Was Neoliberal Overreach Inevitable?

In June 2017 a member of the hard left of the Labour party, reviled by the right and centre for his association with left wing leaders and movements around the world and for his anti-nuclear views, in a few short weeks went from one of the most unpopular party leaders ever to achieving the highest vote share for his party since Tony Blair was leader. While this unexpected turn of events was in part the result of mistakes by, and inadequacies of, the Conservative Prime Minister, there is no doubt that many Labour voters were attracted by a programme that unashamedly increased the size of the state.

Contrast this with the United States. A Republican congress seems intent on passing into law a bill that combines taking away health insurance from a large number of citizens with tax cuts for the very rich. Let me quote a series of tweets from Paul Krugman:

“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. Losing health insurance -- especially if you're older, low-income, and unhealthy, which are precisely the people hit -- is a nightmare. And more than 20 million would face that nightmare. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a tax cut. That cut is a lot of money, but because the 1% are already rich, it raises their after-tax income only 2 percent -- hardly life-changing. So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they'll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”

Or to put it another way, 200,000 more deaths over the next ten years for a marginal increase in the after tax income of the 1%. This is no anachronism created by a Trump presidency, but an inevitable consequence of Republican control of Congress and the White House.

Although these two events appear to be in complete contrast, I think they are part of (in the US) and a consequence of (in the UK) a common process, which I will call neoliberal overreach. [1] Why neoliberal? Why overreach? Neoliberal is the easy part. Although some people get hung up on the word, I use it simply to refer to the set of ideas associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. That includes the goal of reducing the role of the state in many areas of society, including its role in either replacing or regulating markets and taxing individuals (see Kansas), particularly reducing taxes for the well off.

Overreach is more contentious. I use the term because I think, in the UK at least, the period from the 1990s until the global financial crisis could be described as a stable neoliberal hegemony. By this I mean that governments largely accepted the transformations that took place in the 1980s, even when Labour or Democrats were in power. Of course changes did occur. In the UK Labour were prepared to involve the state in alleviating poverty in ways that Thatcher never contemplated, but Labour’s concern did not extend to the other end of the income distribution, and the income share of the 1% continued to rise. They were prepared to see an expansion in the size of the state to meet a natural increase in the demand for health, but they also experimented with bringing in market elements into state provision. However none of these changes compared in size to what went before or came afterwards. (As Tom Clark argues, Labour did not change the [essentially neoliberal] political discourse.)

This period was also characterised in the UK and US by macroeconomic stability: inflation had been contained, perhaps through the delegation of monetary policy to central banks, and growth remained strong such that the high levels of unemployment seen in the 1980s gradually disappeared. This was the ‘great moderation’.

It was undone by a major flaw in the neoliberal project: the self-destructive nature of an unregulated financial sector. The reaction to that, if the left had remained in power, might have been greater controls on finance and perhaps some attempt to reduce inequality (as the two are related). But the left lost power, and we got what I call neoliberal overreach.

Neoliberal deceit in the UK

By 2008 the conversion of the right in the UK to neoliberal ideas was largely complete. This meant that they were determined to continue where Thatcher had left off. But they faced what appeared to be an insurmountable problem: voters wanted the NHS (and other public services) and they wanted more of it partly because they were getting older and wealthier. The recession gave the right the opportunity to continue the neoliberal project by deceit, using two mechanisms.

The first was austerity, which I have talked about many times, but alas what I and other macroeconomists say has so far reached only a small minority (a minority which, importantly, includes the Labour party). What I call deficit deceit was the pretence that we needed above all else to cut spending (that would reduce the size of the state) because otherwise the markets would not buy the government’s debt. There was never any real evidence to back this story up, and plenty to suggest it was nonsense. The fevered imagination of some market participants who turned out to be wrong does not count as evidence. But the politics to make deficit deceit possible was all there: a recent financial crisis, consumers cutting back on debt themselves, a Treasury worried as Treasuries do, a central bank head who acted as central bank heads often do, and a Eurozone crisis that mediamacro made no attempt to understand.

The second deceit was immigration. Elements in society are apt to blame immigrants at a time of rising unemployment and falling real wages, and terrorism gave this an extra twist. The right and their supporters in the press had decided before the crisis that they could exploit fears over immigration to their advantage, and after the recession this became a more powerful weapon. They talked about how immigration was responsible for reduced access to public services and falling real wages, and they promised to bring levels of immigration down. It was deceit because those in charge knew full well that immigration benefited the economy in various ways and as a result they had no intention of really controlling it. But, as with austerity, the deceit worked: so much so that an already weak opposition appeared not to know how to respond.

Some may disapprove of the language I use here. Should a normally sober Oxford macroeconomist talk about political parties deliberately deceiving the electorate? It is not a view I have adopted lightly, but when a Chancellor repeatedly argues that public spending must be cut to meet deficit targets at the same time as reducing inheritance or corporation tax, or a Prime Minister continually repeats the lie that immigration reduces access to public services, what other conclusion can you come to? They could get away with this deceit because academic economists (the majority of whom know that austerity would reduce output, and that immigration improves the public finances) are largely ignored by the media.

Austerity and the deceit required to achieve it was neoliberal overreach in the UK. Austerity quickly became a disaster because it was done at just the wrong time, when monetary policy was unable to offset its effects. That hurt the economy a lot. Whether GDP was reduced by a few percentage points temporarily or permanently we may never know for sure. But for the political reasons I have already outlined, combined with feeble opposition, the Conservatives got away with it sufficiently to win a general election in 2015.

Populism and anti-neoliberalism

The deceit over immigration was also key to a second disaster: the vote to leave the EU. Although the case to Remain in the EU was led by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, neither could combat anti-immigration rhetoric with a positive case because of their earlier deception. For this reason alone you could also label Brexit as a consequence of neoliberal overreach. More importantly, factions on the right that actively campaigned for Brexit did so in part because they believed they could only achieve their regulation free neoliberal nirvana by doing so.

As Jan-Werner Müller writes

“The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.”

It would be wrong to say that Brexit or Trump represent an evolution of neoliberalism. Both promote strong restrictions to trade, and so it would be more accurate to view Brexit as a split within neoliberalism. [2] What is clearer to me is that populism is a consequence of neoliberalism as reflected in the policies of the political right. In the UK immigration was used as a scapegoat for the impact of austerity, which fuelled the Brexit vote. In the US one of the first acts of Reagan was to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which led eventually to the precursor and cheerleaders for Trump: talk radio and Fox news. In addition neoliberalism demonises any kind of regional or industrial strategy designed to alleviate the impact of globalisation.

Why was it Corbyn who led the revolt against austerity in 2017 rather than Miliband in 2015? One obvious explanation is that the more ‘moderate’ left in both the UK, much of Europe and the Democratic establishment in the US had become compromised by neoliberal hegemony. Instead it required those who had stayed faithful to socialist ideas together with the young who had not witnessed the defeats of the 1980s to mount an effective opposition to austerity and perhaps neoliberalism more generally. [***]

I am less familiar with the details of US politics, which are clearly different in some ways from the UK. The way the Republican party has co-opted both race and culture to their cause is different and clearly crucial. But there are plenty of similarities as well. Both countries have had austerity combined with tax cuts for the rich. Both countries have a right wing media which politicians can no longer control, leading to Brexit and Trump respectively. Bernie Sanders, like Corbyn, came from nowhere preaching socialism, but unlike the UK the established Democratic party halted his rise to power.

Was Overreach Inevitable

I’m not going to speculate whether and by how much this neoliberal overreach will prove fatal: whether Corbyn’s ‘glorious defeat’ marks the ‘death throes of neoliberalism’ or something more modest. Instead I want to ask whether overreach was inevitable, and if so why. Many in the centre ground of politics would argue that it would have been perfectly feasible, after the financial crisis, to change neoliberalism in some areas but maintain it in others. It is conceivable that this is where we will end up. But when you add up what ‘some areas’ would amount to, it becomes clear that it would be hard to label the subsequent regime neoliberal.

I think it is quite possible to imagine reforming finance in a way that allows neoliberalism to function elsewhere. Whether it is politically possible without additional reforms I will come to. If we think about populism, one key economic force behind its rise has been globalisation (see Dani Rodrik here for example). If we want to retain the benefits of globalisation, then counteracting its negative impact on some groups or communities becomes essential. Whether that involves the state directly, or indirectly through an industrial strategy, neither of those solutions is neoliberal.

Then consider inequality. I would argue that inequality, and more specifically the extreme wealth of a small number of individuals, has played an important role in both neoliberal overreach (in the US, the obsession within the Republican party with tax cuts for the wealthy) and populism (the financing of the Brexit campaign, Trump himself). More generally, extreme wealth disparities fuel political corruption. Yet ‘freeing’ ‘wealth creators’ of the ‘burden’ of taxation is central to neoliberalism: just look at how the loaded language in this sentence has become commonplace.

Indeed it could well be that gross inequality at the very top is an important dynamic created by neoliberalism. Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva have shown (paper) how reductions in top rates of tax - a hallmark of neoliberalism in the 1980s - may itself have encouraged rent seeking by CEOs which makes inequality even worse. Rent extractors naturally seek political defences to preserve their wealth, and the mechanisms that sets in place may not embody any sense of morality, leading to the grotesque spectacle of Republican lawmakers depriving huge numbers of health insurance to be able to cut taxes for those at the top. It may also explain why the controls on finance actually implemented have been so modest, and in the US so fragile.

The other key dynamic in neoliberal overreach has to be the ideology itself. In the UK surveys suggest that fewer than 10% of the population favour cutting taxes and government spending to achieve a smaller state (see my next post). There is equally no appetite to privatise key state functions: indeed renationalisation of some industries is quite popular. Yet the need to reduce the size and scope of the state has become embedded in the political right. Given that, it is not hard to understand the motivation behind the twin deceits of austerity and immigration control by Conservative led governments.

The dynamic consequences of extreme inequality and an unpopular ideology both suggest that neoliberal overreach may not be a bug but a feature.

[1] Reasons why this discussion might focus on the US and UK are discussed here.

[2] Among those who voted for Brexit, the two main groups were social conservatives who had a social rather than economic fear of immigration and the left behind who were deceived into thinking it was the EU and immigration that was behind their plight rather than neoliberalism itself. Liberal leavers may amount to little more than a few MPs and small businesses. Even among Conservative MPs, it is not clear that neoliberalism was the key factor in determining their position on Brexit.

***Postscript 06/07/17  It came out after I had written this post, but this article by William Davies expresses much better what I was trying to say in this paragraph.  

Inequality or poverty

Tony Blair famously said:

“[It’s] not that I don’t care about the gap [between high and low incomes], so much as I don’t care if there are people who earn a lot of money. They’re not my concern. I do care about people who are without opportunity, disadvantaged and poor.”

Most people, including the Labour government, interpreted that as focusing on poverty rather than inequality. For an excelllent discussion of historic trends in inequality and how they were influenced, among other things, by poverty reduction programmes pushed by Labour (as well as how that may unwind in the near future) see this excellent discussion by Rick. 

I recently saw a very clear defence of the position that poverty mattered more than inequality from Miles Kimball. His argument comes from surveys that quantify a basic principle of economics, which is diminishing marginal utility. He quotes results which suggest that a dollar of income means an awful lot more to someone earning half the average wage than someone who earns double the average wage. He suggests the results come close to validating the second principle of justice suggested by John Rawls. To put the idea at its most simple, we should not worry about the rich too much because their extra money buys them very little extra happiness, but instead focus on reducing poverty.

Now of course this point is irrelevant if we are talking about reducing poverty by taxing the rich. The rich are a very good source of money, because they will not miss it very much. The importance comes if we compare two societies. One has no poverty, but a significant number of very rich people. The other has no rich people, but still has poverty. Miles’s argument is that we should prefer the society with no poverty to the one with no super-rich. In a static sense I think that is right, but I have dynamic concerns that I will now come to.

Right at the start of Miles’s discussion is an interesting paragraph:

“Before going on, let me concede first of all that the amount of wealth held by the ultra-rich is truly astonishing, and that making sure that the ultra-rich do not convert their wealth into total control of our political system is important. Documenting and studying in detail all of the ways in which the ultra-rich influence politics is crucial. But short of the ultra-rich subverting our political system, the focus of our concern about inequality should be how well we take care of the poor; whether money needed to help the poor comes from middle-income families or the rich is an important issue, but still of secondary importance to how well we take care of the poor.”

I want to explore a point that Miles does not pursue. If money matters so little to the very rich, why would they want to become ultra-rich to an astonishing degree, and go on to try and control the political system to ensure they get even more? The answer comes from exactly the same logic as Miles uses. If £1000 means nothing to you because you are very rich, if opportunities arise you put effort into making that £1000 into £10,000 or £100,000. The fact that the ultra-rich have wealth that is truly astonishing may not be an accident, but may be a result of exactly the same principle that Miles explores: diminishing marginal utility. The rich are no different from everyone else in wanting more utility, except for them it requires huge amounts of money to get it. [1]

To see why this can matter, consider an argument put forward by Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva that I discussed here. Why has pre-tax income for the 1% risen so much in the two countries, the UK and US, that in the 1980s saw large reductions in top income tax rates? The argument these authors put forward is that with punitive tax rates, there was little incentive for CEOs or finance high-flyers to use their monopoly power to extract rent (take profits away) from their firms. It would only gain you a few thousands after tax, which as they were already well paid would not increase their utility very much. However once top tax rates were cut, it now became worthwhile for these individuals to put effort into rent extraction.

As I discussed here, the bonus culture may be the means of rent extraction that was incentivised by cutting top tax rates. If you want to see the kind of thing I have in mind in action, read this article by Ben Chu on what happened to Theresa May’s wish to see annually binding votes by shareholders on executive pay. That kind of lobbying takes effort. It worked, and as a result top executives at the builder Crest Nicholson can ignore a shareholder vote against changes to their compensation rules. No wonder executive pay seems to rise even when a company’s fortunes turn sour.

So it seems to me that I could take the same basic principle that Miles explores and write a very different conclusion. Once we allow those at the top the opportunity to earn very high incomes, and the only way these individuals can see to get additional utility is to embark on rent seeking, we can at the very least divert their effort from socially enhancing activities (i.e improving the company). When those efforts extend to influencing the political system, we are in serious trouble. These activities may culminate in taking over the political system, which after all is what has happened in the US, with potentially disastrous consequences. For that reason alone, inequality matters as well as poverty.

[1] Of course status linked to competitive consumption is also important.

Inequality under the Labour government

In the last few months I have sometimes been told that the last Labour government did nothing to reverse the rise of inequality seen under the previous Conservative administration. It is a serious charge, given the harm that inequality creates. But it is also incorrect, and here is a nice chart that shows why.

The Gini coefficient measures inequality. The black line looks at incomes, but the grey line looks at full time earnings. It shows that inequality in earnings was rising throughout the period, including when Labour was in power. Inequality of incomes was flatter while Labour was in power.

The chart is taken from a paper by Mike Brewer and Liam Wren-Lewis (short summary here). The authors use microdata to explain these divergent trends in the 1990s and 2000s. They find four factors at work.

“First, inequality between those with different employment statuses has fallen, primarily due to a fall in the number of unemployed. Second, employment taxes have played a larger role since 1991 in mitigating the increase in inequality of gross employment income than they did before 1991. Third, investment income has contributed less to total income inequality since 1991, largely due to the decline in its importance as an income source. Finally, a rise in the relative incomes of pensioners and households with children under five – both groups that benefited from reforms to welfare benefits and tax credits during the 1990s and (especially) 2000s – has pulled inequality down. Overall, since 1991 these four factors have almost entirely offset the impact on income inequality of the inequality-increasing changes in the distribution of earnings and self-employment income.”

Some of these factors may not have owed much to government policy, but others clearly did. The bottom line is that the last Labour government did quite a lot to reduce inequality. Only once you recognise that can you be realistic about what it would take to do more. Here are some ideas from Tony Atkinson, and I personally would be even more radical in one particular area. 

Inequality, business leaders and more delusions on the left

Those who think current levels of inequality are not a problem can skip this one

The Blair governments did a lot to fight poverty, but were famously relaxed about inequality, or more specifically the earnings of the 1%. For many in those governments this reflected their own views, but it also reflected a political calculation. The calculation went as follows. To win, Labour needed to be seen as competent to run the economy. The media all too often look to business leaders to answer that question. So Labour needed to be business friendly. Now being business friendly should mean creating an environment that business can thrive in. However to get the approval of business leaders you also need to create an environment where business leaders can thrive personally, and they are very much part of the 1%. QED.

Labour today is not following this strategy. First, Miliband has said quite clearly that he sees tackling inequality as a major issue: "Now I have heard some people say they don’t know what we stand for. So let me take the opportunity today to spell it out in the simplest of terms. It is what I stood for when I won the leadership of this party. And it is what I stand for today. This country is too unequal. And we need to change it." Second, it has two policies that directly impinge on the 1%: the mansion tax and restoring the 50p income tax band.

There are some on the left who dismiss these measures as marginal. One of the comments on my earlier post said that “When it comes to the broad trend of ever greater inequality there really is no meaningful difference between the main parties.” This seems to me a colossal tactical error. To see why, you only have to note what has happened over the last week in the UK. Various business leaders have proclaimed that a Labour government would be a disaster. Stefano Pessina, who among other things runs the Boots chain, declined to elaborate on why exactly Labour would be a disaster. In contrast, he was quite clear that the UK leaving the EU would be a big mistake, which of course is much more likely to happen under a Conservative government!

There is an obvious inference. Labour would not so much be bad for business, but bad for business leaders personally. [1] They, unlike some on the left, recognise that Miliband is not Blair, and that there has been a key shift in the direction of Labour policy. So they will do what they can to stop Labour winning. Labour in turn has responded by attacking the tax avoidance practiced by many of these companies. This is the beginnings of a major battle.

There are at least two important implications. First, the non-partisan media need to understand what is going on. Getting business leaders to comment on the relative merits of the two main parties programmes is no longer a neutral decision - it is giving additional airtime to one side. Second, everyone who cares about inequality needs to realise the importance of this election. Inequality is a key election issue, and there is a very meaningful difference between the two main sides. Certain business leaders clearly understand that.

[1] Another possibility is that they think Labour would be much tougher on business tax avoidance than the Conservatives, but saying this in public would be embarrassing.  

Redistribution under the UK coalition government

In his party conference speech, David Cameron did mention inequality. He did not say, as Ed Miliband said recently (see postscript to this post): “This country is too unequal. And we need to change it.” Instead he said “Under Labour, inequality widened. With us, it’s narrowed.” So do the two quotes above mean that both major parties now aim to reduce inequality?

Here is the evolution of two aggregate measures of UK income inequality over time, as calculated by the IFS from this recent study.

The main change is the large increase in inequality that occurred under Mrs Thatcher from 1979 to 1990. There was then a small tendency for inequality to increase until around 2007, since when inequality has fallen. The main reason for this recent fall is the decline in real wages over this period, while benefits have remained more constant in real terms. The share of the top 1% also rose during the Thatcher period, but unlike the measure above continued to rise sharply until around 1997/8. It then remained relatively stable until around 2004, rose sharply until the financial crisis, when it fell back in 2010/11 to end 90s/early 00s levels. (For details, access the PSE database here.)

If the decline in real wages since the financial crisis has reduced overall inequality, what impact has government fiscal changes had? In a landmark report issued this week, Paola De Agostini, John Hills and Holly Sutherland analyse who has gained and who has lost as a result of the direct tax and transfer changes made by the coalition government. (Indirect taxes are excluded.) One of the things I liked about the analysis is that it attempted (with some success) to reconcile its own results with similar analysis undertaken by the UK Treasury and the IFS.

The headline result is shown in this chart.

The black dots track who has gained and who has lost as a result of the coalition’s changes to direct taxation and benefits, including pensions. The poorest have lost out, while the main gains have been in the middle of the top half of the income distribution. So while a decline in real wages may have reduced inequality in the years following the recession, government policy has attempted to move things in the opposite direction. So perhaps what the Prime Minister should have said is “Under Labour, inequality widened. With us, it’s narrowed, but we are doing what we can to change that.”

There are many other interesting results from the study, but let me mention just three here. The first is contained in the most right hand black dot. Over the period in which the coalition has been in power, changes in direct taxes and benefits have had no significant overall impact on incomes, compared to what would have happened if indexation had run its normal course. That means that the impact of benefit cuts in reducing the deficit has been almost exactly offset by tax cuts.

The second told me something I should have realised about the Treasury’s analysis of the distributional impact of budget measures. The Treasury’s analysis is similar, but with one important difference - the biggest losers in their figures are the top income decile. As the report shows, the main reason for this is straightforward - the Treasury analysis starts from January 2010, not (as in this report) from May 2010. Why does this make so much difference? Because the new higher 50p tax rate introduced by Labour actually started in April 2010. George Osborne subsequently reduced this to 45p. So the Treasury’s figures show the top decile losing as a result of the top tax rate going from 40p to 45p, while this study starts at the 50p the coalition inherited.

The third bit of the analysis I wanted to mention was how these numbers might change by 2019/20 under current plans. The broad picture remains similar, but with one large question mark for the lowest decile, concerning the introduction of the new Universal Credit (UC). One of the hopes for UC is that it will increase the uptake of benefits. The report calculates that if everyone who currently claims any one of the benefits UC replaces takes up UC, then UC will lead to large (+3%) overall gains for the bottom decile. Whether this will happen depends in part on the efficiency and manner in which it is introduced.

Bonus Culture

The comments I received on my post about a maximum wage were interesting for many reasons. In this post I just want to focus on one common misperception. This is that a maximum wage, because it interferes with the market, must be distortionary and therefore something that should tend to be avoided. This in turn assumes that the actual economy approximates the competitive efficient allocation students learn about in Econ 101, which is what neoliberals would like people to believe.

To see why this might well not be true when it comes to high pay, I want to briefly discuss a paper (NBER version here) by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, which has the title of this post. I will try and make my discussion as non-technical as possible.

The basic idea is as follows. Jobs involve two types of activity or output, one of which is measurable and one is not. To reflect this, pay involves two components: a fixed component, which the worker always gets, and a performance element (the bonus) which depends on the worker’s measured output. The firm wants the worker to undertake both types of activity, so it sets the appropriate relationship between the two elements of pay to make sure the worker puts the right amount of effort into each type of activity. I will talk about what these two types of activity might be in practice below.

So far, so good. But now we add an information problem. There are two types of workers: the ordinary and the talented. The talented worker is much better at producing the measurable output. The firm cannot tell the two types apart, but it would naturally like to attract some of the more talented workers. One way it can do this is to offer two types of remuneration package: a ‘low bonus’ type and a ‘high bonus’ type. Talented workers will be attracted to the high bonus package, because their talent means that they can achieve high measured output (and therefore high pay) with relatively little effort.

This is useful for the firm, but it creates a problem. The bonus payment is now doing two jobs: allocating worker effort between activities, and attracting talented workers. In these circumstances, the bonus payment can depart from its efficient level. In particular the paper shows (p13) that in a competitive labour market, bonus payments designed for talented workers will be too high, in the sense that they lead to these workers putting too much effort into the measured activity, and too little into the other activity.

So what might these two activities (one measurable, one not) be in practice. The paper suggests, for measurable activities, things like sales, output, trading profits, and billable medical procedures, and for immeasurable activities things like intangible investments affecting long run value, financial or legal risk-taking, and cooperation among individuals or divisions. So the problem is that, in an effort to attract talented workers, the firm over incentivises effort on achieving tangible short term goals at the expense of work on intangible, longer term objectives.

The relationship to my discussion of a maximum wage should now be clear. To quote from the paper: “Turning to policy implications, we show that a cap on bonuses can restore balance in agents’ incentives, and even re-establish the first best, as long as it does not induce employers to switch to some alternative “currency” to screen employees.”

If you want to think about how this idea relates to alternative models of executive pay and competition for talent, I would encourage you to read section 1.1 of the paper, which is not too technical. The paper also contains a lot more that will be of interest to economists.

The general point I want to make is this. We can think about the minimum wage as an unfortunate interference in the market which can nevertheless be justified on equity grounds, or as a means of reducing poverty. However we can also see it as a way of increasing the efficiency of the economy, because many employers of low paid workers can exploit their monopoly power to pay wages that are below the efficient level (monopsony). Exactly the same may be true of the maximum wage. It could be that top pay is inefficiently high because executives have monopoly power, or it could be as this paper suggests because the firm wants to attract unobservable talent. I see no reason to presume that the dramatic increase in top pay reflects increases in the productivity of those workers.

  

If minimum wages, why not maximum wages?

I was in a gathering of academics the other day, and we were discussing minimum wages. The debate moved on to increasing inequality, and the difficulty of doing anything about it. I said why not have a maximum wage? To say that the idea was greeted with incredulity would be an understatement. So you want to bring back price controls was once response. How could you possibly decide on what a maximum wage should be was another.

So why the asymmetry? Why is the idea of setting a maximum wage considered outlandish among economists?

The problem is clear enough. All the evidence, in the US and UK, points to the income of the top 1% rising much faster than the average. Although the share of income going to the top 1% in the UK fell sharply in 2010, the more up to date evidence from the US suggests this may be a temporary blip caused by the recession. The latest report from the High Pay Centre in the UK says:

“Typical annual pay for a FTSE 100 CEO has risen from around £100-£200,000 in the early 1980s to just over £1 million at the turn of the 21st century to £4.3 million in 2012. This represented a leap from around 20 times the pay of the average UK worker in the 1980s to 60 times in 1998, to 160 times in 2012 (the most recent year for which full figures are available).”

I find the attempts of some economists and journalists to divert attention away from this problem very revealing. The most common tactic is to talk about some other measure of inequality, whereas what is really extraordinary and what worries many people is the rise in incomes at the very top. The suggestion that we should not worry about national inequality because global inequality has fallen is even more bizarre. 

What lies behind this huge increase in inequality at the top? The problem with the argument that it just represents higher productivity of CEOs and the like is that this increase in inequality is much more noticeable in the UK and US than in other countries, yet there is no evidence that CEOs in UK and US based firms have been substantially outperforming their overseas rivals. I discussed in this post a paper by Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva which set out a bargaining model, where the CEO can put more or less effort into exploiting their monopoly power within a company. According to this model, CEOs in the UK and US have since 1980 been putting more bargaining effort than their overseas counterparts. Why? According to Piketty et al, one answer may be that top tax rates fell in the 1980s in both countries, making the returns to effort much greater.

If you believe this particular story, then one solution is to put top tax rates back up again. Even if you do not buy this story, the suspicion must be that this increase in inequality represents some form of market failure. Even David Cameron agrees. The solution the UK government has tried is to give more power to the shareholders of the firm. The High Pay Centre notes that: “Thus far, shareholders have not used their new powers to vote down executive pay proposals at a single FTSE 100 company.”, although as the FT report shareholder ‘revolts’ are becoming more common. My colleague Brian Bell and John Van Reenen do note in a recent study “that firms with a large institutional investor base provide a symmetric pay-performance schedule while those with weak institutional ownership protect pay on the downside.” However they also note that “a specific group of workers that account for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade [are] financial sector workers .. [and] .. the financial crisis and Great Recession have left bankers largely unaffected.”

So increasing shareholder power may only have a small effect on the problem. So why not consider a maximum wage? One possibility is to cap top pay as some multiple of the lowest paid, as a recent Swiss referendum proposed. That referendum was quite draconian, suggesting a multiple of 12, yet it received a large measure of popular support (35% in favour, 65% against). The Swiss did vote to ban ‘golden hellos and goodbyes’. One neat idea is to link the maximum wage to the minimum wage, which would give CEOs an incentive to argue for higher minimum wages! Note that these proposals would have no disincentive effect on the self-employed entrepreneur. 

If economists have examined these various possibilities, I have missed it. One possible reason why many economists seem to baulk at this idea is that it reminds them too much of the ‘bad old days’ of incomes policies and attempts by governments to fix ‘fair wages’. But this is an overreaction, as a maximum wage would just be the counterpart to the minimum wage. I would be interested in any other thoughts about why the idea of a maximum wage seems not to be part of economists’ Overton window. 

Triangulation, Miliband and Inequality

This starts off with some rather specific politics, but we get back to some economics at the end.

This post is prompted by an article by Andrew Rawnsley on Labour leader Ed Miliband’s dismal poll ratings, despite the Labour party being ahead in the polls. Rawnsley carefully goes through possible explanations. Is it because he is too left wing? No, the public are to the left of Labour on a number of issues. Is it because Labour’s policies are unpopular? No, some of the policies that have been announced have been very popular, like an energy price freeze. So it seems to be something more personal. To quote: “Voters consistently tell pollsters that they regard him as inexperienced, weak and incapable of being decisive.”

Let’s take each of those in turn. Inexperienced does not wash: as Rawnsley notes: “He has been a member of the cabinet, which is more than either Tony Blair or David Cameron had been before they became prime minister.” But ‘weak’ also seems inappropriate: as Neil Kinnock points out, he had the courage to take on the Murdoch press when other politicians did not.

Wait a minute. Here we have an obvious solution to the Miliband puzzle. The right wing press has taken every opportunity to attack Miliband. Do people tell pollsters that Miliband is not fit to be Prime Minister because they keep reading that he is not fit to be Prime Minister? Rawnsley mentions this possibility, and rather than dismissing it, he simply says that Labour has to “deal with this rather than whinge about it.” He goes on to say

“When you know that a substantial section of the media is looking for any opportunity to ridicule you, best not to gift them a picture of you looking silly as you are vanquished by a bacon butty. It was even less wise to try to truckle to those who would destroy him by sticking a daft grin on his face and posing with a copy of the Sun.”

For those who do not already know why that was a crass thing to do, see here. Go back to those personal failings again. Weak and incapable of being decisive? What could appear more weak and indecisive than trying to appease the Murdoch press that is conducting a campaign against you?

Posing with a copy of the Sun is trivial stuff, but it may be emblematic. What is clearly lacking for Labour at the moment is what those in the US would describe as firing up the base. This is particularly important for Labour, because it is strong among young people, but young people tend to be cynical about politics and less likely to vote. It is why many think David Axelrod has been brought in to help. There is also an obvious issue that can do this job for Labour: inequality. Just as in the US, people think income and wealth should be more equally shared, and their perceptions underestimate how much inequality there actually is. Whether justified or not, high CEO and banker’s pay is not popular.

When in government, Labour was strong on measures to tackle poverty, but famously ‘relaxed’ about inequality. For some in the Labour leadership this may have reflected their underlying beliefs, but for others it may have been just a device to distance the party from ‘old Labour’. If the latter, that job has been done. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has talked about wanting to see the benefits of growth widely distributed, but if that is a subtle call for less inequality it is way too coded to fire up anyone. Labour, unlike the Conservatives or LibDems, is pledged to restore the 50p top tax rate, but it appears only as a means of getting the deficit down.

So why does Miliband not follow Obama and put inequality centre stage? This could achieve the twin goals of rallying those on the left, and appearing strong and decisive. For a possible answer we can go back to Rawnsley again. “There are senior Labour people, and not just of the Blairite persuasion, who think that he has struck too many positions that look ‘anti-business’ and ‘anti-aspirational’. That may well put off some swing voters ….” So the advice Miliband may be receiving is don’t mention inequality, because that might appear anti-business and anti-aspirational. Perhaps the same people have suggested he is photographed posing with some banking CEOs instead?

House prices, rents, and supply

In a previous post I argued that high house prices, in the UK and perhaps elsewhere, could simply reflect lower expected long term interest rates. This had some people puzzled, because it appeared to ignore supply and demand. Surely it is higher demand combined with inelastic supply (supply that is insensitive to changes in prices) which is to blame for high house prices? This short post clarifies how both views can be correct at the same time. I also raise a question about housing wealth and inequality at the end.

The easiest way to think about this, at least for me, is to imagine no one owned their own home. Everyone rents, and houses are owned by landlords. Rents represent the price of ‘housing services’, which is the flow of benefits we get by having a roof over our head. If we calculate these rents in real terms, we have the relative price of housing services compared to other goods. Real rents will reflect the supply and demand for these housing services. If we all suddenly decided we wanted to rent a house in the countryside as well as our house in the city (or vice versa), and if the supply of houses did not increase, rents would rise dramatically until enough of us thought that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Suppose real interest rates fall, but the supply of housing is fixed. There is no particular reason why lower real interest rates should change the demand for housing services relative to other goods. Then with no change in demand or supply, rents do not change in real terms. But house prices will, because they are - to use a bit of jargon - the present discounted value of future rents, where the discount rate is the real interest rate. This is a shorthand way of saying that lower interest rates mean that investments in financial assets yield lower returns than the same amount invested in housing, so investors will want to own houses rather than financial assets. This pushes up house prices until the rate of return on both types of asset are equalised.

That assumes housing supply is inelastic, which is a reasonable assumption in the short term. However suppose by some means (economic or political) these higher house prices generated an increase in the supply of houses to rent. If the demand for housing services is unchanged, greater supply will begin to push down rents. Falling rents push down the yield from owning housing assets. As a result, housing becomes less attractive as an asset, and prices begin to fall.

So if housing supply was very elastic, permanently lower real interest rates need not lead to higher house prices in the long run. Instead, they could produce much lower rents, because a lot more houses get built. Such an outcome seems unlikely in a country like the UK, but it could happen in a country like the US where there is plenty of land available to build on. This is one possible reason for the different trends in house prices in different countries that I commented on in my previous post.

So my original post was certainly not suggesting that increasing housing supply would have no impact on prices. What it was suggesting was that in evaluating whether current prices represent a bubble, we need to allow for the possibility that high prices today reflect a view that real interest rates may stay low for some time.

If interest rates do stay low for some time, and this does keep house prices high, an interesting question is why this matters. Take the case where everyone rents. Rents are unchanged, so those renting are no worse off. Landlords appear richer, but their future income in real terms has not changed. If people own their own houses, their houses have not suddenly got bigger or better. This is related to, but is not quite the same as, a question recently raised by Chris Dillow. It is different because it potentially applies to anyone who owns assets that get more valuable simply because interest rates fall, and not because the future incomes they generate increase. It is the same issue that is raised when some complain that Quantitative Easing, by - say - raising share prices, is benefiting the rich. I think this change in wealth does matter, as this evidence suggests, and I hope to explore the reasons why in a future post.

Pareto, Inequality and Government Debt

Or is economics inherently right wing?

I noted in passing in an earlier post that Pareto efficiency was obviously not a value free criteria. So those who argue that economists should only look for Pareto improvements – changes where no one is made worse off – are making a value judgement. One, and only one, of its implicit normative assumptions is that inequality does not matter. For others see, for example, Elizabeth Anderson (pdf, HT Anon). Now you could argue that an assumption that inequality does not matter intrinsically is at least internally consistent with the conventional assumption that personal utility depends only on personal variables. However as that assumption is clearly incorrect, this is a rather weak defence.

(You could also reasonably argue that Pareto improving increases in inequality could have a negative impact on the personal variables of others that conventional economic analysis ignores. So, for example, rising incomes of the 1% - even if this initially comes from just increasing the size of the pie - allows that 1% greater political power, which they will subsequently use to redistribute income away from the 99%.)

This is hardly a new point. For just two recent examples of other posts saying the same thing: Richard Serlin here, and Ingrid Robeyns here. It only has to keep being said because too many students are taught that economists like the Pareto criteria because it is value free. One of the comments to that second post says that the task should not be to “import liberal or left-wing moral philosophy into economics. It’s to scrub right-wing, libertarian moral philosophy out of it.” Well, in my usual moderate manner, I’d say we should at least expose it.

A more sophisticated defence of Pareto optimality is the second welfare theorem, which says that we can separate issues of distribution from issues of allocative efficiency. So, if some Pareto improving measure only makes the 1% better off, we can go ahead with it and deal with any reduction in social welfare generated by additional inequality using lump sum transfers. One obvious problem with this idea is that there are no lump sum transfers. Another is that we do not as a society decide at some date every year what the optimal distribution of income to implement is. In practice the only chance of reversing any inequality created by a Pareto improving measure is to use compensation alongside that measure, but then agents will recognise this connection which in turn will influence incentives.

The only possibly original point I wanted to make here is that the absurdity of restricting policies to Pareto improvements becomes immediately apparent if we think about government debt. Measures to reduce currently high levels of debt will almost certainly make current generations worse off, because they will have to pay the taxes (or whatever) to get debt down. Yet I do not often hear people arguing that we have to let debt stay high because the government can only implement Pareto improvements. If you think about it for a second, restricting government debt policy to Pareto improvements would be a sure fire recipe for deficit bias.

While this may be obvious, textbooks still make a big deal of dynamic inefficiency. This is the idea that the amount of productive capital in society can be too high, so that too much output is going to preserving that level of capital (replacement investment to offset depreciation etc), and not enough to consumption. If that is true, then if the current generation saves less, everyone can be made better off. Government intervention to discouraging saving would be a Pareto improvement: the current generation consumes more because they save less, but future generations consume more because less output needs to go to replacement investment.

The symmetrical case is where there is too little capital, which also reduces long run consumption compared to what could be achieved. Yet the implication in many textbooks is that this case is not one we should worry about, because to change it (by raising saving) would make the current generation worse off and is therefore not a Pareto improvement. The discussion in Romer, for example, is all about whether economies are dynamically inefficient rather than sub-optimally small. We don’t think this way about government debt, so why should we when it comes to productive capital?

Why is there this emphasis on only looking at Pareto improvements? I think you would have to work quite hard to argue that it was intrinsic to economic theory - it would be, and is, quite possible to do economics without it. (Many economists use social welfare functions.) But one thing that is intrinsic to economic theory is the diminishing marginal utility of consumption. Couple that with the idea of representative agents that macro uses all the time (who share the same preferences), and you have a natural bias towards equality. Focusing just on Pareto improvements neutralises that possibility. Now I mention this not to imply that the emphasis put on Pareto improvements in textbooks and elsewhere is a right wing plot - I do not know enough to argue that. But it should make those (mainstream or heterodox) who believe that economics is inherently conservative pause for thought.    

Inequality, inheritance tax and the UK election battleground

In an earlier post I sketched out what I thought would be the essential macroeconomic battleground for the forthcoming (2015) general election.

●    The Conservatives would lead on austerity and growth. In May 2012 I suggested the line: “Austerity laid the foundation for our current growth, so we need to stick with it to ensure growth continues”, and the Chancellor has certainly followed my advice! Having linked austerity and growth, the Conservatives will go on to claim that only they can be trusted to deliver more austerity, and therefore continued growth.

●    Labour, on the other hand, will lead on how living standards have stagnated over the last five years, which current growth is unlikely to change before the election. Having offered the Chancellor some spin in May 2012, in that post I thought it was only fair to offer something to the opposition, which was this chart.

This is all nonsense of course. Osborne’s claim is Orwellian: austerity was not necessary for achieving growth, but actually delayed it. In Labour’s case we have no idea what lies behind the productivity collapse which is the main factor behind the chart above, so ascribing it all to government policy is a bit heroic. Having said that, the more the Chancellor tries to claim credit for employment growth, the more he opens the government up to the idea that they are responsible for the decline in living standards.

For those who are tired of this focus on traditional macroeconomics, there may be some better news. One additional element in the battleground to come might be the issue of inequality, but only if Labour chooses to fight on this ground. The reason is that the Conservatives have signalled that they will reprise their ambition to raise the exemption threshold for inheritance tax from £325,000 up to £1m.

President Obama has said that inequality is the “defining challenge of our time”. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” emphasises the importance that concentrated wealth is likely to play in increasing this inequality if it is allowed to be transmitted across generations. Inheritance taxes are clearly central to all that. So the Conservative proposal to raise the inheritance tax threshold is in effect saying that they do not regard increasing inequality as a problem.

Will Labour respond by raising the issue of inequality? They have been reluctant to do this in the past, which seems paradoxical. One of the reasons for this paradox that I speculated on here was a view that to be elected Labour has to have some backing from the business sector. This position was recently outlined by Alan Milburn (former Labour cabinet minister) in this FT article. “Labour cannot afford a rerun of the 2010 election campaign, when not a single major corporation was prepared to endorse it. Overcoming that …. will need Labour to embrace a more avowedly pro-business agenda and match it with a more overtly pro-business tone.” He goes on: “Being a “One Nation” party means governing in the interests of all sections of society, better and worse-off alike. Reintroducing a 50p higher income tax rate does not match that objective.” There we have Labour’s dilemma in a nutshell. Taking action to reduce inequality is seen as anti-business, and it is argued that Labour cannot win without some business sector support.

So I read with interest a piece by Ed Balls in the Guardian today. There he majors on the cost of living, but there is just a hint of something more: “the ongoing cost of living crisis is deeper and broader than one or two sets of figures. It's about whether most people on middle and lower incomes see their real earnings grow in line with the growth in the economy.” But inequality is not mentioned once, and fairness is only mentioned in the context of “balancing the books”.

This is hardly raising inequality as a “defining challenge of our time”. Does this reflect a genuine difference between the left on either side of the pond, or simply that Obama is in power and Ed Balls is not? If it is the latter, is Labour right to fear that going strong on inequality would lose them the election? Let me end with some encouragement from an unlikely source. A recent Financial Times leader argued that

“ratcheting up the IHT threshold to £1m cannot be justified at present. Making this promise is good pre-election Conservative politics. Implementing it in these austere times would be socially unjust.”

They make a number of important points. Even if thresholds remain unchanged, and despite high house prices, the OBR estimate that just 10% of estates will be liable to pay any tax at all. Implementing the £1 million threshold would cost the Treasury more than £3bn, which in times of austerity is money that could be better used elsewhere. And finally they say that redistribution is vital if inequality is not to be exacerbated. When the FT starts worrying about inequality, perhaps this is after all a battle that Labour can win.