Economic Growth – Page 22 – artdiamondblog.com

American Poor Are Richer Now than in the Past

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Is a family with a car in the driveway, a flat-screen television and a computer with an Internet connection poor?

Americans — even many of the poorest — enjoy a level of material abundance unthinkable just a generation or two ago.
. . .
(p. B2) Two broad trends account for much of the change in poor families’ consumption over the past generation: federal programs and falling prices.
Since the 1960s, both Republican and Democratic administrations have expanded programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. In 1967, government programs reduced one major poverty rate by about 1 percentage point. In 2012, they reduced the rate by nearly 13 percentage points.
As a result, the differences in what poor and middle-class families consume on a day-to-day basis are much smaller than the differences in what they earn.
“There’s just a whole lot more assistance per low-income person than there ever has been,” said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That is propping up the living standards to a considerable degree,” he said, citing a number of statistics on housing, nutrition and other categories.
. . .
. . . another form of progress has led to what some economists call the “Walmart effect”: falling prices for a huge array of manufactured goods.
Since the 1980s, for instance, the real price of a midrange color television has plummeted about tenfold, and televisions today are crisper, bigger, lighter and often Internet-connected. Similarly, the effective price of clothing, bicycles, small appliances, processed foods — virtually anything produced in a factory — has followed a downward trajectory. The result is that Americans can buy much more stuff at bargain prices.

For the full story, see:
ANNIE LOWREY. “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind.” The New York Times (Mon., May 1, 2014): A1 & B2 (sic).
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 30, 2014, and has the title “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off, but Far Behind.”)

The Invention of the Vacuum Tube as a Revolutionary Event

(p. A11) Mr. Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we must embrace [technological innovation], not reject it.” The book’s other purpose is to persuade climate-change fundamentalists that they are standing on the wrong side of history. Instead of saving the planet by going backward to Don Quixote’s windmills, they need to take a progressive approach to technology itself, he says, striving to make nuclear power safer, for instance, and using the hydrocarbon revolution sparked by fracking and deep-offshore exploration to bridge the way to the future.
. . .
Mr. Bryce focuses in particular on the vacuum tube, designed in 1906 by Lee de Forest, the man also credited with inventing the radio.
The discovery of the vacuum tube, Mr. Bryce says, was a revolutionary event. By trapping the energy generated from the free flow of electrons and directing it to boost a small AC current into a much larger one, de Forest created electric amplification–which the transistor and integrated circuit would multiply exponentially.

For the full review, see:
ARTHUR HERMAN. “BOOKSHELF; How to Defuse the Power Elite; To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 22, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 21, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper’ by Robert Bryce; To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.”)

The book being reviewed is:
Bryce, Robert. Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

French Socialist Wants to Encourage Entrepreneurs by Reducing Regulations

“Emmanuel Macron, France’s new economy minister, has been a major force behind a recent shift by President François Hollande toward a more centrist economic policy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B3) . . . , what is important, Mr. Macron said, as a late train from the nearby Gare de Lyon rumbled beneath his window, is that France continue to streamline and modernize the welfare state.

“For me being a Socialist today is about defending the unemployed, but also defending businessmen who want to create a company, and those who need jobs,” he said. “We have to shift the social model from a lot of formal protections toward loosening bottlenecks in the economy.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “France’s 36-Year-Old Economy minister Is Face of the New Socialism.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 7, 2014): B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 6, 2014, and has the title “Emmanuel Macron, Face of France’s New Socialism.”)

Labor Process Innovations Increased Productivity

(p. 6) . . . , Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, has gone so far as to argue that the Industrial Revolution was in part a self-control revolution. Many economists, beginning with Adam Smith, have argued that factories — an important innovation of the Industrial Revolution — blossomed because they allowed workers to specialize and be more productive.
Professor Clark argues that work rules truly differentiated the factory. People working at home could start and finish when they wanted, a very appealing sort of flexibility, but it had a major drawback, he said. People ended up doing less work that way.
Factories imposed discipline. They enforced strict work hours. There were rules for when you could go home and for when you had to show up at the beginning of your shift. If you arrived late you could be locked out for the day. For workers being paid piece rates, this certainly got them up and at work on time. You can even see something similar with the assembly line. Those operations dictate a certain pace of work. Like a running partner, an assembly line enforces a certain speed.
As Professor Clark provocatively puts it: “Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder. They lacked the self-control to achieve higher earnings on their own.”
The data entry workers in our study, centuries later, might have agreed with that statement. In fact, 73 percent of them did agree to this statement: “It would be good if there were rules against being absent because it would help me come to work more often.”
Of course with newer forms of technology, showing up for work on time need not mean being physically at a given workplace. A study by the economists Nicholas Bloom, John Roberts and Zhichun Ying of Stanford and James Liang of Peking University looked at call center workers in China. In their experiment, some workers were randomly assigned to work at home, others worked in group call centers. The work habits of both groups were carefully monitored electronically, and the workers knew it. The researchers found that those working at home were 13 percent more productive than those in call centers. With modern technology, we now have so many ways to quantify, track and motivate productivity. We do not need to lock factory doors or even have a factory. Yet we have not yet begun to scratch the surface of motivating production in this way.

For the full commentary, see:
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN. “Economic View; Looking at Productivity as a State of Mind.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., SEPT. 28, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 27, 2014.)

The article mentioned above by Clark is:
Clark, Gregory. “Factory Discipline.” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 1 (March 1994): 128-63.

The article mentioned above by Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying is:
Bloom, Nicholas, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying. “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment.” August 18, 2014.

Structural Reforms Needed to Increase Innovation

(p. A13) . . . , a lack of “demand” is no longer the problem.
. . .
Where, instead, are the problems? John Taylor, Stanford’s Nick Bloom and Chicago Booth’s Steve Davis see the uncertainty induced by seat-of-the-pants policy at fault. Who wants to hire, lend or invest when the next stroke of the presidential pen or Justice Department witch hunt can undo all the hard work? Ed Prescott emphasizes large distorting taxes and intrusive regulations. The University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan deconstructs the unintended disincentives of social programs. And so forth. These problems did not cause the recession. But they are worse now, and they can impede recovery and retard growth.
These views are a lot less sexy than a unicausal “demand,” fixable by simple, magic-bullet policies. They require us to do the hard work of fixing the things we all agree need fixing: our tax code, our cronyist regulatory state, our welter of anticompetitive and anti-innovative protections, education, immigration, social program disincentives, and so on. They require “structural reform,” not “stimulus,” in policy lingo.

For the commentary, see:
JOHN H. COCHRANE. “OPINION; The Failure of Macroeconomics; When models don’t yield the spending policies they want, some Keynesians abandon models–but not the spending.” The Wall Street Journal (Thur., July 3, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 2, 2014.)

“A Few Really Good Artisanal Cheese Shops Is No Substitute for a Strong School System”

(p. 836) Moretti’s writing on the “creative class” takes issue with policies associated with Richard Florida, who has exerted a considerable influence on local policymakers worldwide. Moretti uses the example of Berlin, which is a cool place full of creative types but still isn’t much of an economic powerhouse, to make the case against Florida’s recommendations.
. . .
A problem exists if city governments start thinking that their main job is to be hip rather than competent. Having a few really good artisanal cheese shops is no substitute for a strong school system. Local leaders would do well to remember that an externality-creating skilled resident is as likely to be a forty-two-year-old mother who works in (p. 837) a lab as a twenty-five-year-old looking for a good time. The forty-two-year-old’s tastes in local amenities are likely to be quite different from those of the twenty-five-year-old. If Moretti’s caution against creative class policies achieves that end, then it will have done something quite positive.

For the full review, see:
Glaeser, Edward. “A Review of Enrico Moretti’s the New Geography of Jobs.” Journal of Economic Literature 51, no. 3 (Sept. 2013): 825-37.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book under review is:
Moretti, Enrico. The New Geography of Jobs. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2012.

McCloskey’s “Great Fact” of “the Ice-Hockey Stick”

Source of image: http://www.bombayharbor.com/productImage/Ice_Hockey_Stick/Ice_Hockey_Stick.jpg

(p. 2) Economic history has looked like an ice-hockey stick lying on the ground. It had a long, long horizontal handle at $3 a day extending through the two-hundred-thousand-year history of Homo sapiens to 1800, with little bumps upward on the handle in ancient Rome and the early medieval Arab world and high medieval Europe, with regressions to $3 afterward–then a wholly unexpected blade, leaping up in the last two out of the two thousand centuries, to $30 a day and in many places well beyond.
. . .
(p. 48) The heart of the matter is sixteen. Real income per head nowadays exceeds that around 1700 or 1800 in, say, Britain and in other countries that have experienced modern economic growth by such a large factor as sixteen, at least. You, oh average participant in the British economy, go through at least sixteen times more food and clothing and housing and education in a day than an ancestor of yours did two or three centuries ago. Not sixteen percent more, but sixteen multiplied by the old standard of living. You in the American or the South Korean economy, compared to the wretchedness of former Smiths in 1653 or Kims in 1953, have done even better. And if such novelties as jet travel and vitamin pills and instant messaging are accounted at their proper value, the factor of material improvement climbs even higher than sixteen–to eighteen, or thirty, or far beyond. No previous episode of enrichment for the average person approaches it, not the China of the Song Dynasty or the Egypt of the New Kingdom, not the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome.
No competent economist, regardless of her politics, denies the Great Fact.

Source:
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Countries that Protect Jobs Stifle Economic Growth

(p. 240) In an “Interview” conducted by Jessie Romero, John Haltiwanger discusses changing patterns of job creation and destruction: “But now we’re seeing a decline in the entry rate and a pretty stark decline in the share of young businesses. . . . But it’s also important to recognize that the decline in the share of young firms has occurred because the impact of entry is not just at the point of entry, it’s also over the next five or 10 years. A wave of entrants come in, and some of them grow very rapidly, and some of them fail. That dynamic has slowed down. . . . If you look at young small businesses, or just young businesses period, the 90th percentile growth rate is incredibly high. Young businesses not only are volatile, but their growth rates also are tremendously skewed. It’s rare to have a young business take off, but those that do add lots of jobs and contribute a lot to productivity growth. We have found that startups together with high-growth firms, which are disproportionately young, account for roughly 70 percent of overall job creation in the United States. . . . “I think the evidence is overwhelming that countries have tried to stifle the [job] destruction process and this has caused problems. I’m hardly a fan of job destruction per se, but making it difficult for firms to contract, through restricting shutdowns, bankruptcies, layoffs, etc., can have adverse consequences. The reason is that there’s so much heterogeneity in productivity across businesses. So if you stifle that destruction margin, you’re going to keep lots of low-productivity businesses in existence, and that could lead to a sluggish economy. I just don’t think we have any choice in a modern market economy but to allow for that reallocation to go on. Of course, what you want is an environment where not only is there a lot of job destruction, but also a lot of job creation, so that when workers lose their jobs they either immediately transit to another job or their unemployment duration is low.” Econ Focus, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Second Quarter 2013, pp. 30-34. http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2013/q2/pdf/interview.pdf.

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 235-42.
(Note: italics, ellipses, and bracketed word, in original.)

Raghuram Rajan: “Never in the Field of Economic Policy Has So Much Been Spent, with So Little Evidence, by So Few”

(p. 213) Raghuram Rajan delivered the Andrew Crockett Memorial Lecture at the Bank of International Settlements, titled “A Step in the Dark: Unconventional Monetary Policy after the Crisis.” “Two competing narratives of the sources of the crisis, and attendant remedies, are emerging. The first, and the better known diagnosis, is that demand has collapsed because of the high debt build up prior to the crisis. . . . But there is another narrative. And that is that the fundamental growth capacity in industrial countries has been shifting down for decades now, masked for a while by debt-fueled demand. More such demand, or asking for reckless spending from emerging markets, will not put us back on a sustainable path to growth. Instead, industrial democracies need to improve the environment for growth. The first narrative is the standard Keynesian one, modified for a debt crisis. It is the one (p. 214) most government officials and central bankers, as well as Wall Street economists, subscribe to, and needs little elaboration. The second narrative, in my view, offers a deeper and more persuasive view of the blight that afflicts our times.” Rajan argues that central banks took the right actions during the financial crisis, but that the wisdom of the ultra-low interest rate policies in the aftermath of the crisis are not yet clear. “Churchill could well have said on the subject of unconventional monetary policy, ‘Never in the field of economic policy has so much been spent, with so little evidence, by so few’. Unconventional monetary policy has truly been a step in the dark.” June 23, 2013, at http://www.bis.org/events/agm2013/sp130623.htm.

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 211-18.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Natural Resources Increase through Innovation

“A worker inspects solar panels in Dunhuang, China. We have an estimated supply of one million years of tellurium, a rare element used in some panels.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff–metals, oil, clean air, land–and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.
. . .
But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone.
. . .
Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
. . .
(p. C2) . . ., Mr. Ausubel, together with his colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don’t grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.)
. . .
The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient of some kinds of solar panels. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust–one atom per billion. Will it soon run out? Mr. Worstall estimates that there are 120 million tons of it, or a million years’ supply altogether.
. . .
Part of the problem is that the word “consumption” means different things to the two tribes. Ecologists use it to mean “the act of using up a resource”; economists mean “the purchase of goods and services by the public” (both definitions taken from the Oxford dictionary).
But in what sense is water, tellurium or phosphorus “used up” when products made with them are bought by the public? They still exist in the objects themselves or in the environment. Water returns to the environment through sewage and can be reused. Phosphorus gets recycled through compost. Tellurium is in solar panels, which can be recycled. As the economist Thomas Sowell wrote in his 1980 book “Knowledge and Decisions,” “Although we speak loosely of ‘production,’ man neither creates nor destroys matter, but only transforms it.”
. . .
If I could have one wish for the Earth’s environment, it would be to bring together the two tribes–to convene a grand powwow of ecologists and economists. I would pose them this simple question and not let them leave the room until they had answered it: How can innovation improve the environment?

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “The Scarcity Fallacy; Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 26, 2014): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 25, 2014, and has the title “The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out; Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.”)

G.D.P. Is a Useful, But Biased Downward, Measure of Growth

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 6) Dr. Coyle concludes that while imperfect, the G.D.P. is good enough as a measure of how fast the economy is growing and better than any alternative. It is closely correlated with things that do contribute to happiness. (Nobody is happy in a recession.)

“We should not be in a rush to ditch G.D.P.,” Dr. Coyle writes. “Yet it is a measure of the economy best suited to an earlier era.”
For one thing, it fails to count the value of the staggering growth in consumer choice. Where once we had three television networks, we now have 1,000 channels; greater choice equals greater freedom, she declares. It does poorly in measuring the Internet economy, in which so many benefits — like Google searches — are offered free. It badly lags behind the headlong pace of innovation and creativity. It struggles with the true value of a host of products or services that didn’t exist before. To the degree that it misses those new benefits to consumers, it understates the pace of economic growth.

For the full review, see:
FRED ANDREWS. “Off the Shelf; An Economic Gauge, Imperfect but Vital.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 6, 2014): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 5, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Coyle, Diane. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.