Economics – Page 175 – artdiamondblog.com

Fiscal Stimulus Packages Did Not Stimulate

(p. 686) An empirical review of the three fiscal stimulus packages of the 2000s shows that they had little if any direct impact on consumption or government purchases. Households largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government only increased purchases by a small amount. State and local governments saved their stimulus grants and shifted spending away from purchases to transfers. Counterfactual simulations show that the stimulus-induced decrease in state and local government purchases was larger than the increase in federal purchases. Simulations also show that a larger stimulus package with the same design as the 2009 stimulus would not have increased government purchases or consumption by a larger amount. These results raise doubts about the efficacy of such packages adding weight to similar assessments reached more than thirty years ago.

Source:
Taylor, John B. “An Empirical Analysis of the Revival of Fiscal Activism in the 2000s.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 3 (September 2011): 686-702.

Fragile Governments Cling to Failed Foreign Aid

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-VL312_bkrvta_DV_20121122124330.jpg

(p. C12) Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Antifragile” argues that some people, organizations and systems are resilient in the face of stress because they are able to alter themselves by adapting and learning. The converse is fragility, embodied in entities that are immovable even when faced with shocks or adversity. To my mind, an obvious example is how numerous governments and international agencies have clung to foreign aid as a tool to combat poverty even though aid has failed to deliver sustainable growth and meaningfully reduce indigence. And nation-states, which rest on one unifying vision of the nation, tend to be fragile, while city-states that adjust, adapt and constantly evolve tend to be antifragile. Mr. Taleb’s lesson: Embrace, rather than try to avoid, the shocks.

For the full review essay, see:
Dambisa Moyo (author of passage quoted above, one of 50 contributors to whole article). “Twelve Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends to tell us what books they enjoyed in 2012–from Judd Apatow’s big plans to Bruce Wagner’s addictions. See pages C10 and C11 for the Journal’s own Top Ten lists.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): passim (Moyo’s contribution is on p. C12).
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.

Governments Use “Financial Repression” to Lower Their Interest Payments on Debt

(p. 229) Carmen M. Reinhart, Jacob F. Kirkegaard, and M. Belen Sbrancia make a case for “Financial Repression Redux: Governments Are Once Again Finding Ways to Manipulate Markets to Hold Down the Cost of Financing Debt.” “Financial repression occurs when governments implement policies to channel to themselves funds that in a deregulated market environment would go elsewhere. . . . One of the main goals of financial repression is to keep nominal interest rates lower than they would be in more competitive markets. Other things equal, this reduces the government’s interest expenses for a given stock of debt and contributes to deficit reduction. (p. 230) However, when financial repression produces negative real interest rates (nominal rates below the inflation rate), it reduces or liquidates existing debts and becomes the equivalent of a tax–a transfer from creditors (savers) to borrowers, including the government . . .” “Financial repression contributed to rapid debt reduction following World War II. . . . It seems probable that policymakers for some time to come will be preoccupied with debt reduction, debt management, and efforts to keep debt servicing costs at a reasonable level. In this setting, financial repression, with its dual aims of keeping interest rates low and creating or maintaining captive domestic audiences, will continue to find renewed favor, and the measures and developments we have described and discussed are likely to be only the tip of a very large iceberg.”

Reinhart et al as quoted in:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 223-30.
(Note: ellipses added by Taylor.)

For the full Reinhart et al paper, see:
Reinhart, Carmen M., Jacob F. Kirkegaard, and M. Belen Sbrancia. “Financial Repression Redux.” Finance and Development 48, no. 2 (June 2011): 22-26.

Is Economics Major Nuts to Have Left Investment Banking?

“Jeffrey Braverman, right, stepped away from Wall Street to join his father, uncle and cousin in the family’s New Jersey nut business.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) Ten years ago, Jeffrey Braverman was living the dream of many business school graduates. With a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in economics, he landed a job in 2002 at the Blackstone Group, a Wall Street firm specializing in private equity and investment banking.
Less than a year later, however, Mr. Braverman stepped away from Wall Street and returned to his family’s New Jersey nut business, the Newark Nut Company. It struck some as an odd choice: the family-owned company, which had been started by Mr. Braverman’s grandfather, Sol Braverman (known as Poppy), and had once employed 30 people, was down to two employees and two family members, Mr. Braverman’s father and his uncle.
Located in an indoor mall in a desolate part of Newark, the nut shop’s retail sales were fading and its wholesale business was, at best, stagnant. But Mr. Braverman harbored entrepreneurial ambitions.
At the beginning, he agreed to work with his father and uncle for a salary tied directly to how much new business he attracted. He focused on Internet sales and before long, they began to dwarf the existing business.
Now based in Cranford, N.J., the company has grown to more than 80 employees with more than $20 million in revenue, 95 percent of it online. The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation.
Q. Who leaves investment banking to work at a struggling family nut company?
A. Only someone nuts, right? My dad and my uncle both thought I was crazy. I was making more than they were at the time.
Q. Then why?
A. Have you ever read the book “Monkey Business”? It’s a fairly accurate profile of what it’s like to be in investment banking, at least at a junior level. You know, there’s this economic concept called deadweight loss, and I think a lot of investment banking is like that: it doesn’t really add anything to the world, to the economy. I just wanted to do more.
Q. I assume your father and uncle made you take a pay cut.
A. The one thing I did was, I didn’t want to take anything away from them. I structured it so that my compensation was 100 percent based on incremental profit improvement. So from their perspective, there wasn’t very much risk. I also got a small piece of the business. But at the time the business was worth nothing, book value. No one would have bought it.
Q. Did you have any experience in Internet sales?
A. In 1999, I was a freshman in college and I started our Web site, Nutsonline.com. I spent my second semester of freshman year working on that thing four or five hours a day. It kind of just trickled along. In 1999, very few people were buying from Amazon, so they certainly weren’t going to buy from Nutsonline. In 2000, I remember I set a goal: I wanted to do 10 orders a day.

For the full version of the condensed conversation, see:
IAN MOUNT. “Forsaking Investment Banking to Turn Around a Family Business.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 19, 2012): B8.
(Note: bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the conversation has the date April 18, 2012.)

“Sol Braverman, Jeffrey’s grandfather, in the early 1930s.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

ExxonMobil’s “Honorable If Rigid Corporate Culture”

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

(p. C12) From Indiana to Indonesia, ExxonMobil is the multinational corporation that people love to hate. John D. Rockefeller’s creation is famed and feared for its discipline, its disregard for public opinion and its ability, year after year, to pump out the largest profits of any corporation on the planet. In “Private Empire,” Steve Coll provides a rare exploration of what makes a modern corporate giant tick and shows why the world looks different to the executives in the “God Pod” at ExxonMobil’s Texas headquarters than it might to you or me.

For the full review essay, see:
Marc Levinson. “Boardroom Reading of 2012.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): C12.
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

From another review of the same book:

“Private Empire” is meticulous, multi-angled and valuable. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, despite all the dark facts I have dumped above, impartial. Mr. Coll and his phlegmatic research assistants have interviewed more than 400 people, including Exxon Mobil’s longtime chief executive Lee R. Raymond, a legendarily hard character.

It’s among this book’s achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world, as often as not, through Exxon Mobil’s eyes. The company is portrayed here, some egregious missteps aside, as possessing an honorable if rigid corporate culture that seeks to supply a product (unlike tobacco companies, to which it is often compared) that a functioning society actually must have.

For this full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Oil’s Dark Heart Pumps Strong.” The New York Times (Sat., April 27, 2012): C25 & C32(?).
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date April 26, 2012 and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Oil’s Dark Heart Pumps Strong; ‘Private Empire,’ Steve Coll’s Book on Exxon Mobil.”)

The book under review, is:
Coll, Steve. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. New York: The Penguin Press, 2012.

Economics Should Be in “Broad-Exploration Mode”

(p. 85) What does concern me about my discipline, . . . , is that its current core–by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach–has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the precision that it has about the real one. This is dangerous for both methodological and policy reasons. On the methodology front, macroeconomic research has been in “fine-tuning” mode within the local-maximum of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium world, when we should be in “broad-exploration” mode. We are too far (p. 86) from absolute truth to be so specialized and to make the kind of confident quantitative claims that often emerge from the core. On the policy front, this confused precision creates the illusion that a minor adjustment in the standard policy framework will prevent future crises, and by doing so it leaves us overly exposed to the new and unexpected.
. . .
(p. 100) Going back to our macroeconomic models, we need to spend much more effort in understanding the topology of interactions in real economies. The financial sector and its recent struggles have made this need vividly clear, but this issue is certainly not exclusive to this sector.
The challenges are big, but macroeconomists can no longer continue playing internal games. The alternative of leaving all the important stuff to the “policy”-types (p. 101) and informal commentators cannot be the right approach. I do not have the answer. But I suspect that whatever the solution ultimately is, we will accelerate our convergence to it, and reduce the damage we do along the transition, if we focus on reducing the extent of our pretense-of-knowledge syndrome.

Source:
Caballero, Ricardo J. “Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 85-102.
(Note: ellipses added.)

David Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research

“Dr. Robert Langer’s research lab is at the forefront of moving academic discoveries into the marketplace.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair.
The Langer Lab is on the front lines of turning discoveries made in the lab into a range of drugs and drug delivery systems. Without this kind of technology transfer, the thinking goes, scientific discoveries might well sit on the shelf, stifling innovation.
A chemical engineer by training, Dr. Langer has helped start 25 companies and has 811 patents, issued or pending, to his name. More than 250 companies have licensed or sublicensed Langer Lab patents.
Polaris Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm, has invested $220 million in 18 Langer Lab-inspired businesses. Combined, these businesses have improved the health of many millions of people, says Terry McGuire, co-founder of Polaris.
. . .
(p. 7) Operating from the sixth floor of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Langer’s lab has a research budget of more than $10 million for 2012, coming mostly from federal sources.
. . .
David H. Koch, executive vice president of Koch Industries, the conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., wrote in an e-mail that “innovation and education have long fueled the world’s most powerful economies, so I can’t think of a better or more natural synergy than the one between academia and industry.” Mr. Koch endowed Dr. Langer’s professorship at M.I.T. and is a graduate of the university.

For the full story, see:
HANNAH SELIGSON. “Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., November 25, 2012): 1 & 7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 24, 2012.)

Socialism Failed in Jamestown

(p. 226) Stephen Slivinski discusses “Economic History: The Lessons of Jamestown.” In the years after the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the settlers often lacked food. “The company sent Sir Thomas Dale, a British naval commander, to take over the office of colony governor in 1611. Yet, upon arrival in May–a time when the farmers should have been tending to their fields–Dale found virtually no planting activity. Instead, the workers were devoted mainly to leisure and ‘playing bowls.’ . . . All land was owned by the company and farmed collectively. . . . The workers would not hope to reap more compensation from a productive farming of the land any more than the farmers would be motivated by an interest in making their farming operations more efficient and, hence, more profitable. Seeing this, Dale decided to change the labor arrangements: When the seven-year contracts of most of the original surviving settlers were about to expire in 1614, he assigned private allotments of land to them. Each got three acres, 12 acres if he had a family. The only obligation was that they needed to provide two and a half barrels of corn annually to the company so it could be distributed to the newcomers to tide them over during their first year. Dale left Jamestown for good in 1616. By then, however, the new land grants had unleashed a vast increase in agricultural productivity. In fact, upon returning to England with Dale, John Rolfe–one of the colony’s former leaders–reported to the Virginia Company that the Powhatans were now asking the colonists to give them corn instead of vice versa.”

As quoted in:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.
(Note: ellipses added by Taylor.)

The Slivinski article is:
Slivinski, Stephen. “The Lessons of Jamestown.” Region Focus 14, no. 1 (First Quarter 2010): 27-29.

Capitalism Would Bring Economic Growth to Bitouga, and Thereby Save the Elephants

“SEIZED AND DESTROYED; Gabon burned 10,000 pounds of ivory in June to show its commitment against poaching, but elephants are still being slaughtered.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) But as the price of ivory keeps going up, hitting levels too high for many people to resist, Gabon’s elephants are getting slaughtered by poachers from across the borders and within the rain forests, proof that just about nowhere in Africa are elephants safe.

In the past several years, 10,000 elephants in Gabon have been wiped out, some picked off by impoverished hunters creeping around the jungle with rusty shotguns and willing to be paid in sacks of salt, others mowed down en masse by criminal gangs that slice off the dead elephants’ faces with chain saws. Gabon’s jails are filling up with small-time poachers and ivory traffickers, destitute men and women like Therese Medza, a village hairdresser arrested a few months ago for selling 45 pounds of tusks.
“I had no idea it was illegal,” Ms. Medza said, almost convincingly, from the central jail here in Oyem, in the north. “I was told the tusks were found in the forest.”
She netted about $700, far more than she usually makes in a month, and the reason she did it was simple, she said. “I got seven kids.”
It seems that Gabon’s elephants are getting squeezed in a deadly vise between a seemingly insatiable lust for ivory in Asia, where some people pay as much as $1,000 a pound, and desperate hunters and traffickers in central Africa.
. . .
In June, Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, defiantly lighted a pyramid of 10,000 pounds of ivory on fire to make the point that the ivory trade was reprehensible, a public display of resolve that Kenya has put on in years past. It took three days for all the ivory to burn, and even after the last tusks were reduced to glowing embers, policemen vigilantly guarded the ashes. Ivory powder is valued in Asia for its purported medicinal powers, and the officers were worried someone might try to sweep up the ashes and sell them.
Some African countries, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, are sitting on million-dollar stockpiles of ivory (usually from law enforcement seizures or elephants that died naturally) that someday may be legal to sell.
. . .
(p. A10) The growing resentment of the government is undermining conservation efforts, too, with villagers grumbling about not seeing a trace of the oil money and saying Mr. Bongo should not lecture them about poaching for a living.
. . .
The children here eat thumb-size caterpillars, cooked in enormous vats, because there is little else to eat. Many men have bloodshot eyes and spend their mornings sitting on the ground, staring into space, reeking of sour, fermented home-brew.
. . .
International law enforcement officials say the illicit ivory trade is dominated by Mafia-like gangs that buy off local officials and organize huge, secretive shipments to move tusks from the farthest reaches of Africa to workshops in Beijing, Bangkok and Manila, where they are carved into bookmarks, earrings and figurines.
But often the first link in that chain is a threadbare hunter, someone like Mannick Emane, a young man in Bitouga. Adept in the forest, he was trained nearly from birth to follow tracks and stalk game, and was puffing idly on a cigarette he had just lighted with a burning log.
He conceded he would kill elephants, “for the right price.”
“Life is tough,” he said. “So if someone is going to give us an opportunity for big money, we’re going to take it.”
Big money, he said, was about $50.
His friend Vincent Biyogo, also a hunter, nodded in agreement.
“When I was born,” he said, “I dreamed of a better life, I dreamed of driving a car, going to school, living like a normal human being.”
“Not this,” he added quietly, staring at a pot of boiling caterpillars. “Not this.”

For the full story, see:
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN. “In Gabon, Lure of Ivory Is Hard for Many to Resist.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 27, 2012): A5 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 26, 2012.)

“A man in Bitouga, where people live in extreme poverty and say they resent the government’s telling them not to poach.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT story quoted and cited above.

Steve Jobs Was Deeply Influenced by Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”

(p. 408) Microsoft was willing to license its Windows Media software and digital rights format to other companies, just as it had licensed out its operating system in the 1980s. Jobs, on the other hand, would not license out Apple’s FairPlay to other device makers; it worked only on an iPod. Nor would he allow other online stores to sell songs for use on iPods. A variety of experts said this would eventually cause Apple to lose market share, as it did in the computer wars of the 1980s. “If Apple continues to rely on a proprietary architecture,” the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told Wired, “the iPod will likely become a niche product.” (Other than in this case, Christensen was one of the world’s most insightful business analysts, and Jobs was deeply (p. 409) influenced by his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.) Bill Gates made the same argument. “There’s nothing unique about music,” he said. “This story has played out on the PC.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.