Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son?

See Supply, Demand and Marriage by economist Robert Frank. Maybe this shows how powerful supply and demand works if it can help explain marriage. Excerpts:

"IN some cultures, romance isn’t nearly as important as cash when it comes to choosing a marriage partner. And even when money plays no explicit role in selecting a mate, courtship customs are governed by the venerable economic model of supply and demand.

Under the dowry system in India, for example, parents of older brides would typically pay more to prospective grooms. Men with better jobs would receive larger payments, too.

In short, there really is a marriage market in many countries around the world, and economic principles apply to it. In markets with a preponderance of women seeking partners, the terms of trade shift in favor of men. If more men are seeking partners, the reverse is true."

"An imbalance in the opposite direction characterizes the contemporary marriage market in China. The Chinese government’s one-child policy, combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion, have helped to create a large sex-ratio imbalance among young Chinese. For every 100 women in that group, there are now more than 120 men.

According to market models, the terms of trade in the Chinese marriage market should have shifted sharply in favor of women. And evidence suggests that young Chinese women and their families have in fact become much more selective in recent years.

They appear, for example, to focus more critically on the earnings potential of prospective mates. Because house size is often assumed to be a reliable signal of wealth, a family can enhance its son’s marriage prospects by spending a larger fraction of its income on housing. (Other families can follow the same strategy, of course, but when all families do so, the resulting homes are still reliable indicators of relative wealth.) Such a shift appears to have occurred.

For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.

Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished.

“Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”"

Related posts:

A fake job reference can be just a few clicks away.

Fake Economist Fools Portugal.

Slave Redemption in Sudan. (Fake slaves are sold to those who buy slaves and then give them their freedom)

Can A Product Work Just Because It's Expensive?. (fake medicine)

If It Pays To Have Friends, Can You Pay To Have Friends?. (you can hire fake boyfriends)

Study: Half of American Doctors Give Patients Placebos Without Telling Them.

Saudis grapple with fake street sweepers .

Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly)

Another Semester Has Started

Welcome to any new students. The entries usually have something to do with a basic economic principle that is related to a recent news story.

Here is something I wrote for The Ranger (the school paper) back in 2011 titled "Why is college so hard?"

Students might wonder why college, and SAC in particular, is hard. This might sound trite, but I think the faculty at SAC want students to achieve success in life and that means that classes have to be hard if you are going to learn and understand the concepts which provide a foundation for that success.

I think my own experience as a community college student over 30 years ago helps me understand this. My teachers took their subjects seriously and maintained high academic standards. They got me excited because of the expertise they brought to their teaching. Now that I have been a teacher for over 20 years, I can see how important that was.

After finishing my A.S. degree at Moraine Valley Community College (MVCC) in Palos Hills, Ill., I transferred to and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics. But it was my community college teachers prepared me to handle the rigors of the U. of C.

Later, I got a Ph. D. in economics from Washington State University. But I've accomplished some other things I never could have dreamed of when I began taking classes at MVCC and I think my teachers there paved the way for me.

In 2005, I had a letter to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal (I have now had five published there, three in The New York Times and three op-eds in the Express-News). This one was several paragraphs long, nearly as long as some of their op-ed pieces. It was the first letter in the letters section that day, and I got the top headline. It dealt with NAFTA and trade agreements.

As nice as that was, I got a big shock a few days later when I got a letter in the mail, on official stationery, from Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He complimented me on my letter and said it was superb. I had never even met him or ever tried to contact him before.

Wow. I graduated from high school with a 2.7 GPA, and when I started at MVCC, I had no idea what I would do with my life. If you had told me then that someday I would have a letter in the WSJ and get that kind of compliment, I doubt I would have believed you.

Then an adjunct professor at the business school at the University of Chicago contacted me a few years ago and wanted to know if it was OK for her to assign a paper I wrote on entrepreneurs for a class she was teaching on innovation. (Of course, I said yes).

That professor was Nancy Tennant Snyder. She has a Ph. D. from George Washington University and is a vice president at Whirlpool. Business Week magazine has called her one of the leading innovators in the world. She also cited two of my papers in one of her books.

Then I got an email from John Joseph, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is an expert on language and politics. He wanted to know if he could include an essay I wrote in a four-volume work he was planning. I again said yes and it was published last year (and it is called Language and Politics).

It is a collection of essays. Mine is titled "The Intersection of Economic Signals and Mythic Symbols." Other contributors include Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell. When I was a community college student, I never imagined being included along with the likes of those great thinkers.

The co-authors of the book The Economics of Public Issues have thanked me in each of the last three editions for my helpful suggestions. Almost all of the people they thank are from big universities. One of the co-authors of this book, Douglass North, is a Nobel Prize winner. Never imagined someone like that would value my input when I started out as a community college student.

Getting such recognition in cases like this gives me a sense of achievement. I know I have made a scholarly contribution to the world. And I want all SAC students to have a chance for this same kind of success (as an academic or any in line of work). I think all SAC faculty do. That is why school is hard, and that is why I'm thankful that my community college teachers were experts who maintained high academic standards.

China Is Ahead Of The U.S. In Mobile Payments

I use a book in my class called The Economics of Macro Issues by Roger LeRoy Miller & Daniel K. Benjamin. One of the chapters is called "Revolutionizing the Way We Pay." It includes discussions of things like paying for goods with your phone, etc. So this article is related to that.

See The Cashless Society Has Arrived— Only It’s in China:Mobile payments surge to $9 trillion a year, changing how people shop, borrow—even panhandle by Alyssa Abkowitz of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Though the U.S. saw $112 billion of mobile payments in 2016, by a Forrester Research estimate, such payments in China totaled $9 trillion"

"For Alibaba and Tencent, the payoff isn’t just the transaction fees they make from merchants, typically 0.6%. It’s also the consumer data collected"

"The payments haven’t been required to go through the central bank’s clearing system"

"Consumers also are being offered more pitches for loans, investments and other financial products via smartphone. Short-term consumer credit in China soared 160% in the first eight months of 2017"

"Chinese . . . spent about 66 trillion yuan (nearly $10 trillion[in cash]) that way in 2016, down about 10% in two years, according to a central-bank payments report."

"Alibaba, which hosts online shopping bazaars where merchants sell goods to consumers. More than a dozen years ago, Alibaba, taking a page from the U.S. company now called PayPal Holdings Inc., started a system called Alipay as an escrow service."

"passed PayPal as the largest mobile-payment platform in 2013."

"People link their bank accounts to the app, then can pay for things either by scanning a merchant’s QR code or having the merchant scan theirs. People also can transfer money by tapping on an icon in WeChat or Alipay."

"the government made it tough for Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. to set up shop.

The rise of tech companies as financial powers has dealt a blow to traditional banks. China’s state-owned banks lost nearly $23 billion in fees in 2015 they might have collected from card fees"

"Visa and Mastercard both have mobile apps that allow users to pay via near-field communication and are incorporating biometrics into their offerings. They also work with Apple Pay and Samsung Pay."

"Smartphones are vastly more common than Palm Pilots ever were, yet Apple Inc. has struggled to get consumers to use its Apple Pay service, now accepted at more than 50% of all U.S. retail locations.

Just 19% of iPhone users have tried Apple Pay at least once"

"In Scandinavia, Nordic and Dutch banks have cut total branch levels by about 50% from peak levels, and Sweden hasn’t had checks since the late 1980s, according to Citi Research, part of Citigroup Inc."

"WeChat Pay and Alipay are gaining attention in U.S. tourist centers after striking deals with hotels and resorts. A group of Chinese tourists recently dined at the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where the menu includes T-bone Australian lamb, chilled crab legs and handmade dim sum. They settled their bill with a smartphone."

"Tencent and Alibaba say they have no plans to push their payment platforms to U.S. consumers. Many Americans don’t see the need for mobile payments, since their plastic cards and cash are welcomed and some merchants still accept checks.

“Any new way of paying has to prove itself to be incrementally better than any other options you have,” said James Wester of research firm IDC Financial Insights. In the U.S., “plastic is convenient, widely accepted and understood by the customer.”"

Does collective self-deception mask selfish behavior?

Adam Smith talked about how people act on their own self-interest yet are led to help society by the invisible hand. But don't we see people sometimes behaving altruistically? Maybe. But we might be deceiving ourselves about our motives. Maybe we actually have selfish reasons for doing good.

See The Tangled Web We Weave: Collective self-deception helps mask the selfish behavior we see running rampant in art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics. Matthew Hutson reviews ‘The Elephant in the Brain’ by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson from the WSJ. Excerpts:

"“The Elephant in the Brain” focuses on the false narrative of hiding selfish motives. Much of what we do, including our most generous behavior, the authors say, is not meant to be helpful. We are, like many other members of the animal kingdom, competitively altruistic—helpful in large part to earn status. That may be obvious when billionaires jockey for naming rights to buildings, but it plays out in more subtle ways.

Casual conversations, for instance, often trade in random information. But the point is not to trade facts for facts; what you are actually doing, the book argues, is showing off so people can evaluate your intellectual versatility. By sharing information, you are not merely being helpful or entertaining, you are advertising yourself.

The authors take particular interest in large-scale social issues and institutions, showing how systems of collective self-deception help explain the odd behavior we see in art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics. Why do people vote? Not to strengthen the republic, the authors say. A single vote rarely matters, and we rarely even seek objective information on the candidates. Instead, we cheer for our team and participate as a signal of loyalty, hoping for the benefits of inclusion. In education, as many economists have argued, learning is ancillary to accreditation and status. A degree signals that one has the intelligence and stamina to enter and survive a degree program.

The authors call medicine “conspicuous caring.” In many areas of medicine, they note, increased care does not improve outcomes. People offer it to broadcast helpfulness, or demand it to demonstrate how much support they have from others. The case for medicine as a hidden act of selfishness may have some truth, but it also has holes. For example, the book does not address why medical spending is so much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere—do Americans care more than others about health care as a status symbol?"

"Spread the gospel of “effective altruism” so that people gain status for practical rather than flashy charity. Retain academic credentials but teach something useful in schools, such as personal finance. Make promises to be good; you are more likely to follow through for fear of appearing hypocritical, and through such a commitment you may also gain the status of being considered trustworthy."

Bumble Bee agrees to plead guilty in tuna price fixing scheme

By Julia Horowitz of CNN. This is from last May, but it makes for a good anti-trust case and it also mentions "limited competition in the seafood industry."

"Tuna giant Bumble Bee is on the hook for bilking customers.

The company has agreed to plead guilty for its role in a conspiracy to fix the prices of cans and pouches of tuna in the U.S., the Justice Department announced on Monday.

Bumble Bee will also pay a $25 million criminal fine. 

"[We] will continue to hold these companies and their executives accountable for conduct that targeted a staple in American households," Andrew Finch, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's antitrust division, said in a statement.
 
In a felony charge filed in U.S. District Court, Justice Department prosecutors say Bumble Bee and its co-conspirators agreed to "fix, raise, and maintain prices of packaged seafood" between 2011 and 2013, after conversations and meetings with representatives of other major packaged seafood firms.

Bumble Bee said it takes the matter "very seriously" and has fully cooperated with the DOJ throughout the investigation.

"We accept full responsibility for needing to earn back any lost trust in our Company and will do so by acting with integrity and transparency in every way we operate our business," Bumble Bee General Counsel Jill Irvin said in a statement.
 
Irvin said the company hired a chief compliance officer last fall, and has since revised its internal policies.

It's not clear how much federal officials believe the company overcharged customers.
Bumble Bee's senior vice president of sales agreed to plead guilty for his role in the conspiracy in December, as did the senior vice president of trade marketing. Both remain on paid leave.

Limited competition in the seafood industry has been an ongoing issue. Thai Union Group, which owns Chicken of the Sea, dropped plans to buy Bumble Bee in 2015 after the Justice Department expressed concerns."

Do We Need Failure Stories As Much As We Need Success Stories?

See Why success stories are just propaganda by Martin Weigel. I might not agree with all of this, but it raises important issues. Looking at successful companies and realizing they did X, Y or Z, does not mean X, Y or Z caused their success. We might not know how many companies that did X, Y or Z failed. Maybe only 10% of companies that did X, Y or Z succeeded. Excerpt:

"The problem with success stories is that they are not stories about failure. And thus by their very nature, they are distortions. At this point briefly retelling a familiar story about World War II is obligatory. 

The story goes that during World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping the Allies reduce  the number of bombers lost to enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Allies wanted to understand how much additional protection was needed. The challenge was not straightforward. Armour would make the bombers heavier, less manoeuvrable, and less fuel-efficient. But armouring the bombers too little would leave them vulnerable. Examining the bombers that did make it back, the Allies had noted that that the damage wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. Since there were more bullet holes in the fuselage than in the engine, the Allies concluded that this is where they should concentrate the armour. The question they had for Wald was how much armour.

Wald did not answer their question. Instead he argued that the armour shouldn’t go where the bullet holes were – it should go where the bullet holes were not, namely on the engines. This argued Wald, was where the bombers were most vulnerable and where the planes that didn’t make it back had been hit.  Returning planes with damage to the fuselage simply showed that this damage could be survived. From this insight, Wald then calculated how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed and how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced.

Wald’s achievement lay in the fact that unlike his superiors, he did not focus exclusively on the survivors. He avoided what we call ‘survivorship bias’ and instead found a way of seeing the bombers that did not make it back and the bullet holes that were missing. The lesson of this story of course is that focusing exclusively on survivors creates a very distorted reality. As advertisers have long known, focusing exclusively on say, the successful lottery winner or the successful weight loser not only obscures quite how hard success really is to achieve, but all too easily oversimplifies or misrepresents the real reasons behind success.

Take the consultants Collins and Porras authors of the bestselling book Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t.  To get to their recipe for success, Collins and Porras identified 200 leading companies then narrowed them down to include the best and most durable and successful. This was achieved by identifying the twenty organizations most frequently mentioned in a survey of CEOs. Companies founded after 1950 were eliminated and the list culled down to eighteen “visionary” companies (alarm bells should already be ringing at this point). They then looked at the common traits of these companies and compared them with companies that were just “good”. Lo and behold their research revealed that the great companies had a strong core ideology, built a strong corporate culture, set audacious goals, developed people and promoted from within, created a spirit of experimentation and risk taking, and drove for excellence.

“Just about anyone can be a key protagonist in building an extraordinary business institution” Collins and Porras promised, “the lessons of these companies can be learned and applied by the vast majority of managers at all levels. You can learn them. You can apply them. You can build a visionary company.” But in truth their analysis tells us nothing. Other than we are suckers for good story.

After all, as Phil Rosenzweig notes in his wonderful take down of business delusions The Halo Effect, it would be remarkable if great companies were not described in these terms – and if good companies in somewhat lesser terms. And because we know absolutely nothing about all the other companies that were neither Good nor Great, we have absolutely no way of knowing if these factors are the drivers of success, or merely ways of describing a successful company.

As Rosenzweig points out, picking a handful of companies precisely because they’ve done well for many years, and then looking back in time and ‘explaining’ what happened tells us absolutely nothing about what makes for success. If they had concluded that having a blue logo was the key factor in their extraordinary performance or that the CEOs were all Virgos it would have had just as much plausibility.

There is then, nothing like a success story to obscure the real nature of success. The success story of Ryan Gosling renders us blind to every struggling or failed actor waiting on tables, just as the success story of Ryan Higer obscures the unsurfaced and unremarked content produced by a thousand YouTube creators, just as the success story of Chance the Rapper leads us to forget the legions of undiscovered performers toiling in the unknown loneliness of their bedroom. Their stories and accomplishments may well provide hope and comfort and inspiration for those who struggle. But they also misrepresent quite how hard success is to come by. And indeed how it is achieved. As David McRaney puts it:

Survivorship bias… flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.”

***

In reducing their achievements down to a single factor, those who tell their stories of success invariably claim (or believe) to  have had a monopoly of control of events and outcomes, and vastly exaggerate their agency. Yet no person, no organisation, no business functions in isolation from the environments and contexts they are located within. Any story of success is a story of a complex interaction of  factors. Reducing that complexity to a single variable or a simple aphorism might make for good storytelling, but it is usually an exercise in nonsense.

Jim Stengel in his book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies for example, wants us to believe that companies with an ideal at their heart see share price growth far in excess of those lacking such values.

This conclusion was arrived at by taking the 50 brands with the highest loyalty or bonding scores from Millward Brown’s 50,000-strong database, searching for a link between them – a ‘Brand Ideal’ – and then looking at the chosen brands’ stock value growth between 2000 and 2011. Since the these fifty brands had grown by 393% compared with a -7% loss for the S&P 500 benchmark – and ignoring the massively complex array of interrelated variables and dynamics that constitute a business – Stengel declared that having an ideal was the key to driving stratospheric business success.

One has to applaud the audacity of the argument. Yet for Stengel’s argument to have a shred of credibility, one would have had to a) have eliminated all the other factors that might have impacted growth before aligning upon Brand Ideal and b) demonstrated that successful companies have brand ideals more often than unsuccessful ones. Stengel’s analysis does neither.  

But why should the burden of rigorous analysis get in the way of seductive story? People get away this kind of sloppy half-baked stuff because we’d rather hear a story about purpose than interrogate the assumptions made in the analysis or consider that Stengel’s analysis looks at but 50 companies out of a database of 50,000. We’re so dazzled by the mere presence of numbers that we gush about about the “scientist’s rigour” of the author’s analysis. Even Chairman of WPP Sir Martin Sorrell is not immune to a good yarn, declaring that Stengel had “the hard, clean numbers to bear his teachings out”. As Professor Kahneman puts it:

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion – we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality.”"

Are Low Wages Causing Texas Prison Guards To Seek Other Employment?

In economics, we think that labor supply curves slope upward. That is, when the wage in a certain occupation rises (while holding all other wages constant), more workers offer their services. For example, if the wage rises for widget makers and not for any other job, more workers will supply their labor to the widget market.

See Prison turnover leaves units understaffed: Experts attribute exits to stronger oil, gas markets by Keri Blakinger of The Houston Chronicle. Excerpts:

"Texas prisons are shedding officers with a staggering 28 percent turnover rate in the last fiscal year, a "mass exodus" that some experts say stems from a strengthening economy and recovering oil and gas sector.

"A lot of these guys don't want to work in a prison," said Lance Lowry, a spokesman for the Huntsville-based Texas Correctional Employees union. "There's other job opportunities opening up in rural Texas."

Data from the Texas State Auditor's Office show a marked increase over the previous year, when 22.8 percent of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's roughly 26,000 officers left for other jobs. At the same time, department vacancy rates have crept up again to over 12 percent, with 3,207 jobs unfilled.

"When the economy is doing well and growing is typically when we see correctional officers leave for better paying jobs," said TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark. "The more rural areas tend to be more challenging, particularly in South Texas when we've seen an uptick in oil and gas jobs being offered."
But in 2017, with the oil and gas boom largely in the rearview mirror, that doesn't explain the whole picture.

"From 2012 to 2014, (turnover) was becoming pretty acute and especially where fracking was kind of big," said Scott Henson, policy director with the nonprofit Just Liberty. Then, "it was more than just a vague correlation.""

"Low wages, high danger

For officers on the job, high turnover can raise safety concerns when many of the employees are new.
"When you lose 20-some percent of your employees every year, it's hard," Lowry said.

One of the challenges in staffing Texas prisons is the low wages. Officer pay starts around $32,000 per year, with increases at three and nine months. After seven years, pay plateaus at $43,000.

"If you want the staff to stay - and having experienced staff is critical for effective prison operations - then the pay has to increase significantly," said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Whitmire concurred, pointing out other potential troubles that stem from low-income offerings.

"The low pay is a problem in terms of the increase in contraband," he said. "I was told this by a warden: They've caught correctional officers making more in selling contraband cigarettes than they're making from the state.""

How Metrics Or Formulas That Supposedly Measure Quality Of Services Can Create Incentives To Engage In Misleading Behavior

See Metrics and Their Unintended Consequences: The best intentions combine with imprecise data for perverse effects in health care and education by Megan McArdle. Excerpts:

"In December, doctors at a VA hospital in Oregon decided to admit an 81-year-old patient. He was dehydrated, malnourished, plagued by skin ulcers and broken ribs -- in the medical professionals’ opinion, he was unable to care for himself at home. Administrators, however, overruled them.

Was there no bed for this poor man? No, the facility had plenty of beds; in fact, on an average day, more than half of the beds are empty, awaiting patients. Was there no money or medicine to care for him? No, and no. Reporting by the New York Times suggests that Walter Savage was, perversely, turned away because he was too sick. Very sick patients tend to worsen the performance measures by which VA hospitals are judged."

"in the 1990s, New York and Pennsylvania started publishing mortality data on hospitals and surgeons who did coronary bypasses. The idea was that more informed consumers would steer themselves toward the teams with the better statistics -- theoretically good for patients, bad for slacking providers. The reality was less ideal: In those states, surgeons seem to have started doing more operations on healthier patients, while turning away the sickest ones who might otherwise have benefited."

"purchasing managers who have cozy arrangements to buy a certain amount of product from their vendors in December, and ship it back in January, in order to help some sales director make quarterly targets … universities that compete to turn away as many students as possible, because doing so makes them rise in the U.S. News rankings … law schools that hired their own graduates for temporary make-work jobs in order to boost the schools’ employment statistics. All metrics will be gamed, and the games always have costs. And when the metrics involve our health, those costs can be very high indeed."

Just Four Large Countries Have a Higher Debt Burden Than the U.S.

By Josh Zumbrun of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"As of 2017, the general government gross debt of the U.S. stood at 108.1% of gross domestic product, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund. Only four large countries have more debt for the size of their economies."

Japan’s government carries debts at 240.3% of gross domestic product, far and away the world’s largest burden. Japan has struggled in recent decades to tackle its debt, in part because its economy has been stagnant. Attempts to raise revenue via higher taxes have often knocked the economy into recessions. Tax cuts haven’t generated enough growth to ease debt burdens.

The Bank of Japan has embarked on the world’s most aggressive monetary policies, including decades of rates near zero, and the world’s largest asset-purchase program. None of it has revived growth or inflation, meaning Japan’s debt burden has been slowly grinding higher. (Although the low rates have meant the costs to the government of servicing that debt have remained under control.)

Japan’s government debt has been a persistent fiscal challenge, but never quite blossomed into a full-blown crisis.

The next three nations haven’t been so lucky. Greece’s debt-to-GDP stands at 180.2% of GDP, Italy’s at 133% and Portugal’s at 125.7%." 

"But the country with the next-largest debt burden isn’t Spain, but rather the U.S. Spain’s debt-to-GDP climbed above 100% in 2014, but has since slowly dipped to 98.7%, about 10 percentage points lower than the U.S."

"The U.S. hasn’t always been among the highest-debt nations—not even close. As recently as 2001, the U.S. debt for the size of its economy was 93rd out of 169 nations ranked by the IMF that year. By 2008, the U.S. debt had risen to 23rd out of 184, thanks to a combination of factors including a recession in 2001, the start of the global financial crisis in 2007, a pair of massive tax cuts in the early 2000s that did not produce the hoped-for growth benefits, and two expensive wars.

Over the past decade, the U.S. debt has grown. Government revenues plunged during the recession. Spending soared on safety-net programs. The 2009 stimulus package cost nearly $1 trillion. The U.S. debt is now 12th out of 185, and fifth among large countries."

Here are some thoughts on the debt I have posted before:

Real problems the national debt might cause
 
1. About 31% of the debt is owed to foreign citizens. When they get paid back, they come and buy American goods. That leaves fewer goods for Americans (who can't afford to buy as much due to higher taxes that were needed to pay back the debt). BUT THIS MIGHT NOT BE A CONCERN IF WE ORIGINALLY BORROWED THE MONEY FOR A GOOD PURPOSE.

People borrow money all the time to buy houses and cars. Then they pay it back to a person outside of their family or household. We don’t consider this a burden since the money was put to good use. Right after World War II, the national debt was 120% of the GDP. This was much higher than it is now and we survived. No one complains that we borrowed to win the war. The national debt is about 105% of the GDP now. In 1986 it was about 50% of GDP.

2. Raising taxes might hurt economic incentives. At higher tax rates, people might want to work and invest less. Fewer businesses might expand and fewer news ones created since you will get to keep less profit. But again, THIS MIGHT NOT BE A CONCERN IF WE ORIGINALLY BORROWED THE MONEY FOR A GOOD PURPOSE. Also, if taxes only go up a little, and the debt is slowly paid off each year (like after WW II), it may not hurt too much.

3. We may have fewer government services in the future if we pay back the debt by lowering government spending. But this means that we are trading more government services today for fewer in the future. THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY A BAD THING IF THE MONEY IS SPENT WISELY (which everyone not might not agree on).

If taxes and interest rates are higher in the future due to the debt, that will lower our future economic growth rate. We will still probably grow, but not as much."

13 economists on the research that shaped our world in 2017

From Quartz. Excerpts (with just my three favorites listed-you can see all 13 if you click on the link):

"At the end of every year, culture critics get to compile best of the year lists. But why should they have all the fun? Just like films and albums, economics research deserves a little reflection. To identify the research that mattered most in 2017, Quartz decided to call in some help, enlisting some of the greatest minds in economics today, including two Nobel prize winners.

We asked these economists which study they thought was the most important or intriguing of 2017, along with their thoughts on the research. The chosen studies capture the concerns of 2017, with subjects ranging from opioids to gender discrimination to globalization.

Here are their picks:

Accounting for Growth in the Age of the Internet: The Importance of Output-Saving Technical Change (pdf) by Charles Hulten and Leonard Nakamura

Main finding: Living standards may be growing faster than GDP growth.
Nominating economist: Diane Coyle, University of Manchester
Specialization: Economic statistics and the digital economy
Why? “This paper tries to formalize the intuition that there is a growing gap between the standard measure of GDP, capturing economic activity, and true economic welfare and to draw out some of the implications.”

Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health (pdf) by Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah

Main finding: Decriminalizing sex work makes it safer and more common.
Nominating economist: Jennifer Doleac, University of Virgina
Specialization: Criminal justice and public policy
Why? “This paper uses an unusual natural experiment in Rhode Island to measure the effect of decriminalizing indoor prostitution on public health, and the findings will surprise many… When indoor prostitution suddenly became legal, reported rape offenses fell by 30% and female gonorrhea incidence fell by over 40%. Perhaps it’s time to rethink our current policies in this area.” [Indoor prostitution includes brothel workers and call girls. It does not include street solicitors.]

The Macroeconomic Impact of Microeconomic Shocks (pdf) by David Baqaee and Emmanuel Farhi

Main finding: Shocks to the economy in certain sectors can have larger effects on the entire economy than previously thought.
Nominating economist: Jean Tirole, Toulouse School of Economics, winner of the 2014 Nobel prize in economics
Specialization: Industrial organization
Why? “Baqaee and Farhi open up the black box of aggregate production by modeling the network linkages between firms and sectors, and demonstrate the emergence of important nonlinearities. This discovery has far-ranging macroeconomic implications, from the microeconomic origins of business cycles to the identification of key sectors with a disproportionate influence on the overall economy. For example, it leads to a radical revaluation, by a full factor of four, of the macroeconomic impact of the 1970s oil shocks. This opens up a fascinating research direction to build a more realistic macroeconomics, from the grounds up, with realistic microeconomic foundations.”"

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History

By Nicholas Kristof of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"2017 was probably the very best year in the long history of humanity.

A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell."

"Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water."

"As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty."

"Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps."

"the 1950s, the U.S. also had segregation, polio and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history."

"it’s also important to step back periodically. Professor Roser notes that there was never a headline saying, “The Industrial Revolution Is Happening,” even though that was the most important news of the last 250 years."

2017 Was The Fourth Straight Year With At Least A 0.5 Increase In The Percentage Of 25-54 Year-olds Employed

One weakness of the unemployment rate is that if people drop out of the labor force they cannot be counted as an unemployed person and the unemployment rate goes down. They are no longer actively seeking work and it might be because they are discouraged workers. The lower unemployment rate can be misleading in this case. People dropping out of the labor force might indicate a weak labor market.

We could look at the employment to population ratio instead, since that includes those not in the labor force. But that includes everyone over 16 and that means that senior citizens are in the group but many of them have retired. The more that retire, the lower this ratio would be and that might be misleading. It would not necessarily mean the labor market is weak.

But we have this ratio for people age 25-54 (which also eliminates college age people who might not be looking for work)

Click here to see the BLS data. It rose to 78.63% in 2017 from 77.925% in 2016. The last time we had 4 or more straight years of a 0.5 or more gain was 1984-89. But we are still below the 79.9% of 2007 (the recession started in Dec. 2007).

Here is a good graph from the St. Louis Fed. It shows that there are about 125 million people in the 25-54 year old group. So since we are 1.26 percentage points below the 79.9% of 2007, that is still 1.58 million fewer jobs (Hat tip: Vance Ginn of the Texas Public Policy Foundation).

The Price of Prejudice

By Morten Størling Hedegaard and Jean-Robert Tyran.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
vol. 10, no. 1, January 2018
• (pp. 40-63)

"Abstract

We present a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the workplace. Our design allows us to study how potential discriminators respond to changes in the cost of discrimination. We find that ethnic discrimination is common but highly responsive to the "price of prejudice," i.e., to the opportunity cost of choosing a less productive worker on ethnic grounds. Discriminators are on average willing to forego 8 percent of their earnings to avoid a coworker of the other ethnic type. The evidence suggests that animus rather than statistical discrimination explains observed behavior"

The San Antonio Express-News Printed An Article By Me

Is giving back the best approach?

ESPN writer Michael C. Wright writer recently reported a comment by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich on why it is important to give back to the community: “Because we’re rich as hell and we don’t need it all, and other people need it. Then, you’re an (expletive) if you don’t give it. Pretty simple.”

Yes, many people are in great need, and I think most of us want to see the lives of the less fortunate improved. Popovich raises the question of what people need and the best way to help them get it.

If some people cannot afford adequate food or housing, giving money will help them. But what might happen if you did something else with your money?

You could just leave it at the bank, which can then lend it to new businesses or to established ones. If they expand their output, it could lead to more jobs, which will help those in need. As Ronald Reagan used to say, the best social program is a job.

Or, if you are rich, you can spend your money on goods you enjoy. This, too, can create jobs.
The big question is, what is the best approach for lifting people? And if it includes charity, what is the optimal amount?

But we would do well to remember that wealth is created by entrepreneurs. If it weren’t for them, we would not have much wealth to redistribute.

Think of all the great products that even the rich could not afford before the Industrial Revolution. They are largely the result of entrepreneurs starting businesses and creating goods to improve the lives of millions.

So when people like Popovich say the rich need to give back, let’s remember that they may be rich because of what they created through entrepreneurship. In fact, entrepreneurs may get only a small fraction of the value they create.

Economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey wrote in a Cato Institute report that “the economist William Nordhaus has calculated that the inventors and entrepreneurs nowadays earn in profit only 2 percent of the social value of their inventions.” The other 98 percent goes to the rest of us.

William McBride of the Tax Foundation reported that the share of entrepreneurs on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans was 69 percent in 2011. So many wealthy people, by being entrepreneurial, have already given much to their communities.

Do they need to “give back” also? Perhaps not. Giving back implies they took more than they should have, as if there is some fixed pile of wealth they greedily took too much of.

If a person has to give back to their community, as Popovich suggests, what does that mean? Did they charge too much for their products? Did they pay too little to their suppliers, including the workers?

Not likely in our competitive, dynamic economy. But that entrepreneurial dynamism has declined as inequality has grown in the last few decades.

We need to remove regulatory roadblocks for entrepreneurs, including things like so many occupational license requirements.

If Popovich enters politics, as some have hinted, I hope he has some ideas on how to grow the economy and not just redistribute wealth and income.

The surprising link between science fiction and economic history

By Sebastian Buckup. He is Head of Programming, Global Programming Group, Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum. Today is National ScienceFiction Day. Excerpt: 

"Exactly 200 years ago, in 1816, a teen-aged girl called Mary Shelley began writing the story of Frankenstein in a villa in Cologny, a short walk from where the World Economic Forum now has its offices. Her ghoulish but subtle tale featured a scientist bringing a sentient, suffering creature to life from parts found in the “dissecting room and the slaughter-house".

“Frankenstein” was written at the end of the First Industrial Revolution, capturing the fears and squeamishness of a society going through massive transformations whilst making its first forays into surgery. The book took inspiration from earlier critics of the dawn of industrialisation, among them John Milton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Today, Shelley’s Frankenstein is seen as the start of a genre, the first work of science fiction. By imaginatively combining the rigour of science with the freedom of fiction, the genre plays a big role in expressing the hopes and fears we project into our creations.

The best sci-fi stories mix two ingredients. The first is great science which sometimes leads to surprising accuracy: Jules Verne imagined a propeller-driven aircraft in the early 19th century, when balloons were the best that aviation had to offer. In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned the iPad, and Ray Bradbury the Mars landing. It may just be a matter of time until “Samantha”, the AI voice in Spike Jonze’s film Her, will be real, or until we bump into a version of “Ava”, the humanoid robot from Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina”.
 

The second ingredient is a keen understanding of contemporary hopes and fears. This is what makes these books and films great tools for dissecting the sentiments of an era. The two most successful sci-fi stories ever, George Lucas’ Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, are amongst the best examples of how pop culture combined perceptions of technological progress with contemporary hopes and fears."

Major Issues Facing The Fed

See New Priorities for a New Fed Regime: Incoming leadership should make maintaining financial stability one of the central bank’s goals by Martin Feldstein. Excerpt:

"The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 index rose from an average of 18.5 in the three years before the downturn of 2007 to 25.2 now, an increase of 37%. The current P/E ratio is 63% higher than its historic average and higher than all but three years in the 20th century.

If the P/E ratio declines to its historic average, the implied fall would reduce the value of household equities by $9.5 trillion. If every dollar of decline in wealth reduces spending by the historic average of 4 cents, the level of household spending would fall by $475 billion, or more than 2% of gross domestic product. The lower equity prices and the decline in household spending would also cause business investment to fall, further reducing economic activity.

Bond prices are also out of line with historic experience. With inflation at around 2%, the long-term 10-year Treasury yield should be at about 4.5%. Instead it is only about 2.5%. If the yield on long-term bonds returns to normal historic levels, there will be substantial losses of value for current bondholders.

Commercial real estate is overpriced because investors compare the yield on real estate with the interest rate on long-term bonds. Since real estate is often held in highly leveraged investments, falling prices could lead to an even greater decline in the net value of real-estate assets.

The combination of overpriced real estate and equities has left the financial sector fragile and has put the entire economy at risk. The Fed has so far chosen not to address this fragility."