labor market

Hyper-competition

pnrj mathematical models, personal, public policy , , , , , ,

Dec13 JDN 2459197

This phenomenon has been particularly salient for me the last few months, but I think it’s a common experience for most people in my generation: Getting a job takes an awful lot of work.

Over the past six months, I’ve applied to over 70 different positions and so far gone through 4 interviews (2 by video, 2 by phone). I’ve done about 10 hours of test work. That so far has gotten me no offers, though I have yet to hear from 50 employers. Ahead of me I probably have about another 10 interviews, then perhaps 4 of what would have been flyouts and in-person presentations but instead will be “comprehensive interviews” and presentations conducted online, likely several more hours of test work, and then finally, maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get a good offer or two. If I’m unlucky, I won’t, and I’ll have to stick around for another year and do all this over again next year.

Aside from the limitations imposed by the pandemic, this is basically standard practice for PhD graduates. And this is only the most extreme end of a continuum of intensive job search efforts, for which even applying to be a cashier at Target requires a formal application, references, and a personality test.

This wasn’t how things used to be. Just a couple of generations ago, low-wage employers would more or less hire you on the spot, with perhaps a resume or a cursory interview. More prestigious employers would almost always require a CV with references and an interview, but it more or less stopped there. I discussed in an earlier post how much of the difference actually seems to come from our chronic labor surplus.

Is all of this extra effort worthwhile? Are we actually fitting people to better jobs this way? Even if the matches are better, are they enough better to justify all this effort?

It is a commonly-held notion among economists that competition in markets is good, that it increases efficiency and improves outcomes. I think that this is often, perhaps usually, the case. But the labor market has become so intensely competitive, particularly for high-paying positions, that the costs of this competitive effort likely outweigh the benefits.

How could this happen? Shouldn’t the free market correct for such an imbalance? Not necessarily. Here is a simple formal model of how this sort of intensive competition can result in significant waste.

Note that this post is about a formal mathematical model, so it’s going to use a lot of algebra. If you are uninterested in such things, you can read the next two paragraphs and then skip to the conclusions at the end.

The overall argument is straightforward: If candidates are similar in skill level, a complicated application process can make sense from a firm’s perspective, but be harmful from society’s perspective, due to the great cost to the applicants. This can happen because the difficult application process imposes an externality on the workers who don’t get the job.

All right, here is where the algebra begins.

I’ve included each equation as both formatted text and LaTeX.

Consider a competition between two applicants, X and Z.

They are each asked to complete a series of tasks in an application process. The amount of effort X puts into the application is x, and the amount of effort Z puts into the application is z. Let’s say each additional bit of effort has a fixed cost, normalized to 1.

Let’s say that their skills are similar, but not identical; this seems quite realistic. X has skill level hx, and Z has skill level hz.

Getting hired has a payoff for each worker of V. This includes all the expected benefits of the salary, benefits, and working conditions. I’ll assume that these are essentially the same for both workers, which also seems realistic.

The benefit to the employer is proportional to the worker’s skill, so letting h be the skill level of the actually hired worker, the benefit of hiring that worker is hY. The reason they are requiring this application process is precisely because they want to get the worker with the highest h. Let’s say that this application process has a cost to implement, c.

Who will get hired? Well, presumably whoever does better on the application. The skill level will amplify the quality of their output, let’s say proportionally to the effort they put in; so X’s expected quality will be hxx and Z’s expected output will be hzz.

Let’s also say there’s a certain amount of error in the process; maybe the more-qualified candidate will sleep badly the day of the interview, or make a glaring and embarrassing typo on their CV. And quite likely the quality of application output isn’t perfectly correlated with the quality of actual output once hired. To capture all this, let’s say that having more skill and putting in more effort only increases your probability of getting the job, rather than actually guaranteeing it.

In particular, let’s say that the probability of X getting hired is P[X] = hxx/(hxx + hzz).

\[ P[X] = \frac{h_x}{h_x x + h_z z} \]

This results in a contest function, a type of model that I’ve discussed in some earlier posts in a rather different context.


The expected payoff for worker X is:

E[Ux] = hxx/(hxx + hzz) V – x

\[ E[U_x] = \frac{h_x x}{h_x x + h_z z} V – x \]

Maximizing this with respect to the choice of effort x (which is all that X can control at this point) yields:

hxhzz V = (hxx + hzz)2

\[ h_x h_z x V = (h_x x + h_z z)^2 \]

A similar maximization for worker Z yields:

hxhzx V = (hxx + hzz)2

\[ h_x h_z z V = (h_x x + h_z z)^2 \]

It follows that x=z, i.e. X and Z will exert equal efforts in Nash equilibrium. Their probability of success will then be contingent entirely on their skill levels:

P[X] = hx/(hx + hz).

\[ P[X] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_y} \]

Substituting that back in, we can solve for the actual amount of effort:

hxhzx V = (hx + hz)2x2

\[h_x h_z x V = (h_x + h_z)^2 x^2 \]

x = hxhzV/(hx + hz)2

\[ x = \frac{h_x h_z}{h_x + h_z} V \]

Now let’s see what that gives for the expected payoffs of the firm and the workers. This is worker X’s expected payoff:

E[Ux] = hx/(hx + hz) V – hxhzV/(hx + hz)2 = (hx/(hx + hz))2 V

\[ E[U_x] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z} V – \frac{h_x h_z}{(h_x + h_z)^2} V = \left( \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V \]

Worker Z’s expected payoff is the same, with hx and hz exchanged:

E[Uz] = (hz/(hx + hz))2 V

\[ E[U_z] = \left( \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V \]

What about the firm? Their expected payoff is the the probability of hiring X, times the value of hiring X, plus the probability of hiring Z, times the value of hiring Z, all minus the cost c:

E[Uf] = hx/(hx + hz) hx Y + hz/(hx + hz) hz Y – c= (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – c

\[ E[U_f] = \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z} h_x Y + \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z} h_z Y – c = \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} Y – c\]

To see whether the application process was worthwhile, let’s compare against the alternative of simply flipping a coin and hiring X or Z at random. The probability of getting hired is then 1/2 for each candidate.

Expected payoffs for X and Z are now equal:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

\[ E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2} \]

The expected payoff for the firm can be computed the same as before, but now without the cost c:

E[Uf] = 1/2 hx Y + 1/2 hz Y = (hx + hz)/2 Y

\[ E[U_f] = \frac{1}{2} h_x Y + \frac{1}{2} h_z Y = \frac{h_x + h_z}{2} Y \]

This has a very simple interpretation: The expected value to the firm is just the average quality of the two workers, times the overall value of the job.

Which of these two outcomes is better? Well, that depends on the parameters, of course. But in particular, it depends on the difference between hx and hz.

Consider two extremes: In one case, the two workers are indistinguishable, and hx = hz = h. In that case, the payoffs for the hiring process reduce to the following:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/4

\[ E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{4} \]

E[Uf] = h Y – c

\[ E[U_f] = h Y – c \]

Compare this against the payoffs for hiring randomly:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

\[ E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2} \]

E[Uf] = h Y

\[ E[U_f] = h Y \]

Both the workers and the firm are strictly better off if the firm just hires at random. This makes sense, since the workers have identical skill levels.

Now consider the other extreme, where one worker is far better than the other; in fact, one is nearly worthless, so hz ~ 0. (I can’t do exactly zero because I’d be dividing by zero, but let’s say one is 100 times better or something.)

In that case, the payoffs for the hiring process reduce to the following:

E[Ux] = V

E[Uz] = 0

\[ E[U_x] = V \]

\[ E[U_z] = 0 \]

X will definitely get the job, so X is much better off.

E[Uf] = hx Y – c

\[ E[U_f] = h_x Y – c \]

If the firm had hired randomly, this would have happened instead:

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2

\[ E[U_x] = E[U_z] = \frac{V}{2} \]

E[Uf] = hY/2

\[ E[U_f] = \frac{h}{2} Y \]

As long as c < hY/2, both the firm and the higher-skill worker are better off in this scenario. (The lower-skill worker is worse off, but that’s not surprising.) The total expected benefit for everyone is also higher in this scenario.


Thus, the difference in skill level between the applicants is vital. If candidates are very different in skill level, in a way that the application process can accurately measure, then a long and costly application process can be beneficial, not only for the firm but also for society as a whole.

In these extreme examples, it was either not worth it for the firm, or worth it for everyone. But there is an intermediate case worth looking at, where the long and costly process can be worth it for the firm, but not for society as a whole. I will call this case hyper-competition—a system that is so competitive it makes society overall worse off.

This inefficient result occurs precisely when:
c < (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – (hx + hz)/2 Y < c + (hx/(hx + hz))2 V + (hz/(hx + hz))2 V

\[ c < \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} Y – \frac{h_x + h_z}{2} Y < c + \left( \frac{h_x}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V + \left( \frac{h_z}{h_x + h_z}\right)^2 V \]

This simplifies to:

c < (hx – hz)2/(2hx + 2hz) Y < c + (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz)2 V

\[ c < \frac{(h_x – h_z)^2}{2 (h_x + h_z)} Y < c + \frac{(h_x^2 + h_z^2)}{(h_x+h_z)^2} V \]

If c is small, then we are interested in the case where:

(hx – hz)2 Y/2 < (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) V

\[ \frac{(h_x – h_z)^2}{2} Y < \frac{h_x^2 + h_z^2}{h_x + h_z} V \]

This is true precisely when the difference hx – hz is small compared to the overall size of hx or hz—that is, precisely when candidates are highly skilled but similar. This is pretty clearly the typical case in the real world. If the candidates were obviously different, you wouldn’t need a competitive process.

For instance, suppose that hx = 10 and hz = 8, while V = 180, Y = 20 and c = 1.

Then, if we hire randomly, these are the expected payoffs:

E[Uf] = (hx + hz)/2 Y = 180

E[Ux] = E[Uz] = V/2 = 90

If we use the complicated hiring process, these are the expected payoffs:

E[Ux] = (hx/(hx + hz))2 V = 55.5

E[Uz] = (hz/(hx + hz))2 V = 35.5

E[Uf] = (hx2 + hz2)/(hx + hz) Y – c = 181

The firm gets a net benefit of 1, quite small; while the workers face a far larger total expected loss of 90. And these candidates aren’t that similar: One is 25% better than the other. Yet because the effort expended in applying was so large, even this improvement in quality wasn’t worth it from society’s perspective.

This conclude’s the algebra for today, if you’ve been skipping it.

In this model I’ve only considered the case of exactly two applicants, but this can be generalized to more applicants, and the effect only gets stronger: Seemingly-large differences in each worker’s skill level can be outweighed by the massive cost of making so many people work so hard to apply and get nothing to show for it.

Thus, hyper-competition can exist despite apparently large differences in skill. Indeed, it is precisely the typical real-world scenario with many applicants who are similar that we expect to see the greatest inefficiencies. In the absence of intervention, we should expect markets to get this wrong.

Of course, we don’t actually want employers to hire randomly, right? We want people who are actually qualified for their jobs. Yes, of course; but you can probably assess that with nothing more than a resume and maybe a short interview. Most employers are not actually trying to find qualified candidates; they are trying to sift through a long list of qualified candidates to find the one that they think is best qualified. And my suspicion is that most of them honestly don’t have good methods of determining that.

This means that it could be an improvement for society to simply ban long hiring processes like these—indeed, perhaps ban job interviews altogether, as I can hardly think of a more efficient mechanism for allowing employers to discriminate based on race, gender, age, or disability than a job interview. Just collect a resume from each applicant, remove the ones that are unqualified, and then roll a die to decide which one you hire.

This would probably make the fit of workers to their jobs somewhat worse than the current system. But most jobs are learned primarily through experience anyway, so once someone has been in a job for a few years it may not matter much who was hired originally. And whatever cost we might pay in less efficient job matches could be made up several times over by the much faster, cheaper, easier, and less stressful process of applying for jobs.

Indeed, think for a moment of how much worse it feels being turned down for a job after a lengthy and costly application process that is designed to assess your merit (but may or may not actually do so particularly well), as opposed to simply finding out that you lost a high-stakes die roll. Employers could even send out letters saying one of two things: “You were rejected as unqualifed for this position.” versus “You were qualified, but you did not have the highest die roll.” Applying for jobs already feels like a crapshoot; maybe it should literally be one.

People would still have to apply for a lot of jobs—actually, they’d probably end up applying for more, because the lower cost of applying would attract more applicants. But since the cost is so much lower, it would still almost certainly be easier to do a job search than it is in the current system. In fact, it could largely be automated: simply post your resume on a central server and the system matches you with employers’ requirements and then randomly generates offers. Employers and prospective employees could fill out a series of forms just once indicating what they were looking for, and then the system could do the rest.

What I find most interesting about this policy idea is that it is in an important sense anti-meritocratic. We are in fact reducing the rewards for high levels of skill—at least a little bit—in order to improve society overall and especially for those with less skill. This is exactly the kind of policy proposal that I had hoped to see from a book like The Meritocracy Trap, but never found there. Perhaps it’s too radical? But the book was all about how we need fundamental, radical change—and then its actual suggestions were simple, obvious, and almost uncontroversial.

Note that this simplified process would not eliminate the incentives to get major, verifiable qualifications like college degrees or years of work experience. In fact, it would focus the incentives so that only those things matter, instead of whatever idiosyncratic or even capricious preferences HR agents might have. There would be no more talk of “culture fit” or “feeling right for the job”, just: “What is their highest degree? How many years have they worked in this industry?” I suppose this is credentialism, but in a world of asymmetric information, I think credentialism may be our only viable alternative to nepotism.

Of course, it’s too late for me. But perhaps future generations may benefit from this wisdom.

What meritocracy trap?

pnrj book reviews, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy , , , , , , ,

Nov 1 JDN 2459155

So I just finished reading The Meritocracy Trap by David Markovits.

The basic thesis of the book is that America’s rising inequality is not due to a defect in our meritocratic ideals, but is in fact their ultimate fruition. Markovits implores us to reject the very concept of meritocracy, and replace it with… well, something, and he’s never very clear about exactly what.

The most frustrating thing about reading this book is trying to figure out where Markovits draws the line for “elite”. He rapidly jumps between talking about the upper quartile, the upper decile, the top 1%, and even the top 0.1% or top 0.01% while weaving his narrative. The upper quartile of the US contains 75 million people; the top 0.01% contains only 300,000. The former is the size of Germany, the latter the size of Iceland (which has fewer people than Long Beach). Inequality which concentrates wealth in the top quartile of Americans is a much less serious problem than inequality which concentrates wealth in the top 0.01%. It could still be a problem—those lower three quartiles are people too—but it is definitely not nearly as bad.

I think it’s particularly frustrating to me personally, because I am an economist, which means both that such quantitative distinctions are important to me, and also that whether or not I myself am in this “elite” depends upon which line you are drawing. Do I have a post-graduate education? Yes. Was I born into the upper quartile? Not quite, but nearly. Was I raised by married parents in a stable home? Certainly. Am I in the upper decile and working as a high-paid professional? Hopefully I will be soon. Will I enter the top 1%? Maybe, maybe not. Will I join the top 0.1%? Probably not. Will I ever be in the top 0.01% and a captain of industry? Almost certainly not.

So, am I one of the middle class who are suffering alienation and stagnation, or one of the elite who are devouring themselves with cutthroat competition? Based on BLS statistics for economists and job offers I’ve been applying to, my long-term household income is likely to be about 20-50% higher than my parents’; this seems like neither the painful stagnation he attributes to the middle class nor the unsustainable skyrocketing of elite incomes. (Even 50% in 30 years is only 1.4% per year, about our average rate of real GDP growth.) Marxists would no doubt call me petit bourgeoisie; but isn’t that sort of the goal? We want as many people as possible to live comfortable upper-middle class lives in white-collar careers?

Markovits characterizes—dare I say caricatures—the habits of the middle-class versus the elite, and once again I and most people I know cross-cut them: I spend more time with friends than family (elite), but I cook familiar foods, not fancy dinners (middle); I exercise fairly regularly and don’t watch much television (elite) but play a lot of video games and sleep a lot as well (middle). My web searches involve technology and travel (elite), but also chronic illness (middle). I am a donor to Amnesty International (elite) but also play tabletop role-playing games (middle). I have a functional, inexpensive car (middle) but a top-of-the-line computer (elite)—then again that computer is a few years old now (middle). Most of the people I hang out with are well-educated (elite) but struggling financially (middle), civically engaged (elite) but pessimistic (middle). I rent my apartment and have a lot of student debt (middle) but own stocks (elite). (The latter seemed like a risky decision before the pandemic, but as stock prices have risen and student loan interest was put on moratorium, it now seems positively prescient.) So which class am I, again?

I went to public school (middle) but have a graduate degree (elite). I grew up in Ann Arbor (middle) but moved to Irvine (elite). Then again my bachelor’s was at a top-10 institution (elite) but my PhD will be at only a top-50 (middle). The beautiful irony there is that the top-10 institution is the University of Michigan and the top-50 institution is the University of California, Irvine. So I can’t even tell which class each of those events is supposed to represent! Did my experience of Ann Arbor suddenly shift from middle class to elite when I graduated from public school and started attending the University of Michigan—even though about a third of my high school cohort did exactly that? Was coming to UCI an elite act because it’s a PhD in Orange County, or a middle-class act because it’s only a top-50 university?

If the gap between these two classes is such a wide chasm, how am I straddling it? I honestly feel quite confident in characterizing myself as precisely the upwardly-mobile upper-middle class that Markovits claims no longer exists. Perhaps we’re rarer than we used to be; perhaps our status is more precarious; but we plainly aren’t gone.

Markovits keeps talking about “radical differences” “not merely in degree but in kind” between “subordinate” middle-class workers and “superordinate” elite workers, but if the differences are really that stark, why is it so hard to tell which group I’m in? From what I can see, the truth seems less like a sharp divide between middle-class and upper-class, and more like an increasingly steep slope from middle-class to upper-middle class to upper-class to rich to truly super-rich. If I had to put numbers on this, I’d say annual household incomes of about $50,000, $100,000, $200,000, $400,000, $1 million, and $10 million respectively. (And yet perhaps I should add more categories: Even someone who makes $10 million a year has only pocket change next to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.) The slope has gotten steeper over time, but it hasn’t (yet?) turned into a sharp cliff the way Markovits describes. America’s Lorenz curve is clearly too steep, but it doesn’t have a discontinuity as far as I can tell.

Some of the inequalities Markovits discusses are genuine, but don’t seem to be particularly related to meritocracy. The fact that students from richer families go to better schools indeed seems unjust, but the problem is clearly not that the rich schools are too good (except maybe at the very top, where truly elite schools seem a bit excessive—five-figure preschool tuition?), but that the poor schools are not good enough. So it absolutely makes sense to increase funding for poor schools and implement various reforms, but this is hardly a radical notion—nor is it in any way anti-meritocratic. Providing more equal opportunities for the poor to raise their own station is what meritocracy is all about.

Other inequalities he objects to seem, if not inevitable, far too costly to remove: Educated people are better parents, who raise their children in ways that make them healthier, happier, and smarter? No one is going to apologize for being a good parent, much less stop doing so because you’re concerned about what it does to inequality. If you have some ideas for how we might make other people into better parents, by all means let’s hear them. But I believe I speak for the entire upper-middle class when I say: when I have kids of my own, I’m going to read to them, I’m not going to spank them, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to change my mind on either front. Quite frankly, this seems like a heavy-handed satire of egalitarianism, right out of Harrison Bergeron: Let’s make society equal by forcing rich people to neglect and abuse their kids as much as poor people do! My apologies to Vonnegut: I thought you were ridiculously exaggerating, but apparently some people actually think like this.

This is closely tied with the deepest flaw in the argument: The meritocratic elite are actually more qualified. It’s easy to argue that someone like Donald Trump shouldn’t rule the world; he’s a deceitful, narcissistic, psychopathic, incompetent buffoon. (The only baffling part is that 40% of American voters apparently disagree.) But it’s a lot harder to see why someone like Bill Gates shouldn’t be in charge of things: He’s actually an extremely intelligent, dedicated, conscientious, hard-working, ethical, and competent individual. Does he deserve $100 billion? No, for reasons I’ve talked about before. But even he knows that! He’s giving most of it away to highly cost-effective charities! Bill Gates alone has saved several million lives by his philanthropy.

Markovits tries to argue that the merits of the meritocratic elite are arbitrary and contextual, like the alleged virtues of the aristocratic class: “The meritocratic virtues, that is, are artifacts of economic inequality in just the fashion in which the pitching virtues are artifacts of baseball.” (p. 264) “The meritocratic achievement commonly celebrated today, no less than the aristocratic virtue acclaimed in the ancien regime, is a sham.” (p. 268)

But it’s pretty hard for me to see how things like literacy, knowledge of history and science, and mathematical skill are purely arbitrary. Even the highly specialized skills of a quantum physicist, software engineer, or geneticist are clearly not arbitrary. Not everyone needs to know how to solve the Schrodinger equation or how to run a polymerase chain reaction, but our civilization greatly benefits from the fact that someone does. Software engineers aren’t super-productive because of high inequality; they are super-productive because they speak the secret language of the thinking machines. I suppose some of the skills involved in finance, consulting, and law are arbitrary and contextual; but he makes it sound like the only purpose graduate school serves is in teaching us table manners.

Precisely by attacking meritocracy, Markovits renders his own position absurd. So you want less competent people in charge? You want people assigned to jobs they’re not good at? You think businesses should go out of their way to hire employees who will do their jobs worse? Had he instead set out to show how American society fails at achieving its meritocratic ideals—indeed, failing to provide equality of opportunity for the poor is probably the clearest example of this—he might have succeeded. But instead he tries to attack the ideals themselves, and fails miserably.

Markovits avoids the error that David Graeber made: Graeber sees that there are many useless jobs but doesn’t seem to have a clue why these jobs exist (and turns to quite foolish Marxian conspiracy theories to explain it). Markovits understands that these jobs are profitable for the firms that employ them, but unproductive for society as a whole. He is right; this is precisely what virtually the entire fields of finance, sales, advertising, and corporate law consist of. Most people in our elite work very hard with great skill and competence, and produce great profits for the corporations that employ them, all while producing very little of genuine societal value. But I don’t see how this is a flaw in meritocracy per se.

Nor does Markovits stop at accusing employment of being rent-seeking; he takes aim at education as well: “when the rich make exceptional investments in schooling, this does reduce the value of ordinary, middle-class training and degrees. […] Meritocratic education inexorably engenders a wasteful and destructive arms educational arms race, which ultimately benefits no one, not even the victors.” (p.153) I don’t doubt that education is in part such a rent-seeking arms race, and it’s worthwhile to try to minimize that. But education is not entirely rent-seeking! At the very least, is there not genuine value in teaching children to read and write and do arithmetic? Perhaps by the time we get to calculus or quantum physics or psychopathology we have reached diminishing returns for most students (though clearly at least some people get genuine value out of such things!), but education is not entirely comprised of signaling or rent-seeking (and nor do “sheepskin effects” prove otherwise).

My PhD may be less valuable to me than it would be to someone in my place 40 years ago, simply because there are more people with PhDs now and thus I face steeper competition. Then again, perhaps not, as the wage premium for college and postgraduate education has been increasing, not decreasing, over that time period. (How much of that wage premium is genuine social benefit and how much is rent-seeking is difficult to say.) In any case it’s definitely still valuable. I have acquired many genuine skills, and will in fact be able to be genuinely more productive as well as compete better in the labor market than I would have without it. Some parts of it have felt like a game where I’m just trying to stay ahead of everyone else, but it hasn’t all been that. A world where nobody had PhDs would be a world with far fewer good scientists and far slower technological advancement.

Abandoning meritocracy entirely would mean that we no longer train people to be more productive or match people to the jobs they are most qualified to do. Do you want a world where surgery is not done by the best surgeons, where airplanes are not flown by the best pilots? This necessarily means less efficient production and an overall lower level of prosperity for society as a whole. The most efficient way may not be the best way, but it’s still worth noting that it’s the most efficient way.

Really, is meritocracy the problem, or is it something else?

Markovits is clearly right that something is going wrong with American society: Our inequality is much too high, and our job market is much too cutthroat. I can’t even relate to his description of what the job market was like in the 1960s (“Old Economy Steve” has it right): “Even applicants for white-collar jobs received startlingly little scrutiny. For most midcentury workers, getting a job did not involve any application at all, in the competitive sense of the term.” (p.203)

In fact, if anything he seems to understate the difference across time, perhaps because it lets him overstate the difference across class (p. 203):

Today, by contrast, the workplace is methodically arranged around gradations of skill. Firms screen job candidates intensively at hiring, and they then sort elite and non-elite workers into separate physical spaces.

Only the very lowest-wage employers, seeking unskilled workers, hire casually. Middle-class employers screen using formal cognitive tests and lengthy interviews. And elite employers screen with urgent intensity, recruiting from only a select pool and spending millions of dollars to probe applicants over several rounds of interviews, lasting entire days.

Today, not even the lowest-wage employers hire casually! Have you ever applied to work at Target? There is a personality test you have to complete, which I presume is designed to test your reliability as an obedient corporate drone. Never in my life have I gotten a job that didn’t involve either a lengthy application process or some form of personal connection—and I hate to admit it, but usually the latter. It is literally now harder to get a job as a cashier at Target than it was to get a job as an engineer at Ford 60 years ago.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that meritocracy is not exactly what’s wrong here. The problem with the sky-high compensation packages at top financial firms isn’t that they are paid to people who are really good at their jobs; it’s that those jobs don’t actually accomplish anything beneficial for society. Where elite talent and even elite compensation is combined with genuine productivity, such as in science and engineering, it seems unproblematic (and I note that Markovits barely even touches on these industries, perhaps because he sees they would undermine his argument). The reason our economic growth seems to have slowed as our inequality has massively surged isn’t that we are doing too good a job of rewarding people for being productive.

Indeed, it seems like the problem may be much simpler: Labor supply exceeds labor demand.

Take a look at this graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

[Beveridge_curve_data.png]

This graph shows the relationship over time between unemployment and job vacancies. As you can see, they are generally inversely related: More vacancies means less unemployment. I have drawn in a green line which indicates the cutoff between having more vacancies than unemployment—upper left—and having more unemployment than vacancies—lower right. We have almost always been in the state of having more unemployment than we have vacancies; notably, the mid-1960s were one of the few periods in which we had significantly more vacancies than unemployment.

For decades we’ve been instituting policies to try to give people “incentives to work”; but there is no shortage of labor in this country. We seem to have plenty of incentives to work—what we need are incentives to hire people and pay them well.

Indeed, perhaps we need incentives not to work—like a basic income or an expanded social welfare system. Thanks to automation, productivity is now astonishingly high, and yet we work ourselves to death instead of enjoying leisure.

And of course there are various other policy changes that have made our inequality worse—chiefly the dramatic drops in income tax rates at the top brackets that occurred under Reagan.

In fact, many of the specific suggestions Markovits makes—which, much to my chagrin, he waits nearly 300 pages to even mention—are quite reasonable, or even banal: He wants to end tax deductions for alumni donations to universities and require universities to enroll more people from lower income brackets; I could support that. He wants to regulate finance more stringently, eliminate most kinds of complex derivatives, harmonize capital gains tax rates to ordinary income rates, and remove the arbitrary cap on payroll taxes; I’ve been arguing for all of those things for years. What about any of these policies is anti-meritocratic? I don’t see it.

More controversially, he wants to try to re-organize production to provide more opportunities for mid-skill labor. In some industries I’m not sure that’s possible: The 10X programmer is a real phenomenon, and even mediocre programmers and engineers can make software and machines that are a hundred times as productive as doing the work by hand would be. But some of his suggestions make sense, such as policies favoring nurse practitioners over specialist doctors and legal secretaries instead of bar-certified lawyers. (And please, please reform the medical residency system! People die from the overwork caused by our medical residency system.)

But I really don’t see how not educating people or assigning people to jobs they aren’t good at would help matters—which means that meritocracy, as I understand the concept, is not to blame after all.

Monopsony is all around us

pnrj inequality, market failure, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Mar 15 JDN 2458924

Perhaps because of the board game (the popularity of which honestly baffles me; it’s really not a very good game!), the concept of monopoly is familiar to most people: A market with one seller and many buyers can command high prices and high profits for the seller.

But the opposite situation, a market with many sellers and one buyer, is equally problematic, yet far less well-known. This is called monopsony. Whereas in a monopoly prices are too high, in a monopsony prices are too low.

I have long suspected, but the data now confirms, that the most widespread form of monopsony occurs in labor markets. This is a particularly bad place for monopsony, because it means that instead of consumer prices being lower, wages will be lower. Monopsonistic labor markets are bad in two ways: They lower wages and they increase unemployment.


Monopsonistic labor markets are one of the reasons why raising minimum wage seems to have very little effect on employment. In the presence of monopsony, forcing employers to increase wages won’t cause them to fire workers; it will just eat into their profits. In some cases it can actually cause them to hire more workers.

Take a look at this map, from the Roosevelt Institute:

widespread-labor-monopsony1

This map is color-coded by commuting zone, based on whether the average labor market (different labor markets weighted by their number of employees) is monopsonistic. Commuting zones with only a few major employers are colored red, while those with many employers are colored green. In between are shaded orange and yellow. (Not a very colorblind-friendly coding scheme, I’m afraid.)

Basically you can see that the only places where labor markets are not monopsonistic are in major metro areas. Suburban areas are typically yellow, and rural areas are almost all orange or red.


It seems then that we have two choices for where we want to live: We can live in rural areas and have monopsonistic labor markets with low wages and competitive real estate markets with low housing prices, or we can live in urban areas and have competitive labor markets with high wages and monopolistic real estate markets with high housing prices. There’s hardly anywhere we can live where both wages and housing prices are fair.

Actually the best seems to be Detroit! Median housing price in the Detroit area is an affordable $179,000, while median household income is a low but not terrible $31,000. This means you can pay off a house spending 30% of your income in about 10 years. That’s the American Dream, right there.

Compare this to the San Francisco area, where median housing price is $1.1 million and median income is an impressive $104,000. This means it would take over 35 years to pay off your house spending 30% of your income. (And that’s not accounting for interest!) You can make six figures in San Francisco and still be considered “low income”, because housing prices there are so absurd.

Of course, student loans are denominated in nominal terms, so you might actually be able to pay off your student loans faster living in San Francisco than you could in Detroit. Say taxes are 20%, so these become after-tax incomes of $25,000 and $83,000. Even if you spend only a third of your income on housing in Detroit and spend two-thirds in San Francisco, that leaves you with $16,600 in Detroit but $27,600 in San Francisco. Of course other prices are different too, but it seems quite likely that being able to pay $5,000 per year on your student loans is easier living in San Francisco than it is in Detroit.

What can be done about monopsony in labor markets? First, we could try to split up employers—the FTC already doesn’t do enough to break up monopolies, but it basically does nothing to break up monopsonies. But that may not always be feasible, particularly in rural areas. And there are genuine economies of scale that can make larger firms more efficient in certain ways; we don’t want to lose those.

Perhaps the best solution is the one we used to use, and most of the First World continues to use: Labor unions. Union membership in the US declined by half in the last 30 years. Europe is heavily unionized, and the most unionized of all are Scandinavian countries—probably not a coincidence that these are the most prosperous places in the world.


At first glance, labor unions seem anti-competitive: They act like a monopoly. But when you currently have a monopsony, adding a monopoly can actually be a good thing. Instead of one seller and many buyers, resulting in prices that are too low, you can have one seller and one buyer, resulting in prices that are negotiated and can, at least potentially, be much fairer. This market structure is called a bilateral monopoly, and while it’s not as good as perfect competition, it’s considerably more efficient than either monopsony or monopoly alone.

So what can we actually do about sweatshops?

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457489

(The topic of this post was chosen by a vote of my Patreons.) There seem to be two major camps on most political issues: One camp says “This is not a problem, stop worrying about it.” The other says “This is a huge problem, it must be fixed right away, and here’s the easy solution.” Typically neither of these things is true, and the correct answer is actually “This is a huge problem, well worth fixing—but we need to do a lot of work to figure out exactly how.”

Sweatshop labor is a very good example of this phenomenon.

Camp A is represented here by the American Enterprise Institute, which even goes as far as to defend child labor on the grounds that “we used to do it before”. (Note that we also used to do slavery before. Also protectionism, but of course AEI doesn’t think that was good. Who needs logical consistency when you have ideological purity?) The College Conservative uses ECON 101 to defend sweatshops, perhaps not realizing that economics courses continue past ECON 101.

Camp B is represented here by Buycott, telling us to buy “made in the USA” products and boycott all companies that use sweatshops. Other commonly listed strategies include buying used clothes (I mean, there may be some ecological benefits to this, but clearly not all clothes can be used clothes) and “buy union-made” which is next to impossible for most products. Also in this camp is LaborVoices, a Silicon Valley tech company that seems convinced they can somehow solve the problem of sweatshops by means of smartphone apps, because apparently Silicon Valley people believe that smartphones are magical and not, say, one type of product that performs services similar to many other pre-existing products but somewhat more efficiently. (This would also explain how Uber can say with a straight face that they are “revolutionary” when all they actually do is mediate unlicensed taxi services, and Airbnb is “innovative” because it makes it slightly more convenient to rent out rooms in your home.)

Of course I am in that third camp, people who realize that sweatshops—and exploitative labor practices in general—are a serious problem, but a very complex and challenging one that does not have any easy, obvious solutions.

One thing we absolutely cannot do is return to protectionism or get American consumers to only buy from American companies (a sort of “soft protectionism” by social construction). This would not only be inefficient for us—it would be devastating for people in Third World countries. Sweatshops typically provide substantially better living conditions than the alternatives available to their workers.

Yet this does not mean that sweatshops are morally acceptable or should simply be left alone, contrary to the assertions of many economists—most famously Benjamin Powell. Anyone who doubts this must immediately read “Wrongful Beneficence” by Chris Meyers; the mere fact that an act benefits someone –or even everyone—does not prove that the act was morally acceptable. If someone is starving to death and you offer them bread in exchange for doing whatever you want them to do for the next year, you are benefiting them, surely—but what you are doing is morally wrong. And this is basically what sweatshops are; they provide survival in exchange for exploitation.

It can be remarkably difficult to even tell which companies are using sweatshops—and this is by design. While in response to public pressure corporations often try to create the image of improving their labor standards, they seem quite averse to actually improving labor standards, and even more averse to establishing systems of enforcement to make those labor standards followed consistently. Almost no sweatshops are directly owned by the retailers whose products they make; instead there is a chain of outsourced vendors and distributors, a chain that creates diffusion of responsibility and plausible deniability. When international labor organizations do get the chance to investigate the labor conditions of factories operated by multinational corporations, they invariably find that regulations are more honored in the breach than the observance.

So, what would a long-run solution to sweatshops look like? In a word: Development. The only sustainable solution to oppressive labor conditions is a world where everyone is healthy enough, educated enough, and provided with enough resources that their productivity is at a First World level; furthermore it is a world where workers have enough bargaining power that they are actually paid according to that productivity. (The US has lately been finding out what happens if you do the former but not the latter—the result is that you generate an enormous amount of wealth, but it all ends up in the hands of the top 0.1%. Yet it is quite possible to do the latter, as Denmark has figured out, #ScandinaviaIsBetter.)

To achieve this, we need more factories in Third World countries, not fewer—more investment, not less. We need to buy more of China’s exports, hire more factory workers in Bangladesh.

But it’s not enough to provide incentives to build factories—we must also provide incentives to give workers at those factories more bargaining power.

To see how we can pull this off, I offer a case study of a (qualified) success: Nike.

In the 1990s, Nike’s subcontractors had some of the worst labor conditions in the shoe industry. Today, they actually have some of the best. How did that happen?

It began with people noticing a problem—activists and investigative journalists documented the abuses in Nike’s factories. They drew public attention, which undermined Nike’s efforts at mass advertising (which was basically their entire business model—their shoes aren’t actually especially good). They tried to clean up their image with obviously biased reports, which triggered a backlash. Finally Nike decides to actually do something about the problem, and actually becomes a founding member of the Fair Labor Association. They establish new labor standards, and they audit regularly to ensure that those standards are being complied with. Today they publish an annual corporate social responsibility report that actually appears to be quite transparent and accurate, showing both the substantial improvements that have been made and the remaining problems. Activist campaigns turned Nike around almost completely.

In short, consumer pressure led to private regulation. Many development economists are increasingly convinced that this is what we need—we must put pressure on corporations to regulate themselves.

The pressure is a key part of this process; Willem Buiter wasn’t wrong when he quipped that “self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance and self-righteousness to righteousness.” For any regulation to work, it must have an enforcement mechanism; for private regulation to work, that enforcement mechanism comes from the consumers.

Yet even this is not enough, because there are too many incentives for corporations to lie and cheat if they only have to be responsive to consumers. It’s unreasonable to expect every consumer to take the time—let alone have the expertise—to perform extensive research on the supply chain of every corporation they buy a product from. I also think it’s unreasonable to expect most people to engage in community organizing or shareholder activism as Green America suggests, though it certainly wouldn’t hurt if some did. But there are just too many corporations to keep track of! Like it or not, we live in a globalized capitalist economy where you almost certainly buy from a hundred different corporations over the course of a year.

Instead we need governments to step up—and the obvious choice is the government of the United States, which remains the world’s economic and military hegemon. We should be pressuring our legislators to make new regulations on international trade that will raise labor standards around the globe.

Note that this undermines the most basic argument corporations use against improving their labor standards: “If we raise wages, we won’t be able to compete.” Not if we force everyone to raise wages, around the globe. “If it’s cheaper to build a factory in Indonesia, why shouldn’t we?” It won’t be cheaper, unless Indonesia actually has a real comparative advantage in producing that product. You won’t be able to artificially hold down your expenses by exploiting your workers—you’ll have to actually be more efficient in order to be more profitable, which is how capitalism is supposed to work.

There’s another argument we often hear that is more legitimate, which is that raising wages would also force corporations to raise prices. But as I discussed in a previous post on this subject, the amount by which prices would need to rise is remarkably small, and nowhere near large enough to justify panic about dangerous global inflation. Paying 10% or even 20% more for our products is well worth it to reduce the corruption and exploitation that abuses millions of people—a remarkable number of them children—around the globe. Also, it doesn’t take a mathematical savant to realize that if increasing wages by a factor of 10 only increases prices by 20%, workers will in fact be better off.

Where would all that extra money come from? Now we come to the real reason why corporations don’t want to raise their labor standards: It would come from profits. Right now profits are extraordinarily large, much larger than they have any right to be in a fair market. It was recently estimated that 74% of billionaire wealth comes from economic rent—that is to say, from deception, exploitation, and market manipulation, rather than actual productivity. (There’s a lot of uncertainty in this estimate; the true figure is probably somewhere between 50% and 90%—it’s almost certainly a majority, and could be the vast majority.) In fact, I really shouldn’t say “money”, which we can just print; what we really want to know is where the extra wealth would come from to give that money value. But by paying workers more, improving their standard of living, and creating more consumer demand, we would in fact dramatically increase the amount of real wealth in the world.

So, we need regulations to improve global labor standards. But we must first be clear: What should these regulations say?

First, we must rule out protectionist regulations that would give unfair advantages to companies that produce locally. These would only result in economic inefficiency at best, and trade wars throwing millions back into poverty at worst. (Some advantage makes sense to internalize the externalities of shipping, but really that should be created by a carbon tax, not by trade tariffs. It’s a lot more expensive and carbon-intensive to ship from Detroit to LA than from Detroit to Windsor, but the latter is the “international” trade.)

Second, we should not naively assume that every country should have the same minimum wage. (I am similarly skeptical of Hillary Clinton’s proposal to include people with severe mental or physical disabilities in the US federal minimum wage; I too am concerned about people with disabilities being exploited, but the fact is many people with severe disabilities really aren’t as productive, and it makes sense for wages to reflect that.) If we’re going to have minimum wages at all—basic income and wage subsidies both make a good deal more sense than a hard price floor; see also my earlier post on minimum wage—they should reflect the productivity and prices of the region. I applaud California and New York for adopting $15 minimum wages, but I’d be a bit skeptical of doing the same in Mississippi, and adamantly opposed to doing so in Bangladesh.

It may not even be reasonable to expect all countries to have the same safety standards; workers who are less skilled and in more dire poverty may rationally be willing to accept more risk to remain employed, rather than laid off because their employer could not afford to meet safety standards and still pay them a sufficient wage. For some safety standards this is ridiculous; making sufficiently many exits with doors that swing outward and maintaining smoke detectors are not expensive things to do. (And yet factories in Bangladesh often fail to meet such basic requirements, which kills hundreds of workers each year.) But other safety standards may be justifiably relaxed; OSHA compliance in the US costs about $70 billion per year, about $200 per person, which many countries simply couldn’t afford. (On the other hand, OSHA saves thousands of lives, does not increase unemployment, and may actually benefit employers when compared with the high cost of private injury lawsuits.) We should have expert economists perform careful cost-benefit analyses of proposed safety regulations to determine which ones are cost-effective at protecting workers and which ones are too expensive to be viable.

While we’re at it, these regulations should include environmental standards, or a global carbon tax that’s used to fund climate change mitigation efforts around the world. Here there isn’t much excuse for not being strict; pollution and environmental degradation harms the poor the most. Yes, we do need to consider the benefits of production that is polluting; but we have plenty of profit incentives for that already. Right now the balance is clearly tipped far too much in favor of more pollution than the optimum rather than less. Even relatively heavy-handed policies like total bans on offshore drilling and mountaintop removal might be in order; in general I’d prefer to tax rather than ban, but these activities are so enormously damaging that if the choice is between a ban and doing nothing, I’ll take the ban. (I’m less convinced of this with regard to fracking; yes, earthquakes and polluted groundwater are bad—but are they Saudi Arabia bad? Because buying more oil from Saudi Arabia is our leading alternative.)

It should go without saying (but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to) that our regulations must include an absolute zero-tolerance policy for forced labor. If we find out that a company is employing forced labor, they should have to not only free every single enslaved worker, but pay each one a million dollars (PPP 2005 chained CPI of course). If they can’t do that and they go bankrupt, good riddance; remind me to play them the world’s saddest song on the world’s tiniest violin. Of course, first we need to find out, which brings me to the most important point.

Above all, these regulations must be enforced. We could start with enforceable multilateral trade agreements, where tariff reductions are tied to human rights and labor standards. This is something the President of the United States could do, right now, as an addendum to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (What he should have done is made the TPP contingent on this, but it’s too late for that.) Future trade agreements should include these as a matter of course.If countries want to reap the benefits of free trade, they must be held accountable for sharing those benefits equitably with their people.

But ultimately we should not depend upon multilateral agreements between nations—we need truly international standards with global enforcement. We should empower the International Labor Organization to enact sanctions and inspections (right now it mostly enacts suggestions which are promptly and dutifully ignored), and possibly even to arrest executives for trial at the International Criminal Court. We should double if not triple or quadruple their funding—and if member nations will not pay this voluntarily, we should make them—the United Nations should be empowered to collect taxes in support of global development, which should be progressive with per-capita GDP. Coercion, you say? National sovereignty, you say? Millions of starving little girls is my reply.

Right now, the ability of multinational corporations to move between countries to find the ones that let them pay the least have created a race to the floor; it’s time for us to raise that floor.

What can you yourself do, assuming you’re not a head of state? (If you are, I’m honored. Also, any openings on your staff?) Well, you can vote—and you can use that vote to put pressure on your legislators to support these kinds of polices. There are also some other direct actions you can take that I discussed in a previous post; but mainly what we need is policy. Consumer pressure and philanthropy are good, and by all means, don’t stop; but to really achieve global justice we will need nothing short of global governance.

Is marginal productivity fair?

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2456963 PDT 11:11.

The standard economic equilibrium that is the goal of any neoclassical analysis is based on margins, rather than totals; what matters is not how much you have in all, but how much you get from each new one. This may be easier to understand with specific examples: The price of a product isn’t set by the total utility that you get from using that product; it’s set by the marginal utility that you get from each new unit. The wage of a worker isn’t set by their total value to the company; it’s set by the marginal value they provide with each additional hour of work. Formally, it’s not the value of the function f(x), it’s the derivative of the function, f'(x). (If you don’t know calculus, don’t worry about that last part; it isn’t that important to understand the basic concept.)

This is the standard modern explanation for Adam Smith’s “diamond-water paradox“: Why are diamonds so much more expensive than water, even though water is much more useful? Well, we have plenty of water, so the marginal utility of water isn’t very high; what are you really going to do with that extra liter? But we don’t have a lot of diamonds, so even though diamonds in general aren’t that useful, getting an extra diamond has a lot of benefit. (The units are a bit weird, as George Stigler once used to argue that Smith’s paradox is “meaningless”; but that’s silly. Let’s fix the units at “per kilogram”; a kilogram of diamonds is far, far more expensive than a kilogram of water.)

This explanation is obviously totally wrong, by the way; that’s not why diamonds are expensive. The marginal-utility argument makes sense for cars (or at least ordinary Fords and Toyotas, for reasons you’ll see in a minute), but it doesn’t explain diamonds. Diamonds are expensive for two reasons: First, the absolutely insane monopoly power of the De Beers cartel; as you might imagine, water would be really expensive too if it were also controlled by a single cartel with the power to fix prices and crush competitors. (For awhile De Beers executives had a standing warrant for their arrest in the United States; recently they pled guilty and paid fines—because, as we all know, rich people never go to prison.) And you can clearly see how diamond prices plummeted when the cartel was weakened in the 1980s. But Smith was writing long before DeBeers, and even now that De Beers only controls 40% of the market so we have an oligopoly instead of a monopoly (it’s a step in the right direction I guess), diamonds are still far more expensive than water. The real reason why diamonds are expensive is that diamonds are a Veblen good; you don’t buy diamonds because you actually want to use diamonds (maybe once in awhile, if you want to make a diamond saw or something). You buy diamonds in order to show off how rich you are. And if your goal is to show how rich you are, higher prices are good; you want it to be really expensive, you’re more likely to buy it if it’s really expensive. That’s why the marginal utility argument doesn’t work for Porsches and Ferraris; they’re Veblen goods too. If the price of a Ferrari suddenly dropped to $10,000, people would realize pretty quickly that they are hard to maintain, have very poor suspensions, and get awful gas mileage. It’s not like you can actually drive at 150 mph without getting some serious speeding tickets. (I guess they look nice?) But if the price of a Prius dropped to $10,000, everyone would buy one. For some people diamonds are also a speculation good; they hope to buy them at one price and sell them at a higher price. This is also how most trading in the stock market works, which is why I’m dubious of how well the stock market actually supports real investment. When we’re talking about Veblen goods and speculation goods, the sky is the limit; any price that someone can pay is a price they might sell at.

But all of that is a bit tangential. It’s worth thinking about all the ways that neoclassical theory doesn’t comport with reality, all the cases where price and marginal value become unhinged. But for today I’m going to give the neoclassicists the benefit of the doubt: Suppose it were true. Suppose that markets really were perfectly efficient and everything were priced at its marginal value. Would that even be a good thing?

I tend to focus most of my arguments on why a given part of our economic system deviates from optimal efficiency, because once you can convince economists of that they are immediately willing to try to fix it. But what if we had optimal efficiency? Most economists would say that we’re done, we’ve succeeded, everything is good now. (I am suddenly reminded of the Lego song, “Everything is Awesome.”) This notion is dangerously wrong.

A system could be perfectly efficient and still be horrifically unfair. This is particularly important when we’re talking about labor markets. A diamond or a bottle of water doesn’t have feelings; it doesn’t care what price you sell it at. More importantly it doesn’t have rights. People have feelings; people have rights. (And once again I’m back to Citizens United; a rat is more of a person than any corporation. We should stop calling them “rats” and “fat cats”, for this is an insult to the rodent and feline communities. No, only a human psychopath could ever be quite so corrupt.)

Of course when you sell a product, the person selling it cares how much you pay, but that will either trace back to someone’s labor—and labor markets are still the issue—or it won’t, in which case as far as I’m concerned it really doesn’t matter. If you make money simply by owning things, our society is giving you an enormous gift simply by allowing that capital income to exist; press the issue much more and we’d be well within our rights to confiscate every dime. Unless and until capital ownership is shared across the entire population and we can use it to create a post-scarcity society, capital income will be a necessary evil at best.

So let’s talk about labor markets. If you’ve taken any economics, you have probably seen a great many diagrams like this:

supply_demand2

The red line is labor supply, the blue line is labor demand. At the intersection is our glorious efficient market equilibrium, in this case at 7.5 hours of work per day (the x-axis) and $12.50 an hour (the y-axis). The green line is the wage, $12.50 per hour. But let’s stop and think for a moment about what this diagram really means.

What decides that red labor supply line? Do people just arbitrarily decide that they’re going to work 4 hours a day if they get paid $9 an hour, but 8 hours a day if they get paid $13 an hour? No, this line is meant to represent the marginal real cost of working. It’s the monetized value of your work effort and the opportunity cost of what else you could have been doing with your time. It rises because the more hours you work, the more stress it causes you and the more of your life it takes up. Working 4 hours a day, you probably had that time available anyway. Working 8 hours a day, you can fit it in. Working 12 hours a day, now you have no leisure at all. Working 16 hours a day, now you’re having trouble fitting in basic needs like food and sleep. Working 20 hours a day, you eat at work, you don’t get enough sleep, and you’re going to burn yourself out in no time. Why is it a straight line? Because we assume linear relationships to make the math easier. (No, really; that is literally the only reason. We call them “supply and demand curves” but almost always draw and calculate them as straight lines.)

Now let’s consider the blue labor demand line. Is this how much the “job creators” see fit to bestow upon you? No, it’s the marginal value of productivity. The first hour you work each day, you are focused and comfortable, and you can produce a lot of output. The second hour you’re just a little bit fatigued, so you can produce a bit less. By the time you get to hour 8, you’re exhausted, and producing noticeably less output. And if they pushed you past 16 hours, you’d barely produce anything at all. They multiply the amount of products you produce by the price at which they can sell those products, and that’s their demand for your labor. And once again we assume it’s a straight line just to make the math easier.

From this diagram you can calculate what is called employer surplus and worker surplus. Employer surplus is basically the same thing as profit. (It’s not exactly the same for some wonky technical reasons, but for our purposes they may as well be the same.) Worker surplus is a subtler concept; it’s the amount of money you receive minus the monetized value of your cost of working. So if that first hour of work was really easy and you were willing to do it for anything over $5, we take that $5 as your monetized cost of working (your “marginal willingness-to-accept“). Then if you are being paid $12.50 an hour, we infer that you must have gained $7.50 worth of utility from that exchange. (“$7.50 of utility” is a very weird concept, for reasons I’ll get into more in a later post; but it is actually the standard means of estimating utility in neoclassical economics. That’s one of the things I hope to change, actually.)

When you add these up for all the hours worked, the result becomes an integral, which is a formal mathematical way of saying “the area between those two lines”. In this case they are triangles of equal size, so we can just use the old standby A = 1/2*b*h. The area of each triangle is 1/2*7.5*7.5 = $28.13. From each day you work, you make $28.13 in consumer surplus and your employer makes $28.13 in profit.

And that seems fair, doesn’t it? You split it right down the middle. Both of you are better off than you were, and the economic benefits are shared equally. If this were really how labor markets work, that seems like how things ought to be.

But nothing in the laws of economics says that the two areas need to be equal. We tend to draw them that way out of an aesthetic desire for symmetry. But in general they are not, and in some cases they can be vastly unequal.

This happens if we have wildly different elasticities, which is a formal term for the relative rates of change of two things. An elasticity of labor supply of 1 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage you’re willing to work 1% more hours, while an elasticity of 10 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage you’re willing to work 10% more hours. Elasticities can also be negative; a labor demand elasticity of -1 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage your employer is willing to hire you for 1% fewer hours. In the graph above, the elasticity of labor supply is exactly 1. The elasticity of labor demand varies along the curve, but at the equilibrium it is about -1.6. The fact that the profits are shared equally is related to the fact that these two elasticities are close in magnitude but opposite in sign.

But now consider this equilibrium, in which I’ve raised the labor elasticity to 10. Notice that the wage and number of hours haven’t change; it’s still 7.5 hours at $12.50 per hour. But now the profits are shared quite unequally indeed; while the employer still gets $28.13, the value for the worker is only 1/2*7.5*0.75 = $2.81. In real terms this means we’ve switched from a job that starts off easy but quickly gets harder to a job that is hard to start with but never gets much harder than that.

elastic_supply

On the other hand what if the supply elasticity is only 0.1? Now the worker surplus isn’t even a triangle; it’s a trapezoid. The area of this trapezoid is 6*12.5+1/2*1.5*12.5 = $84.38. This job starts off easy and fun—so much so that you’d do it for free—but then after 6 hours a day it quickly becomes exhausting and you need to stop.

inelastic_supply

If we had to guess what these jobs are, my suggestion is that maybe the first one is a research assistant, the second one is a garbage collector, and the third one is a video game tester. And thus, even though they are paid about the same (I think that’s true in real life? They all make about $15 an hour or $30k a year), we all agree that the video game tester job is better than the research assistant job which is better than the garbage collector job—which is exactly what the worker surplus figures are saying.

What about the demand side? Here’s where it gets really unfair. Going back to our research assistant with a supply elasticity of 1, suppose they’re not really that good a researcher. Their output isn’t wrong, but it’s also not very interesting. They can do the basic statistics, but they aren’t very creative and they don’t have a deep intuition for the subject. This might produce a demand elasticity 10 times larger. The worker surplus remains the same, but the employer surplus is much lower. The triangle has an area 1/2*7.5*0.75 = $2.81.

elastic_demand

Now suppose that they are the best research assistant ever; let’s say we have a young Einstein. Everything he touches turns to gold, but even Einstein needs his beauty sleep (he actually did sleep about 10 hours a day, which is something I’ve always been delighted to have in common with him), so the total number of work hours still caps out at 7.5. It is entirely possible for the wage equilibrium to be exactly the same as it was for the lousy researcher, making the graph look like this:

inelastic_demand

You can’t even see the top of the triangle on this scale; it’s literally off the chart. The worker had a lower bound at zero, but there’s no comparable upper bound. (I suppose you could argue the lower bound shouldn’t be there either, since there are kinds of work you’d be willing to do even if you had to pay to do them—like, well, testing video games.) The top of the triangle is actually at about $90, as it turns out, so the area of employer surplus is 1/2*(90-12.5)*7.5 = $290.63. For every day he works, the company gets almost $300, but Einstein himself only gets $28.13 after you include what it costs him to work. (His gross pay is just wage*hours of course, so that’s $93.75.) The total surplus produced is $318.76. Einstein himself only gets a measly 8.9% of that.

So here we have three research assistants, who have very different levels of productivity, getting the same pay. But isn’t pay supposed to reflect productivity? Sort of; it’s supposed to reflect marginal productivity. Because Einstein gets worn out and produces at the same level as the mediocre researcher after 7.5 hours of work, since that’s where the equilibrium is that’s what they both get paid.

Now maybe Einstein should hold back; he could exercise some monopolistic power over his amazing brain. By only offering to work 4 hours a day, he can force the company to pay him at his marginal productivity for 4 hours a day, which turns out to be $49 an hour. Now he makes a gross pay of $196, with a worker surplus of $171.

monopoly_power

This diagram is a bit harder to read, so let me walk you through it. The light red and blue lines are the same as before. The darker blue line is the marginal revenue per hour for Einstein, once he factors in the fact that working more hours will mean accepting a lower wage. The optimum for him is when that marginal revenue curve crosses his marginal cost curve, which is the red supply curve. That decides how many hours he will work, namely 4. But that’s not the wage he gets; to find that, we move up vertically along the dark red line until we get the company’s demand curve. That tells us what wage the company is willing to pay for the level of marginal productivity Einstein has at 4 hours per day of work—which is the $49 wage he ends up making shown by the dark green line. The lighter lines show what happens if we have a competitive labor market, while the darker lines show what happens if Einstein exercises monopoly power.

The company still does pretty well on this deal; they now make an employer surplus of $82. Now, of the total $253 of economic surplus being made, Einstein takes 69%. It’s his brain, so him taking most of the benefit seems fair.

But you should notice something: This result is inefficient! There’s a whole triangle between 4 and 7.5 hours that nobody is getting; it’s called the deadweight loss. In this case it is $65.76, the difference between the total surplus in the efficient equilibrium and the inefficient equilibrium. In real terms, this means that research doesn’t get done because Einstein held back in order to demand a higher wage. That’s research that should be done—its benefit exceeds its cost—but nobody is doing it. Well now, maybe that doesn’t seem so fair after all. It seems selfish of him to not do research that needs done just so he can get paid more for what he does.

If Einstein has monopoly power, he gets a fair share but the market is inefficient. Removing Einstein’s monopoly power by some sort of regulation would bring us back to efficiency, but it would give most of his share to the company instead. Neither way seems right.

How do we solve this problem? I’m honestly not sure. First of all, we rarely know the actual supply and demand elasticities, and when we do it’s generally after painstaking statistical work to determine the aggregate elasticities, which aren’t even what we’re talking about here. These are individual workers.

Notice that the problem isn’t due to imperfect information; the company knows full well that Einstein is a golden goose, but they aren’t going to pay him any more than they have to.

We could just accept it, I suppose. As long as the productive work gets done, we could shrug our shoulders and not worry about the fact that corporations are capturing most of the value from the hard work of our engineers and scientists. That seems to be the default response, perhaps because it’s the easiest. But it sure doesn’t seem fair to me.

One solution might be for the company to voluntarily pay Einstein more, or offer him some sort of performance bonus. I wouldn’t rule out this possibility entirely, but this would require the company to be unusually magnanimous. This won’t happen at most corporations. It might happen for researchers at a university, where the administrators are fellow academics. Or it might happen to a corporate executive because other corporate executives feel solidarity for their fellow corporate executives.

That sort of solidarity is most likely why competition hasn’t driven down executive salaries. Theoretically shareholders would have an incentive to choose boards of directors who are willing to work for $20 an hour and elect CEOs who are willing to work for $30 an hour; but in practice old rich White guys feel solidarity with other old rich White guys, and even if there isn’t any direct quid pro quo there is still a general sense that because we are “the same kind of people” we should all look out for each other—and that’s how you get $50 million salaries. And then of course there’s the fact that even publicly-traded companies often have a handful of shareholders who control enough of the shares to win any vote.

In some industries, we don’t need to worry about this too much because productivity probably doesn’t really vary that much; just how good can a fry cook truly be? But this is definitely an issue for a lot of scientists and engineers, particularly at entry-level positions. Some scientists are an awful lot better than other scientists, but they still get paid the same.

Much more common however is the case where the costs of working vary. Some people may have few alternatives, so their opportunity cost is low, driving their wage down; but that doesn’t mean they actually deserve a lower wage. Or they may be disabled, making it harder to work long hours; but even though they work so much harder their pay is the same, so their net benefit is much smaller. Even though they aren’t any more productive, it still seems like they should be paid more to compensate them for that extra cost of working. At the other end are people who start in a position of wealth and power; they have a high opportunity cost because they have so many other options, so it may take very high pay to attract them; but why do they deserve to be paid more just because they have more to start with?

Another option would be some sort of redistribution plan, where we tax the people who are getting a larger share and give it to those who are getting a smaller share. The problem here arises in how exactly you arrange the tax. A theoretical “lump sum tax” where we just figure out the right amount of money and say “Person A: Give $217 to person B! No, we won’t tell you why!” would be optimally efficient because there’s no way it can distort markets if nobody sees it coming; but this is not something we can actually do in the real world. (It also seems a bit draconian; the government doesn’t even tax activities, they just demand arbitrary sums of money?) We’d have to tax profits, or sales, or income; and all of these could potentially introduce distortions and make the market less efficient.

We could offer some sort of publicly-funded performance bonus, and for scientists actually we do; it’s called the Nobel Prize. If you are truly the best of the best of the best as Einstein was, you may have a chance at winning the Nobel and getting $1.5 million. But of course that has to be funded somehow, and it only works for the very very top; it doesn’t make much difference to Jane Engineer who is 20% more productive than her colleagues.

I don’t find any of these solutions satisfying. This time I really can’t offer a good solution. But I think it’s important to keep the problem in mind. It’s important to always remember that “efficient” does not mean “fair”, and being paid at marginal productivity isn’t the same as being paid for overall productivity.