Quartz #65—>Why Thinking about China is the Key to a Free World

Here is the full text of my 65th Quartz column, “An economist explains why a key to the free world lies with China,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on July 3, 2015. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

Ori Heffetz pointed out the error of my counting 239 years (“almost a quarter of a millenium”) of freedom in the United States since 1776, since the key date for freedom in the United States can’t be counted any earlier than the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution on December 18, 1865 abolishing legal slavery in the US. We are coming up on the 150th anniversary of that event later on this year. This actually reinforces my statement in the first sentence of the column that freedom is a rarity in human history. I am leaving this error in the column itself, because it is an instructive error, once pointed out. 

In addition to comments here, don’t miss the comments and debate in reaction to my first link to the Quartz column.    

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© July 3, 2015: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2020. All rights reserved.

Freedom is a rarity in human history, and still too much of a rarity in the world today. This should be no surprise. Would-be tyrants abound, and it is not easy to establish a system that keeps them all in check. The wonder is that we can celebrate the better part of a quarter of a millennium of freedom in the United States, and comparable freedom in some other lucky countries.

When Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Nichole Szembrot and I surveyed more than four and a half thousand Americans about what they viewed as the most important objectives for public policy, the top two (of 131 choices) were “freedom from injustice, corruption, and abuse of power in your nation,” and “people having many options and possibilities in their lives and the freedom to choose among them.”

This pairing of responses shows an awareness of the danger to freedom from those who would organize the institutions of a nation to serve the interests of an in-group at the expense of an out-group. At the beginning of the struggle toward freedom, the in-group is very small and the out-group large. At later stages of the struggle toward universal freedom, the in-group will be large and the out-group small. But adding up across the world, it is not at all clear that a majority of the people in the world today can be called truly free.

In international struggles for freedom, the advantage free nations have had in per capita income has helped to keep them from being overwhelmed by a coalition of dictatorships and oligarchies. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue in Why Nations Fail, the level of economic freedom necessary to enjoy the full benefits of innovation presents a constant danger of undermining the power of those currently in charge. As long as a country is getting up to speed on existing technologies and settled best practices, such dangers can be kept within bounds. But, a small in-group with a toehold on power is loathe to allow a creative adventure into the unknown that could transform the political arena as well as the economy.

The key to the future of freedom in our world is China. Its one-and-a-quarter billion people and high rate of economic growth are the reasons its course is so important to the future:

  • In the best case, China may evolve toward full freedom, and the full measure of prosperity possible when no one group manages to obstruct progress in order to cling to power.
  • China may descend into a civil war, with advanced weapons on more than one side of that war.
  • China may become like Russia under Putin, only more powerful: nominally democratic, but authoritarian and aggressively nationalistic.
  • China may continue under the rule of a nominally Communist oligarchy as now, but with economic growth gradually slowing (because of the limits to economic liberalization without political liberalization) so that it stalls out at a GDP per person perhaps 30-40% of that in the US—which would still make the total size of its economy significantly larger than that of the US, simply because China has so many more people.

Thus, over a horizon of two or three decades, China is dangerously unpredictable. The last three possibilities—Chinese civil war, a Chinese Putin, or continued dominance by an oligarchy that attacks freedom as a faulty Western conceit—all represent serious dangers to the progress of freedom in the world, as well as to peace. The imperative of raising the likelihood of full freedom in China means that trying to stand in the way of Chinese economic growth is not the answer. And one should remember Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s question: “Does it really improve the national security of the United States for schoolchildren in China to be taught that the United States sought to keep them as poor as possible for as long as possible?”

If one rejects the fool’s errand of trying to stunt the economic growth of a dangerously unpredictable China, the best course to protect freedom and relative peace in the world is to make the free world stronger: numerically, economically, militarily, and in the quality of life freedom can be shown to provide. On all of these fronts, I worry about what I see as a lack of seriousness by the leaders and citizens of the free world about meeting the challenge of China.

Strengthening the free world numerically

Bringing more people into the free world is easier than it sounds. The key is to focus on people, not patches of ground. Although it is hard to bring a patch of ground currently subject to an oppressive regime under free institutions, the economic importance of land—apart from what is on top of the land—continues to decline relative to the importance of people, education and training, ideas and capital. Once one focuses on people, the answer is clear: bring people to where freedom already rules. That is so easy it is hard to do the opposite. Many people in benighted countries seek freedom and the prosperity that full freedom enables. Standing in the way of those hopes, many otherwise free countries make strenuous efforts to keep those people seeking prosperity and freedom out.

The rhetoric is all about those hoping to join the free world taking away the jobs of those already there. Forgotten is the fact that those hoping to join the free world will also serve in the armed forces and pay taxes to support those armed forces, as well as raise children who will invent the technologies that can help us meet the challenge of China economically as well as militarily. (For the record, the only persuasive evidence for immigrants materially hurting the job prospects of those already here is for them hurting the job prospects of other recent immigrants.)

Despite the relative difficulty of bringing nations closer to full freedom, there is important work to be done in that arena—particularly in solidifying and deepening freedom in nations that are well along the road toward freedom, but need to go further. The people in Turkey recently voted decisively against creeping dictatorship. I agree with The Economist in calling for the European Union to move forward with admitting Turkey in order to solidify those gains. And because of the number of people involved, helping India reach its full potential is of crucial importance for the free world.

Strengthening the free world economically

It is much better to have the democratic tug of war between different groups each looking to get their share of the pie than it is to have one favored group that alone gets its way. But when it comes to strength in a dangerous world, it is the size of the pie that matters most. Economists actually have excellent tools for understanding what it takes to foster economic growth. Monetary policy tools for stabilizing the economy are advancing faster than most people realize.

And although issues of taxation and certain labor market rules continue to be contentious, there is broad agreement among economists about many key measures to foster long-run economic growth: improving education, pouring resources into research and development, and preserving economic freedom: the ability to do new things in new ways without your competitor being able to get the government to stop you. In the area of economic policy, one of the biggest problems is simply the amount of political airtime taken up by a small set of issues that leaves little time to discuss everything else.

Strengthening the free world militarily

Militarily, one of the free world’s successes is now also a weakness. After World War II, great efforts were made to encourage pacifism in Japan and Germany. Those efforts bore remarkable fruit. Anyone who spends any time in Japan or Germany soon learns how deep pacifism runs in those countries now. Japan’s pacifism only affects its own military efforts, but Germany’s pacifism has contributed to pacifism in the rest of Europe. For the rest of the free world, I would riff on St. Augustine by saying “Make me pacifist, but not yet.” Peace is important, but so is freedom. Let freedom triumph; then we can hope to be able to afford pacifism. In the meanwhile, the pacifism of Japan and Germany means that the rest of the free world needs to shoulder a bigger military burden.

Given numerical and economic strength–fostered by more immigration, education, research and economic freedom–there is no lack of ideas for how to turn technological sophistication and military spending into military strength (with all the frightfulness inherent in military strength). A fascinating article in The Economist details some of these ideas:

  • putting a new generation of autonomous drones in the air and under the sea
  • lasers and electromagnetic rail guns to protect aircraft carriers against incoming missiles without the huge expense of current anti-missile missiles
  • making our own communications and computing networks robust to enemy attack, while going after theirs.

For the free world, the objective of military strength is not war, but deterrence. What all scenarios for China’s future hold in common is that China is likely to behave better if it faces a relatively strong American military than if it faces weakness.

Strengthening the case for freedom

When the free world does well, it is much harder for the unfree world to keep out the winds of freedom. But autocracies use every failure of the free world to argue that autocracy isn’t so bad in comparison. In making the case for freedom, good economic policy in the free world goes a long way. But making sure that the benefits of freedom extend to everyone is also crucial.

Some argue that the way to make sure that the benefits of freedom extend to everyone is to expand government social programs. But the use of government power when it is not necessary is itself an affront to freedom, since people are in effect being told to “get with the program” or be thrown in jail. I don’t think we currently know how to get done what needs to be done with a doctrinaire libertarian approach, but we can edge in that direction. People want to help others who are less fortunate. The only thing that stops them from doing what needs to be done voluntarily is concern about the time and resources that might take away from their own families.

So, as I advocated here in “Yes, There is an Alternative to Austerity vs. Spending: Reinvigorate America’s Nonprofits,” it is enough to use the arm of the government to require more substantial charitable contributions, while giving people wide latitude to decide which particular causes they want to support. This can both assist in things the government is now doing, such as taking care of senior citizens and supporting medical research, and begin to take care of things that should be done, but aren’t. With millions of people each required to do something, but allowed to think and decide for themselves what most needs to be done, the odds that the benefits of freedom and prosperity extend into all the nooks and crannies of society improve dramatically.

Finally, though efforts to measure national well-being in ways that respect the full range of things human beings care about are still in their infancy, there is hope that developing such measures as counterpoints to GDP can guide public policy toward ways of improving the quality of life in nations that use them in unexpected ways. Such measures of national well-being might also be used by autocrats to keep those they rule over just happy enough to forestall rebellion, but those rulers would be faced with this truth: people love freedom, and will never be content for long without it.

“These different defenses of literature are connected with different conceptions of democracy. The world-citizen view insists on the need for all citizens to understand differences with which they need to live; it sees citizens as striving to deliberate and to understand across these division. It is connected with a conception of democratic debate as deliberation about the common good. The identity-politics view, by contrast, depicts the citizen body as a marketplace of identity-based interest groups jockeying for power, and views difference as something to be affirmed rather than understood. Indeed, it seems a bit hard to blame literature professionals for the current prevalance of identity politics in the academy, when these scholars simply reflect a cultural view that has other, more powerful sources. Dominant economic views of rationality with the political culture have long powerfully promoted the idea that democracy is merely a marketplace of competing interest groups, without any common goals and ends that can be rationally deliberated. Economics has a far more pervasive and formative influence on our life than does French literary theory, and it is striking that conservative critics who attack the Modern Language Association are slow to criticize the far more powerful sources of such anticosmopolitan ideas when they are presented by market economists. It was no postmodernist, but Milton Friedman, who said that about matters of value, ‘men can ultimately only fight.’ This statement is false and pernicious. World citizens should vigorously criticize these ideas wherever they occur, insisting that they lead to an impoverished view of democracy.”

Stephen Strobbe’s 12 Life Lessons

At the University of Michigan we have a student-selected “Golden Apple” award for excellent teachers. The winners traditional give an “Ideal Last Lecture.” I liked the 12 life lessons Golden Apple Winner Stephen Strobbe gave. (You can see the full article in the University of Michigan’s University Record here.) Here they are:

  1. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own happiness.
  2. You can’t accomplish much of anything by yourself.
  3. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason.
  4. Sometimes it’s wonderful to be wrong.
  5. You can learn something from almost anyone.
  6. You don’t need to learn all of life’s lessons the hard way, just the important ones.
  7. Say yes to more than you think you can do.
  8. Ask for what you need.
  9. Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed.
  10. Let yourself be adopted by a dog.
  11. Seek good counsel, and then use it.
  12. When the time comes, you will be enough.

Jennifer Ryan on Andrew Haldane: "The UK’s Subversive Central Banker" →

Unlike Bank of England Chief Economist Andrew Haldane’s position described in Jennifer Ryan’s Bloomberg Business article linked above, I am doubtful that the UK needs lower interest rates right now. But if it did, Andrew Sentance, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee is wrong in saying “There’s not much lower you can go, and a cut to 0.25 percent isn’t going to have a significant impact on the economy” (as quoted in the article). The Bank of England has actually been quite interested in eliminating the zero lower bound, as indicated by making Ken Rogoff and me keynote speakers at their conference on the future of money in May 2015. 

Quartz 64—>Radical Banking: The World Needs New Tools to Fight the Next Recession

Link to the Column on Quartz

Here is the full text of my 64th Quartz column, “Radical Banking: The world needs new tools in the fight against the next recession,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on June 25, 2015. Links to all my other columns can be found here.

If you want to mirror the content of this post on another site, that is possible for a limited time if you read the legal notice at this link and include both a link to the original Quartz column and the following copyright notice:

© June 25, 2015: Miles Kimball, as first published on Quartz. Used by permission according to a temporary nonexclusive license expiring June 30, 2020. All rights reserved.

The cover of the June 13th Economist magazine trumpets “Watch out: The world is not ready for the next recession.” Within, the cover story explains:

When central banks face their next recession, in other words, they risk having almost no room to boost their economies by cutting interest rates. That would make the next downturn even harder to escape.

The Economist is wrong.

The proof that the Economist is wrong could be heard in a remarkable May 18 conference in London, not far from the Economist’s offices. The conference had an impressive list of co-sponsors–the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Imperial College Business School, and the Swiss National Bank—who chose the audacious title “Removing the Zero Lower Bound on Interest Rates.” In other words, the conference organizers were announcing at the top of the program to the assembled central bankers, academics, and financial industry participants their belief that any limits on how much interest rates can be cut can be swept away.  That conference was followed by another conference the next day at the Bank of England, with the same theme.

If interest rates can be cut as much as necessary, central banks alone have plenty of firepower to end the next recession, even without any help from fiscal policy. Given the limits to fiscal policy coming from political squabbles and concerns about adding to national debt, monetary policy unhampered by limitations on central banks’ interest rate targets would be good news indeed. For example, if the Fed could have cut interest rates to -4% throughout 2009, the US could have had a robust recovery by the end of 2009 instead of bad economic times dragging on as long as they did.

I spoke at both conferences. The Centre for Economic Policy Research arranged for interviews of several participants at the lunch break of the “Removing the Zero Lower Bound” conference, and did a brilliant job of editing those interviews into videos with high production values. You can see links for all of the interviews here. All of these interviews take negative interest rates very seriously. Collectively, the full set of interviews gives a sense of how much attitudes are shifting.

The three most radical interviews—arguing that there may ultimately be no limits to how low interest rates can go when necessary to bring economic recovery–are with Citigroup’s Chief Economist Willem Buiter

with Martin Andersson, from Sweden’s Ministry of Finance

and with me

The key to unlimited firepower in monetary policy is to deal with the problem of people storing cash. As I describe in my interview, my own approach to avoiding the problem of people storing paper currency to get an interest rate close to zero rather than the intended negative interest rate during a serious downturn is to charge private banks a deposit fee when they turn in cash at the cash window of the central bank for credit in their reserve accounts with the central bank.

Such a charge at the cash window of the central bank closes the loophole that would otherwise allow financial firms to earn a zero interest rate (minus storage costs) by using cash. In this system, regular people who are saving for long periods of time could still in all likelihood earn positive interest rates on bank accounts and a zero rate on cash over longer periods of time, but the ability to earn a zero interest rate from cash would be temporarily suspended during the worst of an economic downturn. As a result, other interest rates could be pushed down as low as necessary to heal the economy.

After these two conferences, I visited the Bank of Finland as well as the central banks of Sweden, Norway and Canada to explain at length my views on how to enable central banks to cut interest rates as much as they think they should, without being stopped short by the problem of paper currency storage. As compared to my visits to central banks before the conference I find the change in attitudes toward the possibility of deep negative interest rates as a result of these conferences has been dramatic.

The Sveriges Riksbank in Sweden already has negative interest rates, and could easily go further.

The Bank of Canada is less likely to need negative interest rates in the immediate future, but already has an “Effective Lower Bound” working group focused on exploring the possibilities for negative interest rate policy in the next recession. After the London conferences, and my extended discussions with them, these central banks are all thinking more seriously about the possibility that the danger of massive paper currency storage in a negative interest rate environment can be averted by appropriate action at the cash window of a central bank.

Introducing new tools for monetary policy is inherently controversial, but recent years have seen important additions to what is seen in most central banks as the acceptable toolkit: the use of quantitative easing (QE) and more recently the use of mild negative interest rates. Modifications to the way paper currency is handled at the cash window of the central bank to make deep negative rates possible could plausibly be the next major addition to the monetary policy toolkit. If so, the world could be better prepared to deal with the next recession than many people expect.

Michael Reddell: The Zero Lower Bound and Miles Kimball’s Visit to New Zealand

Michael Reddell has had a distinguished career in monetary policy making in New Zealand (as well as in Papua New Guinea and as an IMF appointee in Zambia). He recently retired from his job at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and began a blog “Croaking Cassandra” about economic policy. (He also blogs about religion on his blog “Among Traditions.”)

I was delighted to get an email from him yesterday morning saying he had seen my talk at the New Zealand Treasury Friday, July 24 on the Economics of Happiness and would love to get together to talk about eliminating the zero lower bound. (I had spoken on Wednesday, July 22 at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand about eliminating the zero lower bound.) As it happened, I went to lunch a few hours later with both Michael Reddell and Carsten Schousboe (who is a Senior Health Economist at the Pharmaceutical Management Agency here in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand).

In his email introducing himself, Michael pointed me to this blog post, which he kindly agreed to let me mirror here. Here is what Michael had to say:

One of my persistent messages on my blog “Croaking Cassandra” has been that central banks and finance ministries need to be much more pro-active in dealing with the technological and regulatory issues that make the near-zero lower bound a binding constraint on how low policy interest rates can go, and hence on how much support monetary policy can provide in periods of excess capacity (and insufficient demand).

I’ve found it surprising that the central banks and governments of other advanced economies have not done more in this area. In most of these countries, policy interest rates have been at or near what they had treated as lower bounds since 2008/09. A few have been plumbing new depths in the last year or so, but half-heartedly (the negative rates have not applied to all balances at the central bank), and no one is confident that policy interest rates could be taken much below -50bps (or perhaps -75bps) without policy starting to become much less effective. The ability to convert to physical currency without limit is the constraint. There are holding costs to doing so, but for all except day-to-day transactions, the holding costs would be less than the cost of continuing to hold deposits once interest rates get materially negative. For asset managers and pension funds, for example, that shift would look attractive.  I would certainly recommend that the Reserve Bank pension fund (of which I’m an elected trustee) transferred much of its short-term fixed income holdings into cash if the New Zealand OCR (Official Cash Rate) looked likely to be negative for any length of time.

I’ve been surprised by the lack of much urgency in grappling with this issue in other countries. I suspect there must have been a sentiment along the lines of “well, getting to zero was a surprise, and inconvenient, but we got through that recession, it is too late to do anything now, and before too long policy rates will be heading back up to more normal levels”.     But they haven’t, despite false starts from several central banks. And each of these countries is exposed to the risk of a new recession, with little or no macroeconomic policy ammunition left in the arsenal. Interest rates can’t be cut, and the political limits to further fiscal stimulus are severe in most advanced countries.

If the rather sluggish reaction of other advanced country central banks (and finance ministries) is a surprise, the lack of any initiative by the New Zealand and Australian authorities is harder to excuse. Neither country hit the zero bound in 2008/09, or in the more recent slowdown (Australian policy rates are now at their lows, and commentators increasingly expect that New Zealand’s soon will be).  The period since 2008/09 should have shown authorities that the zero lower bound is much more of a threat that most of us previously realised (not just, for example, a Japanese oddity). It should have suggested some serious contingency planning – as, for example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand had done as part of whole of government preparedness for the possibility of a flu pandemic. Both countries have had years to get ready for the possibility of the zero lower bound. It is not as if the experience of the countries who have hit zero is exactly encouraging – slow and weak recoveries and lingering high unemployment.

But neither New Zealand nor Australia appears to have done anything about it. Indeed, in the most recent Reserve Bank of New Zealand Statement of Intent these issues don’t even rate a mention. I’m not suggesting it is the single most urgent or important issue the central banks face. Contingency planning never is, but that does not make doing it any less important. I’m also not suggesting that New Zealand is as badly placed as some – if we were to get to a zero OCR, our yield advantage would disappear and the exchange rate would probably be revisiting the lows last seen in 2000. And we have some more room for fiscal stimulus than some other countries. But no central bank or finance ministry should contemplate with equanimity the exhaustion of monetary policy ammunition.  Nasty shocks are often worse than we allow for.

My prompt for this post is the visit to New Zealand this week of Miles Kimball, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan (and an interesting blogger across a range of topics). Kimball has probably been the most active figure in exploring and promoting practical ways to deal with the regulatory constraints and administrative practices that make the ZLB a problem. They are all government choices. I’ve linked to some of his work previously. I noticed Kimball’s visit through a flyer for a guest lecture he is giving at Treasury on Friday, on a quite unrelated topic. I presume he will also be spending time at the Reserve Bank, addressing some of the monetary issues. This would seem like a good opportunity for some serious and enterprising journalist to get in touch with Kimball – whether directly, or via the Reserve Bank or Treasury – for an interview on some of his work in this area, and the reaction he is getting as he promotes his ideas, and practical solutions, around the world.

I’ve suggested previously that if our authorities are not willing to start on serious preparations to overcome the ZLB then the Minister should think much more seriously about raising the inflation target. I’d prefer to avoid a higher inflation target – indeed, in the long-run a target centred nearer zero would be good – but current inflation targets (here and abroad) were set before people really appreciated just how much of a constraint the zero lower bound could be. Better to act now so that in any future severe recession there is no question as to ability of the Reserve Bank to cut the OCR just as much as macroeconomic conditions warrant.

Here are some other previous posts where I have touched on ZLB issues:

Aristotle's Eudaimonia

“Aristotle saw people not as striving to maximize a state of satisfaction, and also not as striving to perform a list of duties. He saw them, instead, as striving to achieve a life that included all the activities to which, on reflection, they decided to attach intrinsic value.”

John Stuart Mill’s Laffer Curve

When Maryland tried to tax the Second Bank of the United States, Daniel Webster argued before the Supreme Court in McCulloch v. Maryland that “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy.” The Supreme Court echoed his words, saying “That the power to tax involves the power to destroy … [is] not to be denied.” John Stuart Mill addressed the same issue in paragraph 9 of On Liberty “Chapter V: Applications,” but came to a different rule: taxation must be limited to no higher than the revenue-maximizing rate–otherwise, it is clear that the intent of the taxation is to destroy rather than to raise revenue. He wrote:

A further question is, whether the State, while it permits, should nevertheless indirectly discourage conduct which it deems contrary to the best interests of the agent; whether, for example, it should take measures to render the means of drunkenness more costly, or add to the difficulty of procuring them by limiting the number of the places of sale. On this as on most other practical questions, many distinctions require to be made. To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained, is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste. Their choice of pleasures, and their mode of expending their income, after satisfying their legal and moral obligations to the State and to individuals, are their own concern, and must rest with their own judgment. These considerations may seem at first sight to condemn the selection of stimulants as special subjects of taxation for purposes of revenue. But it must be remembered that taxation for fiscal purposes is absolutely inevitable; that in most countries it is necessary that a considerable part of that taxation should be indirect; that the State, therefore, cannot help imposing penalties, which to some persons may be prohibitory, on the use of some articles of consumption. It is hence the duty of the State to consider, in the imposition of taxes, what commodities the consumers can best spare; and à fortiori, to select in preference those of which it deems the use, beyond a very moderate quantity, to be positively injurious. Taxation, therefore, of stimulants, up to the point which produces the largest amount of revenue (supposing that the State needs all the revenue which it yields) is not only admissible, but to be approved of.

Even apart from the need for revenue, it has always seemed to me that within reason taxes were a gentler way of discouraging something, more consistent with freedom than ironclad rules. The changes in defaults and framing that go by the name of libertarian paternalism or soft paternalism seem even gentler and yet more consistent with freedom.

In the arena of encouraging actions to help the environment, I personally often find social disapproval to be a more onerous, less freedom-respecting means of getting compliance than a modest tax with the same overall effectiveness (and with rebates to maintain neutrality vis a vis the income distribution) would be. It uses up a lot of air time in social interactions for people to be guilting others into green actions that could be encouraged subtly in the background of life with an appropriate Pigou tax. Maybe it is just me, but I often bridle at someone telling me directly what to do, but don’t have any psychological resistance to responding to price signals, within reason.

Answering Adam Ozimek’s Skepticism about a US Sovereign Wealth Fund

image source (2013)

image source (2013)

In many blog posts and Quartz columns, I have argued that major economies such as the US should establish sovereign wealth funds even when issuing bonds is required to capitalize the funds. Sovereign wealth funds are already standard for countries that have positive net liquid assets. The new idea is to say that major countries that have negative net liquid assets should also have sovereign wealth funds as stabilization tools. A good post to turn to first for this is “Roger Farmer and Miles Kimball on the Value of Sovereign Wealth Funds for Economic Stabilization.”

In my tour of central banks to advocate eliminating the zero lower bound, I point out that even if monetary policy is someday done well enough to essentially keep the economy at the natural level of output all the time, there could still be a financial cycle. This possibility becomes clear if one writes down an entirely real general equilibrium noise trader model (as I have done in some very early stage research with Jing Zhang that might involve other coauthors before we are through). Even if the business cycle is entirely conquered in the sense of a zero output gap from sticky prices at all times, the financial cycle can cause welfare losses. Welfare losses can occur even when high enough equity requirements have taken away the implicit bailout subsidy for leverage. A contrarian sovereign wealth fund can help counteract the messed-up price signals caused by the noise traders.

In a July 19, 2015 post, “Skepticism About A U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund,” Adam Ozimek worries about implementation difficulties for a sovereign wealth fund or other major economy. The first thing to say is that in general, institutions tend to be better in countries that–apart from natural resources–would be the richer ones, and so the right benchmark for the likely quality of a US sovereign wealth fund is Norway’s sovereign wealth fund rather than, say Saudi Arabia’s.

The second thing to say is that both Roger Farmer and I recommend a rule that the sovereign wealth fund is only allowed to invest in (low-fee) exchange traded funds. The importance of this is to keep the government from (a) micromanaging the investments and to keep the government from (b) voting the shares and micromanaging the behavior of the firms that way. In the US at least, if a sovereign wealth fund such as I recommend could ever be established, such aspects of the initial design of the fund can be maintained by the difficulty of getting changes opposed by one party through both Congress and a potential presidential veto. An initial bipartisan agreement on principles could not easily be broken.

The third thing to say is that I know in practice how to get the fund started off with a contrarian philosophy: I would recommend appointing John Campbell as the first head of the US Sovereign Wealth Fund.

On the objective of a sovereign wealth fund, the more I think about it, the more I realize that calculating the optimal policy for a large country’s sovereign wealth fund given a concern with overall social welfare in the usual way is a very interesting research problem. Basically, there is a technical answer to this question in the same sense that there is a technical answer for optimal monetary policy, after what I think is easier math than for optimal monetary policy.

The small country problem is, of course, even easier: a small country faces something much more akin to the standard portfolio problem, with the issue of what level of risk aversion to use when investing on behalf of a nation’s citizens. And of course, just as an individual household needs to integrate human capital into its portfolio decision, a small country sovereign wealth fund needs to integrate a wide variety of assets the country’s citizens and government already hold into its portfolio decision.

David Dreyer Lassen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Søren Leth-Petersen—Stimulus Policy: Why Not Let People Spend Their Own Money?

Note: This figure is from Kreiner, Lassen and Leth-Petersen (2014). It presents a local polynomial regression of the marginal propensity to spend the 2009 stimulus, which is collected by survey in January 2010, on the household marginal interest rat…

Note: This figure is from Kreiner, Lassen and Leth-Petersen (2014). It presents a local polynomial regression of the marginal propensity to spend the 2009 stimulus, which is collected by survey in January 2010, on the household marginal interest rate calculated from third party reported data with information about all individual deposit and loan accounts in 2007-2008. The regression is based on 5,055 observations.

Copenhagen was the third stop on my tour campaigning for the elimination of the zero lower bound. At the University of Copenhagen I also learned that the Danes were ahead of me on my “National Rainy Day Accounts” proposal. The Danes are showing the way toward technocratic stabilization policy for nations that share their monetary policy with other countries and sometimes need something more than the common monetary policy. (Denmark is not in the eurozone, but by long and hallowed custom has kept a fixed exchange rate relative to the mark and then the euro, so now it effectively shares its monetary policy with the eurozone.) 

I am delighted to be able to host this guest post by David Dreyer Lassen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Søren Leth-Petersen on the Danish use of national rainy day accounts, based on their research:

How is it possible to stimulate the economy when traditional monetary and fiscal policy instruments are exhausted? Using an unprecedented policy tool the Danish government allowed people in 2009 to prematurely withdraw pension funds that were previously collected into individual accounts through a government mandate, thereby letting people spend their own money while leaving the government budget unaffected. Such a policy will have significant effects on spending if people are liquidity constrained. Evidence from a new study confirms this conjecture.

From 1998 to 2003 almost all Danes contributed 1% of their income to a mandatory pension plan, the so-called Special Pension (SP) savings plan. The funds were kept in individual, non-accessible accounts and were to be paid out starting at the public retirement age. Taking the entire population (as well as pundits and commentators) by surprise, on March 1, 2009 the government suddenly announced that the funds accumulated could be withdrawn during a window starting 1 June 2009 and ending 31 December 2009. The objective of the policy was to stimulate household spending. 

The policy is interesting for several reasons: First, the Danish stimulus policy changed the timing of access to the individual funds while leaving individual wealth unaffected. Spending the pension funds today directly lowers consumption possibilities in the future. In this sense, the Danish stimulus policy implicitly imposed Ricardian equivalence at the micro level, and is thus almost ideal for measuring the importance of liquidity constraints for the spending response. Second, the payout was large. 70% of the population aged 25 or more had accounts. Almost 95% of all funds were taken out. The average individual payout amounted to approximately 1900 USD after taxes, and the total payout amounted to about 1.4% of GDP. Third, the policy was transparent and funds easy to access: All account holders received a personal letter stating the balance of the account. To have the balance paid out, account holders should sign a slip and return it in an enclosed, stamped envelope. The money would then be transferred directly to the holder’s main bank account, already on file. Finally, the policy was announced without any previous discussion in the public. This is important for measuring the effect of the policy because it makes it possible to bound the time frame where possible spending responses could be observed.

To measure the spending effect of the reform, we conducted a telephone survey in January 2010, just after the payout window had closed, resulting in about 5,000 completed interviews with information about spending behavior related to the SP-payout. The survey indicates that almost 65% of the respondents used the entire payout for increasing their spending, corresponding to almost 2% of total private spending in 2009.

To get further insight into whether this huge spending effect is driven by individuals affected by liquidity constraints, we match the survey data at the person level to income tax records and other administrative registers with information about household characteristics, income, and broad categories of financial assets for the period 1998-2009. In addition, we exploit a novel administrative data set that provides third party reported information about all individual deposit and loan accounts held by our survey respondents in 2007-2008. These data enable us to calculate account specific interest rates and, based on this, to estimate the interest rate on marginal liquidity for 2008 for each survey respondent and their household. 

These household specific marginal interest rates represent a measure of the interest wedge between borrowing and lending rates, and is a continuous measure of the intensity of liquidity constraints. We correlate them with information about the propensity to spend the stimulus from the survey. The result is presented in the figure at the top of the post showing a strikingly linear and significant relationship between the propensity to spend the stimulus and the marginal interest rate.  

The correlation is significant also when controlling for a number of covariates including income, financial asset holdings, demographics and expectations regarding future economic constraints, showing that the marginal interest rate is a robust predictor of the propensity to spend the stimulus. This suggests that credit market imperfections are important for explaining consumption responses to stimulus policies ̶ just as standard theory suggests. 

Why do households face different interest rates? We use the longitudinal aspect of the administrative data and show that the level of financial assets held by the same households more than a decade earlier is negatively correlated with the marginal interest rate that we measure just before the stimulus. In other words, those individuals who held the least financial assets in 1998 face the highest marginal interest rates in 2008. Further, when we isolate the variation in marginal interest rates across households that is due to persistent differences in financial behavior, we find that the slope is five times steeper than the gradient illustrated in the figure, that is persistent differences in financial behavior impact the interest rate-spending gradient more than what appears from the raw correlation. This result holds up, and is actually reinforced, when we consider a subsample of individuals (about 50% of the original sample) who have never been unemployed during the last ten years before the stimulus. Overall, these results suggest that differences in liquidity constraint tightness across consumers, observed just before the stimulus policy implementation, reflect heterogeneity across consumers that is persistent to a degree that cannot be accounted for by shocks appearing within the horizon of a typical business cycle. The effectiveness of the policy thus appears to be rooted in persistent differences in financial behavior across households, although other factors, such as size effects, may also play a role.

The policy is remarkable in several respects. It leaves person level wealth unaffected and exploit differences in financial behavior across the population to generate spending effects that are significant at the macro economic level. Moreover, by letting people spend their own money, it has no direct effect on the fiscal budget, and may even have positive derived effects from increased activity. Thus, this type of policy may be a new way to stimulate depressed economies when standard fiscal policies are limited, for example because of high levels of sovereign debt.

This guest post is based on a research paper written by the three of us–Claus Thustrup Kreiner, David Dreyer Lassen, and Søren Leth-Petersen: “Liquidity Constraint Tightness and Consumer Responses to Fiscal Stimulus Policy.” The paper can be downloaded here.

Live: The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists

Note: You can see the written text for this sermon and some useful graphs and tables in my earlier post “The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists.” Click on the picture above to see the video.

I made a false prediction when I gave this sermon on May 20, 2012, eight days before I inaugurated this blog: that I would avoid talking about religion on my blog once I started the blog. In the event for most of the time I have been blogging, I have had a religion post every other Sunday, alternating with philosophy posts on the other Sundays. They can all be found in my “Religion, Humanities and Science” sub-blog.

Everything You Think You Know about Disciplining Kids is Wrong →

Research is suggesting new approaches to helping kids behave. I would like to think that the claims here are true. But I think this research needs to be replicated by a skeptic.

Research in this area is crucial, since if behavior problems can be effectively dealt with, then a big argument people make to “Keep the Riffraff Out!” can be neutralized.

Nigeria Struggling to Be Free

The June 20th issue of the Economist had a special report on Nigeria. It is very illuminating. In particular, it illustrates what I meant in my July 3d Quartz column “An economist explains why the key to a free world lies with China” when I wrote about how ‘freedom from injustice, corruption, and abuse of power in your nation,’ is the key to ‘people having many options and possibilities in their lives and the freedom to choose among them.’ 

It also illustrates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s claim in “Why Nations Fail” that injustice, corruption and abuse of power are what keeps most nations poor (in the sense of a low per capita GDP). Here is a nice summary of the Economist’s special report, from a page entitled “Buhari’s chances: Can he do it?”:

Despite these frequent disappointments, Nigeria remains hopeful, and for good reason. It does not require a miracle for its economy to grow at a consistent 7-8% a year. What it does need is better roads, rail connections and power lines. If the poorest states had the infrastructure to allow farmers to get their produce to market, it would open up the prospect of vast numbers of new jobs in farming and agricultural processing, giving young men an alternative to joining the jihadists or ethnic militias and lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty.

Yet the cure is not as simple as it sounds, for at the root of many of Nigeria’s problems are well-entrenched vested interests and pervasive corruption. If the country’s roads are crumbling, it is not for lack of competent engineers or money to repair them: it is because the money has been diverted to someone else’s pocket so that many of the engineers sit idle. If people pay more than they should for food, power and imported manufactures, it is not because Nigeria is inherently a high-cost economy: it is because politicians, officials and their friends in business have found nefarious ways to profit from shortages and waste. If large parts of the country are ruled by armed gangs, it is because so many of the state’s institutions, from local government to the national police and army, have been hollowed out by corruption.