Visualizzazione post con etichetta keynes salari rigidi. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta keynes salari rigidi. Mostra tutti i post

venerdì 17 marzo 2017

Anatomia di una crisi

Come si esce da una crisi economica?
Cominciamo col dire che ci sono due tipi di crisi economiche.
C'è la crisi da domanda: la gente non spende più perché impaurita, per esempio da uno shock finanziario.
C'è poi la crisi da offerta: le imprese non vendono perché, per esempio, fanno a mano ciò che i concorrenti fanno con i robot.
Fortunatamente, l’economia canonica prescrive la stessa rivetta per uscire da entrambe le crisi: abbassare i salari.
Salari più bassi consentono di abbassare i prezzi e invogliare i clienti in modo da superare le crisi di domanda.
Salari più bassi sollecitano la migrazione dei lavoratori verso settori più produttivi in modo da superare le crisi dell'offerta.
Che ci vuole ad abbassare un salario? Semplice, no?
No. Abbassare i salari non è affatto semplice cosicché le crisi perdurano per decenni interi, come la Grande Depressione che colpì l' America negli anni trenta.
Il salario di solito si esprime come W (wage). Ma il salario deve tener conto dei prezzi (P) affinché possa indicare il potere d'acquisto. Il salario reale è quindi W/P.
Il salario può essere abbassato in due modi: abbassando W o alzando P.
Per abbassare W dobbiamo contare sull'imprenditore. Ma gli imprenditori deludono: non abbassano!
Non si sa perché ma non abbassano. Forse vogliono evitare il conflitto oppure non intendono demoralizzare i dipendenti, sta di fatto che preferiscono chiudere piuttosto che abbassare W. Questo è un dato di fatto, ognuno ci costruisca su la sua teoria.
Per alzare P dobbiamo invece contare sulla banca centrale. È lei che di solito che ha in mano le armi per creare non dico inflazione ma almeno aspettative inflazioniste (bastano quelle in fondo). Eppure, l'inflazione non è un fenomeno facile da controllare, se scappa di mano sono guai, per cui a volte la banca centrale – specie in quei paesi scottati in passato dall’inflazione -ci va con i piedi di piombo.
Keynes conclude: rassegniamoci, i salari sono incomprimibili. L’imprenditore non abbassa (minimo vitale) e la banca centrale è impotente (trappola della liquidità). Bisogna precedere altrimenti abbandonando il paradigma classico.
La sua proposta si fonda su un assunto forte: esistono solo crisi di domanda, le crisi di offerta sono illusorie (e comunque trascurabili).
Non può che partire da lì poiché la sua ricetta prevede di superare le crisi di domanda trasformandole in una crisi di offerta. In questo modo, se le crisi di offerta non esistono, il problema puo’ ben dirsi risolto.
Facciamo un esempio per capire. Supponiamo che il sistema sia in piena crisi: disoccupazione, povertà, sfiducia. Keynes propone: lo stato crei una domanda artificiosa (a debito), per esempio impegnandosi nella costruzione di autostrade. La proposta ha successo, tutti cominciano a costruire autostrade, tutti diventano asfaltatori ed esperti in bitumi: piena occupazione, ricchezza, fiducia... alé!
Poi il debito sale alle stelle e di autostrade c’è sovrabbondanza. Non c’è più bisogno di asfaltatori ma noi ormai siamo tutti asfaltatori specializzati in asfalti drenanti. Che si fa? Nulla, una crisi del genere è una crisi dell'offerta (sistema produttivo inadeguato alle reali esigenze della popolazione) ma le crisi dell'offerta non esistono per definizione. Keynes è un pragmatico: sposta in avanti il problema nella speranza che in qualche modo la rinnovata fiducia di sistema lo risolva da sé, il lungo periodo non lo interessa (“sul lungo periodo saremo tutti morti”).
Pesa di più il pragmatismo o la miopia keynesiana? Nel corso degli anni trenta Mussolini e il suo allievo Hitler hanno speso forte secondo la ricetta keynesiana. Non in autostrade ma in armamenti. La crisi che ha atterrato mezzo mondo è stata da loro brillantemente schivata. E poi? E poi è partita la guerra: l'apparato produttivo che si ritrovava la Germania, per esempio, era l'ideale per sostenere una simile impresa, la riconversione sarebbe costata lacrime e sangue sfociando nell'inevitabile crisi dell'offerta tipica della ricetta keynesiana. Guardando alla storia europea degli anni successivi possiamo ben dire che in questo caso ha pesato di più la miopia.
Molti studiosi ritengono che Keynes ci faccia cadere dalla padella nella brace e che sia necessario un passo indietro. In altri termini, forse non è poi così vero che i salari siano incomprimibili. Uno di questi studiosi è Scott Sumner.
Per Scott Summer, in particolare, la banca centrale può agire  su P in modo efficace e la politica del lavoro può almeno limitare l'aumento di W tenendo a bada i sindacati, o perlomeno non fornendo loro canali privilegiati attraverso cui agire.
L’esperimento naturale dove da sempre si fronteggiano le varie scuole macroeconomiche è costituito dalla Grande Depressione Americana seguita alla crisi di borsa del 1929. E’ su questo decennio che si concentra l’attenzione di Sumner.
Sumner – sulla base della sua analisi di quel periodo storico – ritiene che i keynesiani abbiano preso un granchio colossale nel giudicare inefficaci le politiche monetarie espansive, questo perché le hanno valutate nel momento in cui erano più esposte all’effetto controbilanciante (offsetting) delle politiche del lavoro tese ad incoraggiare W attraverso una forte azione sindacale e governativa.
E’ chiaro che se aumentano sia W che P l’effetto globale su W/P è nullo. 
***
Una delle cause del tracollo nell'analisi di Sumner...
... Many economists now see the initial contraction as being caused, or at least exacerbated, by monetary policy errors and/or defects in the international gold standard...
Si noti che il gold standard limita l'azione della banca centrale: per alzare P occorre emettere moneta, ma in regime di gold standard la cosa è possibile solo possedendo una adeguata riserva aurea. L'oro esiste in quantità limitata e, specie in periodi dove anche i privati intendono detenerlo come bene rifugio, avere riserve adeguate è difficile.
Quel che manca nei precedenti studi...
... But we still lack a convincing narrative of the many twists and turns in the economy between 1929 and 1940...
Il periodo americano dal 1929 al 1940 è una miniera di informazioni con i suoi 17 schock nella produzione industriale.
Tesi...
... I will show that if we take the gold market seriously we can explain much more about the Great Depression than anyone had thought possible...
I cambiamenti cruciali...
... changes in central bank demand for gold, private sector gold hoarding, and changes in the price of gold...
Poi c' è la politica (New Deal)...
... remaining output shocks are linked to five wage shocks that resulted from the New Deal...
La borsa registra fedelmente i cambiamenti di politica monetaria...
... financial market responses to the policy shocks of the 1930s were consistent with a gold market approach...
In questo senso è un termometro attendibile.
L'illustre precedente...
... In 1963, Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States seemed to provide the definitive account of the role of monetary policy in the Great Depression...
Ma il capolavoro ha un difettino...
... Friedman and Schwartz paid too little attention to the worldwide nature of the Depression, especially the role of the international gold standard...
Non sembra valorizzato il vero nodo...
... the complex interrelationship between gold, wages, and financial markets during the 1930s....
Ciò a consentito che ancora oggi circolino bufale sulla grande depressione. Almeno tre.
Prima...
... Assuming causality runs from financial panic to falling aggregate demand (rather than vice versa)...
Seconda...
... Assuming that sharply falling short-term interest rates and a sharply rising monetary base meant “easy money.”...
Terza...
... Assuming that monetary policy became ineffective once rates hit zero...
La spiacevole conseguenza di miti del genere...
... the view that Fed policy was “easy” during late 2008 was almost universal... we congratulate the Fed for avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s, even as it repeats many of those mistakes....
***
Il problema dei nessi è il problema eterno dello statistico. Qui, fortunatamente, abbiamo una risorsa che aiuta...
... financial markets respond immediately... there was an especially close correlation between news stories related to gold and/or wage legislation and financial market prices...
La sentenza individua due chiari colpevoli del disastro...
... The demand shocks were triggered by gold hoarding (or changes in the price of gold), and the supply shocks were caused by policy-driven changes in hourly wage rates....
livello internazionale la "stretta monetaria" dell'ottobre 1929 appare chiara...
... World monetary policy (as measured by changes in the gold reserve ratio) was stable between June 1928 and October 1929, and then tightened sharply over the following twelve months. It was this policy switch, perhaps combined with bearish sentiment from the reduced prospects for international monetary coordination, which triggered a sharp decline in aggregate demand...
La crisi tedesca del 1931 non va trascurata...
... The German economic crisis of 1931 was a key turning point in the Depression. It led to substantial private gold hoarding, and between mid-1931 and late 1932 strongly impacted U.S. equity markets...
L'errore di Keynes...
... Keynes suggested that the Fed’s spring 1932 open market purchases might have been ineffective due to the existence of a “liquidity trap.”... The open market purchases were associated with extensive gold hoarding, and this prevented any significant increase in the money supply...
Un errore del genere ha impedito ai keynesiani di capire gli anni settanta facendo così sparire un’illustre scuola macroeconomica (ormai Keynes piace solo ai politici spendaccioni e a qualche editorialista d’assalto)...
... A misinterpretation of two key policy initiatives, the open market purchases of 1932 and the NIRA, had a profound impact on macroeconomic theory during the twentieth century. Because early Keynesian theory was based on a misreading of these policies, it could not survive the radically altered policy environment of the postwar period...
Altro insegnamento: le aspettative contano più dei fatti...
... President Roosevelt instituted a dollar depreciation program in April 1933 with the avowed goal of raising the price level back to its 1926 level. This program was unique in U.S. history and was the primary factor behind both the 57 percent surge in industrial production between March and July 1933 and the 22 percent rise in the wholesale price level in the twelve months after March 1933. The initial recovery was triggered not by a preceding monetary expansion, but rather by expectations of future monetary expansion....
La sciagura delle politiche dei salari alti...
... The National Recovery Administration (NRA) adopted a high wage policy in July 1933, which sharply increased hourly wage rates. This policy aborted the recovery, led to a major stock market crash, and helped lengthen the Depression by six to seven years.... a second “Great Depression” began in late July 1933...
Le politiche espansive minate dall'incertezza dei comportamenti ondivaghi...
... The gold-buying program of late 1933... was essentially a monetary feedback rule aimed at returning prices to pre-Depression levels... Although the program helped promote economic recovery, it eventually became a major political issue and led key economic advisors to resign from the Roosevelt Administration...
L'uscita dal gold standard: una finta per almeno due anni...
... Although the conventional view is that Franklin D. Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, U.S. monetary policy became even more strongly linked to gold after 1934 than it had been before 1933. A recovery in the United States finally got underway when the Supreme Court declared the NIRA to be unconstitutional in mid-1935....
Per ogni politica buona c'è una politica cattiva: offsetting everywhere
... During 1937, the expansionary impact of gold dishoarding began to be offset by wage increases, which reflected the resurgence of unions after the Wagner Act and Roosevelt’s landslide reelection...
Casi esemplari di offsetting...
... Because the expansionary impact of dollar depreciation was largely offset by the contractionary impact of the NIRA wage codes, economic historians have greatly underestimated the importance of each shock considered in isolation...
Si tratta di compensazioni che fanno saltare l'edificio keynesiano...
... it is a model based on two assumptions, the ineffectiveness of monetary policy and the lack of a self-correcting mechanism in the economy. The first assumption confuses the two (unrelated) concepts of gold standard policy constraints and absolute liquidity preference. And Keynes’s stagnation hypothesis falsely attributes problems caused by government labor market regulations to inherent defects in free-market capitalism...
Averli trascurati troppo ha ripercussioni ancora oggi nella mentalità di molti analisti che ripetono gli errori di allora nel diagnosticare la crisi attuale...
... If the monetary model in this book is correct, then we have fundamentally misdiagnosed the stock and commodities market crashes of late 2008,... Unfortunately, just as contemporaneous observers misdiagnosed those earlier crashes, our modern policymakers attributed the current recession to financial market instability, rather than to the deeper problem of falling nominal expenditures caused by excessively tight monetary policy....
Come giudicare il New Deal di Roosevelt? Male. Timido in politica monetaria e disastroso in politica del lavoro. Schizoide tra passività e interventismo, senza un piano comprensibile ai mercati. Di fatto ha trascinato la crisi per un decennio, poi le guerre mondiali hanno spazzato via tutto...
... At the deepest level, the causes of the Great Depression and World War II are very similar—both events were generated by policymakers moving unpredictably between passivity and interventionism...
La variabile chiave dei salari...
... high frequency fluctuations in real wages during the 1930s were tightly correlated with movements in industrial production. Understanding real wage cyclicality is the key to understanding the Great Depression...
I gravi errori di Roosevelt...
... New Deal legislation led to five separate nominal wage shocks, which repeatedly aborted promising economic recoveries...
Ma perché un'analisi incentrata sul gold standard è tanto utile?...
... is even more useful during the first five years after the United States departed from the gold standard. Under an international gold standard, the domestic money supply, the interest rate, and gold flows are not reliable indicators of domestic monetary policy...
Solo guardando all'oro capiamo la cosa più difficile da capire in macroeconomia: se siamo in presenza di politiche monetarie espansive.
***
Torniamo al problema metodologico della causalità. Di solito il prima e il dopo è l'unica bussola che possediamo...
... Economists often look for leads and lags...
Per noi il problema è quello di identificare gli schock monetari.
Assumendo emh (efficient market hypothesis) i mercati finanziari - che reagiscono istantaneamente - forniscono il segnale più affidabile circa la politica monetaria.
Ma per molti emh è problematica, lo abbiamo visto quando - nel 2008 - si è interpretato il crollo sui mercati come l'esplosione di una bolla immobiliare anziché come un segnale di politiche monetarie restrittive.
Ad ogni modo anche molti simpatizzanti di emh invocano un approccio più eclettico, per esempio Deirdre McCloskey. Il riferimento è sempre al capolavoro...
... the most relevant example would be Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History. Their work combined an extremely detailed narrative, insightful theoretical analysis, and a wealth of descriptive statistics...
Le ragioni dell'ecclettismo sono fondate: nel momento in cui le aspettative contano più delle azioni il mondo dei media e delle notizie diventa cruciale...
... I develop a narrative of the Great Depression that relies heavily on the relationship between policy news and the financial markets...
Difficile capire i mercati senza conoscere le voci di corridoio che circolano in un Ministero.
Certo, per la statistica sarebbe meglio studiare 100 crisi piuttosto che una sola, ma la crisi americana degli anni trenta presenta una volatilità che ci mette a disposizione una varietà di situazioni che per lo studioso sono una manna, inoltre, occupando un intervallo ben definito consente di isolare le notizie e il “sentiment”...
... It is easy to imagine finding a spurious correlation for a single observation; it is less obvious that it would be easy to do so for many dozens of observations that all exhibit a common causal relationship... It has been my good fortune that stock prices during the Depression were unusually volatile, and unusually closely related to policy-oriented news events linked to the world gold market and also to federal labor market policies....
Inoltre, la bussola dei mercati finanziari, ci mette a disposizione un segnale rapidissimo e affidabile di quel che avviene nel mondo opaco della politica (monetaria e no). I mercati reagiscono in un tempo medio che va dai 4 agli 8 minuti. Non è un modo di dire…
... A recent study of the U.S. Treasury bond market showed that if one divides the trading day into five-minute intervals, virtually all of the largest price changes occur during those five-minute intervals that immediately follow government data announcements...
***
Sul piano dei salari abbiamo 5 schock autonomi...
... On the supply side, there were five autonomous wage shocks during the New Deal, each of which led to higher nominal wage rates...
Sul piano della moneta è possibile registrare altrettante variazioni...
... On the demand side, a series of gold market shocks produced a highly unstable price level, which then impacted real wage rates...
Il mix di questi eventi spiega praticamente tutto...
... The mixture of gold market and labor market shocks can explain the high frequency changes in industrial production, and indeed can explain the Great Depression itself...
Si noti come una causa cruciale del tracollo sia la mancata collaborazione internazionale tra banche centrali, risorsa particolarmente preziosa in regime di gold standard. Il perché è chiaro: visto che l'oro ė disponibile in quantità limitate è bene che sia messo nelle mani della banca centrale più bisognosa. Se invece si crea una corsa all'accaparramento - sia da parte dei privati che da parte delle altre timorose banche centrali - gli inconvenienti sono facilmente prevedibili...
... I concentrate most of the analysis on how a lack of policy cooperation led to central bank gold hoarding and how devaluation fears triggered private gold hoarding... If I were to choose a metaphor for the approach taken in Part II, it might be something like “the Midas curse”—that is, a world impoverished by an excessive demand for gold...
***
Come possiamo concludere? Forse così: il modello classico (domanda e offerta) è perfettamente in grado di spiegare un evento anomalo come la Grande Depressione - e a maggior ragione la crisi del 2008. Il ricorso al confuso pragmatismo informale dei keynesiani non è necessario, sperare che poi le cose vadano “a posto da sole” non è obbligatorio, il convento passa di meglio. Le alternative ci sono e gli economisti le conoscono: meno timidezze nella politica monetaria e briglie al sindacato. La conferma che le cose stiano in questi termini? La conversione dei keynesiani in neo-keynesiani, ovvero in economisti che fondamentalmente accolgono queste critiche.
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lunedì 20 luglio 2015

La ricetta keynesiana che non piace ai keynesiani

Wage stickiness and unflattering accounts of the unemployed and poor:



'via Blog this'



Wage stickiness and unflattering accounts of the unemployed and poor

by  on July 19, 2015 at 1:35 am in EconomicsEducationFood and DrinkPhilosophy | Permalink
It is common for left-wing progressives to complain that conservatives serve up unflattering accounts of the unemployed and poor, such as by calling them “moochers” and the like.
But many versions of the standard Keynesian account, once we deconstruct them a bit, don’t paint such a flattering picture of the unemployed either.  In one Keynesian scenario, many of the unemployed have lacked jobs for years because they have sticky nominal wage demands.  Under one scenario, they could find jobs for $x an hour but won’t take the work.  If government policy could reflate the economy enough, those jobs in nominal terms would offer more and the unemployed would be in essence fooled into taking the offer.  The job would be paying the same in real terms, so the ex ante stubbornness is a big mistake, at least under this account of the matter.
Such a mistake is made throughout years of material suffering and psychological deprivation, including serious problems for one’s children.  Yet a mere nominal trick, by boosting pride just a bit, will move them back into a job.
It is of course a well-known stylized fact that, at least in America, unemployment rates for the poor and undereducated are much higher than for wealthier or better educated people.  So a general citation of “money illusion” won’t rescue the victims from the rather unflattering Keynesian portrait painted here.
Alternatively, the relevant mechanism may operate through the demand for labor, rather than the supply.  Perhaps low-skilled workers cannot be employed at lower wages because their resentment at the low wage would be so high that they would impose unacceptable morale costs on the organizations employing them.  In other words, insult them with a sub-par wage offer and they turn destructive toward the entire organization.  Companies of course prefer to keep these workers at arms’ length under this hypothesis.
If Charles Murray had come up with that hypothesis, he would have been savagely attacked for it.  Yet there is growing evidence, for instance from the work of Alan Blinder, that it is a major cause of wage stickiness.
Left-wing Keynesians are reluctant to acknowledge their own implicit unflattering treatment of the poor, which I should add came (in part) from snobby and elite British economists, including Keynes.  Often microfoundations are considered an embarrassing topic, and the emphasis is on “well, we know that wages are sticky,” with a desire not to look too closely under the hood, or to consider how those stories jive with other deeply held views, many of which try to raise the relative status of the poor and unemployed.
Bryan Caplan is consistent and is also happy to satisfy the publicity condition.  He believes in nominal stickiness as a driver of unemployment (under many circumstances) and he holds a relatively skeptical view of the decision-making capabilities of many (by no means all) of the poor.
The most flattering macro theories toward the poor, undereducated, and unemployed are the complementarity, increasing returns, and RBC “the poor are maximizing given some bad constraints” approaches.  Insider-Outsider models make the unemployed victims of exclusion who don’t even get a chance, rather than potential troublemakers ready to sabotage an enterprise at a moment’s notice.  The same can be said for Scott Sumner’s “musical chairs” account.  As for schools of thought, the rational expectations theorists provide the most flattering picture of the poor, yet in the context of macroeconomics they are very frequently mocked for their unrealistic assumptions.  Search theory models of unemployment, which for instance I have tried to promote, also paint a not unfavorable picture of the jobless, but they too are not very popular in the New Old Keynesian economics.  If I were to generalize, and yes there are many exceptions, but still I would say that these more flattering pictures of the unemployed are more likely to be associated with or embraced by the political Right.
Consistency is hard to come by, and probably always will be
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/07/wage-stickiness-and-unflattering-accounts-of-the-unemployed-and-poor.html#sthash.AP1gmtwM.dpuf




When Keynesians want to gloat, they often point to the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of nominal wage rigidity.  For the latest example, see Krugman on the Irish labor market.  Their unemployment is 14.5%, but the nominal wage index has only fallen by about 2.5%.  Krugman's conclusion:
It is really, really hard to cut nominal wages, which is why reliance on "internal devaluation" is a recipe for stagnation and disaster.
The gloating is easy to understand.  After all, nominal wage rigidity is the driving assumption of the Keynesian model.  Unemployment is just a labor surplus; since wages are the price of labor, the fundamental cause of unemployment has to be excessive wages.  And as long as the wage rigidity is nominal, you can neutralize it by printing money or otherwise boosting demand.

What's hard to understand, though, is Keynesian neglect of - if not outright hostility to - the logical implication of their argument: Wages must fall!  If they're right about nominal wage rigidity, it seems like "Wages must fall!" would be the mantra of all good Keynesians.  But few words are less likely to escape their lips.

Why would this be so?

1. Keynesians could say that nominal wage rigidity is such an intractable problem there's no point discussing it.  That's why Krugman emphasizes that "Ireland is supposed to have flexible markets -- remember, before the crisis it was hailed as an example of successful structural reform."  If wages won't even fall in laissez-faire Ireland, what hope does the rest of the world have?

There are two big problems with this story.  (a) Even if it's true, Keynesians should still militantly oppose any government policy - like the employer health care mandate - that increases labor costs.  (b) Government doesn't face a binary choice between conventional labor market regulation and laissez-faire.  There's a third choice: Low-wage interventionism.  If wages won't adjust on their own, why don't Keynesians ask government to actively push them down?  If that sounds too brutal, see Singapore forclever ways to numb the blow.

2. Keynesians could say that monetary and fiscal policy are easier to promote than wage cuts.  But Keynesians are the first to insist that fiscal policy is a valuable supplement to monetary policy.  Why not hail wage cuts as a valuable supplement to both?  At minimum, Keynesians should heatedly resist any government policy that pushes labor costs in the wrong direction - and remind us that "wrong" = up.

3. Keynesians could - and often do - retreat to the view that wage flexibility is a self-defeating solution to the problem of wage rigidity.  The idea is that wage cuts reduce demand, which in turn exacerbates unemployment.

But this argument is full of holes.  As I've pointed out before, there are strong reasons to think that wage cuts will increase aggregate demand, making this solution doubly attractive.  Consider: Labor income equals wages multiplied by hours worked, so the effect on labor income is ambiguous; and as a matter of pure arithmetic, lower wages imply higher profit income.  In any case, if nominal wage cuts really are as rare as a blue moon, what makes Keynesians so sure that wage cuts would backfire if tried?  Without lots of empirical counter-examples, they have every reason to stick to the common sense position: "If wage rigidity is the cause of unemployment, wage flexibility is the cure."

At this point, Keynesians could just bite the bullet: "Wages must fall!"  But in my experience they don't - and I don't think they're going to start now.  The reason, I'm afraid, is politics.  Keynesians lean left.  They don't want to say, "Wages must fall!" They don't want to think it.  "Wages must fall!" sounds reactionary - a thinly-veiled reproach to centuries of anti-capitalist intellectuals and militant unions.  After all, doesn't it mean that every "pro-labor" regulation and "victory for the workers" has anugly downside - more workers unable to find any job at all?

Keynesians are right to ridicule people who deny the reality of nominal wagerigidity.  But they'd be a lot more persuasive if they put leftist qualms aside and focused on the logic of their own model.  Keynesians have every reason to rant against excessive wages.  They have every reason to rant against regulation that increases labor costs.  They have every reason to rant against unions.  And there hasn't been a better time to rant since the Great Depression.  Oh my Keynesian brothers and sisters, let us rant together.

P.S. I'm doing a Stossel taping in NYC tonight (12/15).  The show won't air until January, but I'm hosting a meet-up after the show at 10 PM, at Becco - 355 West 46th Street.  Hope to see you there.


Labor Market Rigidity: Psychology, Technology, and Peter Pan

Real Wages During the 1981-82 ...David Friedman on Robert Frank...
Back in 2008, some of my favorite economists argued that unemployment wouldn't rise much, even if there were a big nominal shock.  Why not?  "Labor markets aremore flexible than they used to be."  Why?  That was a little hazy, but the main reason seemed to be better management due to more advanced information technology.

I never bought this story, and unfortunately, as David Henderson points out, I wasright.   Today's firms do have better management and more advanced information technology than they used to.  But the most important cause of labor market rigidity,at least in the U.S., is psychology.  People resent wage cuts, especially nominal wage cuts.  This resentment varies over place and time, but even economists feel it.  The awful unintended consequence of this resentment: Employers cut employment instead.  If you talk to employers off the record, they often explain that wage cuts hurt productivity by angering workers, but lay-offs raise productivity by scaring them.

Why was I so skeptical of the view that labor markets had changed?  Because cutting wages when labor demand falls isn't rocket science.  You don't need computers or just-in-time inventory systems to do it.  You don't even need a calculator.  Just cut wages by 2 or 3 percent, and see what happens.  The upshot: If workers didn't have a knee-jerk hatred for wage cuts, especially nominal wage cuts, employers would have solved the unemployment problem millenia ago.  And given this knee-jerk hatred, all the computing power in the world isn't enough to stabilize unemployment in the face of big nominal shocks.

Is labor market rigidity a market failure?  I'm afraid so.  But strangely enough, this market failure is largely caused by anti-market bias!  The main reason workers hate wage cuts is that they imagine that wage-cutting employers are satanically "unfair."  If workers saw wage cuts for what they are - a full-employment mechanism - they'd sing a different tune.  While they wouldn't be happy to see their wages cut, they'd grudgingly accept that a little wage variability is a fair price to pay for near-total employment security.  Once this economically enlightened perspective took hold, employers would eagerly cater to it - and the market failure would largely go away.

According to Peter Pan, "Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies,' there's a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."  As far as I know, he's wrong about fairies.  But if Peter had warned, "Everytime a person says, 'I don't believe in markets,' there's a worker somewhere that loses his job," he wouldn't have been far from the truth.  Scoff if you must!  People can and do cause market failure by believing in it.


On Thursday, Casey Mulligan lectured on his The Redistribution Recession at GMU.  Lots of interesting, neglected evidence on the spike in labor market distortions since 2007.  Yet the talk was marred by Mulligan's commitment to a market-clearing model of labor markets.  When pressed, he was quite insistent that given the expansion of the safety net, the unemployed do not want to work at the current market wage.

To be fair, Mulligan explicitly disavowed the view that the unemployed are happy about their situation.  But in his view, the unemployed would be even less happy to keep doing their old jobs for prevailing rates of compensation.  Unemployment's bad, but so are wage cuts.

Why should you reject Mulligan's view?  There's the obvious fact that wages don'tfluctuate like stock prices, even in the face of large shocks to the labor market.  The best argument, though, is introspection.  Ask yourself:

When someone gets laid-off, what is his main emotional reaction likely to be? 

Sorrow.

When someone gets a nominal wage cut, what is his main emotional reaction likely to be? 

Anger.

In Mulligan's model, lay-offs and wage cuts are two sides of the same coin, and workers should respond identically.  But of course they don't.  Part of the reason is that - especially during recessions - labor markets don't clear.  People who keep their jobs are lucky, earning above the market-clearing wage.  The rest are unlucky, and often struggle for months or even years to find a remotely comparable position. 

Yet there's more psychology going on.  When you're laid-off, you feel exiled from your group.  You're rejected, unfit, unworthy.  Many people in this situation break down and cry.  When you face a pay cut, in contrast, you feel betrayed by your group.  You're insulted, snubbed, scorned.  You might weep, but you're more likely to crumple up the memo explaining the pay cut and hurl it in the trashcan.  Especially during a recession, you probably won't be brave enough to quit in retaliation; instead, you'll shave the quality of your work to extract a petty revenge.

Most Keynesians will probably see Mulligan's market-clearing model as an excuse to reject everything he says.  But this is hasty and unfair.  There's no reason why we can't (a) admit that labor markets don't clear during recessions, yet (b) insist that expanding the welfare state seriously retards the labor market's naturally sluggish adjustment mechanism.  Keynesians' benign view of governments' "response" to the Great Recession is not implied by their model.  Indeed, the Keynesian model specifically implies that Keynesians should look upon new labor market distortions with anger, or at least sorrow.