery shopping are simply staggering -- just think what different price/value points Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Safeway, AJ's, and the farmers market offer.

I am constantly amazed when people say that government health care is no different than private competitive models because there will always be rationing.  If you cannot see the difference between "rationing" for yourself based on your own budget and preferences and "rationing" by government committee, well I suppose you deserve what you get.  Except for the problem that unfortunately, I will be forced to take it too.

I realize I did not comment on the Joe Romm oil price bet per se.  Here are two reasons I don't like the bet:

1.  Romm is making a catastrophic forecast (ie oil >$200) but wins his bet at $41, what one might consider a fairly normal current oil price.  This is very equivalent to Romm forecasting a 15F increase in world temperatures in the next century (which he has) but making a bet that he would win if temperatures go up by only 0.1F.  Clearly, a 0.1F increase over the next century would be considered by all a thorough repudiation of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming forecasts.  So why should he win the bet at this level?

2.  The bet, particularly in the next few years, has more to do with the current government's actions than Exxon's or Saudi Arabia's.  To bet that oil prices will stay low in nominal dollars, one must bet that Obama's deficits won't destroy the value of the dollar, that the Fed's expansionist monetary policy won't lead to inflation, that Congress won't pass some kind of legislative restrictions making oil production more expensive, and that the world won't sign a treaty to restrict carbon.  In short, Congress will have more effect in the near term on oil prices than flow rates in Saudi fields, and I am certainly not going to make a bet in favor of Congressional or Presidential restraint.

Postscript: Here is what you have to believe to accept Romm's 15F global warming forecast.   Here is how I opened that post.  It is interesting how similar the forecasting issues are:

For several years, there was an absolute spate of lawsuits charging sudden acceleration of a motor vehicle "” you probably saw such a story:  Some person claims they hardly touched the accelerator and the car leaped ahead at enormous speed and crashed into the house or the dog or telephone pole or whatever.  Many folks have been skeptical that cars were really subject to such positive feedback effects where small taps on the accelerator led to enormous speeds, particularly when almost all the plaintiffs in these cases turned out to be over 70 years old.  It seemed that a rational society might consider other causes than unexplained positive feedback, but there was too much money on the line to do so.

Many of you know that I consider questions around positive feedback in the climate system to be the key issue in global warming, the one that separates a nuisance from a catastrophe.  Is the Earth's climate similar to most other complex, long-term stable natural systems in that it is dominated by negative feedback effects that tend to damp perturbations?  Or is the Earth's climate an exception to most other physical processes, is it in fact dominated by positive feedback effects that, like the sudden acceleration in grandma's car, apparently rockets the car forward into the house with only the lightest tap of the accelerator?

I haven't written about Peak Oil lately, but there is a pretty good editorial on the topic in the NY Times today.  Michael Lynch makes a technical point I have been making for years:

Let's take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don't report that additional recoverable oil as "newly discovered," the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

But Lynch's editorial misses two issues I think are important.

First, nothing ever flat runs out.  If supply declines over time while demand continues to rise, prices increase.  The increased prices cause some buyers to conserve or to find substitutes.  On the supply side, higher prices make recovery of incrementally more difficult oil economic, and provides a higher price umbrella under which substitutes can compete.  This is particularly true in oil, where there is never a fixed limit to the amount of oil recoverable -- estimates are always based on price expectations.  Higher prices mean more investment can be justified, generally allowing more oil recovery.

Second, I think Lynch is misguided in some of his discussion of political risk.  While I am not hugely worried about an OPEC-like embargo in the future, the fact is that more and more of the world's future oil supplies are controlled by public rather than private oil companies.  For countries like Mexico, the state-run oil company is the post office, comparable both in terms of its management competance (or lack thereof) and its focus on non-economic missions (like providing jobs for key political supporters).  Ronald Bailey wrote a while back:

The problem arises because 77 percent of the world's known oil reserves are in the hands of state-owned oil companies. Such "companies" do not respond with alacrity to market signals and so are under-investing in new production technologies and even in maintaining the production facilities that they currently have. I have earlier pointed out that an "oil crisis," that is, a steep rapid run up in the price of oil may occur at any time due to government incompetence or maliciousness.

I wrote about Mexico in particular:

Kevin Drum is concerned that projected drops in Mexican oil production are a leading indicator that the "Peak Oil" theory is coming true.  I would argue that, in fact, it is a trailing indicator of what happens when you let governments run producing assets.  Drum says:

The issue here isn't that Cantarell is declining. That began a couple
of years ago and had been widely anticipated. What's news is that, just
as many peak oil theorists have been warning, when big fields start to
decline they decline faster than anyone expects. So far, Cantarell
appears to be evidence that they're right.

Actually, fields in the US do not tend to decline "all of a sudden" like that.  Why?  Because unlike about any other place in the world, oil fields in the US are owned by private companies with capital to make long-term investments that are not subject to the vagaries of political opportunism and populism.  There are a lot of things you can do to an aging oil field, particularly with $60 prices to justify the effort, to increase or maintain production.  In accordance with the laws of diminishing returns, all of them require increasing amounts of capital and intelligent management.

Unfortunately, state owned oil companies like Pemex (whose assets, by the way, were stolen years ago from US owners) are run terribly, like every other state-owned company in the world.  And, when politicians in Mexico are faced with a choice between making capital available for long-term investment in the fields or dropping it into yet another silly government program or transfer payment scheme, they do the latter.  And when politicians have a choice between running an employment meritocracy or creating a huge bureaucracy of jobs for life for their cronies they choose the latter.

Ditto in Venezuela.

No one sees an immediate crisis at Petróleos de Venezuela. But its windfall from high oil prices masks the devilish complexity and rising costs of producing heavy oil. Meanwhile, the company acknowledged last month that spending on "social development" almost doubled in 2006, to $13.3 billion, while its spending on exploration badly trailed its global peers. And Petróleos de Venezuela's work force has ballooned to 89,450, up 29 percent since 2001 even as production declined"¦ Petróleos de Venezuela's cash is said to be running short as Mr. Chávez uses its revenue to cement political alliances with Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua.  The company has borrowed more than $11 billion since the start of the year, a rapid debt buildup that reflects a wager by Mr. Chávez that oil prices will remain high indefinitely.

The oil industry in these countries follow the following cycle:

1.  US companies invest huge amounts of capital and know-how to build oil industry
2.  Once things are producing, local government steals it all
3.  Oil fields go into extended decline due to short-term focused and incompetent government management
4.  US companies invited back int to invest huge amounts of know-how and capital
5. repeat

Climate activist Adam Sacks at Grist:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we've ever faced.  It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years"”but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora's Box tightly shut.  We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life.  It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably.  Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn't good and we'd better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic.  We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.

Yep, let's all return to that sustainable world of 8000BC, scrap the worldwide division of labor and all our technology, and go back to subsistance farming and travelling by horse.  Gee, what a happy time that was...

Interestingly, this guy is making an incredibly common failure among physical scientists -- the attempt to apply conservation of mass/energy physical models or bacteriological growth models to economic growth:

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always"”but always"”ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.Because of this civilization's obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

Here is what I wrote, in a post titled "Physics, Wealth Creation, and Zero Sum Economics"

My guess is that this zero-sum thinking comes from our training and intuition about the physical world.  As we all learned back in high school, nature generally works in zero sums.  For example, in any bounded environment, no matter what goes on inside (short of nuclear fission) mass and energy are both conserved, as outlined by the first law of thermodynamics.  Energy may change form, like the potential energy from chemical bonds in gasoline being converted to heat and work via combustion, but its all still there somewhere.

In fact, given the second law of thermodynamics, the only change that will occur is that elements will end in a more disorganized, less useful form than when they started.  This notion of entropic decay also has a strong effect on economic thinking, as you will hear many of the same zero sum economics folks using the language of decay on human society.  Take folks like Paul Ehrlich (please).  All of there work is about decay:  Pollution getting worse, raw materials getting scarce, prices going up, economies crashing.  They see human society driven by entropic decline....

[But] the world, as a whole and in most of its individual parts, is wealthier than in was in 1900.  Vastly more wealthy.  Which I recognize can be disturbing to our intuition honed on the physical world.  I mean, where did the wealth come from?  Out of thin air?  How can that be?

Interestingly, in the 19th century, scientists faced a similar problem in the physical world in dating the age of the Earth.  There was evidence all around them (from fossils, rocks, etc) that the earth had to be hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years old.  The processes of evolution Darwin described had to occur over untold millions of years.  Yet no one could accept an age over a few million for the solar system, because they couldn't figure out what could fuel the Sun for longer than that.  Every calculation they made showed that by any form of combustion they understood, the sun would burn out in, at most, a few tens of millions of years.  If the sun and earth was so old, where was all that energy coming from?  Out of thin air?

It was Einstein that solved the problem.  E=mc2 meant that there were new processes (e.g. fusion) where very tiny amounts of mass were converted to unreasonably large amounts of energy.  Amounts of energy so large that it tends to defy human intuition.  Here was an enormous, really huge source of potential energy that no one before even suspected.

Which gets me back to wealth.  To balance the wealth equation, there must be a huge reservoir out there of potential energy, or I guess you would call it potential wealth.  This source is the human mind.  All wealth flows from the human mind, and that source of energy is also unreasonably large, much larger than most people imagine.

In 1946, a factory might employ its own cafeteria staff, the people who cleaned the bathrooms and windows, the folks who painted the building, even mechanics for the motor pool.  Today, all that stuff is outsourced.  The work and jobs are still there, but the jobs have been outsourced to service companies so the factory can focus just on production.

Are manufacturing jobs numbers smart enough to take this into account, or is the (relative) decline in manufacturing jobs in part attributable to unwinding of vertical integration and outsourcing of work to service companies?

To be very specific:  Is an accountant in a factory a manufacturing job, or a service job in the government numbers?  Certainly this person is a service worker if he is an independent contractor working for the factory, but what if he is employed in the factory with an office in the factory on the factory's payroll?

Anyone know?

A Cafe Hayek Reader asks:

Imagine we had entirely private health insurance market "“ no Medicare or Medicaid.  If I live to be sixty-five, I will probably have a personal and/or family history that indicates a strong probability of developing an expensive chronic condition. I would wager that is true of almost all sixty-five year olds.

So here is my question: which insurer in their right mind would take on my risk?

I suspect none. Once philanthropy and savings were exhausted, I would surely risk a painful life and preventable death.

Do I want this? Does anyone? Isn't "socialized" medicine for older people an unpleasant moral necessity for our wealthy society? Please note I am deeply suspicious of most arguments cast in moral terms in discussions of politics and economics. I ask these questions guardedly.

I answer in the comments:

Imagine we had entirely private life insurance market "“ no government options at all. If I live to be sixty-five, I will probably have a pretty high probability of dieing in the next 15 years or so. I would wager that is true of almost all sixty-five year olds.

So why would anyone insure me?

Because the life insurance market has developed a very reasonable solution to this -- you negotiate a term life rate for X number of years. Your rate might be Y a year for 10 years, or 1.5Y a year for 20 years, or 2Y a year for 30 years. The longer the rate guarantee, the higher the rate. You are explicitly paying higher rates than you might have in younger, less risky years to make sure you get a coverage guarantee at an affordable rate in later, risky years.

Of course, if you play the grasshopper and never buy insurance until you are 65, your price is going to be awful. But I don't think it is a reasonable role for government to do all kinds of individual-liberty-defying and costly things just because you did not take responsibility for your old age earlier in life. However, saying that, I of course know that this is EXACTLY what the government does with Social Security.

I have a high deductible individual insurance plan from Assurant who specializes in insuring individuals, and they have been evolving to a pricing model sort of similar to the term life model I listed above, though they are not quite there yet.

To the folks that say this is no solace for folks already 65, that is an implementation transition issue, not an argument against the market's ability to deal with this. Certainly a lot of folks have paid Medicare taxes for years and are counting on it. Some kind of phase out, possibly where the government redirects Medicare funds to make up the difference in policy prices for having not started locking in earlier, is possible. But the question was not an implementation question - it was a question of whether the market inherently fails for 65-year olds, and I think the answer is that it does not. We have a perfectly serviceable analog in life insurance to prove it

I call this the "failure of imagination" argument against free markets.  Some sector of the economy (such as education) has been dominated by government for so long that folks can't imagine a private model.  For example, when I argue for private grade school education, I can't tell you how often people say "private schools are all really expensive, no one could afford them."  Private schools are expensive because in the current government model, the only market niche for private schools is for families that can afford to pay the government for education they don't use and then pay a second time for a private school.

Show him this chart, via Carpe Diem

From the AZ Republic, Paul Krugman is claiming that the administration's stimulus spending, which I don't think has even reached $100 billion of the programmed $1 trillion, has officially averted another Great Depression:

Aggressive stimulus spending by governments helped the world avoid a second Great Depression

but full economic recovery will take two years or more, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said Monday....

"We have managed to avoid a second Great Depression ... but full recovery is at least two years and probably more," Krugman said.

This is just a pure joke.  First, the total additional spending was tiny compared to the size of the world economy.  Second, almost none of the stimulus money has actually been spent -- even the article goes on to say that "Most of the money will flow in 2010."  So is Krugman arguing that just the notion of stimulus spending, without the actual spending, has saved us?  Third, most of the early projects were typically stupid, whatever governments could ram through their procurement processes in a short period of time.   I challenge even the most ardent Keynsian to argue this stimulus was truly structured to target underutilized resources, or whatever their theory is.  I would love to see Krugman stand up in front of a doctoral committee and justify this wild-assed supposition with actual facts and analysis.

But the even more incredible unproven (and in fact entirely non-verifiable) part of the statement was that we were even headed for a second Great Depression anyway.  Many of us from the sidelines said that this looked like a recession similar in magnitude to that of the early 1980's, and in fact that appears to be exactly what we got.  The whole "second Great Depression" meme is merely a giant straw man used first to stampeded ill-conceived spending legislation through Congress with little scrutiny and now to provide a fake alternative against which Obama and company can declare victory.   Krugman is so far in the tank, its impossible for me to even think of him as an economist any more.  The Nobel Laureate who now retails non-verifiable claims.

The fact is that this was a normal recession blown out of proportion first by the Bush and later by the Obama administration.  From the very beginning, it looked much like the recession of the early 1980's or the bank crisis of the early 1990's, and it recovered for the same reason - there are fundamental strengths in the economy.  In fact, the length of the Great Depression was in fact the aberration, caused more by FDR's wild proposals (the worst of which was the National Industrial Recovery Act) which tended to dampen the investment that normally picks up at the bottom of the cycle to take advantage of reduced asset values and input costs.

Other Assertions by Krugman

Interestingly, economist Krugman appears to think that the problem with the financial system is that people can make money in it.  Really?  Gosh, I thought people just invested billions of dollars for the warm feeling it gives them:

He said there was a need to restructure the global financial system and impose tighter regulations to avoid a repeat of the economic crisis, but expressed concern that the momentum for reforms appeared to be easing.

"We do not have the political will to do that just yet ... I suspect clever people can still make a lot of money from the financial system in the next few years," he warned.

I also thought this was funny, in the context of the recent financial mess.  He says:

"Over-reliance on self-regulation is a mistake," he said. "Global regulators should err on the side of investor protection and financial stability rather than rely on a 'buyer beware' regulatory regime."

I must say it is surprising to see Krugman saying this.    Let's think about mortgages, the primary driver of the recent financial difficulties.  In mortgages, the investor is the bank making the loan.  So is Krugman advocating for more protection of mortgage lenders and their insurers like AIG against home buyers who take their money and then don't pay them back?

Update: Oh, and TARP never bought any troubled assets, just was used to bail out a few selected politically connected companies.

I remember in the 1970s the sight of oil company executives getting dragged before Scoop Jackson's committee in Congress, forced to defend themselves against charges they were holding tankers offshore to drive prices up.  Hilariously, this was at the exact same time oil company executives were testifying in front of a Congress begging legislators to allow them to build the Alaska pipeline.  But demonizing oil companies simultaneously for both decreasing and increasing the supply of oil has been a tradition for decades.

Anyway, I have always found it intriguing how behavior in one industry made unsympathetic by the media can be treated so differently from identical behavior in a more media-cherished industry.  Check this out:

U.S. dairies will remove 86,710 cows from their herds to be sold to slaughterhouses as part of an industry-funded program intended to boost milk prices by curbing output.

The buyout is the third such cull in nine months, the Arlington, Virginia-based National Milk Producers Federation said today in a statement. The most recent buyout completed last month involved 101,000 cows, the most ever for the groups so- called Cooperatives Working Together program, which began in 2003.

Note further that this appears to be acceptable behavior in milk but not in oil, despite the fact that milk is heavily subsidized and the beneficiary of government price supports while oil companies simply pay a whole boatload of taxes.

It turns out there is one other such example in the news, where an industry is destroying hundreds of thousands of units of inventory, with the inevitable result of raising prices (particularly to the poor), all with the facilitation and in fact funding from the Obama Administration.  Can you guess what that is?

Income inequality was the topic de jour during much of the election.   The left argued that median wages had stagnated, and tried very hard to date this stagnation from 1980 so that it could be blamed on Ronald Reagan.   Others have argued that the the whole median family wage stagnation thing was overblown, as 1) families had changed alot over 30 years;  2) Compensation had changed (such that wages were less of total compensation with the rise in value of health care plans); and 3) individuals matter, not quartiles, and individuals were doing well and still had mobility between income bands.

My sense is that the income inequality numbers have always been fraught with problems.  For example, rich people have huge incentives to manage the income numbers on their tax returns, so trying to draw conclusions about top earners from their tax returns is a bit dangerous.  Just the shift from C to S corps and LLC's over the last 30 years has fundamentally shifted what income high net worth entrepreneurs show on their tax returns.

All that being said, I think it is clear the income gap has grown, and it really started growing in this country around 1970.  Whether this matters is a different story - its clear from comparing to European countries that while our gap has spread vs. their income gaps, its almost 100% because our rich are richer than their rich.  Our lowest quintile is pretty comparable (here).  If that is the case, its an interesting question to see if this bothers folks.

Anyway, I think there still is work to be done to fully explain and rationalize these income inequality numbers.  But I still find it hard to believe they are not somehow related to immigration.  After all, dropping 20 million new immigrants, many of them quite poor, into the bottom quintile of US workers over the last 20 years certainly tends to pull down medians.  Just compare these two charts, with income inequality on the top and the percentage of residents in any given year that are foreign-born (legal or illegal immigrants).  I fitted the two charts together manually to get the time scales to line up, I don't have time to replot them together as I should.  Click to enlarge.

Its hard to see, by the way, how the top chart really reflects a trend starting with Reagan (as much as the left so desperately wants it to be true).  Something happened around 1970 to reverse the curve.  I have offered one possible cause.  I do so reluctantly, because I don't want to be misunderstood -- I am a big supporter of open immigration and would hate to give the anti-immigration folks any ammunition.

Anyway, you are welcome to discuss.  It is something I am thinking about but don't have an answer for.

Postscript: This is the chart comparing the top and bottom US deciles to countries in Europe on an absolute dollar basis. The conclusion I draw is that our poorest are in about the same shape as the poorest in Europe, but our rich are richer than in Europe.  Given this, does our income inequality still worry you?

The reason the analysis is done this funny way is that what one usually sees is some country like Chad with the poor at 80% of the median income.  But 80% of almost nothing is still almost nothing.  So this chart converts everyone to apples and apples - almost.  I still think it underestimates how well off the US poor are, maybe some sort of exchange rate vs. PPP problem.

My son is at the age in high school that he needs to find a job, either during the summer or after school or both.  But this is not an easy chore.  The economy certainly has a lot to do with this, but Congress has been doing its share to keep teenagers unemployed as well:

Thanks to an ill-advised law enacted with bipartisan support in 2007, the cost of providing an entry-level job to individuals with few skills or minimal experience will be going up by more than 10 percent. Those who cannot find a job paying at least $7.25 an hour will not be permitted to work. Welcome to the latest chapter of America's minimum-wage folly.

Those who press for a higher minimum wage often claim that making entry-level jobs more expensive won't reduce the number of entry-level jobs. Were the government to compel a 41 percent increase (see graph above showing the 41% increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 in 2006 to $7.25 this year) in the price of gasoline or movie tickets or steel, every rational observer would expect a drop in the demand for gasoline, movie tickets, or steel. Yet when it comes to the minimum wage, politicians and journalists somehow persuade themselves that making workers more expensive won't reduce the demand for workers.

But that's exactly what it does. Artificial price floors - mandatory minimum prices set higher than what the market will bear - generate surpluses. Minimum-wage laws are no exception. The price floor imposed by the government on the supply of low-skilled labor results in a labor surplus, which is just another way of saying higher unemployment.

The laws of supply and demand are not optional. They weren't enacted by Congress and Congress can't override them. Minimum-wage laws don't make low- and unskilled Americans more productive, more experienced, or more desirable. They merely make them more expensive - and more likely, therefore, to be unemployed.

People often think of the minimum wage as a restriction on employers -- that they cannot pay less than a certain number for a job.  But it is also equally a restriction on job seekers -- my son cannot legally offer to take a job for less than $7.25, even though he would probably gladly do so.  For teenagers, just gaining the experience of working and building basic skills (like showing up on time, following procedures, interacting with customers and fellow employees) has enormous value, such that even a nominal payment of a few dollars an hour would more than compensate him for his labor.

But I think there is another factor that increasingly limits teenage jobs that is not often discussed - liability.  I never really thought about this until I was running a business and found that my company and I may be personally liable for bone-headed decisions made by far off employees I have never met.  In our super-ligious society, does a company really want 15-year-old boys interacting with the public, no matter how much or little they are paid, when even one teenage-boy-style flip comment or sexual joke might result in a lawsuit?

Previously, I have written a number of articles on the minimum wage focused on the other end of the age scale.  My company hires folks in the seventies and eighties, a practice that is increasingly difficult to maintain with the minimum wage increasing.

Meddle in the economy too much, and investment dries up as entrepeneurs sit on the sidelines to see what's next:

"America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? . . . Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them."

Via Glenn Reynolds

As I wrote before, Waxman-Markey puts most of the onus for CO2 reduction on refiners and transportation fuels, so that is the area we will see the most price increase if the bill passes.

So I ask you, after putting this huge effective tax on refiners, which will also in some cases force refiners to shut down capacity and produce less fuel, how long will it be before a politician starts to demagogue oil companies for rising gasoline prices and/or fuel shortages?

This is at the end of the day why Congress wanted cap-and-trade rather than a carbon tax.  By putting the tax on unsympathetic targets like oil companies, Congress and Obama can pretend that inevitable consumer price increases are the oil companies greedy fault, and not related to the actions in Washington.

A while back I worried that frequent, random, and unprecedentedly extensive Obama interventions in the economy and private commerce could well cause any economic recovery to stagnate as businesses sat on their wallets waiting for more clarity.   Though the ins and outs of the Great Depression are endlessly debated, there is good evidence that the Depression was extended by just this effect, in particular by the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act, America's flirtation with Mussolini-style fascism.

Economist MaxedOutMama (who, to her credit, was sounding alarms last year long before most everyone else including me were) says that there is still a lot to be worried about and that businesses are indeed sitting on their wallets:

The rolling four-quarter change for GDP is now -2.5%. Far more frightening is the same figure for gross private domestic investment, which in Q1 was -23.6%, and has now been falling since fourth quarter 2006! Gross private domestic investment is the fundamental driver of this economy and just about every other economy, and at no time can one ever rack up a such a string of GPDI decreases in an economy without generating a pretty intense recession.

That is the first thing on which every realistic economist must stay concentrated. Talk about a credit crisis does not address the fundamental economic operator, and dumping a lot of stimulus money into the economy will not overcome a recession produced by collapsing GPDI unless it boosts domestic investment - which our stimulus package does not.

In fact, I would argue that government actions over the last 6 months, from executive compensation controls to Waxman-Markey to health care "reform" all do just the opposite -- suppress investment by increasing uncertainty.

By the way, the inflation I have been promising for a while has obviously not occured yet.    The Fed says they have it under control.

The Federal Reserve signaled Wednesday that the weak economy likely will keep prices in check despite growing concerns that the trillions it's pumping into the financial system will ignite inflation.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues held a key bank lending rate at a record low of between zero and 0.25 percent. And they pledged again to keep it there for "an extended period" to help brace the economy.

Inflation is this massive rock that takes a while to start moving.  The Fed has pushed the rock right to the top of the mountain but says not to worry, if it starts accelerating down the hill they will be able to stop it.   Don't believe it.

After business school, I spent years in corporate marketing and planning roles.  A big part of those jobs were prioritizing investment projects against limited available funds.  Perhaps it is due to this experience, but to me it seems dead obvious that shifting capital and other resources to projects businesses would not have done on their own is clearly going to result in losses to the overall economy.  It can be argued that such investments pay off in other ways, and certainly I so argued when we were discussing cleaner water and air, but the whole notion that green spending and requirements will create jobs is just a myth.

I covered this before, but here is a Spanish study on the Spanish wind programs Obama said he wished to emulate (via Carpe Diem):

1. As President Obama correctly remarked, Spain provides a reference for the establishment of government aid to renewable energy. No other country has given such broad support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources. The arguments for Spain's and Europe's "green jobs" schemes are the same arguments now made in the U.S., principally that massive public support would produce large numbers of green jobs. The question that this paper answers is "at what price?"

2. We find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain's experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

3. The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 ($800,000) to create each "green job", including subsidies of more than €1 million ($1.4 million) per wind industry job. The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every "green job" created.

I am a little late on this, but here is the latest from Brink Lindsey, another member of the Princeton Tower Club libertarian blogger set:

Yet the return to peacetime and prosperity did not result in a shift back toward the status quo ante. The more egalitarian income structure persisted for decades. For an explanation, Krugman leans heavily on a 2007 paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin, who argue that postwar American history has been a tale of two widely divergent systems of political economy. First came the "Treaty of Detroit," characterized by heavy unionization of industry, steeply progressive taxation, and a high minimum wage. Under that system, median wages kept pace with the economy's overall productivity growth, and incomes at the lower end of the scale grew faster than those at the top. Beginning around 1980, though, the Treaty of Detroit gave way to the free market "Washington Consensus." Tax rates on high earners fell sharply, the real value of the minimum wage declined, and private-sector unionism collapsed. As a result, most workers' incomes failed to share in overall productivity gains while the highest earners had a field day...

Krugman sees the rise of inequality as a consequence of economic regress"”in particular, the abandonment of well-designed economic institutions and healthy social norms that promoted widely shared prosperity. Such an assessment leads to the conclusion that we ought to revive the institutions and norms of Paul Krugman's boyhood, in broad spirit if not in every detail.

There is good evidence that changes in economic policies and social norms have indeed contributed to a widening of the income distribution since the 1970s. But Krugman and other practitioners of nostalgianomics are presenting a highly selective account of what the relevant policies and norms were and how they changed.

The Treaty of Detroit was built on extensive cartelization of markets, limiting competition to favor producers over consumers. The restrictions on competition were buttressed by racial prejudice, sexual discrimination, and postwar conformism, which combined to limit the choices available to workers and potential workers alike. Those illiberal social norms were finally swept aside in the cultural tumults of the 1960s and '70s. And then, in the 1970s and '80s, restraints on competition were substantially reduced as well, to the applause of economists across the ideological spectrum. At least until now.

The "treaty of Detroit" model, if it ever even existed in the first place, is merely NRA-lite, an echo of the Mussolini-style corporate state FDR tried to create before the war.  Read the whole thing - Brink is, as usual, hard to excerpt.

One thing that is seldom mentioned in discussions of income inequality is the absolute wealth of the lower income brackets.  The evidence is pretty strong that the lowest income brackets in the US do at least as well as comparable brackets in Europe (especially after you correct for immigration), which have pursued the corporate state model Krugman longs for.  Our rich are richer, but our poor are about the same, and unemployment is systematically lower here.  So the problem is, what?  Just envy?

More on income distribution and mobility here.

A lot of the lefty sites are gearing up the "poor aren't sharing in the benefits" bandwagon again.  This is usually brought out of the garage whenever someone wants to put a really progressive soak-the-successful tax plan on the table.  So get ready.

The key to parsing their argument is to understand the following distinction:  Do you care about quintiles, or individuals?  Because if you care about quintiles, then there is no doubt that the real median income of the lowest income quintile has not advanced much over the last 15-20 years.  But quintiles are not individuals, and the evidence is that individuals are still doing well, whatever bracket they begin in.  Because you see, while the average for the bottom quintile may not be much higher than the average for that bracket a decade ago, the fact is that the people in that bracket have changed.   As Mark Perry writes:

A common misperception is that the top or bottom income quintiles, or the top or bottom X% by income, are static, closed, private clubs with very little turnover - once you get into a top or bottom quintile, or a certain income percent, you stay there for life, making it difficult for people to move to a different group. But reality is very different - people move up and down the income quintiles and percentage groups throughout their careers and lives. The top or bottom 1/5/10%, just like the top or bottom quintiles, are never the same people from year to year, there is constant turnover as we move up and down the quintiles.

He quotes some stats from Jeffrey Jones and Daniel Heil:

How much income mobility exists in America? Research consistently affirms that there is substantial upward income mobility in the United States, with the lowest income earners typically showing the strongest results. A Treasury Department study of the 1996"“2005 period used IRS income tax data to discern considerable mobility: more than 55% of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. More than half the people in the lowest fifth of earners moved to a higher quintile over this period (29% to the second, 14% to the third, 10% to the fourth, and 5% to the highest).

Moreover, there is a great deal of movement in and out of the top income groups. The Treasury data show that 57% "of households in the top 1% in 2005 were not there nine years earlier." The rich sometimes get richer, but they get poorer as well. The study also reveals that income mobility has increased, not decreased, during the past twenty years. For example, 47.3% of those in the lowest income quintile in 1987 saw their incomes increase by at least 100% by 1996. That number jumped to 53.5% from 1996 to 2005.

The Pew Economic Mobility Project tried to track actual people, and not brackets, from tax returns.  This is an imperfect science, but the only real way to look at income mobility.  They found that 90% of white children and 73% of black children whose parents were in the lowest income quartile in the base period were later to be found in higher income quartiles.  But this chart, from the same study, is really telling:

(click to enlarge)

That is a pretty amazing picture, marred only by something apparently bad occurring with the kids of middle class African Americans.

So how can there be so much income gain everywhere without the averages for the lower quintile increasing.  I would offer at least two explanations:

1. Immigration. As people gain skills and seniority, they progress to higher income brackets and out of the lower quintile.  However, there is a constant stream of low-skill immigrants moving to this country to fill in the bottom quintile.  It we were to do a quintile analysis apples to apples leaving out new immigrants in the period, I guarantee you would see the median income for the lower quintile increase.  As I wrote before:
   

   Frequent readers will know that I am a strong supporter of open immigration....However, I am tempted to become a close-the-border proponent if the left continue to use numbers skewed by immigration to justify expansions of taxation and the welfare state.  Whether they are illegal or not, whether they should be allowed to stay or not, the fact is that tens of millions of generally poor and unskilled immigrants have entered this country over the last several decades.  These folks dominate the lower quintile of wage earners in this country, and skew all of our traditional economic indicators downwards.  Median wages appear to be stagnating?  Of course the metric looks this way "” as wages have risen, 10 million new folks have been inserted at the bottom.  If you really want to know what the current median wage is on an apples to apples basis back to 1970, take the current reported median wage and count up about 10 million spots, and that should be the number "” and it will be much higher.

   By the way, even for these immigrants, their position in the lower quintile represents upward mobility for them.  Being in the middle of the lower quintile probably is a huge improvement over where they were in their home country - almost by definition, or they would not be working so hard to get here.

2. Safety Net. Some large portion of the bottom quintile are supported by the US government's safety net.  And there are pretty good fiscal reasons why the typical real incomes generated by that safety net have not increased over the last 20 years.  And even beyond the fiscal issues, there are incentives issues as well -- at some point, increasing how lucrative the safety net is can reduce the incentive to get off the safety net and find a job.  Just ask the Swedes.  There is a delicate balance between humanity and sustaining folks vs. killing their motivation.In some ways the left's use of the lack of lower quintile progress as an indictment of American capitalism is wildly ironic.  Basically what they are saying is that the 80% of people who support themselves through capitalist endeavor are doing progressively better but the 20% of the people supported by the government are stagnating -- and therefore we need to increase the role of government.

Bill Whittle makes a great point in this video which is at the heart of the problems with this administration:  While Obama and his young policy wonks may be smarter (or at least think they are smarter) than other folks individually, they cannot possibly be smarter than the sum of 300 million well educated, realtively affluent Americans making decisions for themselves.  Every technocrat founders on these rocks, when they substitute their decision as command and control planners for individual decision making (example).   Everyone talks about a revival of interest in Ayn Rand, and that is great, but it is Hayek who has never been more relevent.

More on the failures of technocrats here.

Kevin Drum, echoing Paul Krugman, looks at rising interest rates on Treasuries and decides that there is nothing to see here, move along.   You will all be relieved to know that these rising interest rates have nothing to do with a couple of trillion dollars in new government borrowing, and the effect that this borrowing (and wild money printing) might have on

• Inflation
• Sovereign risk
• Supply and demand for credit

Boy, do I feel better.

PS - And remember, if interest rates do start exceeding historical norms, Krugman will discover that it is Bush's fault.