Asymptosis

This Twitter thread between Ryan Cooper and Joe Wiesenthal prompts me to do full-spectrum explanation of some thinking that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. (Thanks for the inspiration.)

This is good from @ryanlcooper on why taxes are too low. https://t.co/opACPlEX5e

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 25, 2017

Though I'm not sure about this loanable funds argument. pic.twitter.com/t7p2yuW69d

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 25, 2017

yeah, @asymptosis has some interesting thoughts on that I haven't been able to process properly

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) October 25, 2017

What follows is very unorthodox thinking even among the heterodox. It’s well beyond and different from MMT’s utterly convincing takedowns of “loanable funds” notions, for instance.

So take it as the ravings of an internet econocrank, if you will. But here it is FWIW.

First off, nobody can ever point to these so-called “loanable funds,” or mostly even say if they’re talking about a stock measure or a flow measure. It’s one of those unmeasurable, actually dimensionless, concepts that econs are so fond of, like demand and supply (desire and willingness).

It’s often used synonymously with “savings” with an “s”, at least implying some stock. (The national accounts use the term “saving”; there is no stock measure labeled “savings” therein.)

The only measurable stock of “loanable savings” I can think of is wealth: balance-sheet assets, or net worth. (The national accounts, by the way, only started tallying those comprehensively a decade ago.) Household-sector assets or net worth are probably the best measures of this, because they incorporate the value, telescoped in, of the household sector’s wholly-owned subsidiary, firms.

On the idea that household saving “funds” lending and investment by providing more loanable funds: individual saving increases your assets/net worth. It doesn’t increase our assets/net worth. Your savings are just held in your account instead of — if you spend — someone else’s account. They can be intermediated into investment from either account.

Likewise “saving” by firms — retaining earnings instead of distributing them to shareholders as dividends. In either case those funds are in accounts that are intermediated (and re-re-re-“hypothecated”…) by the financial system. If a firm uses those funds for actual, real investment, that’s…spending! (“Investment spending” as opposed to “consumption spending” — the two sum to GDP.)

Individual saving doesn’t create any extra “loanable funds” — stock or flow. When you eat less corn (save), we have more corn. When you spend less money, we have no more money. Spending — even “consumption spending” — is not consumption. Transferring an asset (spending) doesn’t “consume” that asset, make it disappear. This error of composition pervades economic thinking. Think: Krugman/Eggertsson’s whole “patient savers”/”impatient borrowers” construct. Individual saving doesn’t create collective savings.

Individual saving is actually a non-flow, an accounting residual of two actual transaction flows — income minus expenditures. (Though it is a flow measure as opposed to a stock measure — it’s measured over a period, not at an instant.)

Sectoral saving actually consists of two (or three) things, as revealed by the accounting derivation in the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts (IMAs): capital formation + net lending/borrowing + capital transfers. For households, capital transfers is mostly estate taxes; it’s a small number. Capital formation is the creation of actual new (long-lived) stuff within a sector, whose value is posted to the asset side of balance sheets. Net lending/borrowing is the accumulation of claims against other sectors’ balance-sheet assets.

These two are utterly distinct and different economic mechanisms, crammed together into a single accounting measure labeled “saving.” It’s no surprise that nobody understands saving. In the grand scheme of wealth accumulation, these two saving mechanisms are pretty small change. Here, the derivation of change in private-sector net worth, again from the IMAs.

Real investment in the creation of newly produced, long-lived (productive) stuff — capital formation, investment spending — is overwhelmingly “funded” by churn within wealthholders’ $100-trillionish portfolio. Sell treasuries, buy into an IPO or a real-estate development deal. A zillion et ceteras. The “flow” of saving is small by comparison.

At the macro-est level, that “investment impulse” is driven by collective portfolio preferences, the markets’ risk/reward/yield calculations. (“Jesse Livermore” delivered the Aha for me on this; his measure of equities as a share of outstanding financial assets on Fred here. Pace market monetarists, it sure doesn’t look the market is crowding into “safe assets.”)

Swapping checking-account deposits for Apple shares is not investment in the economic sense of paying people (spending) to create new long-lived (productive) stuff. Collectively, it’s just portfolio allocation. If people are (confidently) optimistic, they bid up risk assets, expanding the total portfolio (wealth) pie.

Monetarists’ obsession with financial instruments like checking and money-market deposits whose prices are institutionally pegged to the unit of account (“cash” — only about 5% of household assets) blinds them to that collective portfolio adjustment mechanism. If government deficit-spends $100 billion in cash onto household balance sheets, the market is overweight cash (if portfolio preferences are unchanged). It re-allocates by competitively buying variable-priced instruments (bonds, stocks, land titles), driving up their prices. There’s more cash and more other assets.

Market asset pricing doesn’t — can’t — influence the total stock of fixed-price, UofA-pegged instruments. Their prices are fixed! (That’s the thing that makes cash, cash.) They can only be created by bank lending and government deficit spending (see next para). Those instruments are largely just a pool of intermediates in portfolio churn, in any case: sell treasuries, get cash; swap cash for IPO shares. As long as there are enough “cash” instruments for transactions to clear (and the peg holds), you’re cool. The transaction system doesn’t bind up. Collective portfolio reallocation is almost all via price changes in, duh, variable-priced instruments.

There are three economic mechanisms that create new private-sector balance-sheet assets ab nihilo: government deficit spending, bank lending, and asset-market price runups/capital gains. (Bank lending creates simultaneous private-sector liabilities, so it doesn’t create new private-sector net worth; the other two do.) These mechanisms create new “loanable funds” a.k.a. wealth. (Fed asset purchases with newly-“printed” “money” — reserves — create no new private sector assets or net worth — they just swap reserves for bonds, changing the private-sector portfolio mix; the market then adjusts its portfolio allocation in response, as described above.)

Of these three ab novo asset-creation mechanisms, capital gains utterly dominates:

Especially since the 80s/90s, as revealed here in corporate equity performance (this in inflation-adjusted dollars):

Think Amazon: essentially zero profits, saving, change in book value over two decades, while delivering half a trillion dollars onto household balance sheets.

This (plus similar or larger cap gains effects in real-estate valuation) gives rise to some very perplexing trends — perplexing for me at least:

This depicts what Sri Thiruvadanthai calls a “structural break,” some kind of seeming phase shift in how markets are working, or how we perceive and report on those markets, in accounting terms. Or both. Earnings and P/E, for instance, are becoming increasingly problematic as predictors of total return. What’s the capitalized present value of future cash flows from a firm that…will never deliver any cash flows/”profits”?

The asset markets seem to think that all our stuff is worth a lot more than it sold for in the new-goods markets.* One of those markets is getting prices “wrong.” Either this is the mother of all multi-decadal asset bubbles, or we’ve been vastly understating GDP for decades. (Or something else, maybe accounting, measurement-related.)

The creation of real, long-lived goods (“capital”) is the ultimate driver of wealth accumulation. But the economic mechanisms of wealth creation and accumulation — creating new claims on all our goods and future production (claims whose market-priced value is tallied up as balance-sheet assets) — are something else entirely.

In any case I agree with Joe: within what I think is a great article, Ryan’s rather rote recitation of standard-issue “loanable funds” truisms merits some careful rethinking.

===============

* The national accounts don’t even come close to tallying all that “capital,” by the way, or the investment in creating it. Consider the massive, lasting productive value, for instance, of widespread knowledge, skills, and abilities imparted through education and training and deployed over lifetimes, or broadly experienced health and well-being delivered through health-care spending. Those expenditures aren’t tallied as “investment” (spending on long-lived goods), nor are the resulting “assets” depreciated as humans age, sicken, and die.

Ralph Musgrave, who knows a thing or two about modern economic thinking, perfectly articulates the giant logical hole in monetarist thinking in a recent comment (emphasis mine):

If the private sector’s stock of saving is what it wants at current rates of interest, then additional public spending will push savings above the latter desired level, which will result in the private sector trying to spend the surplus away (hot potato effect).

Really? People/households say to themselves, “Wow, I’ve got too many assets, too much net worth. I’d better spend more to get rid of it.”

Here’s the verbal and logical sleight of hand that monetarists pull to hide this obviously inane assertion, and that Ralph doesn’t seem to have spotted: they game the word “spending.”

When government deficit-spends, it deposits (helicopter-drops) new assets, created ab nihilo, onto private-sector balance sheets. And since that deficit spending doesn’t create new private-sector liabilities, voila: there’s more private-sector net worth.

Those new assets hit balance sheets in the form of “cash”: checking-account deposits, money-market fund balances, etc. So people might end with a higher proportion of cash in their portfolios than they would like.

But they don’t try to “spend it away” to get rid of it. They rebalance their portfolios by buying riskier/higher-return financial instruments — bonds, equities, titles to real estate. This drives up the prices of those instruments.

These market runups create new balance-sheet assets (and net worth) — while leaving the collective stock of fixed-price “cash” unchanged. (That’s pretty much the definition of “cash”: financial instruments whose price is pegged to the unit of account — the instruments that monetary aggregates try to tally up.)

With a larger percentage of bonds, stocks, etc in their portfolios, and the same amount of cash, people have the portfolio mixes they want. Full stop. No hot potato. Likewise this is no game of musical chairs; market runups create more chairs. This is how “liquidity preferences” play out in the markets.

Those purchases of riskier financial instruments are not “spending.” People aren’t “spending down” their balances on newly produced goods and services. They’re just asset swaps — cash for Apple stock (and the reverse), or whatever. Through the magic of market-makers’ bid/offer order books, these asset swaps create new assets, collectively achieving investors’ preferred or “desired” portfolio mixes.

(Note: investors could also adjust their portfolios by paying off debt, simply shrinking their individual, and the collective private sector’s, balance sheets by disappearing both assets and liabilities into a hole in the ground. As Milton Friedman said, banks have both printing presses and furnaces.)

Now you might suggest: when people bid up Apple stock, that “causes” there to be more investment spending, spending to create more long-lived goods. I’m hoping I don’t have to explain all the logical flaws in that thinking, or point out the empirical disproofs. (It’s basically a freshman error: confusing “investment” with investment.)

Sure: when people buy into IPOs and new private bond issues, or buy titles to new (spec-built?) houses, there’s a quite plausible causal link between those asset swaps and actual increased investment spending. An excess proportion of cash in investors’ portfolios could certainly drive this economic effect.

But: 1. These purchases of newly issued financial instruments constitute a tiny proportion of the portfolio rebalancing we’re talking about; the magnitude of holding gains on existing instruments swamps these measures, and 2. It has nothing to do with investors trying to “spend down” and get rid of their balances, cash or otherwise. That notion is individually implausible, and collectively incoherent.

 

I’ve been quite troubled lately by voices I’ve been hearing from my compatriots on the Left discussing the Job Guarantee — especially in relation to an alternative, Universal Basic Income. A new Jacobin article by Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton displays several of the aspects that make me uncomfortable.

Get the Math Right. Right off the bat, I’m troubled by the article’s flawed arithmetic — not what I would like to be seeing from left economists who need to be scrupulous in their role as authoritative voices for the left.

…we argue for a FJG that would pay a minimum annual wage of at least $23,000 (the poverty line for a family of four), rising to a mean of $32,500. … In comparison, many of the UBI proposals promise around $10,000 annually to every citizen…half the rate that would be available under the FJG.

$10K per citizen versus $23K per worker is not “half the rate.”

How do the two policies actually compare? I have no idea. This is exactly the kind of difficult calculation that we need economists to do for us (it’s way beyond our abilities), so we can evaluate different policies. Absent analysis with clearly stated parameters (Who counts as a citizen? Children? Etc.) this kind of statement carries no import or information value.

These analyses have been done by economists. I’ve seen them around. But I don’t have them to hand; they’re exactly what I’d like this article to point me to. Are these authors unaware of this work, or did they just not bother to look at it, draw on it, or cite/link to it in this article?

Perhaps most important: this kind of slipshod analysis delivers live and loaded rhetorical ammunition to the enemy. It’s an invitation to (very effective) hippie-punching.

Get outside economists’ fetishistic obsession with short-term business cycles, and with the automation versus globalization debate. We’re facing decades-long campaigns to get any JG or UBI implemented, and decades- or centuries-long technological and job-market trends. If Ray Kurzweil’s exponential productivity growth is even somewhat valid (choose your exponent), we’re facing at a world where Star Trek-style replicators can turn a pile of dirt into a skyscraper or a thousand Thanksgiving dinners — and potentially, where a small handful of people own all those replicators.

In this world, nobody would ever pay a human to produce goods. It would be stupid. Will service work deliver the kind of jobs and wages that let a worker share the fruits of that spectacular prosperity? It doesn’t seem likely. Will the highest-paying service jobs themselves be automated? It seems likely.

That’s an extreme vision, but it embodies the long-term issues these policy discussions need to address. Instead we get from the authors:

The dangers of imminent full automation are overstated…. No doubt, stable and high-paid employment opportunities are dwindling, but we shouldn’t blame the robots. Workers aren’t being replaced by automatons; they are being replaced with other workers — ones lower-paid and more precariously employed.

They’re pooh-poohing the technological future — continuing centuries of Luddite-bashing — because (quoting Dean Baker):

In the last decade, however, productivity growth has risen at a sluggish 1.4 percent annual rate. In the last two years it has limped along at a pace of less than 1 percent annually.

Issues here, in very short form: 1. Productivity and “economic capacity” measures are wildly problematic, both theoretically and empirically. The econ on this is a mess. 2. A decade, much less two years, is not even close to a trend. 3. The automation vs offshoring debate is specious; they’re inextricably intertwined, like nature and nurture. 4. They’re (I think unconsciously) buying into the whole economic worldview and conceptual infrastructure (think: “factors of production”) that delivered us unto these times.

The authors are certainly correct that:

…the balance of forces over the last few decades has been skewed so dramatically in the favor of capital. … It’s time to get the rules right

But this fairly muddled (and hidebound) depiction of the issues at hand does little or nothing to suggest what the new rules should be. We need left economists to unpack these long-term secular forces and trends far more cogently — and radically. They need to be examining the very foundations of their economic thinking and beliefs.

The “Dignity of Work.” It actually makes me squirm in discomfort to hear liberals with very cool, interesting, high-paying jobs going on about the dignity of work. I’m just like, “how dare you?” That kind of supercilious presumption arguably explains why liberals have been losing elections for decades — especially the latest one.

Here’s the full passage on this:

Conventional wisdom holds that people dislike work. Introductory economics classes will explain the disutility of labor, which is a direct trade-off with leisure. Granted, employment isn’t always fun, and many forms of employment are dangerous and exploitative. But the UBI misses the way in which employment structurally empowers workers at the point of production and has by its own merits positive dimensions.

This touches on a heated debate on the Left. But for now, there is no doubt that people want jobs, but they want good jobs that provide flexibility and opportunity. They want to contribute, to have a purpose, to participate in the economy and, most importantly, in society. Nevertheless, the private sector continues to leave millions without work, even during supposed “strong” economic times.

The workplace is social, a place where we spend a great deal of our time interacting with others. In addition to the stress associated with limited resources, the loneliness that plagues many unemployed workers can exacerbate mental health problems. Employment — especially employment that provides added social benefits like communal coffee breaks — adds to workers’ well-being and productivity. A federal job guarantee can provide workers with socially beneficial employment — providing the dignity of a job to all that seek it.

The variations on the “dignity” thing are endless. Our authors here give us:

employment structurally empowers workers at the point of production

This is clearly something that working-class workers and voters are clamoring for.

by its own merits positive dimensions

Sure: in our current system where only wage/salary work provides “dignified” income, you’re gonna see positive second- and third-order effects from employment. Does a program where government provides the income (in most implementations, channeled through private-sector employers) change that pernicious social environment?

But wait: workers get communal coffee breaks!

The whole thing actually, rather remarkably, turns Marx on his head. The alienation that he imputes to working-for-the-man, wage labor is here transformed into the sole, primary, or at least necessary source of human dignity and self-worth. It’s the only way for the working class “to contribute, to have a purpose, to participate in the economy and, most importantly, in society.” Contra David Graeber, if there’s not a money transaction involved, it’s not “valuable” or worthy.

This before even considering the freedom to innovate and thrive that arises when you don’t have to go to work. (Every startup I’ve ever been involved in — many — began with endless hours of hanging out and drinking beer with friends.)

Like so much so-called left thinking over the last half century (think: The Washington Consensus), this thinking unquestioningly, even blindly, unconsciously, adopts and is entrapped by one of conservatism’s core economic mantras: “incentives to work.”

Why in the hell do we want people to work more? We know why conservatives do: because it allows rich people to profit from that labor and grab a bigger piece of a bigger pie. But isn’t the whole point of increasing productivity (or a/the main point) to work less while having a comfortable and secure life?

What the authors dismiss as “conventional wisdom” is in fact largely correct: Most people don’t want to go to work. Or they don’t want to work nearly as much as they do. They can manage their “relationships” and social well-being just fine, thank you. Sure, they enjoy the social interaction at work, to the extent that… But they go to work because they want and need the money. Full stop.

In 1930 Keynes predicted a future of 15-hour work weeks. Sounds idyllic to me. Does anyone think workers would object? Or do we have a better handle on their wants and needs than they do?

We haven’t even come close to that future. Two-earner households are now the necessary norm, and hours worked per worker has been flat since — surprise — 1980, after a very nice decline postwar. Here’s annual hours worked per household, even as households have gotten steadily smaller:

A job guarantee as I understand it does nothing to advance that Keynesian bright future. Given the pro-work rhetoric we hear from JG enthusiasts, it might just further entrench what you see above.

So three takeaways here:

• Get the math right. Do the careful, difficult analysis for us so we can make informed judgments. Or point us to the work that’s already been done.

• Look to your theoretical and empirical fundamentals. They’re often inherited, often unconsciously. They’ve been indoctrinated and inscribed into economists’ invisible System 1 thinking. Many of them are not conceptually coherent, or morally valid.

• Just stop talking about the “dignity of work.” It’s a huge own-goal — both the policy results (more work for workers), and the electoral results of that presumption.

If we want that Keynesian utopia — comfortable, secure lives with not a lot of work required — UBI seems like a far more direct path to getting there. If you want to give people comfort, security, dignity, well-being, power, the opportunity to thrive on their own terms, and economic security…give them money.

 

The Fed data portal, Fred, just posted a blog item that I take exception to, “suggested” by Christian Zimmermann, Assistant Vice President of Research Information Services. Here’s my response.

Dear Mr. Zimmerman:

I’m pleased to see that this post focuses on the interest burden of the federal debt. It’s an important measure that doesn’t get enough attention in discussions of the subject.

But still I’m shocked by how many things are poorly represented in the post. I have no doubt you know all of this, but:

1. Public Debt (gross) is not Debt Held by the Public. (“The Public” here meaning the private sector including Rest of World.) Gross Public debt includes money owed by government to itself (SS trust fund, etc.).

Almost every economist agrees that Debt Held by the Public, not “Gross Debt,” is the economically significant measure. Highlighting gross debt is not useful in educating the public on this subject. Quite the contrary.

This measure of course paints a very different (and less dire) picture:

2. This of course impacts the interest burden, and also paints a very different picture.

3. Even for Debt Held by the Public: Federal Reserve Banks are included in “the public” for this measure — even though their balance sheets and profits/losses redound to Treasury, IOW government, not “the public.”

Here’s actual Debt Held by The actual Public — only 60% of GDP:

One can discuss whether the Fed will ever shrink its balance sheet, and how it would do so, but this is the current condition.

4. Again, the interest burden: Treasury’s interest payments to Fed banks on their bond holdings cycle directly back to Treasury. So true, total government out-of-pocket interest payments:

Less than 1% of GDP.

5. Circa 50% of those interest payments are to the U.S. domestic private sector, so are in no way a drain on the U.S. domestic sector.

Interest payments to foreign entities come to less than .5% of GDP.

Probably unintentionally, this Fred post contributes to the widespread “scare tactics” that result in such economically destructive fiscal decisions by our legislators.

Thanks for listening,

Steve Roth
Publisher, Evonomics

The half-century story of Democrats’ abdication and decline

By Steve Roth. Publisher, Evonomics

On January 1, 1964, John F. Kennedy posthumously initiated the half-century decline of the Democratic Party, beginning its descent into this moment’s dark and backward abysm of slime. His massive tax cuts for the rich, implemented in ’64 and ’65, were the turning point and beginning of Democrats’ five-decade abandonment of its longtime winning formula: full-throated, unabashed, progressive economic populism. It was the signal moment when Democrats began to abandon the working and middle class. The working and middle class, betrayed and feeling betrayed, have now returned the favor.

Unapologetic progressive economic populism — starting really with Teddy Roosevelt’s slash-and-burn trustbusting, and turned up full-throttle in his namesake’s New Deal — had given Democrats three decades of electoral success. FDR lost two states and eight electoral votes in 1936. He got 523 out of 531. Over four campaigns, he never got less that 432. Eisenhower got a couple of terms as a very moderate Republican, really a progressive, but Democrats’ dominance of Congress and state governments seemed eternal.

Because: that economic populism also delivered success for America. The New Deal, combined with the government deficit spending of World War II, resulted in the greatest burst of widespread growth, progress, prosperity, and individual economic freedom in American history — before or since.

James Carville was certainly right: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Democrats’ remaining progressivism under Johnson — civil-rights legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, and the wholesale movement of liberated women into the workforce — eventually pushed a hot middle-out economy into the demand-driven inflation of the 70s. That torrid growth brought government debt down from 120% of GDP in 1947, to 35% in 1980. (You know what happened after that.)

But even amidst that burst of growth and sustainable government finance, Democrats were abandoning the very source of their economic and electoral success. Kennedy’s top-tier tax cuts were a preemptive, voluntary abdication to trickle-down theory, before “trickle-down” even existed. When Reagan turned that dial to eleven, he was only occupying ideological ground that Democrats had ceded and abandoned to the enemy, long before. It was an epochal own-goal of historic proportions.

Democrats have been kicking the economic ball into their own net ever since. The obvious solution to the 70s inflation was to raise taxes, reducing government deficit spending, to drain off excess demand from a too-hot economy. Instead they acceded to the banker-industrial complex and the diktats of childish monetarism, again conceding the win to an economic belief system that is egregiously self-serving for the rich, and anathema to Democratic progressive economic populism.

That’s when the enthusiastic, progressive Democratic base stopped turning out in force. (Exception: Obama. For other reasons.) Progressive baby boomers have spent their whole lives voting against Republicans and their swingeing, destructive economic policies, not for inspiring Democrats. Think about the Democratic presidential candidates since 1964. McGovern was a true social progressive, but really a one-issue anti-war candidate. Bill Clinton did okay, within the confines of the post-Reagan economic belief system, which he never seriously challenged as FDR did. Obama didn’t either, in rhetoric or practice. His administration’s failure to prosecute a single prominent bankster is arguably the best single explanation for Hillary’s electoral meltdown.

Can you name one full-throated economic progressive Democratic candidate in the past half century? I’m not even asking for fire-eating. Here’s some help: Humphrey. Carter. Mondale. Dukakis. Gore. Kerry. (Are you still awake?) Aside from Obama, no Democratic candidates had the Democratic base flocking to the polls. (Compare: Republicans and their rabid Tea-Party base.) Add Hillary to that rather stultifying list.

Starting in the 60s, Democratic candidates stopped delivering an inspiring economic message. But the real failure was substantive. In their sellout to the enrich-the-rich supply-siders, Democrats abandoned the working and middle class, and the party’s winning legacy of widespread prosperity. The Democratic party elite bought into and helped promulgate an economic belief system (the “Washington Consensus”) in which distribution and concentration of wealth and income not only don’t matter, they can’t matter. The quite predicable results are upon us — decades of working-class wage stagnation, and wealth concentrations that are as high or higher than any period in modern world history.

It’s no wonder the Democratic base feels betrayed. They were betrayed.

Still: despite those decades of weak-kneed collaborationism, Democrats have obviously remained more economically progressive than Republicans. Clinton and Obama managed to raise taxes some, and Obama gave us Obamacare. And the economy has shown the results. Democratic presidents have delivered growth, progress, widespread prosperity, individual economic security, and true personal economic “freedom” that Republicans — the self-proclaimed “party of growth” — can only imagine in their fever dreams.

By almost any economic measure — GDP or income growth, job creation, stock-market runups, deficit reduction, people in poverty…choose your measure — Democrats’ economic performance has unfailingly beggared what Republicans have offered up. That is true for any multi-decade period you choose to look at since World War II, or over the last century for that matter. It’s true at the national, state, and local levels. Republicans constantly promise prosperity and growth. Democrats consistently deliver it (at least compared to Republicans). They’ve kicked Republicans’ economic asses, decade after decade.

Bigger pie? Raise all boats? Talk to the Democrats.

But nobody seems to know that. Did you? And Democrats never even say it — much less repeat it endlessly over decades, shouting it from the rooftops to stir up the base as Republicans would. The old saw is apparently right: “A liberal is someone who won’t take their own side in an argument.”

Perhaps that failure is a result of progressives’ fussy squeamishness about people getting rich. They don’t really like that word. But voters do. A third of Americans’ think they’ll be rich someday. Fifty percent of 18–29-year-olds do. (About 5% of Americans actually are rich, with more than couple of million dollars in net worth.) That squeamishness explains the persistent “anti-capitalist” strain of American liberalism, which is such an electoral disaster at the voting booth.

Democrats have much to atone for in their failure to hold the line on progressive economic principles, their failure to wholeheartedly champion and defend the working and middle classes, their sellout and abdication to the bankster class. But they also have much to crow about. Instead, though, they’ve stood by for decades while Republicans have falsely claimed the “party of growth” moniker, contrary to all historical evidence.

It is the economy, stupid. Voters, Democratic and Republican alike, will tell you in surveys about all the things they care about. But when they walk into the voting booth, they’re going to choose the person who they think will make them, their families, and those around them more prosperous, comfortable, and economically secure. They vote for candidates who they think will deliver better lives — starting with people having enough money to pay the bills. The Republicans realized that forty-plus years ago, and they’ve been winning based on that ever since. “I’ll cut your taxes and deliver economic growth.” Full stop, drop the mic.

Trump showed us that fire-breathing populism wins elections. While his brimstone reeked of many things, economic populism was at the core of his rhetorical fur ball. Even as he prepared to betray the working class at unheard-of levels, he channeled that betrayal straight onto his vote tally. “Audacity”? Obama should grab a stool and go to school.

And Bernie showed us the same thing. His campaign was unprecedented in American political history, funding a full-boat national campaign and outspending Hillary by 25 million dollars, almost completely with small donations. His message of economic populism brought in more than 200 million dollars in donations from 2.5 million people. And he turned out the enthusiastic base, in droves. Presumably he would have done so on election day, as well. Are Democratic political operatives finally beginning to take note?

There is a path out of the wilderness for Democrats. It’s the path they’ve trod before, with huge success. It involves (for once) coalescing around a core message that resonates with all Americans, repeated endlessly over years and decades. “Equality” and “opportunity,” important as they are, are weak beer on the campaign trail. Most Americans change the channel.  Tell them what they want to hear:

“We make America rich.”

The double meaning is fully intended.

 

In recent posts on the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts, I’ve highlighted that we have two market estimates of what America’s “capital” is worth — the cumulative sum of net investment (roughly, “book value”), and total household wealth (“market value”). I got curious: how to they compare over the decades? What’s America’s market-to-book ratio, or Tobin’s Q?

Here are two pictures depicting that:

And here’s how I calculated them based on the IMA’s table S.2.a, plus BEA inflation measures (spreadsheet here):

Start with the IMA’s estimate of total household net worth in 1960 (expressed in 1960 dollars), as the asset markets’ best estimate of what all America’s stuff (“capital”) was worth at that moment.

Inflation-adjust that value to show it in 2015 dollars. (Choose your deflator; I tried a few, but settled on simple old CPI.)

Add net capital formation (net of capital consumption) for 1960, again expressed in 2015 dollars. This is the value of stuff added to our stock. That gives you book value of our stuff in 1961 (the 1960 stock of stuff, plus new stuff added).

Repeat for each ensuing year, ending in 2015 with a cumulative sum of all those years’ net capital formation. This is the 2015 “book value” of that accumulated stuff, expressed in 2015 dollars. (See: Perpetual Inventory Method.)

Now for comparison, look at the IMAs’ annual estimates of household net worth, with each year converted to 2015 dollars. These are the asset-markets’ year-by-year estimates of the value of all our stuff. (Alternatively you could use “U.S. Net Wealth” from Table B.1, which excludes the value of land and nonproduced nonfinancial assets.)

Is this interesting or significant? Do these pictures tell us anything useful?

The main takeaway, I think: since the mid 90s, the measures of capital formation have been having a lot of trouble capturing the value of…new capital formation. Hard-to-measure intellectual, human, and social capital have increasingly dominated our economy. The existing-asset markets incorporate that new “capital” into their estimate of our total worth, but measures of sales in the new-goods markets have trouble doing so. (This even after the 2013 GDP revisions, which added much “intangible” value to its measures, notably intellectual property and even “brand value.”)

For example, how valuable are the services from Facebook, Twitter, and Google? Nobody pays anything for them. And the advertising spending that supports them (in case you were wondering) is not counted as part of GDP. Advertising is considered an “intermediate good,” an “input to production,” so is excluded from the “value added” that is GDP. (For reference, U.S. advertising spending is about $150 billion a year — 0.8% of GDP.) The stock market knows (thinks) those firms have value, but how much “capital formation” do they do? It’s a pretty dicey question.

Apply the same kind of thinking to even harder-to-measure human intangibles like knowledge and skills, developed through education and training, and you probably have a pretty good explanation of the divergence between the book and market lines over recent decades.

 

A friend and I were discussing Brooks’ recent column about Anthony Kronman’s new book, “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.” I thought I’d share my thoughts here. Full disc: I haven’t read Kronman’s book, only Brooks’ column.

Some good stuff in there. Love the focus on books and writers. (Though Brooks’ [and Kronman’s?] barely-concealed dog-whistle adulation for dead white guys’ books is both predictable and predictably infuriating…)

A quick note in response to recent twitter thread, and to a widespread usage that I find to be deeply problematic.

You constantly hear very smart thinkers about money saying that money is debt. I strongly disagree. It’s not a useful way to think about money. Quite the contrary.

Balance-sheet assets designating the value of claims may have offsetting liabilities/debts on other balance sheets. (Not all do; that’s why, for instance, U.S. households have positive net worth — assets minus liabilities, credit minus debt — of $88 trillion.) But in any case, the asset being “held” is credit, not debt. A holder of a Target gift card is holding Target credit, not debt — the “claim” side of the tally stick.

“Holding debt” is handy and ubiquitous (Wall Street) shorthand, but it’s conceptually incoherent. You can’t own an obligation; it’s not an asset. Money is not “debt.” Exactly the opposite.

I think this “money is debt” confution cripples our our conversations, our collective thinking, and our collective understanding.

Semi-aside: a dollar-bill is best thought of as a handy, exchangeable physical token representing a balance-sheet asset. Sure, that asset has an offsetting nominal “liability” on the government balance sheet (which we devoutly hope will never be “paid off”). That’s immaterial; the dollar bill represents credit, an asset. It’s incoherent to suggest that when you have a dollar bill in your pocket, you are holding “debt.”

Even if the asset you’re holding will someday be redeemed by the original issuer, the thing you’re holding holding is an asset, which you can transfer to someone else’s balance sheet in exchange for work, or real stuff or…some other financial instrument, be it a Euro bill a bond, a title to land, or whatever (which is also a credit, or asset). They’re all financial instruments (with various rights designated). Claims. Credits.

In 2013, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson — no wild-eyed liberals, they — asked a very important question: Why has the U.S. economy performed better under Democratic than Republican presidents, “almost regardless of how one measures performance”?

Start with their “performed better” assertion: it’s uncontestable. While you can easily cherry-pick brief periods and economic measures that show superior economic performance under Republicans, over any lengthy comparison period (say, 25 years more), by pretty much any economic measure, Democrats have outperformed Republicans for a century. Even Tyler Cowen, director of the Koch-brothers-funded libertarian/conservative Mercatus Center, stipulates to that fact without demur.

Here’s just one bald picture of that relative performance, showing a very basic measure, GDP growth:

The difference is big. At those rates, over thirty years your $50,000 income compounds up to $105,000 under Republicans, $182,000 under Democrats — 73% higher. (And this is all before even considering distribution — whether the growing prosperity is widely enjoyed, or narrowly concentrated.)

Hundreds of similar pictures are easily assembled — different time periods, different measures, aggregate and per-capita, inflation-adjusted or not — all telling the same general story. No amount of hand-waving, smoke-blowing, and definition-quibbling will alter that reality. (If you feel you must try to debunk Blinder, Watson, and Cowen: be aware that you almost certainly don’t have an original argument. Read the paper, and follow the footnotes. You’ll also find more here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

So what explains that superior performance? Blinder and Watson’s regression model basically says, “we dunno.” Their model, for whatever it’s worth, rules out a whole slew of possibilities — only finding a significant correlation with oil price shocks (uh…okay…) and Total Factor Productivity (the black-box residual economic measure that’s left when the other growth factors economists can think of are accounted for in their models).

Standing empty-handed after all their work, Blinder and Watson punt. They attribute Democrats’ consistently superior performance to…luck. Yes, really.

On its face, the bare fact of Democrats’ consistent outperformance suggests a straightforward explanation: Democrat policies and priorities, in their myriad interacting forms, expressions, and implementations, directly cause faster growth, more progress, greater and more widespread prosperity. (Blinder and Watson pooh-pooh this idea, simply because they don’t find short-term correlation with the rather bare measure of fiscal balances.)

So the question remains: what could it be about the Democratic economic policy mix that delivers superior performance? Here are eight possibilities:

1. Wisdom of the Crowds. Democrats’ dispersed government spending — education, health care, infrastructure, social support — puts money (hence power) in the hands of individuals, instead of delivering concentrated streams to big entities like defense, finance, and business. Those individuals’ free choices on where to spend the money allocate resources where they’re most valuable — to truly productive industries that deliver goods that humans actually want.

2. Preventing Government “Capture.” Money that goes to millions of individuals is much harder for powerful players to “capture,” so it is much less likely to be used to then “capture” government via political donations, sweetheart deals, and crony capitalism.

3. Labor Market Flexibility. When people feel confident that they and their families won’t end up on the streets — they know that their children will have health care, a good education, and a decent safety net if the worst happens — they feel free to move to a different job that better fits their talents — better allocating labor resources. “Labor market flexibility” often suggests the employers’ freedom to hire and (especially) fire, but the freedom of hundreds of millions of employees is far more profound, economically.

4. Freedom to Innovate. Individuals who are standing on that social springboard that Democratic policies provide — who have that stable platform of economic security beneath them — can do more than just shift jobs. They have the freedom to strike out on their own and develop the kind of innovative, entrepreneurial ventures that drive long-term growth and prosperity (and personal freedom and satisfaction) — without worrying that their children will suffer if the risk goes wrong. Give ten, twenty, or thirty million more Americans a place to stand, and they’ll move the world.

5. Profitable Investments in Long-Term Growth. From education to infrastructure to scientific research, Democratic priorities deliver money to projects that free market don’t support on their own, and that have been thoroughly demonstrated to pay off many times over in widespread public prosperity.

6. Power to the Producers. The dispersal of income and wealth under Democratic policies provides the widespread demand (read: sales) that producers need to succeed, to expand, and to take risks on innovative new ventures. Rather than assuming that government knows best and giving money directly to businesses (or cutting their taxes), Democratic policies trust the markets to direct that money to the most productive producers.

7. Fiscal Prudence. True conservatives pay their bills. From the 35 years of declining debt after World War II (until 1982), to the years of budget surpluses and declining debt under Bill Clinton, to the radical shrinking of the budget deficit under Obama, Democratic policies demonstrate which party merits the name “fiscal conservatives.”

8. Labor and Trade Efficiencies. The social support programs that Democrats champion — if they truly provide an adequate level of support and income — give policy makers much more freedom to put in place what are otherwise draconian, but arguably efficient, trade and labor policies. If everyone can confidently rely on a decent income, we have less need for the sometimes economically constricting effects of unions and trade protectionism.

To go back to Blinder and Watson’s “luck” explanation: A non-economist might suggest that “to a great extent, you make your own luck.” And: “hire the lucky.”

Cross-posted at Evonomics.

Noah Smith asks what seems to be an interesting question in a recent post: “what leads to big recessions: wealth or debt”?

But I’d like to suggest that it’s actually a confused question. Like: is it the heat or the (relative) humidity that makes you feel so hot? Is it the voltage or the amperage that gives you a shock, or drives an electric motor? The answer in all these cases is obviously “Yes. Both.”

The question’s confused because wealth and debt are inextricably intertwined. “Wealth” is household net worth — household assets (including the market value of all firms’ equity shares) minus household sector debt. Debt is part (the negative part) of wealth.

Still, it’s interesting to look at time series for household-sector assets, debt, and net worth, and see how they behave in the lead-ins to recessions.

I’ve pointed out repeatedly that year-over-year declines in real (inflation-adjusted) household net worth are great predictors of recessions. Over the last 65 years, (almost) every time real household net worth declined, we were just into or about to be into a recession (click for interactive version):

Update 6/8: This was mistakenly showing the assets version (see next image); it’s now correctly showing the net worth version.

This measure is eight-for-seven in predicting recessions since the late sixties. (The exception is Q4 2011 — false positive.) It makes sense: when households have less money, they spend less, and recession ensues.

But now here’s what interesting: YOY change in real household assets is an equally good predictor:

Adding the liability side of the household-sector balance sheet (by using net worth instead of assets) doesn’t seem to improve this predictor one bit. This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. Household-sector liabilities, at about $14 trillion, are pretty small relative to assets ($101 trillion). Even if levels of household debt make big percentage moves (see the next graph), the actual dollar volume of change isn’t all that great compared to asset-market price runups and drawdowns. Asset levels make much bigger moves than debt levels.

It’s also interesting to look at changes in real household-sector assets (or net worth) compared to changes in real household-sector liabilities:

As we get closer to recessions, the household sector takes on debt progressively more slowly, with that shift happening over multiple years. (2000 is the exception here.) That speaks to a very different dynamic than the sudden plunges in real assets and net worth at the beginning of the last seven recessions. Perhaps: household’s portfolios are growing in these halcyon days between recessions, so they have steadily less need to borrow. And as those days continue, they start to sniff the next recession coming, so they slow down their borrowing.

My impressionistic take, unsupported by the data shown here: Higher levels of debt increase the odds that market drawdowns will go south of the border, driving the economy into recession. And they increase the likely depth of the drawdown, as lots of players (households and others) frantically need to shrink and deleverage their balance sheets, driving a downward spiral.

If the humidity’s high, and it gets hotter, you’re really gonna notice the change.

My obstreperous, categorical take, cadging from the past master of same:

Recession is always and everywhere a financial phenomenon.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.