Economics – Page 172 – artdiamondblog.com

Chinese Couples Divorce to Avoid Government Regulations and Taxes

“A police officer attempted to stop residents from rushing into a real estate trading center in Shanghai after new restrictions were announced.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) SHANGHAI — When the Chinese government announced new curbs on property prices this month, homeowners bombarded social networking sites with complaints. They formed long lines at property bureaus to register to sell their homes before the restrictions went into effect.

And some couples went even further: they filed for divorce.
Divorce filings shot up here and in other big cities across China this past week after rumors spread that one way to avoid the new 20 percent tax on profits from housing sales was to separate from a spouse, at least on paper.
The surge in divorce filings is the latest indication of how volatile an issue real estate has become in China in the past decade and how resistant people are to additional taxes.
. . .
On Friday, at a marriage registration center in the Pudong district, a 33-year-old woman named Frances Tao arrived with her husband. She acknowledged that they were filing for divorce, not to avoid the 20 percent capital gains tax on second homes, but to get around another restriction, which requires home buyers to put down a much higher deposit on a second home than on a primary residence.
Ms. Tao said that by divorcing, one of them would be able to purchase a first home and put down less money and get a better interest rate.
“We don’t have other choices,” Ms. Tao said. “But the government and developers continue to make a lot of money.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID BARBOZA. “In China, Checklist for a Home Seller: First, Get a Divorce.” The New York Times (Sat., March 9, 2012): A4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 8, 2012.)

Knowledge Economy Migrating to Intangible Goods and Services

(p. 67) Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move toward the immaterial. (Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more economically valuable.) Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says, “Data from nearly all parts of the world show us that consumers tend to spend relatively less on goods and more on services as their incomes rise. . . . Once people have met their basic needs, they tend to want medical care, transportation and communication, information, recreation, entertainment, financial and legal advice, and the like.” The disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium. In six years the average weight per dollar of U.S. exports (the most valuable things the U.S. produces) (p. 68) dropped by half. Today, 40 percent of U.S. exports are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea-based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis in original; a graph is omitted that appears in the middle of the paragraph quoted above.)

In Latvia Deep Budget Cuts Lead to High Economic Growth

“A worker cleaned equipment at a new dairy factory outside Riga. The I.M.F. has hailed Latvia for its deep budget cuts.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

It is interesting that the New York Times photographer (see above) chose to display the Latvian economic success story in bleak shades of grey and darkness.

(p. A1) RIGA, Latvia — When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff one by one and then shut down the business. He watched in dismay as Latvia’s misery deepened under a harsh austerity drive that scythed wages, jobs and state financing for schools and hospitals.

But instead of taking to the streets to protest the cuts, Mr. Krumins, whose newborn child, in the meantime, needed major surgery, bought a tractor and began hauling wood to heating plants that needed fuel. Then, as Latvia’s economy began to pull out of its nose-dive, he returned to architecture and today employs 15 people — five more than he had before. “We have a different mentality here,” he said.
. . .
Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases.” The New York Times (Weds., January 2, 2013): A1 & A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 1, 2013.)

David Kay Johnston Defends Entrepreneurial Capitalism Against Crony Capitalism

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/manually-added/fineprint_custom-c26eb6a3f6c4d9bc09220769911f3cbeaa900b7f-s6-c10.jpg

I saw an informative C-SPAN interview with David Cay Johnston a while back. I had known from Johnston’s previous books and reporting, that he was devoted to exposing the outrages of crony capitalism. What the interview revealed to me was that Johnston was not opposed to capitalism in general, and in fact viewed himself as friendly to entrepreneurial capitalism.

I believe that big companies are not bad when they got and stay big by honestly earning big profits from willing and delighted consumers. But big companies are bad when, as often happens, they use their size to get the government to suppress start-up competitors or to take money from taxpayers to subsidize their activities.
I have not yet read Johnston’s latest book on the big and bad, but I expect it to present sad, but useful, examples.

Book discussed:
Johnston, David Cay. The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind. New York: Portfolio, 2012.

Reinhart Rogoff Result Robust: High Debt Lowers Growth Rate from 3.5 to 2.3 Percent

(p. A29) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. In May 2010, we published an academic paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” Its main finding, drawing on data from 44 countries over 200 years, was that in both rich and developing countries, high levels of government debt — specifically, gross public debt equaling 90 percent or more of the nation’s annual economic output — was associated with notably lower rates of growth.
. . .
Last week, three economists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, released a paper criticizing our findings. They correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error that led us to miscalculate the growth rates of highly indebted countries since World War II. But they also accused us of “serious errors” stemming from “selective exclusion” of relevant data and “unconventional weighting” of statistics — charges that we vehemently dispute.
. . .
Our 2010 paper found that, over the long term, growth is about 1 percentage point lower when debt is 90 percent or more of gross domestic product. The University of Massachusetts researchers do not overturn this fundamental finding, which several researchers have elaborated upon.
. . .
There were just 26 cases where the ratio of debt to G.D.P. exceeded 90 percent for five years or more; the average high-debt spell was 23 years. In 23 of the 26 cases, average growth was slower during the high-debt period than in periods of lower debt levels. Indeed, economies grew at an average annual rate of roughly 3.5 percent, when the ratio was under 90 percent, but at only a 2.3 percent rate, on average, at higher relative debt levels.
. . .
The fact that high-debt episodes last so long suggests that they are not, as some liberal economists contend, simply a matter of downturns in the business cycle.
In “This Time Is Different,” our 2009 history of financial crises over eight centuries, we found that when sovereign debt reached unsustainable levels, so did the cost of borrowing, if it was even possible at all. The current situation confronting Italy and Greece, whose debts date from the early 1990s, long before the 2007-8 global financial crisis, support this view.

For the full commentary, see:
CARMEN M. REINHART and KENNETH S. ROGOFF. “Debt, Growth and the Austerity Debate.” The New York Times (Fri., April 26, 2013): A29.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 25, 2013.)

The full reference to the authors’ book is:
Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth Rogoff. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

The Costs of Green Jobs Policies

Source of book image: http://javelindc.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/regulating_to_disaster.jpg

I caught part of a C-SPAN presentation on the Regulating to Disaster book. It sounded plausible and intriguing—consistent with other evidence I have seen that “green” jobs have been over-hyped and under-delivered.
Perhaps more important, there are the high opportunity costs of the tax dollars devoted to the “green” jobs, in terms of the non-green jobs that would have been created by entrepreneurs if less of their income had been taxed away.
I hope to look at the book in the near future.

Book discussed:
Furchtgott-Roth, Diana. Regulating to Disaster: How Green Jobs Policies Are Damaging America’s Economy. New York: Encounter Books, 2012.

Analytical Solutions Require Unrealistic Assumptions that Make Models Useless for Policy

Source of book image: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/edward.leamer/images/COVER%209120_jkt_Rev1.jpg

(p. 190) When I was a younger man, I and all of my cohort were apprehensive if we saw Ed Leamer in the audience when we were presenting a paper. His comments were blunt, incisive, and often negative. But what truly terrified us was that he was almost always right. . . .

Leamer has produced a highly original little book, with big insights and lessons for us all. He explores the tension between economics that is mathematically sophisticated and complex but often vacuous, versus economics that may be vague but which is useful and carries a message. It is frankly a remarkable work, full of insights and persuasive arguments that need to be read, debated, and taken seriously.
. . .
(p. 191) But this is no rant of an old guy. Leamer gets very specific about his notions of usefulness versus rigor. A good drum to bang on is Samuelson, an important “mathematizer.” I would strongly encourage all young trade economists and perhaps all graduate students who have been subjected to a traditional international trade course at any level, to read the section on factor-price equalization. This is beautifully done and even exciting and funny at times. As told by Leamer, the young Samuelson excoriates Ohlin for largely dismissing the possibility of factor-price equalization and then presents his (Samuelson’s) “proof” of factor-price equalization. The latter, of course, is a theorem that is mathematically correct given the assumptions, but Ohlin is talking about its usefulness in understanding the world and constructing policy. The factor-price-equalization theorem is indeed a prime example of something that is valid but not useful.
. . .
Yet at the same time, I have thought long and hard about exactly what message should be given to graduate students and assistant professors without much success. The journal publishing business puts a huge premium on rigor over usefulness and few referees or editors are inclined to take the chance inherent in accepting papers that are a bit loose in their analytical or econometric structures, no matter how exciting they might be. If you accept that, then the profession as a whole has to rethink our view of what is an important scientific contribution: I cannot simply tell graduate students to think more broadly and worry less about elegance. Some will of course deny that there is any tension, but I side with Leamer. Over and over again, I hear, read, and/or referee papers (p. 192) where, in order to get an analytical solution to a model, the author has to assume away almost every interesting feature of the problem to the point that the remaining model is uninteresting and uninformative. But that at least qualifies the paper for possible publication in Econometrica, RESTud, or JET.

For the full review, see:
Markusen, James R. “Book Review of Ed Leamer’s the Craft of Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature 51, no. 1 (2013): 190-92.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

The book under review is:
Leamer, Edward E. The Craft of Economics, Ohlin Lectures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

“The French Work Force Gets Paid High Wages But Works Only Three Hours”

(p. B1) PARIS — “How stupid do you think we are?”
With those choice words, and several more similar in tone, the chief executive of an American tire company touched off a furor in France on Wednesday as he responded to a government plea to take over a Goodyear factory slated for closing in northern France.
“I have visited the factory a couple of times,” Maurice Taylor Jr., the head of Titan International, wrote to the country’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, in a letter published in French newspapers on Wednesday.
“The French work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.”
“I told this to the French unions to their faces and they told me, ‘That’s the French way!’ “

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Quel Brouhaha! A Diatribe on Unions Irks the French.” The New York Times (Thurs., February 21, 2013): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 20, 2013.)

For a similar account, see:
GABRIELE PARUSSINI. “U.S. CEO to France: “How Stupid Do You Think We Are?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 21, 2013): B1.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 20, 2013, and has the title “U.S. CEO Blasts French Work Habits.”)

New Technology Allows Maple Syrup Farms to Adapt and Thrive with Global Warming

“Tom Morse, left, and his father, Burr, at work on their maple farm in Vermont.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 11) Scientists say the tapping season — the narrow window of freezing nights and daytime temperatures over 40 degrees needed to convert starch to sugar and get sap flowing — is on average five days shorter than it was 50 years ago. But technology developed over the past decade and improved in recent years offers maple farmers like Mr. Morse a way to offset the effects of climate change with high-tech tactics that are far from natural.

Today, five miles of pressurized blue tubing spider webs down the hillside at Morse Farm, pulling sap from thousands of trees and spitting it into tubs like an immense, inverse IV machine. Modern vacuum pumps are powerful enough to suck the air out of a stainless steel dairy tank and implode it, and they help producers pull in twice as much sap as before.
“You can make it run when nature wouldn’t have it run,” Mr. Morse said.
His greatest secret weapon is a reverse-osmosis machine that concentrates the sap by pulling it through sensitive membranes, greatly increasing the sugar content before it even hits the boiler. The $8,000 instrument with buttons and dials looks like it belongs in a Jetsons-era laboratory more than in a Vermont sugarhouse. But it saves more fuel and money than every other innovation combined. With it Mr. Morse can process sap into syrup in 30 minutes, something that used to take two hours.
. . .
The biggest United States maple farmers have expanded their production acreage and are tapping more trees than ever before: the total was 5.5 million taps last year, compared with slightly over 4 million taps 10 years earlier.
As a result, United States maple syrup production hit a new high in 2011. In Vermont, the top-producing state, sap yield per tap has risen over the past decade.

For the full story, see:
JULIA SCOTT. “Maple Syrup: Old-Fashioned Product, Newfangled Means of Production.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., March 31, 2013): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 30, 2013, and has the title “High-Tech Means of Production Belies Nostalgic Image of Maple Syrup.”)

Tax Rates Have Big Effect on Labor Supply and Rate of Entrepreneurial Start-Ups

(p. A23) Higher taxes will produce long-term changes in social norms, behavior and growth. Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, found that, in the 1950s when their taxes were low, Europeans worked more hours per capita than Americans. Then their taxes went up, reducing the incentives to work and increasing the incentives to relax. Over the next decades, Europe saw a nearly 30 percent decline in work hours.
The rich tend to be more sensitive to tax-rate changes because they’ve got advisers who are paid to be. Martin Feldstein, an economics professor at Harvard, looked into tax changes in the 1980s and concluded that raising rates causes people to shift compensations to untaxed fringe benefits and otherwise suppresses their economic activity. A study last year by the economists Michael Keane and Richard Rogerson found that tax rates can have a surprisingly large influence on how much people invest in education, how likely they are to create businesses and which professions they go into.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Progressive Shift.” The New York Times (Tues., March 19, 2013): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 18, 2013.)

The Keane and Rogerson paper summarized by Brooks is:
Keane, Michael, and Richard Rogerson. “Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom.” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 2 (June 2012): 464-76.

Confident Winner Studied Economics at Cambridge and Directed Bronson in “Death Wish”

“Michael Winner, left, and Charles Bronson on the set of the 1974 film “Death Wish.” The two collaborated on several films.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) Michael Winner, the brash British director known for violent action movies starring Charles Bronson including “The Mechanic” and the first three “Death Wish” films, died on Monday [January 21, 2013] at his home in London. He was 77.
. . .
Mr. Winner’s films viscerally pleased crowds, largely ignored artistic pretensions and often underwhelmed critics. He directed many major stars in more than 30 films over more than four decades.
. . .
Mr. Bronson played Paul Kersey, a New York City architect who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is sexually assaulted by muggers.
. . .
Michael Robert Winner was born in London on Oct. 30, 1935. The son of a well-to-do business owner, Mr. Winner graduated from Cambridge, having studied law and economics.
. . .
He was confident on set, sometimes bordering on the dictatorial. “You have to be an egomaniac about it. You have to impose your own taste,” he said. “The team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.”

For the full obituary, see:
DANIEL E. SLOTNIK. “Michael Winner, 77, ‘Death Wish’ Director.” The New York Times (Tues., January 22, 2013): B8.
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the slightly different title “Michael Winner, ‘Death Wish’ Director, Dies at 77.”)
(Note: ellipses and bracketed date were added.)