Category: Economics

Contra the Pundits: “Buy the Damned Coffee, if it Makes You Happy”

  Source of illustration:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

APPARENTLY, I’m an idiot.  Every financial advice columnist seems to be telling me so.

My crime:  buying morning coffee from Starbucks for my wife and me.

Avoiding the regular cup of overpriced coffee has become an easy cliché for financial advisers, a symbol of money frittered away.  The advice has appeared just about everywhere.  Drop the caramel mocha frappu-whatever, they say, or you’ll spend your retirement testing recipes that combine Hamburger Helper and dog food.  David Bach, the author of “The Automatic Millionaire,” pushes what he calls the Latte Factor, which he has defined as “the daily extravagances that drain your resources.”  Another guru, Paul Farrell, has estimated that skipping Starbucks and compounding the savings could save you an eye-popping $500,000 by retirement.  At my own newspaper, Damon Darlin, a financial columnist, has repeatedly brought up this issue.

Before bringing up a point of disagreement — what logicians call the “Big But” — it is common to bestow a few compliments to ease the sting.  So, as a preface to the Big But, let me say that Mr. Darlin is a fine journalist and, for all I know, a swell dancer besides.

Still, I disagree.  Buy the damned coffee, if it makes you happy.  When I show up back at the house after dropping off my high schooler in the morning and I have that latte in hand for my wife, she will sometimes refer to me as “my hero!”  After more than 30 years together, this is about the only time I am called that.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

JOHN SCHWARTZ.  "ESSAY; Skip the Coffee? What’ s Money for, Anyway?"  The New York Times, Section 3, Part 2  (Sun., October 8, 2006):  25.

 

Mellon Allowed Great Innovation By Restraining Intrusive Government

(p. W4) Though scarcely known today, Andrew W. Mellon was a colossus in late 19th-century and early 20th-century America.  He would come to play a major role in the management of the American economy, but first he built one of the country’s great fortunes, one that would rank him today with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  He is now the subject of a comprehensive, if slightly grudging, biography by David Cannadine, the distinguished British historian.

Mellon is not associated with any single industry, in the way that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller are.  He was a venture and equity-fund capitalist, one of the first to function on a major scale.  He and his younger brother, Dick, took over their father’s Pittsburgh-based investment and coal-mining business and expanded it into many fields, including copper, oil,  petrochemicals and aluminum (Alcoa).

No banker was as gimlet-eyed; Mr. Cannadine shows Mellon shrewdly and coldly calculating every investment prospect.  Yet few venture capitalists were as daring.  In the 1890s, when Rockefeller was ruthlessly monopolizing the petroleum industry, Mellon didn’t flinch from setting up a competing refinery.  When Mellon finally sold out to Rockefeller, he did so at a considerable profit.  Several years later he came back to oil and eventually built Gulf into an industry giant.

Original Supply-Sider

But Mellon was more than an entrepreneurial industrialist.  In his mid-60s he became a famous — and infamous — public servant, performing as Treasury secretary under three presidents, from 1921 to 1932.  He was the original supply-sider, pushing tax cuts under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.  He argued that the high tax rates left over from World War I were depressing economic activity; that lower rates would turn the economy around; that high-income earners would end up paying more and that low-income earners would be removed from the tax roles entirely.

His program was a fantastic success.  The top rate was cut to 25% from 77%.  The rich did indeed pay more, while low- and middle-income earners saw their tax bills shrink to nothing or next to nothing.  The economy boomed.  The U.S. outstripped more heavily taxed nations, such as Britain and France.  Mellon also pushed painstakingly for the creation of an international monetary system to replace the one shattered by World War I.  The big challenge was huge Allied war debts to the U.S. and onerous German reparations.  Mellon negotiated the easiest terms that were politically possible so that trade and economies could revive.

We sometimes forget just how dynamic the 1920s were in America.  The automobile became a commonplace item for working Americans; labor-saving devices, such as the washing machine, grew ever more common as well; movies and radio provided mass entertainment as never before (an experimental television broadcast was carried out in 1927); and stock ownership widened to include more members of the middle class.

It was a time of great innovation and inventiveness, and in a sense Mellon presided over it all by allowing it to happen without intrusive government policies.

 

For the full review, see:

STEVE FORBES.  "BOOKS; The Man Who Made the Twenties Roar."  The Wall Street Journal    (Fri., October 6, 2006):  W4.

 

Reference for the book:

David Cannadine.  MELLON.  Knopf, 2006.  779 pages, $35

 

 MellonBK.jpg  Source of book image:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

 

Why Should We Be Forced to Subsidize Those Who Choose to Live in the Boonies?

  Kerry Caruselle, the only passenger on her federally subsidized flight between Pueblo and Denver, leaves the plane.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.  Grant Campbell has plenty of room to spread out on his federally subsidized flight between Pueblo and Denver.  Source of the photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

(p. A1)  PUEBLO, Colo. — Hoping for an empty seat beside you on your next flight?  No problem — just schedule a trip to someplace like Kingman, Ariz.; Brookings, S.D.; or Pueblo.

They are among more than 100 locales around the country that receive federally subsidized airline service, and the average number of passengers on each flight is about three.

Most of these flights on 19-seat prop planes have plenty of elbow room — a rare luxury in this age of jampacked commercial jets.  Some major airlines have cut their fleets about 20 percent since 2001 and have abandoned unprofitable routes, meaning planes are flying fuller than at any time since World War II.

The more tranquil cabins come courtesy of the Essential Air Service, put in place when the airline industry was deregulated in 1978.  The idea was to help travelers in smaller cities adjust to the new competitive era of air travel.  The intention was for the service to go away after 10 years, but it was renewed for a second decade — and then made permanent.

Over time, though, the program has come to seem mostly expensive and, to its critics, unessential.

After all, travelers adjusted very well after deregulation, and started driving the extra distance to busier regional airports nearby that offered increasingly cheap and plentiful jet service.  That left the program with (p. C7) mostly empty planes, making them more costly to fly.  Add in higher maintenance and fuel costs, and spending has more than quadrupled since 1996, to $110 million.

That, of course, is not a lot in the federal scheme of things.  But the program is a good case study of how poorly the government sometimes keeps pace with the free market and consumer tastes, and how entrenched interests, even in the face of some creative map-drawing, can keep such a program aloft in the face of efforts to ground it.

. . .

The emptier the subsidized flights, it seems, the more cherished the program became.  Members of Congress regularly pressured the Transportation Department to continue subsidies to towns they represented.  A lobbying group sprang up solely to fight to preserve and expand the program.

 

For the full story, see: 

JEFF BAILEY.  "Subsidies Keep Airlines Flying to Small Towns."  The New York Times   (Fri., October 6, 2006):  A1 & C7.

 

  Source of the graphic:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

Italy Suffers from a “Growing Spirit of Cynicism and Escapism”

  Source of book image:  http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/0767914392.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V57219494_.jpg

 

As anyone can attest who has lived in Italy even briefly, its domestic life can be gracious and sweet.  The question is whether this way of life can survive the many urgent challenges enumerated by Mr. Severgnini:  an abysmal fertility rate, crushing pension obligations, marginal economic growth, a sclerotic legal system, the flight abroad of the most creative young minds, and a growing spirit of cynicism and escapism.

 

For the full review, see:

FRANCIS X. ROCCA.  "BOOKS; An Italian Challenge; Keeping la dolce vita as modernity spreads."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., September 9, 2006):  P8.

 

The reference to the book:

Beppe Severgnini.  La Bella Figura. Broadway, 2006.  217 pages, $23.95.

How Speculators Stablilize Gas Prices

As long ago as 1953, Milton Friedman argued that speculation normally helps to stabilize prices rather than destabilize them.

Mr. Friedman’s argument was applied to currency trading, but the same reasoning works here.  If speculative trading tends to push prices higher when they are already high and lower when they are already low, then traders must be buying high and selling low.

That would mean that traders have to lose money on average — which does not seem very likely.  To the contrary, speculative traders try to buy low and sell high, activities that by their nature tend to push prices up when they are too low and down when they are too high.

Since Mr. Friedman’s 1953 article several papers have been published, both supporting and attacking this argument.  But the general principle seems quite robust.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

Hal R. Varian.  "ECONOMIC SCENE; The Rapidly Changing Signs at the Gas Station Show Markets at Work."  The New York Times  (Thurs., August 24, 2006):  C3.

 

The Milton Friedman article that Varian refers to, is: 

Friedman, Milton. "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates." In Friedman. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Laptops Update Read and Friedman’s “I, Pencil” Story

  Source of graphic:  scanned from p. B1 of NYT article cited below.

 

Leonard Read in his classic "I, Pencil" told the story of how the various compenents of a mere pencil came from different suppliers the world over.  People who did not know each other, and might not like each other if they met, but who were brought together in productive co-operation through the power of the market.  Milton Friedman frequently presented his own verison of this story.  The cover of my 1980 edition of Free to Choose has a picture of Friedman holding a pencil as if in the middle of this story.  And there is a short video-clip of Friedman telling the story.

A similar story could be told with many other products, and several sources have presented the raw materials in print to tell the story for laptop computers.  (By "raw materials" I mean that they list the diversity of sources of the inputs; but usually without drawing all the lessons that Reed and Friedman drew.)  One source is a chapter in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. 

Two other sources are articles that appeared within a few days of each other in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 

The reference to The New York Times article is:

DAVID BARBOZA.  "An Unknown Giant Flexes Its Muscles; Amid Talk of Deal With I.B.M., Lenovo of China Sheds Some Obscurity."  The New York Times (Sat., December 4, 2004):  B1 & B3.

The reference to The Wall Street Journal article is:

Jason Dean and Pui-Wing Tam.  "The Laptop Trail; The Modern PC Is a Model Of Hyperefficient Production And Geopolitical Sensitivities."   The Wall Street Journal  (Thurs., June 9, 2005):  B1 & B8. 

 

  Source of graphic:  scanned from p. B1 of WSJ article cited above.

 

Profit-Maximizing Infrastructure Installation

  Verizon employees in New York installing fiber optic cable.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below. 

 

(p. C1)  Building a whole new state-of-the-art network is a laborious and expensive process that Verizon says it must undertake to fend off rivals like Comcast and Vonage, which are moving fast into the phone business.  As Verizon replaces more of its old copper network with more durable fiber lines, the company also expects to save billions of dollars in maintenance costs.

Verizon will spend about $20 billion by the end of the decade to reach 16 million homes from Florida to California. But it is in New York City where Verizon has the most at stake, because New Yorkers are some of the nation’s biggest buyers of video,  Internet and phone services.  The company plans to spend about $3 billion to reach the city’s 3.1 million homes and apartments.

With such a high concentration of potential customers, competition is fierce — and Verizon has been losing ground.  Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and others are stealing about 1,000 Verizon phone customers a day, and their discounted services are making it hard for Verizon to win them back — another reason to get the fiber network up quickly.

“The guys understand the importance of this fiber project,” said Robert Fighera, a lineman and chief union steward in the Bronx, nodding to the workmen nearby.  “We’re also stockholders, and we know we have to install this or we’ll fall by the wayside of all these other companies.”

 

For the full story, see: 

KEN BELSON.  "Verizon Is Rewiring New York, Block by Block, in a Race for Survival."  The New York Times  (Mon., August 14, 2006):  C1 & C6.

The Opportunity Cost of a Bad Bottle of Wine

  Len Evans.  Source of photo:  http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/heart-attack-kills-len-evans-king-of-australian-wine/2006/08/17/1155407960581.html

 

BACK in the early 1990’s Len Evans, the Australian wine man and legend in his own lifetime, gave me some advice.

”I’d say you’re about 60,” he said, ”and from the looks of you, you’ll be lucky to make 75.  You’ve got about 15 years ahead of you, and it’s time for you to learn my Theory of Capacity.

”You’ve got to make the most of the time you’ve got left, man.  You’ve got to calculate your future capacity.  A bottle of wine a day is 365 bottles a year.  Which means you’ve probably only got 5,000 bottles ahead of you.

”People who say you can’t drink good stuff all the time are fools.  You must drink good stuff all the time.  Every bottle of inferior wine you drink is like smashing a superior bottle against a wall:  the pleasure is lost forever.  You can’t get that bottle back.”

 

For the full story, see: 

FRANK J. PRIAL.  "A Wine Man Who Vowed to Drain the Cup."  The New York Times  (Weds., August 30, 2006):  D7. 

R&D Stats Better; But Still Omit a Lot of Innovation

GDPgrowthWithR&Dgraph.gif  Source of graphic:  online version of WSJ article cited below.

Note well Romer’s caveat below that, although we may be measuring better, we are still not measuring Schumpeterian innovations (such as the Wal-Mart innovations that are vastly increasing the efficiency of retailing).

 

That research and development makes an important contribution to U.S. economic growth has long been obvious.  But in an important advance, the nation’s economic scorekeepers declared they can now measure that contribution and found that it is increasing.

. . .

Since the 1950s, economists have explained economic output as the result of measurable inputs.  Any increase in output that can’t be explained by capital and labor is called "multifactor productivity" or "the Solow residual," after Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist considered the father of modern growth theory.

From 1959 to 2002, this factor accounted for about 20% of U.S. growth.  From 1995 to 2002, when productivity growth accelerated sharply, that grew to about 33%.  Accounting for R&D would explain about one-fifth, by some measures, of the productivity mystery.  It suggests companies have been investing more than the official data had previously shown — a good omen for future economic growth.  "The slump in investment is not as drastic as people thought before they saw these figures," says Dale Jorgenson, professor of economics at Harvard University.

Mr. Jorgenson noted a lot of the multifactor productivity growth remains unexplained.  "The great mystery of growth . . . is not eliminated."

Paul Romer, an economics professor at Stanford Business School, said the better the measurements of R&D become, the more economists and policy makers will realize other factors may be more important.  "If you look at why we had rapid productivity growth in big-box retailing, there were lots of intangibles and ideas that . . . don’t get recorded as R&D."

 

For the full story, see:

GREG IP and MARK WHITEHOUSE.  "Why Economists Track Firms’ R&D; Data on Knowledge Creation Point to an Increasing Role In Domestic Product Growth."  Wall Street Journal  (Fri., September 29, 2006):  A2.

(Note:  The slightly different online version of the title is:  "Why Economists Track Firms’ R&D; Data on Knowledge Creation Point to an Increasing Role In Domestic Product Growth.")

(Note:  ellipses in Jorgenson and Romer quotes, in original; ellipsis between paragraphs, added.)

 

Hernando de Soto Creates Buzz in Clinton Hallways

DeSotoClinton.jpg  Hernando de Soto and Bill Clinton at the second annual Clinton Global Initiative.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

 

. . . the buzz in the hallways centered on a topic that until recently most philanthropists all but ignored:  registering poor people’s property so they could borrow against it to build businesses, pay taxes or for other purposes.  Many citizens of developing countries don’t formally have title to their land, and many economists — including Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, another conference attendee — see this as a key source of urban poverty.  According to Mr. de Soto’s research, the value of unregistered land in developing countries totals over $9 trillion.  Mr. Clinton told the audience that these assets "cannot be converted into collateral for loans — wealth locked-up and locked-down — keeping people in grinding poverty instead of being an asset that can lift them up."  Up to 85% of urban land parcels in the developing world are unregistered, Mr. Clinton said, citing Mr. de Soto’s research.

But standing in the way of widespread land-ownership records are insufficient legal frameworks, confusing procedures and corrupt property registries.  And establishing land ownership is all but impossible in communist and socialist countries, where property usually is owned by the state, said John Bryant, chief executive of Operation Hope, a nonprofit in Los Angeles that provides financial services to the poor.

 

For the full article, see: 

SALLY BEATTY. "GIVING BACK; Helping the Poor Register Land." Wall Street Journal (Fri., September 29, 2006): W2.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

Sulfa: First Antibiotic Was Pursued for Profit

  Source of the book image:  http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1400082137.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V52133117_.jpg

 

Economists have debated whether patents mainly provide incentives, or obstacles, to innovation.  In the story of the development of sulfa, the first powerful antibiotic, the desire for profit, through patents, was one motive that drove an important part of the development process; this, even though, in the end, sulfa turned out not to be patentable:

(p. P9) Mr. Hager follows a group of doctors into postwar German industry — specifically into the dye conglomerate IG Farben.  These men, having witnessed horrible deaths by infection on the battlefield, picked up on Ehrlich’s hypothesis by trying to synthesize a dye that specifically stained and killed bacteria.  Led by the physician-scientist Gerhard Domagk, they brought German know-how, regimentation and industry to the enterprise.

Year after year the team infected mice with streptococci, the bacteria responsible for so many deadly infections in humans.  The researchers then treated the mice with various dyes but had to watch as thousands upon thousands of them died despite such treatment.  Nothing seemed to work.  The 1920s turned into the ’30s, and still Domagk and his team held to Ehrlich’s idea.  There was simply no better idea around.

Then one of the old hands at IG Farben mentioned that he could get dyes to stick to wool and to fade less by attaching molecular side-chains containing sulfur to them.  Maybe what worked for wool would work for bacteria by making the dye adhere to the bacteria long enough to kill it.

. . .

The IG Farben conglomerate expected huge profits from Prontosil.  But then French scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris dashed these dreams.  The German scientists — all of them Ehrlich disciples — thought that the power to cure infection rested in the dye, with the sulfa side-chain merely holding the killer dye to the bacteria.  The scientists at the Pasteur Institute, though, showed that the sulfa side-chain alone worked against infection just as well as the Prontosil compound.  In fact, the dye fraction of the compound was useless.  You could have Ehrlich’s magic bullet without Ehrlich’s big idea!  This bombshell rendered the German patents worthless.  The life-saver "drug" turned out to be a simple, unpatentable chemical available in bulk everywhere.

 

For the full review, see: 

PAUL MCHUGH.  "BOOKS; Medicine’s First Miracle Drug."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., September 30, 2006):  P9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

 

The reference for the book is: 

Thomas Hager.  The Demon Under The Microscope.  Harmony, 340 pages, $24.95