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The Meaning and Misuses of GDP

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

America’s Gross Domestic Product — GDP — is a very powerful statistic. Markets and politicians zealously track the quarterly numbers looking for a bottom line on how investors and the rest of us feel about our conditions and prospects. Compiled by some 2,000 economists and statisticians at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), GDP pulls together everything they can measure concerning how much America’s households and various industries earn, consume and invest, and for what purposes. Over the last two weeks, however, two new developments should have reminded us that we know less about GDP than we usually believe.

Early this week, the BEA itself tacitly acknowledged that the GDP measure lags behind the actual economy. The Bureau released a set of changes in how it calculates GDP, designed to take better account of the economic value of ideas and intangible assets. Today, few among us would question the notion that new ideas can have great economic value. But some 15 years ago, long before smart phones, tablets and protein-based medications, the BEA started to study how to revise the GDP measure to take better economic account of innovations. This week, the Bureau announced that when a company undertakes research and development or creates a new book, music, or movie, those costs will be counted as investments that add to GDP, rather than ordinary business expenses, which do not.

In an instant, the official accounting of the economy’s total current product increased some $400 billion. Business profits also have been larger than we thought, because ordinary business expenses reduce reported profits, while investments do not. Most important, the revisions told us that American businesses and government, together, now invest just 2.1 percent of GDP in R&D — less investment than in the 1990s here, especially by businesses, and less than much of Europe.

While this week’s BEA changes bring us closer to an accurate picture of GDP, last week we learned how naïve we can be about blatant misuses and distortions of GDP. This story began four years ago, when two well-respected economists, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, published an economic history of financial crises. R&R’s timing (2009) was impeccable, and their book was a bestseller for an academic treatise. More important, it gave its authors wide public credibility when they issued a paper the following year, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that claimed to have found a deep and strong connection between high levels of government debt and a country’s economic growth. The data, they reported, showed that when a country’s government debt reaches and exceeds the equivalent of 90 percent of GDP, its growth slumps very sharply.

With the big run-up in government debt spurred by the financial crisis and subsequent deep recession, conservatives who had waited a long time for a plausible economic reason to slash government found it in the new R&R analysis. And based on its authors’ newly-elevated reputations, conventional wisdom-mongers from think tanks to editorial boards echoed the new line on austerity. Even the most liberal administration since LBJ couldn’t resist the new meme. Despite a palpably weak economy, the President and congressional Democrats grudgingly accepted large budget cuts, and then pumped the economy’s brakes some more by insisting on higher taxes. And we were not the only ones so economically addled. As government debt in Germany, France, Britain and most other advanced countries rose sharply, conservatives there argued that less government was a necessity for average Europeans as well.

Just last week, we learned that the R&R 2010 analysis was so riddled with technical mistakes that its “findings” about what moves GDP are meaningless. When three young economists from the University of Massachusetts found they couldn’t replicate the results – the standard test for scientific findings — they took R&R’s model apart, piece by piece, to figure out why. It turns out that R&R – or more likely, their graduate assistants – left out several years of data for some countries, miscoded other data, and then applied the wrong statistical technique to aggregate their flawed data. And as bad luck would have it, all of their disparate mistakes biased their results in the same direction, amplifying the errors. In the end, instead of advanced countries experiencing recessionary slumps averaging – 0.1 percent growth once their government debt exceeded 90 percent of their GDP, the correct result was average growth of 2.2 percent carrying that debt burden.

Utterly wrong as R&R’s analysis was, the austerity advocates proceeded to badly misuse it. The authors had merely reported a correlation between high debt and negative growth – or, as we now know, between high debt and moderate growth – without saying what that correlation might mean. Hard line conservatives and their think tank supporters, here and abroad, quickly insisted it could only mean that high debt drives down growth. That can happen, but only rarely — when high inflationary expectations drive up interest rates, which at once slows growth and increases government interest payments. In the much more common case, Keynes still rules: Slow or negative growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around. In those more typical instances, cutting government only depresses growth more, further expanding government debt. Occasionally, the correlation of negative growth and high government debt reflects some independent third cause. The tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck Japan in 2012, for example, simultaneously drove down growth and drove up government debt. And sometimes, there is no correlation: Britain carried government debt burdens of 100 percent to 250 percent of GDP from the early-to-mid-19th century, while it was giving birth to the Industrial Revolution.

The R&R analysis did not distinguish between these various scenarios. Yet, the conservative interpretation became the received public wisdom. The IMF, the World Bank and most politically-unaffiliated economists insisted that slashing government on top of weak business and household spending would only make matters worse. No matter. The inevitable result was not the stronger growth as promised, but persistently high unemployment and slow growth here, and double-dip recessions for much for Europe and Japan. In the end, R&R deserve less criticism for their mistakes than for their failure to correct the damaging distortions of their deeply flawed work.

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Why We All Have to Worry about Cyprus

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

With Europe’s brazen mismanagement this week of the banking collapse in Cyprus, the Euro crisis moved closer to farce and, potentially, closer to a serious problem for the rest of us. Over the past three years, as global investors have periodically fled the government bond markets of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy, Eurozone leaders have grudgingly spent $650 billion bailing those countries out. The whole point of these bailouts has been to protect the solvency of the European banks that hold most of the bonds of those countries, including any of the leading banks in Germany and France. Yet, last week, when the two major banks in tiny Cyprus needed a modest bailout of $13 billion to hold the Eurozone together, European leaders proposed that all of the banks’ depositors help pay the bill. In short, they were prepared to tear up the EU pledge of deposit insurance, the last defense against nationwide bank runs.

Luckily, the people of Cyprus said no. Yet, this Tuesday, Eurozone finance ministers came up with a new way of restructuring the ailing Cypriot banks that will still mean large losses for their large depositors, as a condition of the latest bailout. So now, the next time global investors lose confidence in the bonds of, say, Italy or Spain, the banks across Europe that hold those bonds may face waves of withdrawals by their largest depositors. That could bring on the kind of far-reaching financial crisis which the bailouts were designed to head off.

From the vantage of Berlin or Paris, the new deal is certainly appealing in broad, if crude, political terms. European voters get the satisfaction of forcing the well-heeled depositors of the failing banks to pay a price, along with those banks’ investors. And many of those depositors aren’t even Eurozone citizens: Instead, they’re hyper-rich Russians, including at least 80 oligarchs who looted much of their country’s economy and then shifted their proceeds to foreign accounts. They didn’t choose Cypriot banks for their investment expertise, since the bankers sunk much of the deposits in Greek sovereign bonds, the world’s worst investment. They chose Cyprus because it’s a traditional tax haven with very low taxes and strict bank secrecy laws. Old times may also have played a role with many of the oligarchs, since Cyprus was once the KGB’s favorite listening post on the Middle East.

The global economics of the deal, however, are simply terrible. Large depositors account for a tiny fraction of all Cypriot bank accounts, but more than half of all Cypriot bank deposits. It’s a pattern seen almost everywhere, including the United States. Here, bank accounts of $250,000 or more account for less than one-half of one percent of all bank accounts, but nearly one-quarter of total bank deposits. In normal times, our own deposit insurance limits the amount subject to its guarantee at $250,000. But when confidence in banks is fragile or failing, the government always steps in to guarantee all deposits. That’s just what the Treasury and FDIC did in September 2008, to prevent a run on American banks by large depositors that would have spread the crisis across the U.S. banking system. That unlimited guarantee remained in place until our financial system was stable and healthy again, ending only at the end of last year.

Eurozone leaders have ignored these basic tenets of deposit insurance. Instead, they have sent a troubling message to large European depositors: Even in a financial crisis, large accounts are no longer safe. So, the next time that global investors begin selling off Italian or Spanish government bonds, threatening the solvency of the banks holding those bonds, we could see a run by large depositors not only in Italy and Spain, but also across Germany and France. And that would set off a new financial crisis that could trigger a downward spiral across much of world – including here in America.

Moreover, it seems that unnecessary economic mistakes have become the new norm. Austerity programs for economies struggling with weak recoveries, both here and across much of Europe, are the most common example. That’s why the Eurozone, taken together, has been in a recession for nine months; why Britain’s GDP has declined in four of the last five quarters; and why even the German economy has been contracting since at least last October. And an extended downturn in Europe only increases the likelihood of renewed government bond problems in Italy or Spain which, given this mismanagement of deposit insurance in Cyprus, could spiral out of control.

These are not the only examples of inane economic policy thinking these days.

Paul Krugman this week, for example, offered a defense of capital controls, citing how the movement of funds in and out of national markets can destabilize economies. But the issue is not the unfettered movement of funds across global markets. In fact, those capital flows have been a key factor in the strong performance of many developing economies, as well as our own economic stability. Rather, the problem lies in what financial institutions do with those funds and the willingness of governments to enforce sensible limits on what they do. In the end, the spectacular stupidity of Eurozone leaders this week may be just the most recent and dangerous example of how politicians manage to miss the most obvious and important economic point.

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How a Grand Bargain on the Deficit Could Erode Social Security

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

Paul Ryan’s new budget blueprint released this week — details to follow, as usual — will only intensify the partisan warfare over the deficit. In truth, the deficit is just a cover story here, since the real debate is over the scope and role of government itself. Ryan at least is more upfront about it than most – he includes large new tax cuts as well as draconian spending reductions in what is ostensibly a plan to “balance the budget.”  In his fervor to miniaturize Washington’s domestic role, however, he cannot provide the resources to maintain the core commitments of Social Security and Medicare.

The ideological core of this debate also explains why most of the proposals and agreements of the past year have paid so little heed to the needs of the economy. There is no doubt that the spending cuts and tax hikes of the last six months have weakened economic growth — and as a result, deficits actually could be larger over the longer-term than they otherwise would have been. The additional spending cuts contemplated for the next six months under the sequester — and under most of the grand bargains being floated to supersede the sequester — would inflict more damage. In this regard, Ryan stands at the extreme with a plan that would drive us back into recession.

Nonetheless, a major deal that includes entitlement reforms and tax-loophole closings remains possible. In the politics that could determine the relative weights of those two factors, Republicans will have less maneuvering room on taxes than Democrats will enjoy on entitlements. That’s because primary challengers from the far right already have taken down a number of conventional Republicans, heightening the GOP’s resistance to more revenues. By contrast, there have been no successful attacks so far on centrist Democrats for supporting the cutbacks in federal programs now in place. This political difference suggests that more of the burden in any grand bargain will likely fall on entitlements than on revenues. The next question is, what entitlement changes could Democrats accept and still preserve the essential missions of those programs.

Let’s consider Social Security and its core guarantee of basic economic security for more than 40 million retirees (plus nearly 9 million people with disabilities). Unfortunately for Ryan and his fellow supporters of austerity for the elderly and disabled, no change that would trim the benefits of all Social Security recipients is compatible with the program’s central mission. To begin, while countries such as Germany, France and Italy provide monthly pension checks equal on average to 75 percent or more of a person’s average monthly wages over a lifetime, this “replacement rate” for Social Security is only about 40 percent. That translates into an average monthly benefit of $1,230, or less than $15,000 per-year. Moreover, these bare benefits comprise at least 90 percent of the total income for more than one-third of all current Social Security recipients.

Let’s do the math. The terms just described translate into an annual income of less than $16,300, which amounts to a very bare minimum. After all, the average cost today of a small apartment (rent and utilities) is over $7,000 per-year. Even if elderly people pay 20 percent less than the average, their rent and utilities still claim an average of $5,600 per-year or nearly 40 percent of all their income. Add to that at least $335 per-month for food at a poverty level ($4,000 annually) and another $310 per-month for Medicare Part B and Part D premiums and other out-of-pocket medical expenses ($3,700 annually). That leaves tens of millions of elderly and disabled Americans with about $130 per-month ($1,600 per-year) to cover all other expenses such as clothes, transportation, recreation, state and local taxes, and any unexpected expenditures.

These data suggest that any across-the-board benefit cut today is incompatible with Social Security’s essential mission. That takes off-the-table changes in the annual inflation adjustment or the retirement age. Given current benefits, the only reforms consistent with the program’s central commitment are ones based on means-testing. For example, Congress could apply a smaller annual cost-of-living adjustment to the benefits of the top tier of retirees. And if Congress is set on guaranteeing the system’s solvency for the next 75 years, in the same spirit they should think about applying the payroll tax to the capital income of the top tier of workers. Not that there is an enormous rush, given the actuaries estimate that the system’s solvency is secure for at least another quarter-century.

Much like George W. Bush’s proposal to privatize part of Social Security, the 2013 Ryan budget is simply uninterested in the missions that animate federal entitlement programs. Democrats would commit a grave mistake, as a matter of both social policy and politics, if they also sacrificed those commitments in search of Republican acquiescence to more revenues.

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Dark Thoughts on the Coming Sequester

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

This week’s bout over federal spending pits Tea Party militants, conservative pundits and most Republican office holders against the President, his congressional allies and most economists who pay attention. But behind the politics, there is simply no economic basis for the immediate spending cuts that would follow the sequester — or immediate tax increases for that matter. The economy is still fragile enough that GDP went negative in the last quarter, when inventory purchases and federal spending both slowed more than usual. And just last weekend, Moody’s credit rating agency stripped the United Kingdom of its AAA rating — not because UK deficits are too high, but because Britain’s premature austerity policies are leaching away the growth required to make its deficits manageable. Moody’s decision only echoed recent warnings from the IMF and World Bank against just such precipitous moves to bring down cyclical deficits.

Back home, President Obama’s odds of prevailing on the sequester would be greater, if those who have made careers out of fetishizing a balanced budget were not receiving quiet support from much of Washington’s split-the-difference political pros, including a clutch of Democrats.  Looking out a few weeks, a chorus of self-described centrists and a few liberals could nudge the President into accepting a “compromise package” of substantial, immediate spending cuts and what Ronald Reagan used to call “revenue enhancers.” If it stops there, the economic damage will be contained. But the scenario could turn worse if, as seems likely, such a compromise also becomes embedded in a Continuing Resolution that will cover the rest of the fiscal year and create a new, lower baseline for 2014.

This premature austerity inescapably will weaken the economy, raising deficits even more down the line. Worse, such a bipartisan agreement could reinforce both parties’ natural resistance to contain Medicare spending and build up the tax base, especially over the long-term. And that could finally convince global financial markets that the United States has lost its way economically. The result would be higher interest rates, which in turn would mean even slower growth and higher deficits. What the markets want and have long expected from us is just fiscal common sense. That means, first, sidestep the sequester trap and instead increase federal investments in infrastructure, basic R&D along our technological frontiers, and access for all adults to upgrade their skills. Then follow it up with serious steps to contain long-term Medicare spending and expand the national tax base.

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The Lessons of Today’s Troubling Report on GDP

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

This morning’s disappointing report that GDP actually declined by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year is a lesson in how government and serendipity can shape our economic path, especially in the short-term. The basic elements of economic prosperity are in place. To begin, Americans are spending again: Personal consumption accelerated from a 1.6 percent increase in the July-August-September quarter to 2.2 percent in October-November-December. Even better, spending on durable goods — autos, appliances, and so forth — increased at nearly a 14 percent rate. That should be no surprise, since disposable personal income rose at a strong and healthy 8.1 percent rate in the fourth quarter. Firms looking to the future are spending, too: Business investment expanded more than 8 percent, and investments in equipment and software were up more than 12 percent, a rate reminiscent of near-boom times. Housing is back as well, with residential investments growing at a rate of more than 15 percent.

How does all this good news translate into a flat quarter? For one thing, our exports fell faster than our imports. One reason for that was the economic slowdown in the huge European and Japanese markets. The other was Hurricane Sandy, which disrupted shipments in and out of the huge, New York and New Jersey ports. The hurricane also disrupted inventory purchases, which slowed by two-thirds compared to the preceding quarter. But the biggest single drag on the economy was Washington: Federal spending fell 15 percent, led by defense which declined at the fastest quarterly rate, 22 percent, in 40 years. Those declines were fueled entirely by politics, especially planning for the spending sequesters threatened for January 1.

We cannot influence the weather, but we can control the impact of government on the economy. This report should remind us that the economy remains vulnerable to precipitous, additional budgetary austerity. And given the progress we’ve already made on deficits — $1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years enacted in 2011 and $700 billion in new revenues enacted late last year — we can now proceed in a very measured way with the final stage of long-term entitlement reforms and additional revenues. And to assure everyone that grown-ups who understand the economy are in charge again in Washington, Congress should cancel the sequesters and enact a clean, long-term increase in the debt limit.

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The New Nihilism in the Debate over the Debt Ceiling

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

For decades, fiscal conservatives have used congressional debates over raising the debt limit to vent their frustrations with big government. But no one seriously questioned the need to do so, not until a band of Tea Party uber-conservatives in 2011 resolved to use the debt limit as a bargaining chip in budget talks. They ignored the fact that raising the debt ceiling does not in any way determine future spending or taxes. It simply allows the Treasury to borrow the funds to finance spending that past Congresses and Presidents already have undertaken. Raising the debt limit, in short, is a ministerial act that grants the government the technical legal authority to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. And since the Treasury securities that comprise that credit underpin much of the operations of the American economy, withholding that technical authority could have devastating economic effects.

To understand how and why, start with the basics. When Washington runs a deficit, the Treasury has to borrow from investors not only to fund the deficit, but also to cover the interest on the government’s existing debt and to refinance much of that debt, all on a continuing basis. A failure to raise the debt limit, as many Tea Party denizens in Congress propose, therefore could force the Treasury to default on those obligations. Sovereign debt defaults have many well-known and very unpleasant consequences. Interest rates spike, stock and bond markets fall sharply, the value of the currency declines dramatically, and the country quickly falls into a deep recession. Given those consequences, no government with sane leadership would ever default voluntarily. Rather, the only reason any country has ever found itself unable to pay the interest on its bonds or issue new government debt is that domestic and foreign investors won’t lend it the funds to do so.

If, beyond all reason, Congress effectively forces our own government to default on our national debt, the results would be particularly nasty. Trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasury securities are held by financial institutions here and abroad, so the default would quickly freeze capital markets around the world. In other words, private lending to businesses and households here and in many other nations would halt. The reserves held by many of the world’s central banks include more trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasuries, so a U.S. default also would quickly bring on a global financial crisis that could dwarf the chaos of late-2008. In fact, even if the debt-limit debate merely increases the concerns of investors that a U.S. debt default somehow might occur, their heightened apprehension could have serious effects on interest rates, the dollar, and the stock and bond markets.

Even before a technical debt default could set in, however, the government would be forced to drastically cut current federal spending. Federal borrowing today covers between 35 and 40 percent of all federal spending. If Congress prevents the Treasury from legally borrowing any more funds, the government will be forced at once to slash spending by 35 percent to 40 percent. Such truly unimaginable cuts — more than ten times those contemplated under the sequester provisions of the 2011 budget Act — would force the President to shut down many parts of the federal government, including some national security operations, and even cut income support programs for tens of millions of retired Americans. And since the President and the Treasury would determine the distribution of these cuts, failure to raise the debt ceiling would effectively shift the power of appropriations from Congress to the Executive.

Conservatives have serious and sincere differences with progressives over certain federal programs and functions. Whether Republican leaders recognize it or not, putting at risk the government’s legal authority to issue new bonds as a lever to press their policy preferences is a form of political nihilism. It easily dismisses the costs of wrecking the operations of government, because it places so little value on government itself. As such, the new political nihilism is as far from genuine conservatism, which seeks to preserve traditional political arrangements, as it is from a progressivism that uses government to reform those arrangements. Nevertheless, by vowing to block any increase in the debt limit until the administration accedes to their budget demands, congressional conservatives have embraced this new nihilism.

Nor, as some Tea Partiers would have it, should a failure to raise the debt limit be seen as a “preemptive default” intended to head off a real one. Global investors continue to lend the United States whatever funding we require — and judging by the low interest rates they accept, they are eager do so. We also are one of only two countries in the world (Denmark is the other) that places a legal limit on the debt its government can issue. So, now a handful of radical members would have the Congress refuse to raise that limit, knowing that the country will face another recession as government programs are slashed, followed by the chaos of a sovereign debt default. Republican leaders have no reasonable alternative but to join the President in rejecting such nihilism. 

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Modest Progress on the Deficit Is Just What the U.S. Economy Needs

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

One argument nearly entirely absent in the debate over the fiscal cliff issues is the effect on the economy. True, some diehard conservatives warn that without drastic steps to privatize part of Social Security and much of Medicare, our national debt will soon make us pariahs in global capital markets, on the Greek model. But there was never any economic evidence or reasoning behind their feverish scenario. In fact, throughout our long fiscal debate, worldwide investors have been eager to lend the Treasury virtually unlimited funds in 10-year tranches and accept annual yields of less than 2 percent.

Based on that, some diehard liberals insist that we do not have to cut spending at all, especially when there are plenty of well-heeled Americans around who can afford to pay higher income taxes. Their position ignores economic history — namely, that whenever our deficits have climbed and the national debt has threatened to soar, we earned the confidence of global investors by addressing those problems in measured ways. The only genuine economic imperative in this entire dismal fight is not that we should raise taxes on the wealthy or cut domestic spending, but simply that we once again have to take care of our fiscal business in a reasonable manner.

Despite the protestations of partisan economists, the economy is largely indifferent to whether we address these imbalances by cutting spending or raising taxes. The first stage of this effort, in 2011, brought $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. The verdict of the markets was, “well done”; and, despite the heated rhetoric of last year’s campaign, the 2011 deal was followed by a generally strengthening economy. Stage two was resolved in this week’s agreement to raise nearly $700 billion in new revenues over 10 years, including substantially higher taxes on capital income. The markets are satisfied with that, too, and the economy almost certainly will continue to strengthen.

Stage three will come in a few months, when the President and Congress will likely agree to modest entitlement changes in exchange for additional revenues raised through some version of corporate tax reform. The economy will be fine with that resolution as well.

In fact, this process has been a quiet refutation of the slash-the-deficit chorus. That includes those of the Paul Ryan variety who would upend entitlements to finance more tax cuts, and “responsible budget” types who would hike taxes and slash spending as much as possible to reduce the cost of business borrowing in years to come. The truth is, the economy does not usually respond to drastic measures that confound the expectations of investors and consumers. For all of the complaints that rather than make a meal of the deficit, we take a nibble here, another nibble there and then a third nibble somewhere else, this tortured course allows businesses and households to adjust little by little. And that is the best course for the economy.

So, setting aside politics and social policy, the economic imperative remains that Washington must manage to take care of its fiscal business in measured and reasonable ways, whether through taxes or spending cuts of almost any variety. Looking ahead, this means that the debt limit can never again become a negotiating chip in fiscal politics. The last time that House and Senate hyper-conservatives went down that path, it cost the U.S. government its triple-A rating from one of the three major credit-rating agencies. A government capable of letting lapse its own legal authority to issue new debt and pay interest on its existing debts is one that, by definition, cannot take care of its basic business. And that is especially so in the current circumstances, when there are no market pressures on the government to default and when the government’s debt securities comprise much of the reserves of most of the world’s central banks.

Global investors would be anything but indifferent to such contempt for predictable economic consequences. A technical sovereign debt default triggered by a debt-ceiling stalemate would be a calamity for the U.S. and world economies. Any political leader or party that helps to bring about such a catastrophe will prove themselves unfit to govern for a very long time.

 

 

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The State of the Union and the Power of Technological Change

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

President Obama made inequality a major theme of his State of the Union address last night, an unsurprising choice as he prepares to face Mitt Romney. Everyone now knows that just last year Mr. Romney paid a smaller share of his $21 million income in taxes than the average American paid on a $50,000 salary. But if inequality was the President’s theme, his main subject was jobs. For Obama, faster job growth depends on more government. We need Washington, for example, to retrain workers, reduce college costs, and provide special supports for manufacturers. For Romney, the answer for job creation is, what else, less government: Washington needs only to cut regulation and reduce taxes, especially for the wealthy people and corporations who, in the Romney worldview, create the jobs. But not so fast — there are other options as well. A new report from the NDN think tank suggests that certain kinds of new technologies can spur job creation more effectively than most government programs or tax cuts. The new study, conducted by Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute and myself, found that the rapid spread of new 3G wireless devices from 2007 to 2011 led directly to the creation of nearly 1.6 million new jobs. And those job gains occurred even as the overall economy was shedding 5.3 million other jobs.

Our analysis tracked shifts by consumers and businesses from 2G wireless phones to 3G smart phones and tablets, quarter by quarter and state by state, from July 2007 to December 2011. We then analyzed the links between the shift to the more powerful 3G devices and changes in employment, quarter to quarter and state by state. We did the math and found that every 10 percentage point increase in the use of those devices generated more than 231,000 new jobs within a year.

It makes clear and compelling economic sense. As a growing share of Internet use shifts to wireless devices, the people and businesses that use them become more efficient and productive. Those gains, in turn, create new value which ultimately leads to more job creation. The spread of 3G wireless devices also created a platform for new services — for example, in mobile e-commerce, mobile social networking, and location-based services. The growth of those new services also led to more job creation.

And the best news for jobs is that another technological shift is occurring right now, from 3G to 4G wireless devices. 4G wireless networks and the Internet infrastructure that supports them have the potential to drive significant new efficiencies and innovations across the economy. Jobs already are being created in 4G-dependent areas such as cloud-based services and mobile health applications. According to industry analysts, 4G wireless networks in the near future could be used to create a Smart Electricity Grid and a national public safety system.

This analysis, then, can provide a new direction for job creation efforts: Adopt spectrum and other policies that will promote the broad and rapid deployment of 4G

Still, there are also kernels of economic truth in the Romney and Obama positions. Romney is not wrong, for example, when he says that lower taxes are usually better for the economy than higher taxes. But there’s no evidence that lower taxes on wealthy people or corporations would produce many jobs. And in a period of trillion-dollar budget deficits, calls for tax cuts seem at best irrelevant, and at worst politically cynical and misleading.

The President is on firmer ground. Greater access to higher education and retraining should increase productivity and growth, at least over the long haul. Since the direct benefits from those efforts would presumably go to people from modest or middle-income households, Obama’s approach also could help address inequality. And since the President seems prepared to raise the revenues to finance his proposals, they could be more than political window dressing.

For all of these good points, these approaches are not the answer to slow job creation. For that, President Obama and Mr. Romney have to directly address the forces that actually create and destroy private-sector jobs. One such force is technology, and our new analysis shows that the 3G and 4G wireless technologies can create many more jobs than they may destroy, and do so quickly. Another approach could focus on reducing the additional costs that businesses bear directly when they create new jobs. That could mean cuts on the employer side of the payroll tax or new measures to slow increases in the health care costs that businesses bear for their employees. At a minimum, any of these approaches would produce more economic benefits for more people than all of the tax cuts promoted by Obama’s opponents.

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The Bankruptcy of Austerity Economics

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Conservative conventional wisdom collided this week with a dose of economic reality, and the winner is reality. For two years, every Republican congressional leader and presidential hopeful has proudly insisted these days that austerity is the cure for a sluggish economy like ours. It is an approach embraced most memorably, of course, by Herbert Hoover, although Angela Merkel also pushes it today for the faltering Eurozone. In fact, austerity in the face of high unemployment, slow investment and weak demand has been decisively refuted by a half-century of economic analysis and policy. The best medicine for a slow economy is usually measures to jump-start investment and consumption funded by more private or public debt.

Congress has refused to let Washington play that role since the 2010 elections, so finally American households are stepping into the breach. Last week, we learned that employment rose sharply in November, and this week we found out why: Borrowing by American households jumped $20.4 billion in November. That’s the largest increase in ten years. This new willingness by Americans to take on new debt is the main reason why consumer spending is finally picking up, which in turn is the main reason why the jobless rate keeps on falling.

It would be rash to read too much into these new data, but they could be a powerful signal of stronger growth ahead. For three years, Americans have saved in order to reduce the burden of their outstanding debts. New Federal Reserve data show that it is working. In 2007, payments on mortgage, consumer and auto debts claimed a larger share of the incomes of an average household than at any time since 1980. But by the third quarter of last year, this household indebtedness had fallen to the lowest levels since 1994, providing a reasonable basis to begin borrowing again.

Moreover, the renewed willingness of average Americans to take on new consumer debt may also signal that housing values have finally bottomed out. Falling housing values — and Washington’s inability to do anything to help stabilize them — have been the single largest obstacle to a strong recovery. When home prices fall month after month, that not only increases the net debt of most homeowners; it also makes American homeowners poorer, month after month. And people who see their assets shrink, month after month and year after year, cut back on their spending. So, recent signs that consumer borrowing and spending are heating up again suggest that housing values may have finally stabilized. If that’s the case, the recovery may finally accelerate.

America’s new acolytes of austerity could still screw this up. In the last year, they tried to block payroll tax relief and extended unemployment benefits, and the truest believers among them even hoped to block an increase in the legal debt limit. All three of these matters will come back to Congress in coming months. The political landscape has shifted, however. The public now holds Congress in such low esteem — and especially House conservatives — that even fervent advocates of austerity may hesitate to repeat their wildly unpopular 2011 performance in an election year.

A stronger U.S. recovery could still fall victim to the European austerity caucus. Merkel continues to press austerity on the Eurozone governments, even as Europe slides into recession. Moreover, piling yet more austerity on economies in recession can only worsen the sovereign debt crisis which already threatens to pull down the Euro and major banks across Europe. Sometime next week or in the next few months, global investors may conclude that Merkel’s attachment to austerity will finally preclude meaningful steps to stabilize Italian and Spanish government debt. If that comes to pass, the ensuing financial crisis almost certainly would short circuit a strong American recovery.

For now, that recovery is in the hands of America’s households. Thankfully, they display more economic sense than many members of Congress or leaders of the Eurozone.

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Obama Channels Clinton on the Economy, But Will it Work the Second Time?

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

In Kansas last week, President Obama laid out the economic brief for his reelection. Its substance plainly recalls the program Bill Clinton offered in 1992. Both plans are built around new public commitments to education, R&D and infrastructure, some fiscal restraint to finance the public investments and unleash more private investment, plus some modest redistribution of the tax burden from working families to the wealthy. This formula still strikes the right notes politically, at least for those who aren’t diehard, pre-New Deal conservatives. But economically, this mainstream approach will face much greater hurdles today.

Most of the President’s conservative critics have focused on his call for more revenues from affluent Americans, starting with a surtax on millionaires. In fact, congressional Republicans not only have rejected the surtax; they’ve also suggested that they might hold payroll tax relief hostage until Obama agrees to make the Bush upper-end tax cuts permanent. It’s a bluff, and not a very good one: The GOP will stop the surtax on the rich, but they cannot be seen at the same time as raising taxes on everyone else. Whether or not Bush’s largesse for upper-income Americans survives will turn on who is inaugurated in January 2013.

This tax debate may pack a good political punch for Obama; but in the end, it doesn’t have much economic significance. Yes, a higher marginal rate, in itself, would have negative effects. But in the real world, a higher rate never operates by itself. The additional revenues may help bring down interest rates by reducing deficits and so spur business investment, as they did under Clinton. Or the same revenues could help finance public investments that make businesses more efficient and productive. And the truth is, the adverse effects of a higher tax rate on the wealthy, by itself, fall somewhere between quite weak and very weak. What else can an economist infer from strong growth in the 1950s when the top rate exceeded 90 percent, quickening growth in the 1990s after Clinton hiked the top rate, and more tepid growth after Bush cut the top rate?

The harder and more important issue is whether the combination of more public investment and smaller deficits, which worked so well for Clinton, will make much difference today. Like Clinton in 1992, Obama last week called for more federal dollars in the three specific areas that can boost productivity and growth in every industry, and which businesses tend to shortchange. This covers worker education and training, basic research and development, and transportation infrastructure. The theory, confirmed by the boom of the latter 1990s, is that these factors help make businesses more efficient and their workers more productive. Together, those gains translate into higher incomes and stronger business investment, especially if businesses don’t have to compete with Washington for capital to invest. And all of that should produce stronger growth, more jobs, and a much-sought-for virtuous circle.

The catch lies in jobs and wages. If the public investments allow businesses to become more efficient and productive, but those investments do not lead to higher incomes and more jobs, the only result will be higher profit margins. The whole virtuous circle will slow down or even stall out, much like what happened once the 2009 stimulus ran its course. In the 1990s, the strategy worked like a charm, because U.S. companies still responded to higher growth and productivity with strong job creation and wage increases. But those connections have weakened badly since then.

Consider the following. The Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007 saw GDP grow by an average of 2.7 percent a year, 30 percent slower than the 3.5 percent annual gains for a comparable period in the 1990s, say 1993 to 1998. But while the number of private sector jobs grew by more than 18 percent from 1993 to 1998, this rate fell to less than 6 percent from 2002 to 2007, a two-thirds decline from the earlier period . Even worse, the connection between productivity and wage gains broke down even more. In the 1990s, productivity grew 2.5 percent per-year, and average wages increased nearly in lock-step, by 2.2 percent a year. In grim contrast, productivity grew 3 percent a year from 2002 to 2007 while the average wage didn’t go up at all.

Clinton’s program could take strong job creation and wage gains virtually for granted. President Obama’s program will have to address these issues head on, and in ways that might attract some bipartisan support. Obama will also have to contend with additional hurdles, including the persistent economic drag from the financial crisis and, perhaps, from another round triggered by Europe’s faltering sovereign debt.

Here are three ways to begin.

First, while the President’s temporary payroll tax cut for workers provides some welcome stimulus, reducing the tax burden that falls directly on job creation on a permanent basis — the employer side of the payroll tax — would be more powerful economically.  We could cut employer payroll taxes in half, for example, and replace the revenues with a new carbon fee on greenhouse gases. In the bargain, the United States also would become the world’s leading nation in fighting climate change.

To address stagnating wages as well as slow job growth, the President should recast his training agenda as a new right. Most jobs today — and virtually all positions very soon — require some real skills with computers and other information technologies. All working Americans should have the opportunity to upgrade their IT skills, year after year. They could have that, and at modest cost to taxpayers, if Washington will give community colleges new grants to keep their computer labs open and staffed at night and on weekends, so any American can walk in and receive additional IT training for free.

Finally, U.S. multinationals have lobbied furiously, without success, for a temporary tax cut on profits they bring back from abroad. Give them what they want, if they will give the economy what it needs. We could let U.S. multinationals bring back, say, 50 percent of their foreign profits at a lower tax rate if, and only if, they expand their U.S. work forces by 5 percent. A 6 percent increase in a company’s U.S. workers would entitle them to bring back 60 percent of those profits at a lower tax rate, and on up to a 10 percent job increase and 100 percent of foreign profits.

That’s what it will take, just to begin, for an economically-powerful program of public investment and fiscal restraint to work its magic this time.

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