Category: Economics

The Rockefeller Institute recently published a study showing that the economic anxiety index is at an all time high.

The full report can be found at:

http://nw-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/ESI_report_embargoed_until_7-22_low-res.pdf

According to the report, the American people are significantly more anxious about their economic situation today than at any time since the study began in the early 1980’s. But according to the trends shown in the report, it is not just a spike caused by the current economic recession. The trend line has been up since the mid 1980’s (when the survey first began.)

There are many reasons for this increased anxiety but a major factor is the increase in job instability. Fewer people are working at large corporations and no longer have the expectation of career-long employment, which was common up through the 1970’s. Large companies are increasingly being replaced by small business and sole entrepreneurs. Being your own boss is great, you are free to succeed and fail based on your own efforts. But there is no safety net for poor performance. The same holds true if you are an employee at a small business. One bad month can mean the difference between employment and unemployment.

The demise of large, hidebound companies and the rise of more flexible small businesses means a more flexible economy, but this creates a need for more flexible employees. The cost of this flexibility is less security. Good for business, bad for employees sense of stability. And guess what? Employees are citizens. So economic flexibility can lead to a sense of employment insecurity, and a general sense of unease among the public.

This corresponds to the bigger problem: economic uncertainty leads to political instability. Politics have become more unsettled in the last twenty or thirty years as the economy has become more unstable. The public is increasingly worried about the economy, and not just about the problems caused by the current recession. They want stability, they want security, and most of all they want politicians that can bring this about. And increasingly the public is willing to try anything, to grasp for any solution, simple or silly.

Obama was elected, in large part because of the public’s dismay at the way the Bush Administration and the majority Congressional Republicans seemed to screw up the economy. And now that things are not getting better, the public is ready to throw out Obama and the Democrats. That is certainly understandable. The so called experts and supposed smart people who ran the economy (and the government) for the last ten or fifteen years sure haven’t done a great job, so why not try someone unproven? Why not Sarah Palin or some other new and untested leader? Given recent events, and the lousy job done by the old hands, how could inexperience be any worse?

But what if neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a solution to the current problems? What if the national and world economy has changed so fundamentally that the old solutions are obsolete?

The Bush era tax cuts and de facto deregulation (which follow standard conservative theory) only made matters worse. And the Keynesian policies of the Obama administration haven’t improved things.

I suspect that this political instability will not go away until this high level of economic instability also goes away, or at least is significantly reduced. And neither party seems to know how to do that, so I think for the time being we are in for some interesting politics.   

In discussing the Tea Party movement, David Adams, campaign manager for Rand Paul, said that the guiding principles of the Tea Party movement are “distinctly Kentuckian: balanced budgets and getting government out of the business of picking economic winners and losers.”

If Adams and the Tea Party want to suggest as a matter of economics or of political philosophy that government should not be in the business of picking economic winners and losers they are free to do so. But it is simply wrong to suggest that this is the historical norm or historical reality. The government has been in the business of picking economic winners and losers since George Washington sided with Alexander Hamilton and chartered the First Bank of the United States.  The government picked economic winners and losers in when it granted the charter to provide steam ship service on the Hudson River to Robert Fulton rather than John Fitch, James Rumsey, or John Stevens. 

The Government picked economic winners and losers when it funded canals to open up the interior. The government program to fund canals, by the way, was one of the main programs of Henry Clay, the powerful Whig Speaker of the House from Lexington, Kentucky.

The government picked economic winners and losers when it built the Transcontinental Railroad. It picked winners and losers when it granted Edison the first contract to build electric service in New Jersey. It picked winners and losers when it bought planes for the Army and the Postal Service at the dawn of aviation. It picked winners and losers when it let the contracts to build ENIAC, the first digital computer. It picked economic winners and losers when it decided where to build the interstate highway system. It picked winners and losers when it selected IBM to build computers for the space program. These are just a sampling, but the point is that government involvement in picking economic winners and losers is pervasive through our economy and our history.

Whether this is right or wrong as a matter of political philosophy is an interesting question. Perhaps it is wrong for government to become as involved as it is. This is an issue that certainly should be discussed.

But whether it is right or wrong as a matter of economics is another matter. Perhaps government should have no role in the economy, but is has since the dawn of government. (Recall Joseph’s involvement in Egyptian agriculture, see Genesis 41:37 – 57.) Government and the economy are so intertwined that it is difficult to know where one starts and the other ends.

To suggest, as Mr. Adams does, that government should have no role in “picking economic winners and losers” is an interesting philosophical theory. But it is little more than a theory.

There is a term in political philosophy for people who suggest that government should be run based on untested theories, and it is not “conservative.” The soul of conservativism is the idea that human affairs should be governed by time tested and practical methods. Conservatives have long opposed “liberals” whom they castigate for trying to reform society based on untested social theories. But now some want to restructure society based on untested economic theories. The term for someone who wants to try to reshape society based on untested theories is not liberal or conservative, but radical. The reality is that the theory of the totally unconstrained free market is neither liberal or conservative but radical.

In an article in National Affairs, Jim Manzi, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute says that the world’s economy has changed dramatically in the last twenty years or so, and neither American political party knows how to deal with the new economic reality. He says that basically Republicans have become free market fundamentalists, but fail to appreciate that the free market can create a variety of unfavorable conditions that have a negative impact on society. He says that Democrats, in contrast, are far too focused on maintaining social cohesion, often at the expense of a vibrant economy. It is a fascinating article that I recommend to anyone interested in understanding the changes and problems of the modern world. It is currently available on-line at: http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/keeping-americas-edge

I want to address one of the issues that Manzi discusses. He notes that modern businesses need to be flexible to compete in the world economy. If a business is not flexible it will lose out to more flexible competition from other countries. Flexibility means that a company must be able to quickly shift production, merge with other companies or spin off certain production lines, close unprofitable lines of business and nimbly open others. It also needs to be able to find and hire the best people, and on the flip side, let unproductive people go. This flexibility is fundamental to competition and vital to success.

But this flexibility for business equates to lack of stability of workers. The papers are full of stories of companies cutting workers, many due to the recession, but others in order to compete with foreign competition. Downsizing and outsourcing were common throughout the last decade. Some studies indicate that the average worker today will change jobs ten times in his or her career. Companies must be flexible, and so too must be workers. But this flexibility equates to a lack of stability. Polls indicate widespread anxiety among workers as they contemplate company bankruptcies, mergers, layoffs, and outsourcing.

Workers are citizens and voters. And polls indicate widespread concern among the voting public. One recent poll I saw indicated that 60% of the respondents felt that their children would not enjoy the same quality of life and lifestyle that they did. This economic uncertainly leads to political uncertainty. I personally believe that the recent interest in new and untested politicians (including both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin) is due in no small measure to the believe that the old politicians did not do well by the economy and the public.

That is one issue, but the more fundamental issue is that what is good for business is, in this case at least, not good for politics. A modern economy needs – truly and fundamentally needs – flexibility. But that flexibility leads to social and political anxiety.

People entering the workforce in America today know and understand that they will not work for a single company their entire career. They will not work forty years of GM, or Sears, or IBM, or AT & T, and retire with a gold watch and a nice pension. They will change jobs frequently, and as a result they are largely responsible for planning and saving for their retirement. They have no sense that loyalty to a company will result in the company protecting them, not because the company is venal, but because the company is fighting for its own survival in the uncertain seas of the world economy. That is the new economic reality. It is unsettling for workers, and since workers are voters, it is creating political uncertainty as well. And that is the new political reality.     

[Orignally Posted on Campaign Blog on April 25]

The financial problems of the Commonwealth, and of the nation, are serious and significant. They arise from a complex set of issues, from tax policy and the changing nature of manufacturing, to competition from China and globalization. Yet some people see the solution is simplistic terms.          

Representative Stan Lee said “You can’t spend your way out of a recession. You can’t tax yourself to prosperity. You can’t borrow your way out of debt.”

With one simple sentence, Lee rejects one hundred years of evidence that Keynesian economics works. This nation only recovered from the Great Depression because of World War Two. The Great Depression ended because of government spending. Since the Second World War there have been recessions around the world, and nations have tried many possible solutions. Japan and Argentina tried cuts to government to end their major recessions, and those nations are still weekend. In Japan the 1990’s are known as the lost decade. Sweden spent its way out of a financial collapse in the late 1990’s, and the recession lasted less than a year. History teaches that done right, a nation can spend its way out of a recession.

With another simple sentence, Lee shows that he has never even contemplated the world beyond this nation’s borders. Why, for example, do Scandinavian countries have high standards of living (read a rich population) when they have high taxes, while South American countries have low standards of living when they have low tax rates? Until the 1960’s, the standard of living in Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and Brazil was comparable to the standard of living of most of Europe.     

I know that many conservatives will say that they don’t want to be like Europe. That’s fine. But I don’t want to be like Brazil. And when I hear them talk about their ideal tax and regulatory schemes I think of Brazil: vastly rich and lightly taxed small upper class and teaming slums of the poor.

Finally, Mr. Lee says you can’t borrow your way out of debt. That is probably news to many businesses that routinely borrow money to invest in new technology or facilities all in an attempt to increase their revenue. I often hear conservatives say we should operate government more like a business, but then I hear things like Mr. Lee’s statement, and I wonder if they have any concept of what business really does.

We are faced with many complex problems. We will have a hard time solving these problems if we are so constrained by clichés and sound bites that we can’t think.      

Among the reasons that some Republicans give for opposing the extension of unemployment benefits is that it actually encourages people not to look for work. In other words if people are getting unemployment benefits they will not look for work, and so if their benefits end they will be forced to get a job.

There are two problems with that outlook. First it implies that most people are lazy. I think that is an ugly view of humanity, but I will save that topic for another day.

The other problem is that it ignores economic reality. The unfortunate reality in the current recession is that there are simply not as many jobs as there are people looking for and needing jobs. According to a recent article in the New York Times:

For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work … 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s. [According to the story a large chunk of that 23 percent are in the “too discouraged to look” category.] 

The college-educated among these young adults are better off. But nearly 17 percent are either unemployed or not seeking work, a record level (although some are in graduate school). The unemployment rate for college-educated young adults, 5.5 percent, is nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession, in 2007, and the highest level — by almost two percentage points — since the bureau started to keep records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college.

The full story can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/economy/07generation.html?pagewanted=1&ref=homepage&src=me

This is a serious problem for this nation. Regardless of where you may stand on the issue of extending unemployment benefits, it is imperative that we begin to look at the major problems facing our economy, and start to come up with ways to fix them. The constant political fight in Washington, which is supposedly about “ideology”, is not even remotely addressing the real issues. And rather than address the real problems facing the economy, some Republicans are willing to kick the unemployed while they are down. Kind of sad.