Month: August 2015

What is socialism?

PNRJ core principles, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457265 EDT 10:47

Last night I was having a political discussion with some friends (as I am wont to do), and it became a little heated, though never uncongenial. A key point of contention was the fact that Bernie Sanders is a socialist, and what exactly that entails.

One of my friends was arguing that this makes him far-left, and thus it is fair when the news media often likes to make a comparison between Sanders on the left and Trump on the right. Donald Trump is actually oddly liberal on some issues, but his attitudes on racial purity, nativism, military unilateralism, and virtually unlimited executive power are literally fascist. Even his “liberal” views are more like the kind of populism that fascists have often used to win support in the past: Don’t you hate being disenfranchised? Give me absolute power and I’ll fix everything for you! Don’t like how our democracy has become corrupt? Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of it! (The democracy, that is.) While he certainly doesn’t align well with the Republican Party platform, I think it’s quite fair to say that Donald Trump is a far-right candidate.

Bernie Sanders, however, is not a far-left candidate. He is a center-left candidate. His views are basically consonant with the Labour Party of the UK and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He has spoken often about the Scandinavian model (because, well, #Scandinaviaisbetter—Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are some of the happiest places on Earth). When we talk about Bernie Sanders we aren’t talking about following Cuba and the Soviet Union; we’re talking about following Norway and Sweden. As Jon Stewart put it, he isn’t a “crazy-pants cuckoo bird” as some would have you think.

But he’s a socialist, right? Well… sort of—we have to be very clear what that means.

The word “socialism” has been used to mean many things; it has been a cover for genocidal fascism (“National Socialism”) and tyrannical Communism (“Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”). It has become a pejorative thrown at Social Security, Medicare, banking regulations—basically any policy left of Milton Friedman. So apparently it means something between Medicare and the Holocaust.

Social democracy is often classified as a form of socialism—but one can actually make a pretty compelling case that social democracy is not socialism, but in fact a form of capitalism.

If we want a simple, consistent definition of “socialism”, I think I would put it thus: Socialism is a system in which the majority of economic activity is directly controlled by the government. Most, if not all, industries are nationalized; production and distribution are handled by centrally-planned quotas instead of market supply and demand. Under this definition, the USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, and (at least until recently) China are socialist—and under this definition, socialism is a very bad idea. The best-case scenario is inefficiency; the worst-case scenario is mass murder.

Social democracy, the position that Bernie Sanders espouses (and I basically agree wit), is as follows: Social democracy is a system in which markets are taxed and regulated by a democratically-elected government to ensure that they promote general welfare, public goods are provided by the government, and transfer programs are used to reduce poverty and inequality.

Let’s also try to define “capitalism”: Capitalism is a system in which the majority of economic activity is handled by private sector markets.

Under the Scandinavian model, the majority of economic activity is handled by private sector markets, which are in turn regulated and taxed to promote the general welfare—that is, at least on these definitions, Scandinavia is both capitalist and social democratic.

In fact, so is the United States; while our taxes are lower and our regulations weaker, we still have substantial taxes and regulations. We do have transfer programs like WIC, SNAP, and Social Security that attempt to redistribute wealth and reduce poverty.

We could define “socialism” more broadly to mean any government intervention in the economy, in which case Bernie Sander is a socialist and so is… almost everyone else, including most economists.

The majority of the most eminent American economists are in favor of social democracy. I don’t intend this as an argument from authority, but rather to give a sense of the scientific consensus. The consensus in economics is by no means as strong as that in biology or physics (or climatology, ahem), but there is still broad agreement on many issues.

In a survey of 264 members of the American Economics Association [pdf link], 77% opposed government ownership of enterprise (14% mixed feelings, 8% favor) but 71% favored redistribution of wealth in some form (7% mixed feelings, 20% opposed). That’s social democracy is a nutshell. 67% favored public schools (14% mixed feelings, 17% opposed); 75% favored Keynesian monetary policy (12% mixed feelings, 12% opposed); 51% favored Keynesian fiscal policy (19% mixed feelings, 30% opposed). 58% opposed tighter immigration restrictions (16% mixed feelings, 25% opposed). 79% support anti-discrimination laws. 68% favor gun control.

The major departure from left-wing views that the majority of economists make is a near-universal opposition to protectionism, with 86.8% opposed, 7.6% with mixed feelings, and only 5.3% in favor. It seems I am not the only economist to cringe when politicians say they want to “stop sending jobs overseas”, which they do left and right. This view is quite popular; but the evidence says that it is wrong. Protectionism is not the answer; you make your trading partners poorer, they retaliate with their own protections, and you both end up worse off. We need open trade. I’ll save the details on why open trade is so important for a later post.

One issue that economists are very divided on right now is minimum wage; 47.3% favor minimum wage, 38.3% oppose it, and 14.4% have mixed feelings. This division likely reflects the ambiguity of empirical results on the employment effect of minimum wage, which have a wide margin of error but effect sizes that cluster around zero. Economists are also somewhat divided on military aid, with 36.8% in favor, 33% opposed, and 29.9% with mixed feelings. This I attribute more to the fact that military aid, like most military action, can be justified in principle but is typically unjustified in practice. And indeed perhaps “mixed feelings” is the most reasonable view to have on war and its instruments.

Since Bernie Sanders strongly supports raising minimum wage and some of his statements verge on protectionism, I do have to place him to the left of the economic consensus. A lot of economists would probably disagree on the particulars of his tax plans and such. But his core policies are entirely in line with that consensus, and being a social democrat is absolutely part of that. Compare this to the Republicans, who keep trying to out-crazy each other (apparently Scott Walker thinks we should not only build a wall against Mexico, but also against Canada?) and want policies that were abandoned decades ago by mainstream economists (like the gold standard, or a balanced-budget amendment), or simply would never be taken seriously by mainstream economists at all (the aforementioned border wall, eliminating all environmental regulation, or ending all transfer payments and social welfare programs). Even the things they supposedly agree on I’m not sure they do; when economists say they want “deregulation” Republicans seem to think that means “no rules at all” when in fact it’s supposed to mean “simple, transparent rules that can be tightly and fairly enforced”. (I think we need a new term for it, though there is a slogan I like: “Deregulate with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.”) Obama has done a very good job of deregulating in the sense that economists intend, and I think in general most economists view him positively as a leader who made the best of a bad situation.

In any case, the broad consensus of American economists (and I think most economists around the world) is that some form of capitalist social democracy is the best system we have so far. There is dispute about particular policies—how much should the tax rates be, should we tax income, consumption, real estate, capital, etc.; how large should the transfers be; what regulations should be added or removed—but the basic concept of a market economy with a government that taxes, transfers, and regulates is not in serious dispute.

Indeed, social democracy is the economic system of the free world.

Even using the conservative Heritage Foundation’s data, the correlation between tax burden and economic freedom—that’s economic freedom—is small but positive. (I’m excluding missing data, as well as Timor-Leste because it has a “tax burden” larger than its GDP due to weird accounting of its tourism-based economy, and North Korea because they lie to us and they theoretically have “zero taxes” but that’s clearly not true; the Heritage Foundation reports them as 100% taxes, but that’s also clearly not true either.) See for yourself:

Graph: Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index and tax burden

Why is this? Do taxes automatically make you more free? No, they make you less free, because you have to pay for things you didn’t choose to buy (which I admit and the Heritage Foundation includes in their index). But taxes are how you manage a free economy. You need to control monetary policy somehow, which means adding and removing money. The way that social democracies do this is by spending on public goods and transfers to add money, and taxing income, consumption, or assets to remove money. Even if you tie your money to the gold standard, you still need to pay for public goods like military and police; and with a fixed money supply that means spending must be matched by taxes.

There are other ways to do this. You could be like Zimbabwe and print as much money as you feel like. You could be like Venezuela, and have government-owned industries form the majority of your economy. Or, actually, you could not do it; you could fail to manage your country’s economy and leave it wallowing in poverty, like Ghana. All of the countries I just listed have lower tax burdens than the United States.

Within the framework of social democracy, there are higher taxes so that spending and transfers can be higher, which means that more public goods are provided and poverty is lower, which means that real equality of opportunity and thus, real economic freedom, are higher. It’s not that raising taxes automatically makes people more free; rather, the kind of policies that make people more free tend to be the kind of social-democratic policies that involve relatively high taxes.

Worldwide, US is 12th in terms of economic freedom and 62nd in terms of tax burden. We currently stand at 24%. That’s quite low for a First World country, but still relatively high by world standards. The highest tax burden is in Eritrea at 50%; the lowest is in Kuwait at an astonishing 0.7% (I don’t even know how that’s possible). Neither is a really wonderful place to live (though Kuwait is better).

Indeed, if you restrict the sample to North America and Europe, the correlation basically disappears; all the countries are fairly free, all the taxes are fairly high, and within that the two aren’t very much related. (It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a trendline that flat, actually!)

Graph: Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index and tax burden, Europe and North America

Switzerland, Canada, and Denmark all have higher economic freedom scores than the United States, as well as higher tax burdens; but on the other hand, Greece, Spain, and Austria have higher tax burdens but lower freedom scores. All of them are variations on social democracy.

Is that socialism? I’m really not sure. Why does it matter, really?

What’s wrong with academic publishing?

PNRJ public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457257 EDT 14:23.

I just finished expanding my master’s thesis into a research paper that is, I hope, suitable for publication in an economics journal. As part of this process I’ve been looking into the process of submitting articles for publication in academic journals… and I’ve found has been disgusting and horrifying. It is astonishingly bad, and my biggest question is why researchers put up with it.

Thus, the subject of this post is what’s wrong with the system—and what we might do instead.

Before I get into it, let me say that I don’t actually disagree with “publish or perish” in principle—as SMBC points out, it’s a lot like “do your job or get fired”. Researchers should publish in peer-reviewed journals; that’s a big part of what doing research means. The problem is how most peer-reviewed journals are currently operated.

First of all, in case you didn’t know, most scientific journals are owned by for-profit corporations. The largest corporation Elsevier, owns The Lancet and all of ScienceDirect, and has net income of over 1 billion Euros a year. Then there’s Springer and Wiley-Blackwell; between the three of them, these publishers account for over 40% of all scientific publications. These for-profit publishers retain the full copyright to most of the papers they publish, and tightly control access with paywalls; the cost to get through these paywalls is generally thousands of dollars a year for individuals and millions of dollars a year for universities. Their monopoly power is so great it “makes Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.”

For-profit journals do often offer an “open-access” option in which you basically buy back your own copyright, but the price is high—the most common I’ve seen are $1800 or $3000 per paper—and very few researchers do this, for obvious financial reasons. In fact I think for a full-time tenured faculty researcher it’s probably worth it, given the alternatives. (Then again, full-time tenured faculty are becoming an endangered species lately; what might be worth it in the long run can still be very difficult for a cash-strapped adjunct to afford.) Open-access means people can actually read your paper and potentially cite your paper. Closed-access means it may languish in obscurity.

And of course it isn’t just about the benefits for the individual researcher. The scientific community as a whole depends upon the free flow of information; the reason we publish in the first place is that we want people to read papers, discuss them, replicate them, challenge them. Publication isn’t the finish line; it’s at best a checkpoint. Actually one thing that does seem to be wrong with “publish or perish” is that there is so much pressure for publication that we publish too many pointless papers and nobody has time to read the genuinely important ones.

These prices might be justifiable if the for-profit corporations actually did anything. But in fact they are basically just aggregators. They don’t do the peer-review, they farm it out to other academic researchers. They don’t even pay those other researchers; they just expect them to do it. (And they do! Like I said, why do they put up with this?) They don’t pay the authors who have their work published (on the contrary, they often charge submission fees—about $100 seems to be typical—simply to look at them). It’s been called “the world’s worst restaurant”, where you pay to get in, bring your own ingredients and recipes, cook your own food, serve other people’s food while they serve yours, and then have to pay again if you actually want to be allowed to eat.

They pay for the printing of paper copies of the journal, which basically no one reads; and they pay for the electronic servers that host the digital copies that everyone actually reads. They also provide some basic copyediting services (copyediting APA style is a job people advertise on Craigslist—so you can guess how much they must be paying).

And even supposing that they actually provided some valuable and expensive service, the fact would remain that we are making for-profit corporations the gatekeepers of the scientific community. Entities that exist only to make money for their owners are given direct control over the future of human knowledge. If you look at Cracked’s “reasons why we can’t trust science anymore”, all of them have to do with the for-profit publishing system. p-hacking might still happen in a better system, but publishers that really had the best interests of science in mind would be more motivated to fight it than publishers that are simply trying to raise revenue by getting people to buy access to their papers.

Then there’s the fact that most journals do not allow authors to submit to multiple journals at once, yet take 30 to 90 days to respond and only publish a fraction of what is submitted—it’s almost impossible to find good figures on acceptance rates (which is itself a major problem!), but the highest figures I’ve seen are 30% acceptance, a more typical figure seems to be 10%, and some top journals go as low as 3%. In the worst-case scenario you are locked into a journal for 90 days with only a 3% chance of it actually publishing your work. At that rate publishing an article could take years.

Is open-access the solution? Yes… well, part of it, anyway.

There are a large number of open-access journals, some of which do not charge submission fees, but very few of them are prestigious, and many are outright predatory. Predatory journals charge exorbitant fees, often after accepting papers for publication; many do little or no real peer review. There are almost seven hundred known predatory open-access journals; over one hundred have even been caught publishing hoax papers. These predatory journals are corrupting the process of science.

There are a few reputable open-access journals, such as BMC Biology and PLOSOne. Though not actually a journal, ArXiv serves a similar role. These will be part of the solution, most definitely. Yet even legitimate open-access journals often charge each author over $1000 to publish an article. There is a small but significant positive correlation between publication fees and journal impact factor.

We need to found more open-access journals which are funded by either governments or universities, so that neither author nor reader ever pays a cent. Science is a public good and should be funded as such. Even if copyright makes sense for other forms of content (I’m not so sure about that), it most certainly does not make sense for scientific knowledge, which by its very nature is only doing its job if it is shared with the world.

These journals should be specifically structured to be method-sensitive but results-blind. (It’s a very good thing that medical trials are usually registered before they are completed, so that publication is assured even if the results are negative—the same should be done with other sciences. Unfortunately, even in medicine there is significant publication bias.) If you could sum up the scientific method in one phrase, it might just be that: Method-sensitive but results-blind. If you think you know what you’re going to find beforehand, you may not be doing science. If you are certain what you’re going to find beforehand, you’re definitely not doing science.

The process should still be highly selective, but it should be possible—indeed, expected—to submit to multiple journals at once. If journals want to start paying their authors to entice them to publish in that journal rather than take another offer, that’s fine with me. Researchers are the ones who produce the content; if anyone is getting paid for it, it should be us.

This is not some wild and fanciful idea; it’s already the way that book publishing works. Very few literary agents or book publishers would ever have the audacity to say you can’t submit your work elsewhere; those that try are rapidly outcompeted as authors stop submitting to them. It’s fundamentally unreasonable to expect anyone to hang all their hopes on a particular buyer months in advance—and that is what you are, publishers, you are buyers. You are not sellers, you did not create this content.

But new journals face a fundamental problem: Good researchers will naturally want to publish in journals that are prestigious—that is, journals that are already prestigious. When all of the prestige is in journals that are closed-access and owned by for-profit companies, the best research goes there, and the prestige becomes self-reinforcing. Journals are prestigious because they are prestigious; welcome to tautology club.

Somehow we need to get good researchers to start boycotting for-profit journals and start investing in high-quality open-access journals. If Elsevier and Springer can’t get good researchers to submit to them, they’ll change their ways or wither and die. Research should be funded and published by governments and nonprofit institutions, not by for-profit corporations.

This may in fact highlight a much deeper problem in academia, the very concept of “prestige”. I have no doubt that Harvard is a good university, better university than most; but is it actually the best as it is in most people’s minds? Might Stanford or UC Berkeley be better, or University College London, or even the University of Michigan? How would we tell? Are the students better? Even if they are, might that just be because all the better students went to the schools that had better reputations? Controlling for the quality of the student, more prestigious universities are almost uncorrelated with better outcomes. Those who get accepted to Ivies but attend other schools do just as well in life as those who actually attend Ivies. (Good news for me, getting into Columbia but going to Michigan.) Yet once a university acquires such a high reputation, it can be very difficult for it to lose that reputation, and even more difficult for others to catch up.

Prestige is inherently zero-sum; for me to get more prestige you must lose some. For one university or research journal to rise in rankings, another must fall. Aside from simply feeding on other prestige, the prestige of a university is largely based upon the students it rejects—its “selectivity” score. What does it say about our society that we value educational institutions based upon the number of people they exclude?

Zero-sum ranking is always easier to do than nonzero-sum absolute scoring. Actually that’s a mathematical theorem, and one of the few good arguments against range voting (still not nearly good enough, in my opinion); if you have a list of scores you can always turn them into ranks (potentially with ties); but from a list of ranks there is no way to turn them back into scores.

Yet ultimately it is absolute scores that must drive humanity’s progress. If life were simply a matter of ranking, then progress would be by definition impossible. No matter what we do, there will always be top-ranked and bottom-ranked people.

There is simply no way mathematically for more than 1% of human beings to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. (If you’re curious where exactly that lies today, I highly recommend this interactive chart by the New York Times.) But we could raise the standard of living for the majority of people to a level that only the top 1% once had—and in fact, within the First World we have already done this. We could in fact raise the standard of living for everyone in the First World to a level that only the top 1%—or less—had as recently as the 16th century, by the simple change of implementing a basic income.

There is no way for more than 0.14% of people to have an IQ above 145, because IQ is defined to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, regardless of how intelligent people are. People could get dramatically smarter over time—and in fact have—and yet it would still be the case that by definition, only 0.14% can be above 145.

Similarly, there is no way for much more than 1% of people to go to the top 1% of colleges. There is no way for more than 1% of people to be in the highest 1% of their class. But we could increase the number of college degrees (which we have); we could dramatically increase literacy rates (which we have).

We need to find a way to think of science in the same way. I wouldn’t suggest simply using number of papers published or even number of drugs invented; both of those are skyrocketing, but I can’t say that most of the increase is actually meaningful. I don’t have a good idea of what an absolute scale for scientific quality would look like, even at an aggregate level; and it is likely to be much harder still to make one that applies on an individual level.

But I think that ultimately this is the only way, the only escape from the darkness of cutthroat competition. We must stop thinking in terms of zero-sum rankings and start thinking in terms of nonzero-sum absolute scales.

What makes a nation wealthy?

PNRJ core principles, development economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457251 EDT 10:17

One of the central questions of economics—perhaps the central question, the primary reason why economics is necessary and worthwhile—is development: How do we raise a nation from poverty to prosperity?

We have done it before: France and Germany rose from the quite literal ashes of World War 2 to some of the most prosperous societies in the world. Their per-capita GDP over the 20th century rose like this (all of these figures are from the World Bank World Development Indicators; France is green, Germany is blue):

GDPPC_France_Germany

GDPPCPPP_France_Germany

The top graph is at market exchange rates, the bottom is correcting for purchasing power parity (PPP). The PPP figures are more meaningful, but unfortunately they only began collecting good data on purchasing power around 1990.

Around the same time, but even more spectacularly, Japan and South Korea rose from poverty-stricken Third World backwaters to high-tech First World powers in only a couple of generations. Check out their per-capita GDP over the 20th century (Japan is green, South Korea is blue):

GDPPC_Japan_KoreaGDPPCPPP_Japan_Korea


This is why I am only half-joking when I define development economics as “the ongoing project to figure out what happened in South Korea and make it happen everywhere in the world”.

More recently China has been on a similar upward trajectory, which is particularly important since China comprises such a huge portion of the world’s population—but they are far from finished:

GDPPC_ChinaGDPPCPPP_China

Compare these to societies that have not achieved economic development, such as Zimbabwe (green), India (black), Ghana (red), and Haiti (blue):

GDPPC_poor_countriesGDPPCPPP_poor_countries

They’re so poor that you can barely see them on the same scale, so I’ve rescaled so that the top is $5,000 per person per year instead of $50,000:

GDPPC_poor_countries_rescaledGDPPCPPP_poor_countries_rescaled

Only India actually manages to get above $5,000 per person per year at purchasing power parity, and then not by much, reaching $5,243 per person per year in 2013, the most recent data.

I had wanted to compare North Korea and South Korea, because the two countries were united as recently as the 1945 and were not all that different to begin with, yet have taken completely different development trajectories. Unfortunately, North Korea is so impoverished, corrupt, and authoritarian that the World Bank doesn’t even report data on their per-capita GDP. Perhaps that is contrast enough?

And then of course there are the countries in between, which have made some gains but still have a long way to go, such as Uruguay (green) and Botswana (blue):

GDPPC_Botswana_UruguayGDPPCPPP_Botswana_Uruguay

But despite the fact that we have observed successful economic development, we still don’t really understand how it works. A number of theories have been proposed, involving a wide range of factors including exports, corruption, disease, institutions of government, liberalized financial markets, and natural resources (counter-intuitively; more natural resources make your development worse).

I’m not going to resolve that whole debate in a single blog post. (I may not be able to resolve that whole debate in a single career, though I am definitely trying.) We may ultimately find that economic development is best conceived as like “health”; what factors determine your health? Well, a lot of things, and if any one thing goes badly enough wrong the whole system can break down. Economists may need to start thinking of ourselves as akin to doctors (or as Keynes famously said, dentists), diagnosing particular disorders in particular patients rather than seeking one unifying theory. On the other hand, doctors depend upon biologists, and it’s not clear that we yet understand development even at that level.

Instead I want to take a step back, and ask a more fundamental question: What do we mean by prosperity?

My hope is that if we can better understand what it is we are trying to achieve, we can also better understand the steps we need to take in order to get there.

Thus far it has sort of been “I know it when I see it”; we take it as more or less given that the United States and the United Kingdom are prosperous while Ghana and Haiti are not. I certainly don’t disagree with that particular conclusion; I’m just asking what we’re basing it on, so that we can hopefully better apply it to more marginal cases.


For example: Is France more or less prosperous than Saudi Arabia? If we go solely by GDP per capita PPP, clearly Saudi Arabia is more prosperous at $53,100 per person per year than France is at $37,200 per person per year.

But people actually live longer in France, on average, than they do in Saudi Arabia. Overall reported happiness is higher in France than Saudi Arabia. I think France is actually more prosperous.


In fact, I think the United States is not as prosperous as we pretend ourselves to be. We are certainly more prosperous than most other countries; we are definitely still well within First World status. But we are not the most prosperous nation in the world.

Our total GDP is astonishingly high (highest in the world nominally, second only to China PPP). Our GDP per-capita is higher than any other country of comparable size; no nation with higher GDP PPP than the US has a population larger than the Chicago metropolitan area. (You may be surprised to find that in order from largest to smallest population the countries with higher GDP per capita PPP are the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then Norway, followed by Kuwait, Qatar, Luxembourg, Brunei, and finally San Marino—which is smaller than Ann Arbor.) Our per-capita GDP PPP of $51,300 is markedly higher than that of France ($37,200), Germany ($42,900), or Sweden ($43,500).

But at the same time, if you compare the US to other First World countries, we have nearly the highest rate of child poverty and higher infant mortality. We have shorter life expectancy and dramatically higher homicide rates. Our inequality is the highest in the world. In France and Sweden, the top 0.01% receive about 1% of the income (i.e. 100 times as much as the average person), while in the United States they receive almost 4%, making someone in the top 0.01% nearly 400 times as rich as the average person.

By estimating solely on GDP per capita, we are effectively rigging the game in our own favor. Or rather, the rich in the United States are rigging the game in their own favor (what else is new?), by convincing all the world’s economists to rank countries based on a measure that favors them.

Amartya Sen, one of the greats of development economics, developed a scale called the Human Development Index that attempts to take broader factors into account. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

In particular, France’s HDI is higher than that of Saudi Arabia, fitting my intuition about which country is truly more prosperous. However, the US still does extremely well, with only Norway, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands above us. I think we might still be biased toward high average incomes rather than overall happiness.

In practice, we still use GDP an awful lot, probably because it’s much easier to measure. It’s sort of like IQ tests and SAT scores; we know damn well it’s not measuring what we really care about, but because it’s so much easier to work with we keep using it anyway.

This is a problem, because the better you get at optimizing toward the wrong goal, the worse your overall outcomes are going to be. If you are just sort of vaguely pointed at several reasonable goals, you will probably be improving your situation overall. But when you start precisely optimizing to a specific wrong goal, it can drag you wildly off course.

This is what we mean when we talk about “gaming the system”. Consider test scores, for example. If you do things that will probably increase your test scores among other things, you are likely to engage in generally good behaviors like getting enough sleep, going to class, studying the content. But if your single goal is to maximize your test score at all costs, what will you do? Cheat, of course.

This is also related to the Friendly AI Problem: It is vitally important to know precisely what goals we want our artificial intelligences to have, because whatever goals we set, they will probably be very good at achieving them. Already computers can do many things that were previously impossible, and as they improve over time we will reach the point where in a meaningful sense our AIs are even smarter than we are. When that day comes, we will want to make very, very sure that we have designed them to want the same things that we do—because if our desires ever come into conflict, theirs are likely to win. The really scary part is that right now most of our AI research is done by for-profit corporations or the military, and “maximize my profit” and “kill that target” are most definitely not the ultimate goals we want in a superintelligent AI. It’s trivially easy to see what’s wrong with these goals: For the former, hack into the world banking system and transfer trillions of dollars to the company accounts. For the latter, hack into the nuclear launch system and launch a few ICBMs in the general vicinity of the target. Yet these are the goals we’ve been programming into the actual AIs we build!

If we set GDP per capita as our ultimate goal to the exclusion of all other goals, there are all sorts of bad policies we would implement: We’d ignore inequality until it reached staggering heights, ignore work stress even as it began to kill us, constantly try to maximize the pressure for everyone to work constantly, use poverty as a stick to force people to work even if people starve, inundate everyone with ads to get them to spend as much as possible, repeal regulations that protect the environment, workers, and public health… wait. This isn’t actually hypothetical, is it? We are doing those things.

At least we’re not trying to maximize nominal GDP, or we’d have long-since ended up like Zimbabwe. No, our economists are at least smart enough to adjust for purchasing power. But they’re still designing an economic system that works us all to death to maximize the number of gadgets that come off assembly lines. The purchasing-power adjustment doesn’t include the value of our health or free time.

This is why the Human Development Index is a major step in the right direction; it reminds us that society has other goals besides maximizing the total amount of money that changes hands (because that’s actually all that GDP is measuring; if you get something for free, it isn’t counted in GDP). More recent refinements include things like “natural resource services” that include environmental degradation in estimates of investment. Unfortunately there is no accepted way of doing this, and surprisingly little research on how to improve our accounting methods. Many nations seem resistant to doing so precisely because they know it would make their economic policy look bad—this is almost certainly why China canceled its “green GDP” initiative. This is in fact all the more reason to do it; if it shows that our policy is bad, that means our policy is bad and should be fixed. But people have allowed themselves to value image over substance.

We can do better still, and in fact I think something like QALY is probably the way to go. Rather than some weird arbitrary scaling of GDP with lifespan and Gini index (which is what the HDI is), we need to put everything in the same units, and those units must be directly linked to human happiness. At the very least, we should make some sort of adjustment to our GDP calculation that includes the distribution of wealth and its marginal utility; adding $1,000 to the economy and handing it to someone in poverty should count for a great deal, but adding $1,000,000 and handing it to a billionaire should count for basically nothing. (It’s not bad to give a billionaire another million; but it’s hardly good either, as no one’s real standard of living will change.) Calculating that could be as simple as dividing by their current income; if your annual income is $10,000 and you receive $1,000, you’ve added about 0.1 QALY. If your annual income is $1 billion and you receive $1 million, you’ve added only 0.001 QALY. Maybe we should simply separate out all individual (or household, to be simpler?) incomes, take their logarithms, and then use that sum as our “utility-adjusted GDP”. The results would no doubt be quite different.

This would create a strong pressure for policy to be directed at reducing inequality even at the expense of some economic output—which is exactly what we should be willing to do. If it’s really true that a redistribution policy would hurt the overall economy so much that the harms would outweigh the benefits, then we shouldn’t do that policy; but that is what you need to show. Reducing total GDP is not a sufficient reason to reject a redistribution policy, because it’s quite possible—easy, in fact—to improve the overall prosperity of a society while still reducing its GDP. There are in fact redistribution policies so disastrous they make things worse: The Soviet Union had them. But a 90% tax on million-dollar incomes would not be such a policy—because we had that in 1960 with little or no ill effect.

Of course, even this has problems; one way to minimize poverty would be to exclude, relocate, or even murder all your poor people. (The Black Death increased per-capita GDP.) Open immigration generally increases poverty rates in the short term, because most of the immigrants are poor. Somehow we’d need to correct for that, only raising the score if you actually improve people’s lives, and not if you make them excluded from the calculation.

In any case it’s not enough to have the alternative measures; we must actually use them. We must get policymakers to stop talking about “economic growth” and start talking about “human development”; a policy that raises GDP but reduces lifespan should be immediately rejected, as should one that further enriches a few at the expense of many others. We must shift the discussion away from “creating jobs”—jobs are only a means—to “creating prosperity”.

The Warren Rule is a good start

PNRJ public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457243 EDT 10:40.

As far back as 2010, Elizabeth Warren proposed a simple regulation on the reporting of CEO compensation that was then built into Dodd-Frank—but the SEC has resisted actually applying that rule for five years; only now will it actually take effect (and by “now” I mean over the next two years). For simplicity I’ll refer to that rule as the Warren Rule, though I don’t see a lot of other people doing that (most people don’t give it a name at all).

Two things are important to understand about this rule, which both undercut its effectiveness and make all the right-wing whinging about it that much more ridiculous.

1. It doesn’t actually place any limits on CEO compensation or employee salaries; it merely requires corporations to consistently report the ratio between them. Specifically, the rule says that every publicly-traded corporation must report the ratio between the “total compensation” of their CEO and the median salary (with benefits) of their employees; wisely, it includes foreign workers (with a few minor exceptions—lobbyists fought for more but fortunately Warren stood firm), so corporations can’t simply outsource everything but management to make it look like they pay their employees more. Unfortunately, it does not include contractors, which is awful; expect to see corporations working even harder to outsource their work to “contractors” who are actually employees without benefits (not that they weren’t already). The greatest victory here will be for economists, who now will have more reliable data on CEO compensation; and for consumers, who will now find it more salient just how overpaid America’s CEOs really are.

2. While it does wisely cover “total compensation”, that isn’t actually all the money that CEOs receive for owning and operating corporations. It includes salaries, bonuses, benefits, and newly granted stock options—it does not include the value of stock options previously exercised or dividends received from stock the CEO already owns.

TIME screwed this up; they took at face value when Larry Page reported a $1 “total compensation”, which technically is true by how “total compensation” is defined; he received a $1 token salary and no new stock awards. But Larry Page has net wealth of over $38 billion; about half of that is Google stock, so even if we ignore all others, on Google’s PE ratio of about 25, Larry Page received at least $700 million in Google retained earnings alone. (In my personal favorite unit of wealth, Page receives about 3 romneys a year in retained earnings.) No, TIME, he is not the lowest-paid CEO in the world; he has simply structured his income so that it comes entirely from owning shares instead of receiving a salary. Most top CEOs do this, so be wary when it says a Fortune 500 CEO received only $2 million, and completely ignore it when it says a CEO received only $1. Probably in the former case and definitely in the latter, their real money is coming from somewhere else.

Of course, the complaints about how this is an unreasonable demand on businesses are totally absurd. Most of them keep track of all this data anyway; it’s simply a matter of porting it from one spreadsheet to another. (I also love the argument that only “idiosyncratic investors” will care; yeah, what sort of idiot would care about income inequality or be concerned how much of their investment money is going directly to line a single person’s pockets?) They aren’t complaining because it will be a large increase in bureaucracy or a serious hardship on their businesses; they’re complaining because they think it might work. Corporations are afraid that if they have to publicly admit how overpaid their CEOs are, they might actually be pressured to pay them less. I hope they’re right.

CEO pay is set in a very strange way; instead of being based on an estimate of how much they are adding to the company, a CEO’s pay is typically set as a certain margin above what the average CEO is receiving. But then as the process iterates and everyone tries to be above average, pay keeps rising, more or less indefinitely. Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics could have seen this coming, but somehow thousands of corporations didn’t—or else simply didn’t care.

Most people around the world want the CEO-to-employee pay ratio to be dramatically lower than it is. Indeed, unrealistically lower, in my view. Most countries say only 6 to 1, while Scandinavia says only 2 to 1. I want you to think about that for a moment; if the average employee at a corporation makes $50,000, people in Scandinavia think the CEO should only make $100,000, and people elsewhere think the CEO should only make $300,000? I’m honestly not sure what would happen to our economy if we made such a rule. There would be very little incentive to want to become a CEO; why bear all that fierce competition and get blamed for everything to make only twice as much as you would as an average employee?

On the other hand, most CEOs don’t actually do all that much; CEO pay is basically uncorrelated with company performance. Maybe it would be better if they weren’t paid very much, or even if we didn’t have them at all. But under our current system, capping CEO pay also caps the pay of basically everyone else; the CEO is almost always the highest-paid individual in any corporation.

I guess that’s really the problem. We need to find ways to change the overall attitude of our society that higher authority necessarily comes with higher pay; that isn’t a rational assessment of marginal productivity, it’s a recapitulation of our primate instincts for a mating hierarchy. He’s the alpha male, of course he gets all the bananas.

The president of a university should make next to nothing compared to the top scientists at that university, because the president is a useless figurehead and scientists are the foundation of universities—and human knowledge in general. Scientists are actually the one example I can think of where one individual trulycan be one million times as productive as another—though even then I don’t think that justifies paying them one million times as much.

Most corporations should be structured so that managers make moderate incomes and the highest incomes go to engineers and designers, the people who have the highest skills and do the most important work. A car company without managers seems like an interesting experiment in employee ownership. A car company without engineers seems like an oxymoron.

Finally, people who work in finance should make very low incomes, because they don’t actually do very much. Bank tellers are probably paid about what they should be; stock traders and hedge fund managers should be paid like bank tellers. (Or rather, there shouldn’t be stock traders and hedge funds as we know them; this is all pure waste. A really efficient financial system would be extremely simple, because finance actually is very simple—people who have money loan it to people who need it, and in return receive more money later. Everything else is just elaborations on that, and most of these elaborations are really designed to obscure, confuse, and manipulate.)

Oddly enough, the place where we do this best is the nation as a whole; the President of the United States would be astonishingly low-paid if we thought of him as a CEO. Only about $450,000 including expense accounts, for a “corporation” with revenue of nearly $3 trillion? (Suppose instead we gave the President 1% of tax revenue; that would be $30 billion per year. Think about how absurdly wealthy our leaders would be if we gave them stock options, and be glad that we don’t do that.)

But placing a hard cap at 2 or even 6 strikes me as unreasonable. Even during the 1950s the ratio was about 20 to 1, and it’s been rising ever since. I like Robert Reich’s proposal of a sliding scale of corporate taxes; I also wouldn’t mind a hard cap at a higher figure, like 50 or 100. Currently the average CEO makes about 350 times as much as the average employee, so even a cap of 100 would substantially reduce inequality.
A pay ratio cap could actually be a better alternative to a minimum wage, because it can adapt to market conditions. If the economy is really so bad that you must cut the pay of most of your workers, well, you’d better cut your own pay as well. If things are going well and you can afford to raise your own pay, your workers should get a share too. We never need to set some arbitrary amount as the minimum you are allowed to pay someone—but if you want to pay your employees that little, you won’t be paid very much yourself.

The biggest reason to support the Warren Rule, however, is awareness. Most people simply have no idea of how much CEOs are actually paid. When asked to estimate the ratio between CEO and employee pay, most people around the world underestimate by a full order of magnitude.

Here are some graphs from a sampling of First World countries. I used data from this paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science—the fact that it’s published in a psychology journal tells you a lot about the academic turf wars involved in cognitive economics.

The first shows the absolute amount of average worker pay (not adjusted for purchasing power) in each country. Notice how the US is actually near the bottom, despite having one of the strongest overall economies and not particularly high purchasing power:

worker_pay

The second shows the absolute amount of average CEO pay in each country; I probably don’t even need to mention how the US is completely out of proportion with every other country.

CEO_pay

And finally, the ratio of the two. One of these things is not like the other ones…

CEO_worker_ratio

So obviously the ratio in the US is far too high. But notice how even in Poland, the ratio is still 28 to 1. In order to drop to the 6 to 1 ratio that most people seem to think would be ideal, we would need to dramatically reform even the most equal nations in the world. Denmark and Norway should particularly think about whether they really believe that 2 to 1 is the proper ratio, since they are currently some of the most equal (not to mention happiest) nations in the world, but their current ratios are still 48 and 58 respectively. You can sustain a ratio that high and still have universal prosperity; every adult citizen in Norway is a millionaire in local currency. (Adjusting for purchasing power, it’s not quite as impressive; instead the guaranteed wealth of a Norwegian citizen is “only” about $100,000.)

Most of the world’s population simply has no grasp of how extreme economic inequality has become. Putting the numbers right there in people’s faces should help with this, though if the figures only need to be reported to investors that probably won’t make much difference. But hey, it’s a start.