Coyote Blog

A couple of quick thoughts on this map from this Vox article edited by Matt Yglesias

1. I hate to diss my old cohorts at McKinsey, but isn't this entirely arbitrary to how you draw the map?  If you made the map break in, say, the Atlantic Ocean with the Ivory Coast on the far left of the map and Newfoundland on the far right, won't this look different?
2. People seem to want to get freaked out about China passing the US in terms of the size of its economy.  But in the history of Civilization there have probably been barely 200 years in the last 4000 that China hasn't been the largest economy in the world.  It probably only lost that title in the early 19th century and is just now getting it back.  We are in some senses ending an unusual period, not starting one.

Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias think that 401-K's are a total ripoff.

After the new fee disclosure statements went out, roughly the same percentage—half!—of participants said that they still do not know how much they pay in plan annual fees and expenses, according to a recent survey by LIMRA, an association of insurance and financial services organizations.

....For those 401(k) participants who said they thought they knew how much they paid in fees, most of them were way off base. One out of four participants thought they paid 25% or more in fees, 16% thought they paid between 10% to 24% in fees, and 30% thought they paid between 2% and 9% in fees. Only 28% of participants thought their fees were less than 2%.

That group is the closest to reality. On average fees and expenses range between 1 to 2 percent, depending on the size of the plan (how many employees are covered) and the employees’ allocation choices (index funds versus actively managed funds), says LIMRA.

First, this is bizarre, as the indictment here of private fund management seems to be that people are *gasp* paying fees that are much lower than they think they are.   Also, it may well be that these people are not mistaken, but just using a different mental definition for fee percentage.  After all, why is total assets necessarily the best denominator for this calculation?  Obviously the fund industry likes it that way because it gives the lowest number, but it could be that people are thinking about annual fees as a percentage of the annual income.  Thus a fee of 1-2% of assets could well be 25% of annual income.  Hell, since I invest for income growth, I could argue that this is a MORE rational way to think about fees.  Obviously Drum and Yglesias are just captive mouthpieces of big Mutual Fund.

Second, and perhaps more importantly -- do you know what retirement fund has higher implicit fees and a lower lifetime total return than nearly any private fund in existence?   Social Security.  Read your statement you get and do the math.  You will find that the total you will likely get out will be less than you put in, even BEFORE present value effects, even if you have put money in for 30 years.  In other words, the internal rate of return on your and your employer's taxes is less than zero.

Ahh, but you say, that is because your Social Security taxes are going to subsidize people who don't work.  Fine, but then don't be surprised if there is strong support for a retirement system that does not pass the money through government hands.  Even getting a crappy rate of return from some hack investment manager is likely still better than putting your money in a government system where cash is skimmed off to feed whatever political constituency has the clout to grab it.

Postscript -- by the way, I leave aside the issue of whether it is a productive thing to tax-subsidize.  I am generally against tax preference for selected behaviors, even relatively popular  ones like savings.  But Yglesias wants to replace 401-K's with some kind of coerced government system (the note about fees above is to make the case that the average person cannot be trusted and that our masters need to do the savings for us).  Image one giant Calpers.  Ugh.

Matt Yglesias and I certainly do read history differently.  He writes recently in a Salon article:

The basic economic foundations of industrial capitalism as we've known them for the past 150 years or so have an activist state at their core. Building political institutions capable of doing these things properly is really difficult, and one of the main things that separates more prosperous places from less prosperous ones is that the more prosperous places have done a better job of building said institutions. There's also the minor matter of creating effective and non-corrupt law enforcement and judicial agencies that can protect people's property rights and enforce contracts.

The point is, it takes an awful lot of politics to get an advanced capitalist economy up and running and generating wealth. A lot of active political decisions need to be made to grow that pie. So why would you want to do all that? Presumably because pie is delicious. But if you build a bunch of political institutions with the intention of creating large quantities of pie, it's obviously important that people actually get their hands on some pie. In other words, you go through the trouble of creating advanced industrial capitalism because that's a good way to create a lot of goods and services. But the creation of goods and services would be pointless unless it served the larger cause of human welfare. Collecting taxes and giving stuff to people is every bit as much a part of advancing that cause as creating the set of institutions that allows for the wealth-creation in the first place.

The other day, there was an intriguing story in the USA Today that a disproportionate share of stimulus money is flowing to counties that voted for Obama.  In fact, counties that voted Obama are getting twice as much per capita so far as counties that did not.  Matt Yglesias writes:

The insinuation of the piece is that the stimulus bill's funding streams are being artfully manipulated or something to disproportionately direct resources toward Obama-loving constituencies....[But] the secret to the riddle seems to be that areas that benefit from federal spending formulae tend to support the Democrats. Not as a result of short-term fluctuations in voting patterns or federal spending levels, but as a structural element of American politics.

Kevin Drum misses Matt's point, I think, when he responds:

Actually, that's not quite right.  It's weirder than that.  I just got around to reading the piece, and aside from the factual statement in the lead, it doesn't insinuate that the money is being unfairly distributed.  In fact, every single paragraph after the lead quotes people saying that there's nothing dubious going on and the money is just being distributed by formula.  The piece doesn't quote a single person, not even Sarah Palin, suggesting that there's any monkey business going on here.

But this does not refute Matt's point as I understand it, that "tinkering" is not necessary because the formulas themselves have been worked over time to preferentially send money certain places.  I would use the analogy that there are well worn channels where the money preferentially flows.

I must disagree that a story that money tends to flow preferentially (on a ratio as high as 2:1) to Democratic districts should be spiked, as Kevin Drum advocates. I think there is a story in this, though certainly I agree with Kevin it is not the story the author set out to write (one of micro-manipulation by Administration employees).

My sense is that the causality involved would be impossible to discover. Does money flow preferentially to these districts because Democrats are better or more focused on bringing home the taxpayer largess to their districts? Or does our money preferentially flow to these districts based on, say, economic or demographic factors that line up well with Democratic constituencies. Or is it, more likely in my mind, a virtuous circle with both factors involved.

Either way, this is an interesting story and some interesting new data in our endless red state-blue state analyses.

Michael O'Hare and Matt Yglesias (via Megan McArdle subbing at Instapundit) makes this very good point about carbon taxes:

Tragically, if you tell people you're going to tax their ft ossile
fuels, they freak out and your political career dies a swift and
merciless death. But if you tell people you're going to subsidize alternative energy sources
the people will like that. Functionally, however, these are basically
the same thing, except for the fact that the tax method works much,
much better.

This is unfortunately true.  As I have posted a number of times, I am skeptical that man-made global warming and the net of the problems (and opportunities) it brings will be bad enough to justify the economic cost of slowing or reversing CO2 emissions.  However, I can imagine being convinced that efforts to limit CO2 emissions are necessary.

Regulations on emissions, whether to the air or into shared waterways, is one of the few areas of government action that actually facilitate the smooth operation of strong property rights.  As I explained before, one could easily imagine a world of strong property rights bogged down in constant suits and counter-suits, as any property owner could rightfully sue over molecules of emissions that crossed their property line from another.  Certainly I can imagine private solutions and agreements that could have developed in the absence of government to sort this out, but government emissions restrictions, when done well, are not an unreasonable approach.

Of course, there are a lot of bad ways to manage emissions, and the government has tried about all of them.  New source controls, which are still debated and, incredibly, supported, represent all the worst of government hubris in trying to micro-manage solutions and technologies rather than just defining the desired outcome.  If anything, new technology subsidies (think ethanol) have been even worse, acting more like political pork and rent-seeking than intelligent pollution policy.

However, the government, especially the environmental lobby which tends to be full of technocrats and statists, greatly prefer the government micromanagement approach.  The impossibility of the task should be clear.  Take CO2 reduction -- to micromanage the reduction, the government would have to sort through every source of CO2, every available technology, and come up with a prioritized plan for investment to get the most reduction for the least $.  And even if the tried, they would be wrong, because this is a problem with a billion variables.  And even if they happen to get it right, they would not implement it, changing their plans the minute the Archer Daniels Midland lobbyist walked in the door. 

To understand the complexity, take one example: electric cars.  Hey, everyone loves the idea of electric cars -- they are zero emissions, right?  Well, sort of.  Actually they are emissions outsourcing devices, shifting emissions from the individual car's tailpipe to the power plant where the electrical charge is coming from.  Now, that power plant is a lot more efficient at burning fossil fuels, so often the net is better, but what if the marginal electricity production is coming from coal?  Does that net reduce CO2?  And, if electric cars reduce carbon emissions, does $10,000 investing in electric cars reduce more or less carbon emissions than $10,000 in solar?

These decisions are impossible to make, but we don't have to.  Every day, markets and price signals help individuals make such tradeoffs rationally.   That's why a carbon tax, that raises the price of CO2 emissions fairly directly, would be a much more efficient approach to managing emissions.

Update: People have asked about emissions trading.  Emissions trading schemes are OK, in that they help push emissions reductions towards the people who can do it most efficiently.  What I don't like about them is they are a government form of incumbent subsidy - basically industry incumbents get a tradeable asset of value, while new and future entrants do not.