2 Our New (Not So) Productive Economy The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton by Tyler Cowen ----------- falsaproduttività mele&strade pildeforme produttivitàdalicenziamento produttivitàdellafinanza marginalecoreservice spesatotaleespesaconsumo topinnovational5% usaciproguadalupegrecia randexperiment inonassicuratistannomeglio lalobbydeivecchi inostriragazzisonopiàistruiti? flynneffectetestscolastici erasmusegite piùpoveridelpil
2 Our New (Not So) Productive EconomyRead more at location 235
Note: Obiezione alla tesi del libro: ma i numeri della produttività sembrano buoni! Sì ma potrebbero essere ingannevoli: in gran parte sono ottenuti licenziando (e mantenendo inalterata la produzione). Spesso segnalano solo bolle (vedi produttività finanziaria). D'altronde salari e azioni sono stagnanti, evidentemente parliamo di una produttività sterile... Il punto debole della contabilità nazionale: il valore di beni e servizi statali è valutato al prezzo (poichè sono venduti) quello di beni e servizi statali al costo (visto che nn esiste x loro un mercato). Ora, un aumento di produzione si traduce in un aumento meno che prop. nel valore ma qs. dinamica è catturata dai prezzi nn dai costi cosicchè il contributo statale risulta sopravvalutato. Un conto è arricchirsi con l"export un altro espandendo la spesa pubblica. Domanda: quanto PIL dobbiamo a sopravalutazioni di qs. tipo? Tesi: quanto + il governo partecipa all'economia tanto + è difficile capire se stiamo migliorando. Ai tempi d'oro dell'innovazione il G. pesava per il 5% sul PIL... Quanto vale veramente la nostra sanità? Domanda legittima visto che i dottori nn si sottopongono al test del mercato. Con loro oltretutto, persino il criterio di mercato funziona poco (figuramoci il criterio della spesa): 1) i benefici sono troppo protratti in là nel tempo cosicchè finiscono x contare altri fattori 2) di solito nn spendiamo i ns. soldi ma i soldi di altri (governo o assicurazioni). Qui la produttività nn è misurabile in modo attendibile: confronta Cipro e USA. Questi ultimi spendono di più senza ottenere di più. Ciò significa che la produttività sanitaria di Cipro è superiore? Si può escluderlo, molto semplicemente la produttività sanitaria è molto ambigua... Tesi: alcune cure funzionano altre no e noi spendiamo molto di più per le seconde. Tutta la ns. spesa marginale è sulle seconde. Conclusione: nella sanità è evidente + che altrove che i LHF sono stati colti. Qui + che mai un aumento della spesa pubblica nn segnala necessariamente un aumento di pari importo della ricchezza e purtroppo è proprio l'ampliamento di qs settori a trainare il PIL e a farci dire che stiamo meglio... L'istruzione è un altro settore dove la spesa è aumentata molto. Quanto ha reso qs. investimento? Gli studenti sono + preparati oggi? Nella scuola dell'obbligo gli ultimi 40 anni nn sembrano registrare miglioramenti (italiano e matematica). Qs. mediocri risultati sono ottenuti avendo a disposizione ragazzi più intelligenti e con più mezzi e il pc a casa. La matem. poi nn cambia cosicchè le tecniche d'insegnamento possono affinarsi. Nel frattempo la spesa x alunno è raddoppiata. Forse le scuole sono più accoglienti e offrono + attività rispetto a ieri. Come se nn bsstasse nemmeno qui c'è un market test gran parte della spesa è pubblica. Ebbene, anche qs ambiguo settore risulta trainante quando misuriamo la crescita di qs. anni Edit
Productivity statistics over the last few decades apparently offer hope. Productivity is quite slow from 1973 to the mid-1990s, but after then, we see some spurts.Read more at location 238
Nonetheless, I have come to fear that the productivity statistics, and the national income statistics, are misleading us.Read more at location 241
gains are being offset by productivity losses elsewhere in the economy. A simple example: In 2005, finance accounted for 8 percent of U.S. GDP, and that figure had been rising throughout the 2000-2004 “productivity boom” period. I know what the numbers say, but what was the financial sector really producing during those years? The published figures do not pick up the problematic nature of financial sector growth, which of course culminated in a major crash.Read more at location 244
Keep in mind that median income growth has been slow, and stock prices—the valuation of capital—haven’t made lasting progress in a long time.Read more at location 249
As economist Michael Mandel puts it, if neither labor nor capital is reaping much gain, can we really trust the productivity numbers?Read more at location 250
gains do not seem to have reflected stunning new technologies. Instead, employers laid off a lot of workers and showed they could produce almost as much as before without those individualsRead more at location 253
“Discovering who isn’t producing very much and firing them” has been the biggest productivity gainRead more at location 255
To understand the unreliability of productivity and national income numbers in more detail, let’s think about gross domestic product and how it’s calculated.Read more at location 258
To start with a simple example, if our food supply chain harvests, retails, and sells an apple for $1, that adds a dollar to measured national income. Maybe sometimes that apple is the proverbial “bad apple,” but if consumers continue to buy the apples over time, we pretty much know what we’re getting. The economy is producing a dollar’s worth of apple value in that example.Read more at location 259
Now let’s think about government in this framework. Let’s say government spends $1 million fixing a road: How much does that contribute to measured GDP? $1 million. No consumer “buys” the road, but the expenditure counts nonetheless toward the output of goods and services.Read more at location 262
Sometimes government outputs are worth a lot more than what we spend on them, and sometimes they are worth a lot less.Read more at location 267
Over time, an increasing percentage of what we spend on government is spent on optional rather than core servicesRead more at location 274
Another way of putting it is to say that the marginal value of added government, even if positive, falls as government grows larger.Read more at location 275
Like government spending, it’s also true that the extra apples are (again, on average) less valuable to us than the initial apples we buy.Read more at location 281
As the economy produces more apples, those apples fall in price.Read more at location 283
To better measure how well we are doing as a nation, remember this about productivity: 1. The larger the role of government in the economy, the more the published figures for GDP growth are overstating improvementsRead more at location 288
By the way, the relevant number here for the size of government is not “government as a percentage of the economy,” because that includes a lot of transfer and welfare andRead more at location 294
A better measure is “government consumption”—what government itself is doing—and that figure commonly falls in the range of 15 to 20 percentRead more at location 296
2. The larger the percentage of government consumption in the economy, the harder it is to tell exactly how well we are doingRead more at location 299
If we go back to the peak time for innovation, estimated by Jonathan Huebner to have been the mid- to late nineteenth century, government at all levels was usually in the range of about 5 percent of U.S. GDP.Read more at location 301
We go to the doctor because we hope it will make us healthier.Read more at location 315
On the other hand, very often we don’t know for a long time, if ever, what the doctor did for us.Read more at location 318
There’s another reason why the market test for medicine is not such an accurate one, namely the prevalence of third-party payment,Read more at location 321
The United States spends a higher percentage—a much higher percentage—of its GDP on medical services than any other country in the world. It’s now more than 17 percent of our economy. Yet American health outcomes are not obviously superiorRead more at location 327
And yet health care is the fastest-growing major segment of the U.S. economy.Read more at location 337
Life expectancy in Cyprus, Guadaloupe (French Caribbean), and Greece is higher than in the United States, and each of those countries also has much smaller medical bills per capita.Read more at location 338
The American system has a lot of advantages over these countries. The hospitals are nicer, we have more and better specialized treatments and more abundant pharmaceuticals, you receive more of a feeling of hope, and the chance of a cutting-edge cure is higher. Still, when all is said and done, we’re not living longer lives.Read more at location 342
aggregate health expenditures across the fifty states do not seem to predict health care outcomes.Read more at location 346
The famous RAND Corporation study of the 1970s gave thousands of Americans 100 percent free medical care, while the control group had to face insurance co-payments for care, as under normal circumstances. The group with free care consumed 25-30 percent more medical services. Yet, except for the very poorest group, the free health care didn’t make people any healthier.Read more at location 349
When it comes to surgical patients, the uninsured seem to have better health outcomes than do Medicaid patients, even after controlling for thirty different comorbid conditions and many other relevant variables.Read more at location 352
David Cutler is a Harvard professor of economics and he is perhaps the leading health care economist in the country. Recently, he did a study of American economic productivity between the years 1995 and 2005. As he measured it, the average rate of productivity growth was 2.4 percent. What was the measured rate of growth in health care productivity? It was slightly negative.Read more at location 355
Our health care sector is not especially accountable, and I don’t very much trust the market tests we have in place for measuring health care value.Read more at location 362
we’re not very good at measuring the quality and real net value of health care expenditures.Read more at location 364
For the parts of health care that don’t work, we’re spending a lot of extra money for little extra return.Read more at location 367
We can say most of the benefits and money go to the elderly.Read more at location 369
Educational expenditures are now about 6 percent of U.S. GDP. But is all that extra money invested in education giving us much of a return?Read more at location 387
Let’s turn to the latest 2009 report from the National Assessment of EducationalRead more at location 389
“The average reading score for 17-year-olds was not significantly different from that in 1971.”Read more at location 391
“The average mathematics score for 17-year-olds was not significantly different from that in 1973.”Read more at location 392
the bottom line is that an “eyeball test” shows very little in terms of net gainsRead more at location 393
Keep in mind that according to the so-called “Flynn effect,” each generation has higher average IQ scores than the last. So if we’re getting smarter on relatively abstract IQ tests but not getting better test scores at school, possibly schools are declining in their productivity, despite all the extra money spent.Read more at location 395
We are a wealthier and smarter nation, more reliant on mathematics in our technology, and there is more mathematics “on tap” in any home computer. If anything, instructional progress, and thus progress in measured scores, is to be expected. You might also think that mathematics hasn’t changed so much in decades, so the better teaching techniques should spreadRead more at location 397
The rate of high school completion has been falling in this country.Read more at location 402
How has spending on education changed over the last forty years? Well, it has gone up a lot. The test scores haven’t risen since the early 1970s, but, adjusted for inflation, we’re spending more than twice as much per pupil.Read more at location 407
Or consider the international comparison. U.S. spending on education, as a percentage of our economy, is well above the OECD average and, by one measure, is second only to Iceland.Read more at location 410
Maybe some of the quality improvements have come in areas other than test scores. Maybe there are new and fun soccer teams,Read more at location 413
no obvious “eyeball-ready” correlation between how much money is spent in U.S. public schools and the quality of final outcomes.Read more at location 417
We have numerous reasons to be worried about the productivity of our education system, and that system is becoming a bigger part of our economy.Read more at location 431
So let’s sum up. Government consumption spending, education spending, and health care spending overlap to some extent, but in total, without double counting, they still exceed 25 percent of U.S. GDP. They are also three of our most rapidly growing sectors, and at least two of them—health care and education—ought to be two of our most dynamic sectors. Those are also three sectors where it is especially hard to measure valueRead more at location 432
They are, to my eye, also three sectors where there is massive government distortion of incentives. Arguably, those are three sectors where we are overestimating qualityRead more at location 436
That means we may well be a good deal poorer than the measures of productivity and gross domestic product indicate.Read more at location 438
“People don’t want to believe that technology is broken.... Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology—all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think.Read more at location 448
Note: THIEL
