Adam Ozimek: School Choice in the Long Run →

Many programs to help the poor create incentives not to earn too much, which discourages hard work. By contrast, improved schooling raises the incentives to work hard at a career because the range of job choices is so much greater after better schooling. So I have long thought of school reform as an ideal avenue for helping the poor. And since monopolies and near-monopolies tend to perform poorly, I have long been a passionate advocate of school choice. In “School Choice in the Long Run,” Adam Ozimek provides a subtle discussion of evidence for the benefits of school choice.

Update: In a related post, Matthew DiCarlo provides a good discussion of why attrition “Student Attrition is a Core Feature of School Choice, Not a Bug.”  

No Tax Increase Without Recompense

The slogan “No taxation without representation” played a key role in the American Revolution. There is great wisdom in this slogan. First of all, it recognizes that taxation is necessary. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

May the Constitution of the United States of America continue to long endure! And may we someday be free of death and taxes. But freedom from death and taxes will not come in my lifetime. Indeed, in his piece 

“The Reality of Trying to Shrink Government,”

Larry Summers makes a persuasive case that anything like our current expectations for what government should do cannot be funded without substantial government revenue increases in the future. The reason is that one of the largest tasks our government has taken on is helping older Americans. As the ratio of older Americans to younger Americans increases that task becomes more difficult.

Japan and most nations in Europe are already ahead of us in being subject to the heavy burdens governments face from an aging population.

This is an important factor in the debt crises they face.

There is one way for America (and the other rich nations) to escape the fiscal difficulties of taking care of an aging population. That escape hatch is dramatically more open immigration, which I urge as a matter of basic ethics in “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” and “Adam Ozimek: What ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Tells Us About Immigration.’”

But for the rest of this post, I will consider what we need to do in tax policy if American politicians, for whatever reason, stubbornly refuse to live up to the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty. In the better case of dramatically more open immigration, what I say below should still be helpful in the context of lower overall tax rates than if current quite-restrictive immigration policies continue.

The second dimension of wisdom in the slogan

“No taxation without representation”

is the idea that, if taxes are necessary, we should at least demand something in return for our taxes–something beyond the government spending itself. Members of the English parliament used the need of kings for tax revenue to establish this principle of asking for something in return for taxes using the earlier slogan “redress of grievances before supply." 

Polycarp ably explains on the Straight Dope website:

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the title for its presiding officer, as noted, by paralleling the English institution, where there was a Speaker of the House of Commons. And this name came about for historical reasons: back in the early days, when the law was the king’s commands, the Lords and Commons were convened to (1) approve taxes for the benefit of the realm, e.g., defense, the idea being taxes people had a voice in were less resented than those levied by the king alone, and (2) advise the king on the people’s needs and wants, so that he was informed on conditions throughout the realm. To ensure their concerns got listened to, they adopted a policy of "redress of grievances before supply”, i.e., “deal with our complaints before we vote you any money.” They would draft up bills of grievances outlining what was wrong and suggesting what the king might do about it, which eventually took the form of draft legislation prepared for the king to approve. (This is why a not-yet-passed law is a “bill”) The person who would bring the result of the Commons’ deliberations before the King in formal address was its presiding officer, the person who would speak to HM for it – and hence its Speaker.

In my post “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich,” I wrote:

…human beings want many things, including many intangibles. It is my belief that we can do much better at harnessing these other desires for the common good than we have.

In particular, if we give people something in return for their taxes that increases with the amount of taxes they pay, then their motivation to avoid taxes will not be as strong. Scott Adams himself wrote in “How to Tax the Rich” about 

…how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.

I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.

To encapsulate the idea that–especially if current policy is being altered–the government should give people something in return for their taxes other than just the government spending, let me propose two slogans with the same basic meaning. The formal version is 

No tax increase without recompense.

The colloquial version is 

No tax hike without something to like!

I hasten to say that–especially when leaving aside the benefits of the government spending itself–it would be overoptimistic to hope that the “something to like” will be enough to make those being taxed more heavily actually feel better off. The aim is to lessen the sting and lessen the motivation to avoid the tax.

It might seem utopian to think that these twin slogans could carry any weight in the political sphere. But the Republican Party–stiffened in its resolve by the amazingly effective Grover Norquist–has come surprisingly close in the last few years to enforcing a rule of no tax increases at all at the Federal level. So I do not think it unreasonable to hope to enforce a rule of “No tax increase without recompense.”  On the other side, to those who think that Grover Norquist’s rule of no tax increases at all is too powerful to disobey, let me say that budget constraints are powerful things.

Holding things together in anything like the way to which we are accustomed is likely to be impossible without substantial revenue increases in the future. And any substantial need for revenue increases will hit close to home: there are not enough superrich; so a tax hike that makes a big difference on the revenue front is likely to hit the many who are moderately rich–such as economists, doctors and lawyers–not just the few who are very rich. Therefore, as a matter of self-interest, as well as out of public-spiritedness, I believe it is of great importance to come up with good proposals for tax hikes with something to like. Combining a tax increase with some kind of recompense is crucial both to avoid any hint of class warfare that could fray the social fabric and to keep tax distortions as small as possible. Here, I will make a specific proposal that is so ready to hand that many others have suggested something similar. But the details matter, and I will present my own version. 

Even many economists who otherwise want to simplify the tax code have recognized the special status of the charitable deduction. Greg Mankiw wrote in the New York Times:

THERE are certain tax expenditures that I like. My personal favorite is the deduction for charitable giving. It encourages philanthropy and, thus, private rather than governmental solutions to society’s problems.

The substantive merit of the tax deduction for charitable contributions is also an important point in Matt Yglesias’s post “Tax Reform is Hard and It’s Not Just Politics.”  In my proposal, I want to steer a course between partially balancing out a tax increase by expanding the current tax deduction for charitable contributions and partially balancing out a tax increase by following the proposal Tom Grey gives in his comment to “Scott Adams’s Finest Hour: How to Tax the Rich”:

How about 100% tax credits for …

donating directly to a Federal Gov'tProgram.

Thus, the rich who wantmore Social Security, donate their taxes to that cause.  Or those who want more defense.

I’m pretty sure the rich would donate more taxes if they could choose where their money goes (despite the obvious ease of gov’t budget-makers just reducing the amount of other gov’t spend ).

Heck, such 100% tax credits could, and should, be available for all real taxpayers (not legal fiction corporations).

A key inspiration for my proposal is a trio of tax credits in Michigan State tax law, the public contribution credit, community foundation credit and homeless shelter/food bank credit. Although these credits are severely limited in size, up to that limit they mean that, together with the benefits of the Federal deduction, a taxpayer can get back over 70% of his or her contribution. But the set of organizations eligible for these three Michigan state tax credits is much narrower than the set of organizations eligible for the Federal tax deduction for charitable contributions. My interpretation of the intent of the law is that these three tax credits are meant to encourage people to give in ways that reduce the amount of direct government spending needed by the State of Michigan. For my proposal, let me define a “public contribution” as follows:

A public contribution is a donation to a nonprofit organization meeting high quality standards that engages in activities that (a) could be legitimate, high-priority activities of Federal or State governments and (b) can to an important extent substitute for spending these governments would otherwise be likely to do.

My proposal is to raise marginal tax rates above about $75,000 per person–or $150,000 per couple–by 10% (a dime on every extra dollar), but offer a 100% tax credit for public contributions up to the entire amount of the tax surcharge.

The reason I am not proposing a simple expansion of the current charitable deduction is that I want to make sure that the program helps ease government budget problems in a big way. (Note that, in addition to substituting to an important extent for government spending, these public contributions would crowd out some fraction of regular charitable deductions and increase government revenue in that way.) On the other side, though Tom Grey’s proposal of choosing which government program to support is great for a portion of existing taxes (as I think he intended it) I don’t think it goes far enough for a tax increase. 

Now let me paint the picture of the kinds of effects I think this program of public contributions (the  tax surcharge plus 100% public contribution credit up to the amount of the tax surcharge) would have:

  1. Many creative people, with more money to work with, would think of brilliant new ways to help the poor, as well as continuing and expanding tried-and-true ways of helping the poor. 
  2. Scientific and medical research would be much better funded than currently.
  3. Foreign aid going to ordinary people, not dictators, would dramatically increase. 
  4. It would be possible to fund better and cheaper ways to take care of older Americans in their own homes and delay any need for them to go into nursing homes. 
  5. Needs that the government is slow in meeting could be addressed more quickly.

The substitute-for-government-spending test in the proposed law is not meant to prevent the total amount of public contributions for some things from going above what the government would do under the current system. Its purpose is simply to make it possible for the government to cut back on some types of spending to an important degree. Although religious congregations would not be directly eligible for public contributions because of the legitimate-activity-of-government test, many already have associated nonprofit organizations that could be eligible. And a large fraction of religious donations are from people who earn less than $75,000 per year. Support of arts enjoyed mainly by the rich, such as opera, might not meet the high-priority test, although the fine arts would still be eligible for the usual deduction for charitable donations. Setting the public contribution goal at 10% of annual income above $75,000 per person should be enough to ensure that nonprofit activities eligible for the public contribution credit are much better funded despite any crowding out or relabeling of existing contributions. There would probably be some reduction in funding for activities not considered important enough to qualify as public contributions–which would occasion much debate about exactly where to set the boundary between “public contributions” and regular charitable contributions–but setting priorities is not a bad thing. 

On the part of the relatively high-income taxpayers who are subject to the combination of tax surcharge and 100% public contribution credit, many would look at the unchanged amount they actually pay the government in the end, after the tax credit, and not think of it as a net tax increase at all. Being required to devote 10% of income above $75,000 per person to public contributions would take some getting used to, but after a while, I think many people would have fun with it. Parents could teach their kids about their social responsibilities by discussing as a family where to devote the family’s public contributions. People might become involved in volunteer work in the same organizations to which they had directed their public contributions. There is joy in giving, and by providing a choice of which organization to give to, my hope is that the joy of giving would be only partially muted by the requirement of giving to some appropriate organization. 

James Madison wrote in the Federalist # 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Since we are not angels, most of us need very strong encouragement to give as much to public causes as the health of our Republic requires. Since those who govern us are not angels, it is best that many of the details be left to each of us to decide individually. To the extent possible, let’s have the government specialize in those important tasks that for one reason or another are not as emotionally rewarding for individuals to donate to and let individuals make decisions about those tasks that are.

People love freedom. Tax increases cannot help harming freedom to some extent. On the cost side, a program of public contributions like the one outlined above comes close to minimizing the harm to freedom from a tax increase. And the benefit side is substantial. In addition to the benefits of steering far away from national bankruptcy, it is hard for me not to think it would be a better world, with greater soft power than ever for the United States of America, if we adopted a program of public contributions like the one I have outlined. 

 

For more on this idea, see "How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide"

Matt Yglesias on How the "Stimulus Bill" was About a Lot More Than Stimulus →

Rahm Emanuel (as can be seen in this 13-second video) famously said

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.

Here, Matt Yglesias reviews a new book by Michael Grunwald documenting the ways in which the Obama administration used the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus Bill”) to accomplish many of its other legislative priorities in addition to trying to stimulate the economy. Though many of those other legislative priorities were arguably in the right direction, I think the commingling of stimulus with other efforts having a more partisan coloring accounts for some of the Republican hatred of the Stimulus Bill. This is a good example of the political economy issues I discuss in my post “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football.”

Vipul Naik and Garett Jones on the Robustness of This Unbelievable American System →

In my post “You Didn’t Build That: America Edition” I wrote:

We didn’t build this unbelievable American system, and it is not our private property. We don’t have a moral right to exclude other human beings—human beings like us—from the benefits of this unbelievable American system. As stewards of this unbelievable American system, we need to regulate the pace of arrival so that the system itself is not overwhelmed and destroyed, but unless this unbelievable American system itself is threatened, let us open our doors wide to others who have not had the good fortune to be born Americans.    

(“This unbelievable American system” is Barack’s phrase.) Vipul Naik and Garett Jones argue, as I would argue as well, that it is not that easy to overwhelm “this unbelievable American system” with new arrivals.

   

When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job’

In one of the videos I flag in my post “Milton Friedman: Celebrating His 100th Birthday with Videos of Milton,” Milton defines Aaron Director’s law: 

Director’s Law is, that almost invariably, government programs benefit the middle income class, at the expense of the very poor and the very rich.

But sometimes, the rich and the middle class both gang up on the poor. This is nowhere more in evidence than in the area of occupational licensing. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Chip Mellor writes:

More than 100 low-income and moderate-income occupations require licenses somewhere in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. They range from the understandable (school bus driver, emergency medical technician) to the ridiculous: interior designer, makeup artist, florist.

These licenses don’t come cheap. On average, they force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees (as documented in the Institute of Justice study “License to Work”). One-third of the licenses take more than a year to earn. Rather than working, these individuals spend time and money jumping through hoops for the government’s permission to work.

Once an occupational licensing regime is set up, one factor making the system hard to change is that those who “paid their dues” to get the license resent the idea that others could do what they do without a license. But even before an occupational licensing regime is set up, an important impetus is often those within a field who resent the idea that others who do lower quality work should be allowed to tarnish the reputation of a field. There is a problem here. It is often a low level of skills that puts someone in the position of being poor. Therefore, to say that no one should be allowed to put up a shingle to do cheap, low-quality work is often to say that a poor person should not be allowed to work. But somehow, the poor who look so sympathetic in other contexts start looking like “riffraff” when they are the competition.

How can we square free entry into occupations with high quality for those who want high quality? In my post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School,” I suggest that 

… the stratification into different quality levels should be handled by the market as much as possible (and by government fiat as little as possible), with continually improved web-based ratings mechanisms.

Nevertheless, if political forces are insistent that something must be done by government, there is all the difference in the world between government regulation of labels and government regulation of substance. For example, under current Michigan law, you are not allowed to call yourself a “massage therapist” without a relatively high level of training. But you are allowed to do the same work as a massage therapist without special training as long as you call yourself a “body worker.” Although there is little doubt that this kind of regulation can be an aid to schemes to “keep the riffraff out,”  where the forces of competition are otherwise strong it can be argued that this kind of regulation provides extra information to consumers without actually blocking any freely-agreed-upon economic activity.    

To the extent that even the urge toward substantive occupational licensing cannot be resisted because of at least superficially plausible arguments about health and safety, it might be possible to get a better balance by imposing some kind of global budget constraint on licensing requirements that forces regulation to focus on those requirements that have the least specious justifications. Again from my post “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School,” in the context of arguing for a longer school year, I write:

Others argue that health and safety and basic competence really do require training even for many jobs that sound easy, such as cutting hair or cutting nails. 

What I want to do is to restrain the tendency to go overboard on occupational licensing while allowing genuinely necessary competencies to be transmitted by requiring states to ensure that their schools high school tracks that would make it reasonably possible to be meet the legal qualifications for any of at least 60% of all licensed occupations, with each student able to be qualified with his or her high school diploma for at least 10% of all licensed occupations. Then the graduates might actually be able to get a job. This requirement for getting the Federal education grant could be met by any combination of reducing licensing requirements and increasing effective training that each state chose. I am sure that states would game the rule, so that the overall effect would be less than what this sounds on the surface, but it would be better than the way things are now, where students graduating from high school are kept out of many of the more desirable occupations by occupational licensing restrictions.  

Although occupational licensing is a major way in which the government says “You may not have a job” to the poor, sometimes the restrictions on economic activity by the poor are even more blatant. Here again from 

Chip Mellor in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Sometimes the hoops can’t be squeezed through, as Silvio Membreno of Miami has learned. Mr. Membreno seeks to do what countless immigrants have done before him: Come to America and provide for his young family as a street vendor, then grow that business into something bigger and better. Without much need for investment capital or formal education, street vendors can be their own bosses while climbing the economic ladder.

But the Nicaraguan immigrant’s dreams are being dashed by the city of Hialeah, the Miami suburb where he works. Hialeah city officials make it impossible to be an effective street vendor.

They bar vendors from selling within a football field of brick-and-mortar stores that sell the “same or similar merchandise.” They force vendors, unless in the middle of a transaction, to remain in constant motion when they would much rather stay put, sell and be safe. Vendors are even prohibited from displaying their merchandise anywhere on public or private property, even if they have the permission of the property owner. In a country with a long history of street vendors, local governments nationwide are increasingly quashing this traditional form of bootstraps entrepreneurship.

What I don’t want you to miss is the injustice of telling someone he or she may not work if the only job he or she can find is one that creates too much competition for groups who are politically more powerful.

The Flat Tax, The Head Tax and the Size of Government: A Tax Parable

As Axel Leijonhufvud wonderfully spoofed in “Life Among the Econ,” one of the bread-and-butter tasks of a working economist is to build and study economic models. Some of these models are meant to be a reasonable representation of some aspect of the economy, while others are meant to be only what one of my favorite philosophers, Daniel Dennett would call “intuition pumps”—parables that give us the pregnant analogies and intellectual workouts needed to raise our economic IQ for thinking about the real world. In this post, I’ll tell you a tax parable. It is not meant to have any immediate moral for the real world, but only to provide food for thought. 

Economic models are inhabited by creatures called “agents.” Agents are stand-ins for people. The key ingredients in economic models are

  1. what the agents want,
  2. what the agents know, and
  3. what is possible for the agents to do.

In this model, the agents are all identical (more identical than real-life identical twins), and want three things: consumption C, leisure time L and a public good (think of city parks or Mars landers) labeled G to stand for government purchases. They know everything going on in the model, and the key thing they can do is divide up their time between making consumption goods C, enjoying leisure L, and making the public good G. Let’s measure the amount of each good by how much time it takes to make it or enjoy it. All the different uses of time have to add up to all the time the agents have. Since all the time they have is 1 day per day, measuring everything in time equivalents enables us to say that   

          C+L+G=1.                  (Only So Much Time in a Day Equation)

You might want to think of this as waking time being divided up, with sleep time off limits to the model. You also might find it helpful to imagine that a stripped-down central bank has no other job than to keep the wage at $1 per (waking) day.

The details of how much the agents want each of C, L and G are governed by the preferences and utility function most beloved of economists: Cobb-Douglas preferences, represented by a Cobb-Douglas utility function. Because I, like many economists, love logarithms (in particular the natural kind), I will use logarithms to write down the utility function.  But since many readers will not have the same love for logarithms that I have, I am giving you fair warning to avert your eyes from the following utility function:

          (1/3) log( C ) + (1/3) log(L) + (1/3) log(G)             (Utility Function)

You can escape having to think any more about logarithms, if you know just one thing: Cobb-Douglas preferences make agents want to devote a fixed fraction of their spending to each individual good. (That is the way to maximize utility.) In this case, if C, L and G were ordinary goods, the agents would want to devote 1/3 of their spending to each. Update: If you want to learn more about logarithms and why this utility function tends to lead to equal amounts spent on each good, see my posts “The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates” and “The Shape of Production: Charles Cobb’s and Paul Douglas’s Boon to Economics.”

The closest we can come to treating consumption, leisure and the public good in this model as ordinary goods is if we imagine a social planner. In the real world, free-market economists are not at all fond of social planners, seeing them as chauffeurs on Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But as long as they are confined inside of economic models, free-market economists love social planners best of all. The reason is that–as long as there are no distortionary taxes or other more complex distortions–the free market delivers the same outcome as a wise and benevolent social planner. In other words, the social planner I am talking about is not a fallible human, but the Invisible Hand. The one limitation to the benevolence of the Invisible Hand is that the Invisible Hand sometimes favors some individuals over others, making some rich and some poor. But in this model, all are alike to the Invisible Hand, and there is equality.  But there is another complication for the Invisible Hand. The Invisible Hand knows just how hard the agents should work once the amount of the public good G has been decided, but needs a government to decide how much of the public good G to make. Fortunately, since everyone is identical in this model, as long as the principle of equality is maintained, there are no political disagreements in this model, and the Invisible Hand plus a democratic government would yield the same result as an all-wise, benevolent social planner committed to equality: each agent would spend a 1/3 of her time making consumption goods, 1/3 of her time enjoying leisure, and 1/3 of her time making public goods. (“Agents” are traditionally female ever since the dawn of political correctness, and I will hew to that tradition here.)

Recall now that to bring forth the Invisible Hand in all its power from Aladdin’s lamp, the taxes must be non-distortionary taxes.  Non-distortionary taxes are taxes that do not create perverse incentives, which means they need to be taxes where the amount does not depend on what the agents do.  Since all the agents are being treated equally, that means a head tax: each agent pays exactly the same amount, regardless of how much she earns.  To show that with a head tax the Invisible Hand does the same thing as a benevolent, all-knowing social planner, think of things this way. Once the political decision is made to have the amount of the public good that 1/3 ofeveryone’s time can produce (financed by the head tax), each individual then wants to divide up the remaining time equally between the two private goods: consumption and leisure.  Since 2/3 of the time remains after the public good G is produced, dividing it equally between consumption and leisure leads to 1/3 of everyone’s time being devoted to consumption and 1/3 to leisure, exactly as the social planner would have done.   

Whatever time the agents are not spending at leisure, they spend working. So spending 1/3 of their time at leisure means they spend 2/3 of their time working. With the amount work produces worth $1 per waking day of work, that means that output (GDP) is 2/3 of a dollar per person per day, or 66 and 2/3 cents per day:  

          Output = C+G = 1-L = 2/3.    (GDP Per Person Under a Head Tax)

So far so good. Now, suppose that in order to have a tax system more like other worlds, this economy switches over to financing the public good by a flat tax on labor income. (The government is only going to raise enough taxes to pay for the public good G.) Think of the agent’s decision of how much time to spend working under the flat tax. She is working when she isn’t at leisure, so she is working 1-L per day.  If the tax is at rate t, then she takes home (1-t)(1-L) dollars each day after taxes if the wage is $1 per day. Firms have to pay the whole before-tax wage of $1 per day, so with competition, prices end up at $1 for a day’s worth of consumption goods and $1 for a day’s worth of the public good.

We haven’t yet figured out the best size of government (amount of the public good G) is when there is a flat tax. But whatever G is, if the agent sees G as fixed, to maximize the rest of her utility she will want to “spend” an equal amount on the other two goods: leisure and consumption. But what is the “price” of leisure she sees that we should use in figuring out how she thinks of herself as spending on leisure? If she works a bit less, she only has to sacrifice the after-tax wage $(1-t) per day’s worth of extra leisure. So let’s think of her total spending on leisure as (1-t)L dollars per day. Spending the same amount on consumption as leisure (as the Cobb-Douglas preferences lead her to do) then means that

          C = (1-t)L.        (Equal Shares Equation: Flat Tax)

But she also has to be able to pay for the consumption. Since she takes home (1-t)(1-L) dollars per day, the amount she can afford is

           C=(1-t)(1-L).     (Budget Constraint: Flat Tax)

There has been a debate online about how much algebra students should be taught in high school. (One of the best pieces in that debate is this one.) One of the arguments in favor of learning algebra is that one never knows when the urge to analyze an economic model might strike. Combining the Equal Shares Equation and the Budget Constraint, 

          (1-t)L = C = (1-t) (1-L)       (Combination Equation: Flat Tax)

The tax rate is less than 1, that is, less than 100%, so (1-t)>0 and we can divide by it to find that 

          L = 1-L.          (Equation to Solve for Leisure L: Flat Tax)

This one is easy to solve: L=½. That is, under the flat tax, an agent always spends half of her waking time at leisure and the other half of her time working.  

Being at leisure half the time means the agents work the other half of the time. So

          Output = C+G = 1-L = ½.    (GDP Per Person Under a Flat Tax)

That is, GDP under the flat tax is 50 cents per person per day under the flat tax instead of the 66 and 2/3 cents per person per day it was under the head tax. Since ½ is equal to ¾ of 2/3, imposing a flat tax instead of a head tax has caused GDP to fall by ¼ or 25%.   

It is time to think about the size of the government–in this case, the amount of the public good G.  Let’s imagine that the government in this world experiments with various levels of G for a little while before they settle on the best amount.  The agents in this world will notice something interesting: the size of the government has no effect on GDP! As long as the budget is balanced, with the flat tax just paying for G, time worked, and therefore output, will stay constant at ½.  What is going on? As I wrote in two passages of my post

“Can Taxes Raise GDP”: 

… what about a consumption tax that is a certain percentage of everyone’s consumption?  On the one hand this makes people feel poorer so they want to work more, but on the other hand, what someone can buy with an extra hour of work is less, so they want to work less.  The standard view is that these two effects will roughly cancel each other out.  So the amount people want to work—and thus GDP in this simple model—will stay about the same. …The basic argument for the standard view is that to households, a consumption tax looks a lot like a wage cut.  And we have a lot of information about what higher or lower wages do to desired work hours.  Among people who have to live on their own wages, there is surprisingly little difference in how many hours people want to work based on whether they have high wages overall or low wages overall over the course of their lives.  

In the model at hand, it is easy to see how a tax increase looks like a wage cut: the after-tax wage is 1-t.

With G having no effect on the fraction of time worked and therefore no effect on GDP, the  amounts of consumption and the public good have to add up to the constant GDP of ½:

          C+G = ½.

Equivalently,

         C = ½ - G.

Thus, more of the public good G comes at the expense of consumption, one for one. So even though a larger government does not reduce GDP, it does cost something.  It has an

opportunity cost

in reduced consumption.

What is the right size of government if it is stuck with financing G with a flat tax? Again, the Cobb-Douglas preferences help. Holding leisure fixed at ½, Utility is maximized by equalizing the amount spent on consumption and the amount spent on the public good. Since the two amounts add up to ½, to equalize them, the quantity of consumption and the quantity of the public good must both be ¼. Here again, as under the head tax, this happens through the political process, but with everyone identical and treated equally, there is no reason for any disagreement. Since half of output was to be used for the public good, the flat tax rate had to be 50%.   

As in all standard economic models, all of the agents in this model understand the economics of the model perfectly. But let’s pretend that some of the children, too young to be agents making economic decisions in their own right–while eating their portions of their mothers’ consumption–ask questions about taxes: “Mom, in the olden days when our people experimented with different sizes of government, it seemed that the size of government and the level of taxes had no effect on output. Does that mean that taxes don’t matter?” And the mothers all carefully explain to their children that in the truly ancient days (before they had begun to follow the customs of other worlds), when there was a head tax instead of a flat tax, output had been higher: 66 and 2/3 cents per person per day, instead of 50 cents per person per day. And in those truly ancient days, agents had had both more consumption and more of the public good (with the same 50-50 shares of output in C and G as now). So, they told their children “Taxes do matter for output.”

But one bright and brave girl said “Mom, in those truly ancient days, people may have had more consumption and more of the public good, but they had less leisure. Are you sure they were better off?” That led to an algebra lesson. Her younger sister averted her eyes in fear of the equations. But this bright and brave girl learned (with her mother writing with big spaces in between equations to make things less fearsome) about utility functions. She learned that utility functions only had more and less but otherwise had no meaning, so that any increasing function of a utility was as good as the original utility function. And she learned that 

exp(3*[ (1/3) log( C ) + (1/3) log(L) + (1/3) log(G)]) = C L G,

so that one could compare how well-off people were in the truly ancient days to how well-off they were now by looking at C L G just as well as by looking at

(1/3)log( C )+(1/3)log(L)+(1/3)log(G).

In the truly ancient days, under the head tax, C L G was

(1/3)(1/3)(1/3) = 1/27.

Now, under the flat tax, C L G was 

(¼)(½)(¼) = 1/32.

In order to compensate for the effect of the flat tax, current consumption C would have to be increased by the factor 32/27, holding L and G constant, in order to make agents as well-off as in the truly ancient days under the head tax. Since 32/27 is about 1.185, it would take an 18.5% improvement in the technology for producing consumption in order to have the same effect on agents’ welfare as it would to switch back to the head tax, her mother told her.    

But the bright and brave girl was not finished with her questions. “Mom, what if when I grow up I am not as good at making things as the other agents and so have a lower income? Would I still be better off under the head tax than under the flat tax?” Her mother first reassured her “In all of our world, no one has ever been any different from anyone else in productivity once they were grown. But let’s look at your question as a math problem.” After setting up the problem as a cubic equation, the mother left her daughter to do the problem as math practice. Assuming she was less productive than others (A<1, where A was her relative productivity) the bright and brave girl could see that, under the flat tax she would pay only A/4 in taxes (and others would pay ¼), while under the head tax she would pay 1/3.  But under the flat tax, G would be only ¼, while it was 1/3  under the head tax. Also, under the flat tax, the annoying incentive to work less and the smaller income effect from taxes would mean she would have leisure of ½ and consumption of A/4, while under the head tax, both her consumption and leisure would be [A-(1/3)]/[1+A]. Though the bright and brave girl was not completely certain her answer was correct, the number she came up with was that as long as she was at least 86.4% as good at making things as all the other agents when she grew up, she would still be better off under the head tax.  

But even then, once she had solved the cubic equation, the bright and brave girl had one more question: “Mom, why do we have to follow the customs of other worlds and have a flat tax instead of a head tax?”

Rich People Do Create Jobs: 10 Tweets →

This is my answer to a TED talk by Nick Hanauer, “Rich people don’t create jobs.” In the context of his TED talk, “rich people” means “entrepreneurs.” You can see my 10 tweets here, as well as by clicking on the title of this post. Let me explain a little background on a couple of these tweets.

  1. It is when rich people consume that they use resources for themselves. If they save and invest their money, they are influencing how resources are deployed, but not using those resources up. If they give their money away, then the choice is in the hands of those they give the money to. If it is to their children, let’s hope their children also save and invest or give most of the money away so that they don’t use too many resources on themselves.
  2. When I say that the efforts of entrepreneurs are complementary with those of other workers, I mean that extra effort by workers in a company produces more additional output the harder the entrepreneur is working to organize things.  
  3. In the short run, higher labor demand leads to more employment, but in the long run, higher labor demand leads mostly to higher wages, not to people working more. This is because, even if people are offered more jobs, there is a limit to how much they want to work. But almost all political rhetoric about labor demand is discussed in terms of “jobs." 
  4. One of my biggest themes on this blog is that despite the ways in which current policy is flailing around, that getting enough aggregate demand is not, in principle a hard problem. The hard thing is to foster the combination of more long-run growth and a fairer long-run distribution of the resources people actually use for themselves by consuming them.
  5. Although having a large middle class providing a market for new goods probably is quite a good thing for technological progress, I think that trying to get a larger middle class by redistributing from the rich to the middle-class would backfire. That’s not the way to do it. What is a good way to bolster the middle class? How about breaking the public quasi-monopoly on education with vouchers and charter schools? Or failing that, how about doing what I propose in "Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School.” Also, let me repeat here my statement about rich, poor and middle-class, from my post “Rich, Poor and Middle Class”:

I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists. Helping them is one of our highest ethical obligations. I am deeply concerned about the honest rich—not so much for themselves, though their welfare counts too—but because they provide goods and services that make our lives better, because they provide jobs, because they help ensure that we can get good returns for our retirement saving, and because we already depend on them so much for tax revenue. But for the middle-class, who count heavily because they make up the bulk of our society, I have a stern message. We are paying too high a price when we tax the middle class in order to give benefits to the middle-class—and taxing the rich to give benefits to the middle-class would only make things worse. The primary job of the government in relation to the middle-class has to be to help them help themselves, through education, through loans, through libertarian paternalism, and by stopping the dishonest rich from preying on the middle-class through deceit and chicanery. 

6. Successful entrepreneurs create jobs in their own firms, but also typically destroy jobs in competing firms. That is part of how economic progress happens. We can block this competitive creation of new jobs and destruction of old jobs only at the cost of long-run stagnation. I doubt Nick Hanauer meant to argue for blocking progress in that way.  

7. Outsourcing and offshoring also create jobs. People in other states or other countries getting jobs counts, too. They are human beings, just like us.

Adam Ozimek: What "You Didn't Build That" Tells Us About Immigration

Adam Ozimek has a new post agreeing with my take on immigration in my post “You Didn’t Build That: American Edition.”  He begins:

University of Michigan economist Miles Kimball has a novel and important and take on President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” statement and the ensuing debate.

What Adam adds is to the moral case that I make is to point out how small the costs to current citizens are of allowing additional immigration:

I think this is one of the most important and underemphasized ideas right now. I am constantly humbled at how fortunate any of us are to have been born here, and disappointed at how shamefully entitled we act towards this luck. The idea, for instance, that we should block millions from moving here and vastly bettering their lives because there may be a small statistical impact on some subset of us. On the basis of a 5% wage premium for high school dropouts (who we otherwise neglect in so many other ways) we’re going to exclude others from a privilege we did nothing to inherit? Just as egregious is excluding them because we refuse to either design a policy that allows low-skilled workers to enter and pay their on way (which they could!) or just let them enter and bear the minor cost like we do for low-income natives. (Of course we don’t exempt the high-skilled from paying more than their share, which they do).

It is hard to reconcile the selfish attitudes embodied in the kind of mindset that would lock someone out of this unbelievable American system for the sake protecting an unearned privilege, and for the sake of trying to capture every last ounce of luck for themselves…

And I interpret the following passage from Adam’s post as making the point that the cost to current citizens of allowing additional immigration is especially low, or nonexistent if one includes the dynamic benefits to the economy from immigration:

Ironically it is this open, free, and welcoming attitude we turn our backs on that in large part has made us a great and powerful nation. Where would we be if we pulled up the drawbridge in 1800? Or in 1900? This country would be a shadow of itself, and would’ve turned away many of the great Americans, or their parents or grandparents, who made us who we are.

I do not have the expertise to comment as knowledgeably as I would like on what the actual costs and benefits of immigration to current citizens are, so I very much hope that others in the economic blogosphere will continue to clarify these costs and benefits, so that misconceptions can be dispelled. But I also hope that in talking about the evidence about those costs and benefits that we don’t lose sight of the ethical point that those who desperately want to immigrate to the United States are human beings too, whose welfare counts just as much, ethically, as the welfare of citizens of the United States. Here is the comment I made to Adam’s post on the Modeled Behavior blog: 

Thanks, Adam! 

In my post, I didn’t emphasize how small the costs to current citizens are from immigration, because I wanted to make a full-throated moral argument that we should allow open immigration even if the costs to current citizens were relatively large: even substantial costs to current citizens could not possibly be anywhere close to the magnitude of the benefit to those allowed to immigrate. Also, I understand that there are many who will never be convinced that the costs of additional immigration to current citizens are modest.

But of course the fact that the costs to current citizens are relatively modest makes the case that much stronger. I have thought about what I would say if someone said to me “But you are a well-off professor, you aren’t the one who would bear the costs of additional immigration.” Given how many times greater the benefits to the immigrants are compared to the costs to current citizens (10, 100, or more times greater, I would think, for immigrants from very poor countries), I would say it was as if my challenger were saying “But it wouldn’t be your suit that would get wet if I jumped in to save the drowning man!"

You Didn't Build That: America Edition

Before Barack said

Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

with an intonation pattern that was a little confusing given his likely intent, he said this:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.

It is good to see that discussion of what Barack said has gone beyond “gotcha” to a discussion of deeper philosophical issues. Even Rush Limbaugh has turned philosopher, discussing the underlying issues that Barack raises. (Here is my review.) 

I am moved by the statement 

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have.

Leaving aside the rest of Barack’s speech, there is an important message in this. Those of us alive now didn’t build this unbelievable American system from scratch. Those who have gone before us have handed down to us something precious. I think the right response to that gift is gratitude, a determination to do our part to preserve the wondrous aspects of that system, and a desire to share the benefits of this unbelievable American system with others.

When I say “share the benefits of this unbelievable American system with others,” I mean what I say. And it is something that far transcends the importance of our current debates about taxing and spending policy. It is churlish of us to shut others out from the benefits of this unbelievable American system. The framers of our Constitution and the others who did the most to put together this unbelievable American system had an open attitude toward immigration. And we know that as late as 1883, these words were engraved on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty, where they can still be seen to this day:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus, 1883

This is my policy on immigration, as I think it should be the policy of the United States Government and the policy of the People of the United States. We didn’t build this unbelievable American system, and it is not our private property. We don’t have a moral right to exclude other human beings–human beings like us–from the benefits of this unbelievable American system. As stewards of this unbelievable American system, we need to regulate the pace of arrival so that the system itself is not overwhelmed and destroyed, but unless this unbelievable American system itself is threatened, let us open our doors wide to others who have not had the good fortune to be born Americans.

Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School

In my book, the two truly wonderful things Barack has done on the domestic front are advancing gay rights (through ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and more recently by rhetorical support for gay marriage rights) and advancing education reform through the brilliant work of Arne Duncan as his Secretary of Education.  By dangling a few gigadollars worth of grant money in front of states, Arne has gotten states to fall all over themselves passing education reforms that I would have thought impossible in such a short time–often with buy-in from the teachers unions.  I cheer on this effort and other efforts at education reform.

Although I am in favor of more school choice, including both charter schools and Milton Friedman’s still excellent idea of education vouchers, let me focus in on two aspects of education reform that can be fully implemented within regular public schools: increasing the total amount of schooling kids get in their K-12 years and making sure they are legally qualified to pursue a wide range of careers when they earn a high school diploma.

Sometimes the most important fact in a given area is one so obvious it might not even seem worth saying. I heard one such fact from a top researcher in education at an academic seminar at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center: the single most important variable in predicting whether a student will get a test question right is whether that topic was covered in class or not. Students don’t always remember what they were taught. But they never remember something they weren’t taught. More time in school means more things can be taught at least once, and the more important things can even be repeated a few times.

The secret recipe behind the “Knowledge is Power Program” or KIPP schools (which have been very successful even with highly disadvantaged kids) is this:

  1. They motivate students by convincing them they can succeed and have a better life through working hard in school.
  2. They keep order, so the students are not distracted from learning.
  3. They have the students study hard for many long hours, with a long school day, a long school week (some school on Saturdays), and a long school year (school during the Summer).

The KIPP schools also have highly motivated teachers, but that is a topic for another day.

So my first proposal for this post is to go to a 12-month school year, and to extend the school day until at least 5 PM (but with many extracurricular activities and sports being eligible to count as part of the school day, as they do in Japan). Research has shown poor kids and rich kids learn at a somewhat similar rate during the school year, but that poor kids forget a lot during the Summer, while rich kids retain more. So lengthening the school year is especially helpful for poor kids. Lengthening the school year and the school day also effectively provides year-round day care for poor parents who desperately need it. For rich families who are used to being able to go on a summer vacation, I would allow families to make proposals for family or individual activities with educational value that could substitute for some part of school in the summer, and grant permission for these substitutions for summer school relatively liberally for anything that research shows keeps kids academically sharp. The poor kids will think this is unfair, but they simply need the formal schooling more because their parents can’t afford other high-quality educational activities. So keeping them in school during the summer really is doing them a favor.

I won’t try to work out all the details of how the longer school day and school year would work, but I need to address one objection that will spring to many readers minds: extra costs. I don’t want to assume massive new infusions of money into schooling that might never be available. But I think it can be done without major additional costs. The school buildings are there anyway, year round, so the major expense to worry about is teacher salaries. Here I think we could start by having each teacher teach the same number of annual hours as they now do, but staggered throughout the year. (Over time, on a merit basis, some teachers could be allowed to work year round at a commensurately higher salary, to make up for normal attrition.) The margin that would give is that class sizes would go up. Except in Kindergarten, and maybe in 1st grade, higher class sizes have been shown by research to have only a small effect on learning–probably less than a tenth the effect on learning on the minus side that more total school hours for the kids would have on the plus side. We might need to knock out a few walls between classrooms to accommodate these larger class sizes, but it could be done. (Note that the total number of kids in school at any one time would be basically the same as now, so the kids would fit.) Even with these expedients, costs would go up some. For example, the lights would have to be kept on longer. But I think it should be manageable. And the fact that some of the rich kids wouldn’t be there in the summer would either help bring down class sizes for the poor kids then, or allow school districts to save on staffing during the summer.  

Much of the extra schooling time from the longer school day and longer school year would go toward learning the basics better–reading, writing, math–and maybe getting a little extra cultural background that will help students enjoy a wider range of things in their lives. But I want to claim some of the extra time to make sure that the kids are legally qualified to do a wide range of jobs when they finish school. One of the most important drifts of political economy at the state level in the United States has been toward requiring licenses for more and more jobs. Here is what Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger say in their 2008 National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper “The Prevalence and Effect of Occupational Licensing”:

We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold an occupational license from a government agency … Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions–that is about 15 percent …

Many economists and other observers feel that occupational licensing has gone too far. Here is an interesting Wall Street Journal article:

Dick Carpenter and Lisa Knepper WSJ “Do Barbers Really Need a License?”

And here is an article from what I think is a Libertarian website (“The Library of Economics and Liberty”):

S David Young, “Occupational Licensing”

Others argue that health and safety and basic competence really do require training even for many jobs that sound easy, such as cutting hair or cutting nails. 

What I want to do is to restrain the tendency to go overboard on occupational licensing while allowing genuinely necessary competencies to be transmitted by requiring states to ensure that their schools high school tracks that would make it reasonably possible to be meet the legal qualifications for any of at least 60% of all licensed occupations, with each student able to be qualified with his or her high school diploma for at least 10% of all licensed occupations. Then the graduates might actually be able to get a job. This requirement for getting the Federal education grant could be met by any combination of reducing licensing requirements and increasing effective training that each state chose. I am sure that states would game the rule, so that the overall effect would be less than what this sounds on the surface, but it would be better than the way things are now, where students graduating from high school are kept out of many of the more desirable occupations by occupational licensing restrictions.  

Many schools these days have a program that allows more ambitious students to earn an Associate’s degree (equivalent to two years of college) before their time in publicly-funded high school education runs out. For them, I would add the requirement that states make it possible for ambitious students doing the equivalent of an Associate’s degree to be licensed for any of 50% of medical care jobs. (Being a doctor would still require much, much more training. Note: “any” is not the same as “all.” They would have to do some choosing.) This would not only help these students get jobs, it would help us as a nation to be able to afford the medical care that we want.  

Note that any reduction in occupational licensing restrictions increases the value of having  readily available and accurate quality ratings for services as well as goods. To be honest, in my personal experience, which I think will match that of most of my readers, I have seldom been satisfied with services from the bottom half of those in any occupation. But the stratification into different quality levels should be handled by the market as much as possible (and by government fiat as little as possible), with continually improved web-based ratings mechanisms. High school graduates need entry-level jobs, even though it is hard to be really good at anything at first before accumulating experience, especially for those who would not have been able to get jobs at all without the changes I am advocating.

Let me end by explaining my title. In his recent post “What it to be done now, Jeff Sachs appears to miss the point by a substantial margin,” Brad DeLong lays out his short-run Keynesian program for the economy, and says this about Jeff Sachs’s column:

When I started Jeff’s column, I thought it was going to be an exercise in hippie-punching, along the lines of: “Simplistic Keynesian remedies will not solve our problems. See, I am a Very Serious Person. What will solve our problems is X.” And X would turn out to be simplistic Keynesian remedies plus some magic ingredient Y. That might have been useful. It would have been a call for simplistic Keynesian policies plus magic ingredient Y.

As I discussed in my immediately previous post “Preventing Recession-Fighting from Becoming a Political Football” I am all for more aggregate demand right now, as long as it is achieved in ways that don’t ultimately add too much to the national debt, but what Brad DeLong’s words sparked in me was a desire to come up with “magic ingredient Y” for long run growth and improvement in the economy. Thinking that there might be many magic ingredients that can help in the long run–hopefully more than there are letters in the alphabet, I am going to start off with numbers. Hence, “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School.”

Adam Ozimek on Worker Voice

I love Adam Ozimek’s post “How to Improve Working Conditions” It encapsulates very well what I think Adam and I both learned from the work of Harvard Professor Richard Freeman–especially his influential book What Do Unions Do? Richard Freeman says that unions have two effects:

  1. Unions raise wages and benefits above what the workers in the union would otherwise get, which is much like a tax on a firm hiring workers and causes similar distortions. (The main difference from a tax is that the workers get the money from the “employment tax” instead of the government.)
  2. Unions communicate to firms the details of what workers want (and gather information from the workers in the union to be able to do this), often identifying ways to make workers better off that are worth more to the workers than they cost the firm, so that they increase the total size of the pie to be divided between workers and the firm.

Number 2 is the “worker voice” that Adam praises.

The simple bottom line on unions is this:

Raising wages or benefits and so making it harder for people to get jobs, bad. Making life better for workers in common-sense ways, good.

We can have the good, worker voice, without the bad, a worker-imposed employment tax that reduces employment and output, by adopting Adam’s proposal of encouraging worker associations as opposed to traditional unions. Workers need an organization that can speak for them. But they don’t need traditional unions that hurt the economy by grabbing for a bigger share in the short run.

Corporations are People, My Friend

The title is one of my cousin Mitt’s most famous quotations. This statement has not served him well politically, but I want to agree with him. There are two potential meanings of this statement, and I want to agree with both: 

  1. When the government taxes a corporation, the tax ultimately falls on some human being.
  2. When a corporation makes a decision, some set of human beings is behind that decision, and they are morally responsible for that decision.

Mitt wanted to emphasize the first point: that any tax on corporations is ultimately paid by some human being. That is a sound principle in the academic field of Public Finance. The big problem with corporate taxes is that, despite efforts on the part of many economists, economists don’t have that good a handle on exactly who ends up paying them. Whatever someone says on this score, I think I can guarantee that it will be controversial even at the purely academic level–though I would be happy to learn of a widespread academic consensus on this that I missed somehow. So if the intent is to make taxes depend on income, for example, it is a lot easier to get the intended effect on that score by taxing people directly rather than by taxing corporations.

I want to focus more on the second meaning: when a corporation makes a decision, some set of human beings is behind that decision, and they are morally responsible for that decision. By and large, those who have the most power in important corporations are well paid, and so count as members of “the rich.” So I will hold “the rich” responsible for decisions that corporations make. When a corporation makes a decision or takes an action that respects truth, I will attribute that decision to “the honest rich.” Whenever a corporation makes a decision or takes an action that does not respect truth, I will attribute that decision to “the dishonest rich.” To my mind, that adds moral clarity compared to talking about the decisions of, say, “Microsoft” or “Lehman Brothers.” When approaching corporate decisions ethically, it minces words not to recognize the people behind the decisions, even when their exact identities are not clear.

Among some of those who viscerally reject the statement that “corporations are people” I think there is a hidden impulse that is quite dangerous: the impulse to read CEO’s and other key corporate decision makers out of the human race. Even when a CEO commits evil, he or she is still a human being, and needs to be treated with the dignity that everyone deserves for being a human being, despite his or her crimes. 

Now, although corporations are people, typically a corporation is not a person, but instead many people. To the extent that corporate decisions reflect the outcome of a game  among many people (in economists’  technical sense of the word “game”), the actions of a corporation may not reflect any coherent objective function, as I discuss in my post Jobs And in that post, one of my key recommendations is each corporation be encouraged or even required by law to articulate what its objective function is intended to be, as a fictive legal person. Then its actions can be judged in relation to the intended objectives of the corporation. In that way, we can try to protect people from Frankenstein monsters of corporations that are doing things no one intends because of internal games being played. And this policy of asking corporations to articulate their objective function would help somewhat in clarifying whether the moral responsibility key decision makers in corporations bear is a responsibility for intending what the corporation did, or a responsibility for letting the corporation become a Frankenstein monster that is doing something no one intends.

As I wrote the last paragraph, I was reminded of Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market that leads to good results that go beyond what the participants in the market intend. But unless a corporation were structured internally very much like a market, I don’t know of any theorem suggesting that an invisible hand will work within a corporation to make good things happen that no one intended. And the wisdom of literature such as Scott Adams Dilbert or TV shows such as The Office suggest, to the contrary, that entropy often reigns–so that corporations often do less well than the intentions of the people in them.

Even in the small world of the University of Michigan and the medium-sized world of the Economics profession, I have seen how simple justice usually requires someone to put in serious time and effort to make that justice happen. Sadly, justice–or any kind of good behavior on the part of an organization–doesn’t come for free. I honor those who help make good things come from organizations, and hold responsible those who don’t, even if it is from inaction.

Putting together everything I have said about the ethical sense of “corporations are people,” I come to a key point. For anyone who has a modicum of power within a corporation, it is possible to be a member of “the dishonest rich” by my definition without ever lying and deceiving personally, if by inaction one makes no efforts to prevent one’s corporation from lying and deceiving. 

See my first post on Mitt: “Rich, Poor and Middle-Class,” inspired by Mitt’s saying “I am not concerned about the very poor …‘ 

Rich, Poor and Middle-Class

Today I want to react to my friend Karl Smith, to my cousin Mitt Romney, and to the part of the American electorate Mitt was trying to pander to when he said:

I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.

I think Mitt has things exactly backward here. Fortunately, I have high hopes that he said it precisely because it isn’t true: that he is concerned about the very poor and the very rich, but has a lot of trouble connecting emotionally with the middle-class. So, since he might be our next president, oh may it be true that Mitt, in his heart of hearts, agrees with me when I say this:

I am deeply concerned about the poor, because they are truly suffering, even with what safety net exists. Helping them is one of our highest ethical obligations. I am deeply concerned about the honest rich–not so much for themselves, though their welfare counts too–but because they provide goods and services that make our lives better, because they provide jobs, because they help ensure that we can get good returns for our retirement saving, and because we already depend on them so much for tax revenue. But for the middle-class, who count heavily because they make up the bulk of our society, I have a stern message. We are paying too high a price when we tax the middle class in order to give benefits to the middle-class–and taxing the rich to give benefits to the middle-class would only make things worse. The primary job of the government in relation to the middle-class has to be to help them help themselves, through education, through loans, through libertarian paternalism, and by stopping the dishonest rich from preying on the middle-class through deceit and chicanery. 

With that statement in hand, it is easy to answer Karl Smith, whowrites this in response to my post “Why Taxes are Bad”:

If we agree that benefits reduce work effort, while taxes reduce utility then basic tax transfer mechanisms seem to offer us exactly the tradeoff we want.

Welfare benefits discourage the poor from working. However, the poor have a low marginal productivity of labor.  So, society loses little when poor people work less.

On the other hand rich people have a low marginal utility of income. So if we extract their utility by extracting their income society loses little.

However, when we redistribute money to the poor society gains a lot because the poor have a high marginal utility of income.

Isn’t this exactly the trade we are looking for?

On the part of the poor, my answer is “Of course we should help the poor more, and should not worry much about any resulting lost output by the poor.” However, we do need to be concerned that for many, a job is an important contributor to self-esteem, in a way that the poor do not always fully take into account when they let tax and benefit incentives influence whether or not they work.

As for the rich, as I write above, it is not so much their welfare I am concerned about, though that counts too, but getting incentives right to encourage them to work hard for the benefit of the rest of society. Among other things, the best of the rich provide a crucial decentralized guiding role for our economy.

But Karl’s point that benefits reduce work effort is a big problem when those benefits go to the middle class. The middle class make up the bulk of our society and produce the bulk of GDP. So if government benefits cause them to work less–for example, to retire earlier than they otherwise would–we all end up poorer.

Two last points: First, it will take me at least a hundred posts to develop, clarify and defend my views about taxation and related aspects of public policy. Second, many readers will be surprised that I think Romney might care about the poor (though not so much about the middle class) in his heart of hearts. This could be my familial bias talking, but I try to back up this view in my post “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?”

Also inspired by a saying of Mitt’s:                  

“Corporations are People, My Friend”

Inspired by a saying of Barack’s:

“You Didn’t Build That: America Edition”

Jobs

Jobs and the nature of work are central to the issues I laid out in my first post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” I am prompted to write about jobs and the nature of work today by the interesting debate about giving up freedom to get and keep a job kicked off by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch at Crooked Timber, answered by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who in turn are answered by John Holbo. Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior provides clarity to the debate.  And the hive mind of Karl Smith and Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior asked me by tweet to weigh in. I won’t try to do a blow-by-blow, but I have some things to say. If you don’t have the energy to read the whole debate, everything I say below can be understood from just reading this litany of limitations on employee freedom from the post that started it all: Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch at Crooked Timber.

1. Abridgments of freedom inside the workplace:

On pain of being fired, workers in most parts of the United States can be commanded to pee or forbidden to pee. They can be watched on camera by their boss while they pee. They can be forbidden to wear what they want, say what they want (and at what decibel), and associate with whom they want. They can be punished for doing or not doing any of these things—punished legally or illegally (as many as 1 in 17 workers who try to join a union is illegally fired or suspended). But what’s remarkable is just how many of these punishments are legal, and even when they’re illegal, how toothless the law can be. Outside the usual protections (against race and gender discrimination, for example), employees can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. They can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss (fired by the same boss, that is), refusing to have their person and effects searched, calling the boss a “cheapskate” in a personal letter, and more. They have few rights on the job—certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers—and what rights they do have employers will fight tooth and nail to make sure aren’t made known to them or will simply require them to waive as a condition of employment. Outside the prison or the military—which actually provide, at least on paper, some guarantee of due process—it’s difficult to conceive of a less free institution for adults than the average workplace.

2. Abridgements of freedom outside the workplace

In addition to abridging freedoms on the job, employers abridge their employees’ freedoms off the job. Employers invade employees’ privacy, demanding that they hand over passwords to their Facebook accounts, and fire them for resisting such invasions. Employers secretly film their employees at home. Workers are fired for supporting the wrong political candidates(“work for John Kerry or work for me”), failing to donate to employer-approved candidates,challenging government officials, writing critiques of religion on their personal blogs (IBM instructs employees to “show proper consideration…for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory—such as politics and religion”), carrying on extramarital affairs, participating in group sex at home, cross-dressing, and more. Workers are punished for smoking or drinking in the privacy of their own homes. (How many nanny states have tried that?) They can be fired for merely thinking about having an abortion, for reporting information that might have averted the Challenger disaster, for being raped by an estranged husband. Again, this is all legal in many states, and in the states where it is illegal, the laws are often weak.

To me the ethical question of whether work requirements are morally justified is very closely tied to the economic question of whether or not those requirements are necessary for the effective production of the goods and services the job is intended to produce. To make this ethical point, let me give the example of our volunteer military–a comparison that Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch allude to.

In my view, our volunteer military system is one of the glories of our republic. I cannot see how the drastic governmental coercion of a military draft could ever be justified if a volunteer military can do the job of protecting our country and policing the world as well as our volunteer U.S. Military has. (In this post let’s leave aside questions about the morality of decisions by our Commanders in Chief–here I am only talking about the overall effectiveness of the U.S. Military.) But as it is, men and women voluntarily choose to join the the U.S. Military. Once they join, many are sent far away from home into the face of hostile attacks. Moreover, they are all subject to a wide range of commands from superior officers and to military discipline. If they are fired–that is, dishonorably discharged–there is a due process procedure, but one that respects the needs of the military to do what it takes to be an effective fighting force. As long as the effects (both intended and collateral) of what the U.S. Military is doing on those outside the U.S. Military itself are on net positive, I don’t see an ethical problem with allowing people to choose to become soldiers and subject themselves to military orders and discipline.

On the ethical question of unfreedom at work, the only difference between the volunteer U.S. Military and other employment is (1) the high level of importance of the U.S. Military’s task, and (2) what the U.S. Military needs from its employees to be effective at its task. In my view, in jobs that are voluntarily taken, and can be voluntarily left, job strictures that are necessary for a firm to be effective at producing the goods and services it specializes in are ethically OK.

I am troubled, however, when a firm takes freedom away from its employees unnecessarily. This can easily happen, for example, when the owners of a firm are not easily able to monitor the underbosses they employ, and these underbosses use their power over the employees under them at least in part for personal gain rather than for the sake of the firm’s mission. A firm may also take freedom away from its employees out of ignorance. In our paper “The Decline of Drudgery and the Paradox of Hard Work,” which is not yet ready to circulate, Brendan Epstein and I argue that figuring out how to make jobs more pleasant without using too many resources to do so is an important dimension of technological progress. At the cutting edge, this kind of technological progress can give a firm a competitive advantage. And once any bit of technological progress has happened, the ignorance of the way things were done before becomes apparent. But many firms are nowhere near the cutting edge of the on-the-job-utility/productivity frontier; many operate far below the level of current best practice.

Since organizations involve many people, they do not always coherently pursue their declared mission. (And indeed, even individuals do not always behave coherently.) In judging unfreedom at work, I think we should judge according to an organization’s declared mission or missions. This is a little like the legal principle that things the government does should have a rational basis. An organization could declare that its mission is making profits, protecting endangered species from extinction, fostering a particular religion or political point of view, seeking truth or raising economic welfare. Whatever it declares its mission to be, it should only ask its employees to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of furthering that mission. Now if an organization declared that its mission was to make life miserable for its employees, within limits that might be allowable too, but only if the organization clearly declared that to be its mission in advance.

What is a good set of institutions to prevent organizations from taking freedom away from their employees unnecessarily? The key is to have the judgment made by others who are sympathetic to the organization’s general type of mission, and who will have appropriate deference to the organization’s specialized knowledge about what works and what doesn’t, but without ties to the organization itself. For organizations whose mission is to make a profit, I think it is important to have the judgment made by a panel of others who have met a payroll and worried about their firms going under. This may seem overly favorable to firms, but remember that it represents a higher level of due process for workers than current law in most states.   

The reason I don’t think a regular jury can adequately judge job dismissals is that it would be hard for most people to ignore the fact that something very valuable has been taken from someone who is fired from a job. It is not easy to remember that the person hired to replace the one fired gains something equally valuable. And it is not that easy for most people to appreciate how necessary is the threat of firing (or where firing is impossible, how important is the threat of some sort of demotion) at a systems level to undergird those dimensions of workplace discipline that are necessary for a firm to fulfill its missions of making a profit and effectively producing goods and services that improve people’s lives. 

Let end with a point that ties into the concerns I raised in my first post “What is a Supply-Side Liberal?” The fact that employees are willing to put up with so much for the sake of keeping their jobs indicates just how valuable jobs are to the typical employee. Economists tend to use simple models with no preexisting distortions to illustrate the benefits of low taxes. In simple models with no preexisting distortions, workers actually don't value their existing jobs much at all–they can always get another job. The fact that, in the real world, jobs are very valuable to people makes the destruction of jobs by taxes and unwise regulations much worse than if people didn’t value jobs.

The simple models are nice because what happens in the absence of taxes is clean and neat and attractive.  But the benefits of low marginal tax rates are actually much greater in more advanced models where, in ways I will discuss down the road, (a) imperfect competition is already leading firms to underproduce and (b) minimum wages, union power, occupational licensing, and the need to obtain worker cooperation lead to jobs being valuable to people, as jobs are valuable to people in the real world.

Gary Cornell on Intergenerational Mobility

Mathematician Gary Cornell has a theory I like about perceptions of intergenerational mobility in different countries and an empirical question the theory depends on.  Please send replies to him at gary@thecornells.com . I will find out from him what answers he got.  Here is his email I reprint with his permission with his theory and question:

Hi Miles, thanks for the post.

I wonder if you know anything about the following conjecture of mine:

The background is that I’ve long puzzled about people believe that America is the land of opportunity even though intergenerational mobility  is actually lower here than in many other countries. I  have a conjecture  that seems to have some  evidence to sustain it. (Basically I scanned the equivalent of the Forbes rich lists here and in other countries).

Namely:  While moving from upwards from one quintile to another  is less likely in the united states, moving  to the top .01% of wealth (assets of about $30 million roughly) is far more likely in the United States than in other countries or even moving into the top .1% (about 7 million in assets)  (For these people think of the first 1,000 people hired at Google or the first few hundred at Facebook  for example… )  In other countries I am pretty sure that the probability  that someone born  middle class or even upper middle class can become really really rich is a small fraction of what it is here.  So more precisely my conjecture is that, for example, because the ratio:

P(getting rich in the US)/P(getting rich in Europe)  

is so large people (and the media) tend to believe and the media tends to report that America is a land of opportunity compared to other countries and to forget that

P(getting really  rich in the US)

is almost vanishingly small in absolute terms… (If you look at the equivalent of the Forbes list in other countries it sure looks like the american list has fewer examples of people getting their place through the lucky sperm derby than in England, France. Or Germany.) Do you know of any papers on this?