trade policy

Intellectual Property, revisited

pnrj core principles, development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 12, JDN 2457825

A few weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the burden of proof for intellectual property, but didn’t have time to get into the empirical question of whether our existing intellectual property system can meet this burden of proof.

First of all, I want to make a very sharp distinction between three types of regulations that are all called “intellectual property”.

First there are trademarks, which I have absolutely no quarrel with. Avoiding fraud and ensuring transparency are fundamental functions without which markets would unravel, and without trademarks these things would be much harder to accomplish. Trademarks allow a company to establish a brand identity that others cannot usurp; they ensure that when you buy Coca-Cola (R) it is really in fact the beverage you expect and not some counterfeit knockoff. (And if counterfeit Coke sounds silly, note that counterfeit honey and maple syrup are actually a major problem.) Yes, there should be limits on how much you can trademark—no one wants to live in a world where you feel Love ™ and open Screen Doors ™—but in fact our courts are already fairly good about only allowing corporations to trademark newly-coined words and proper names for their products.

Next there are copyrights, which I believe are currently too strong and often abused, but I do think should exist in some form (or perhaps copylefts instead). Authors should have at least certain basic rights over how their work can be used and published. If nothing else, proper attribution should always be required, as without that plagiarism becomes intolerably easy. And steps should be taken to ensure that if any people profit from its sale, the author is among them. I publish this blog under a by-sa copyleft, which essentially means that you can share it with whomever you like and even adapt its content into your own work, so long as you properly attribute it to me and you do not attempt to claim ownership over it. For scientific content, I think only a copyleft of this sort makes sense—the era of for-profit journals with paywalls must end, as it is holding back our civilization. But for artistic content (and I mean art in the broadest sense, including books, music, movies, plays, and video games), stronger regulations might well make sense. The question is whether our current system is actually too strong, or is protecting the wrong people—often it seems to protect the corporations that sell the content rather than the artists who created it.

Finally there are patents. Unlike copyright which applies to a specific work of art, patent is meant to apply to the underlying concept of a technology. Copyright (or rather the by-sa copyleft) protects the text of this article; you can’t post it on your own blog and claim you wrote it. But if I were to patent it somehow (generally, verbal arguments cannot be patented, fortunately), you wouldn’t even be able to paraphrase it. The trademark on a Samsung ™ TV just means that if I make a TV I can’t say I am Samsung, because I’m not. You wouldn’t copyright a TV, but the analogous process would be if I were to copy every single detail of the television and try to sell that precise duplicate. But the patents on that TV mean that if I take it apart, study each component, find a way to build them all from my own raw materials, even make them better, and build a new TV out of them that looks different and performs better—I would still be infringing on intellectual property. Patents grant an extremely strong notion of property rights, one which actually undermines a lot of other, more basic concepts of property. It’s my TV, why can’t I take it apart and copy the components? Well, as long as the patent holds, it’s not entirely my TV. Property rights this strong—that allow a corporation to have its cake of selling the TV but eat it too by owning the rights to all its components—require a much stronger justification.

Trademark protects a name, which is unproblematic. Copyright protects a work, which carries risks but is still probably necessary in many cases. But patent protects an idea—and we should ask ourselves whether that is really something it makes sense to do.

In previous posts I’ve laid out some of the basic philosophical arguments for why patents do not seem to support innovation and may actually undermine it. But in this post I want to do something more direct and quantitative: Empirically, what is the actual effect of copyrights and patents on innovation? Can we find a way to quantify the costs and benefits to our society of different modes of intellectual property?

Economists quantify things all the time, so I briefly combed the literature to see what sort of empirical studies had been done on the economic impact of copyrights and patents.

Patents definitely create barriers to scientific collaboration: Scientific articles with ideas that don’t get patented are about 10-20% more likely to be cited than scientific articles with ideas that are patented. (I would have expected a larger effect, but that’s still not trivial.)

A 1995 study found that creased patent protections do seem to be positively associated with more trade.

A 2009 study of Great Britain published in AER found it “puzzling” that stronger patents actually seem to reduce the rate of innovation domestically, while having no effect on foreign innovation—yet this is exactly what I would have predicted. Foreign innovations should be largely unaffected by UK patents, but stricter patent laws in the UK make it harder for most actual innovators, only benefiting a handful of corporations that aren’t even particularly innovative.

This 1996 study did find a positive effect of stronger patent laws on economic growth, but it was quite small and only statistically significant when using instrumental variables that they couldn’t be bothered to define except in an appendix. When your result hinges on the use of instrumental variables that you haven’t even clearly defined in the paper, something is very fishy. My guess is that they p-hacked the instruments until they got the result they wanted.

This other 1996 study is a great example of why economists need to listen to psychologists. It found a negative correlation between foreign direct investment and—wait for it—the number of companies that answered “yes” to a survey question, “Does country X have intellectual property protection too weak to allow you to transfer your newest or most effective technology to a wholly-owned subsidiarythere?” Oh, wow, you found a correlation between foreign direct investment and a question directly asking about foreign direct investment.

his 2004 study found a nonlinear relationship whereby increased economic development affects intellectual property rights, rather than the other way around. But I find their theoretical model quite odd, and the scatter plot that lies at the core of their empirical argument reminds me of Rexthor, the Dog-Bearer. “This relationship appears to be non-linear,” they say when pointing at a scatter plot that looks mostly like nothing and maybe like a monotonic increase.

This 1997 study found a positive correlation between intellectual property strength, R&D spending, and economic growth. The effect is weak, but the study looks basically sound. (Though I must say I’d never heard anyone use the words “significant at the 24% level” before. Normally one would say “nonsignificant” for that variable methinks. It’s okay for it not to be significant in some of your regressions, you know.)

This 1992 paper found that intellectual property harms poor countries and may or may not benefit rich countries, but it uses a really weird idiosyncratic theoretical model to get there. Frankly if I see the word “theorem” anywhere in your empirical paper, I get suspicious. No, it is not a theorem that “For economies in steady state the South loses from tighter intellectual property rights.” It may be true, but it does not follow from the fundamental axioms of mathematics.

This law paper is excellent; it focuses on the fact that intellectual property is a unique arrangement and a significant deviation from conventional property rights. It tracks the rise of legal arguments that erroneously equate intellectual property with real property, and makes the vital point that fully internalizing the positive externalities of technology was never the goal, and would in fact be horrible should it come to pass. We would all have to pay most of our income in royalties to the Newton and Faraday estates. So, I highly recommend reading it. But it doesn’t contain any empirical results on the economic effects of intellectual property.

This is the best paper I was able to find showing empirical effects of different intellectual property regimes; I really have no complaints about its econometrics. But it was limited to post-Soviet economies shortly after the fall of the USSR, which were rather unique circumstances. (Indeed, by studying only those countries, you’d probably conclude that free markets are harmful, because the shock of transition was so great.)

This 1999 paper is also quite good; using a natural experiment from a sudden shift in Japanese patent policy, they found almost no difference in actual R&D. The natural experiment design makes this particularly credible, but it’s difficult to generalize since it only covered Japan specifically.

This study focused in particular on copyrights and the film industry, and found a nonlinear effect: While having no copyright protection at all was harmful to the film industry, making the copyright protections too strong had a strangling effect on new filmmakers entering the industry. This would suggest that the optimal amount of copyright is moderate, which sounds reasonable to me.

This 2009 study did a much more detailed comparison of different copyright regimes, and was unable to find a meaningful pattern amidst the noise. Indeed, they found that the only variable that consistently predicted the number of new works of art was population—more people means more art, and nothing else seemed to matter. If this is correct, it’s quite damning to copyright; it would suggest that people make art for reasons fundamentally orthogonal to copyright, and copyright does almost nothing useful. (And I must say, if you talk to most artists, that tends to be their opinion on the matter!)

This 1996 paper found that stronger patents had no benefits for poor countries, but benefited rich countries quite a large amount: Increased patent protection was estimated to add as much as 0.7% annual GDP growth over the whole period. That’s a lot; if this is really true, stronger patents are almost certainly worth it. But then it becomes difficult to explain why more precise studies haven’t found effects anywhere near that large.

This paper was pretty interesting; they found a fat-tailed distribution of patents, where most firms have none, many have one or a few, and a handful of firms have a huge number of patents. This is also consistent with the distribution of firm revenue and profit—and I’d be surprised if I didn’t find a strong correlation between all three. But this really doesn’t tell us whether patents are contributing to innovation.
This paper found that the harmonization of global patents in the Uruguay Round did lead to gains from trade for most countries, but also transferred about $4.5 billion to the US from the rest of the world. Of course, that’s really not that large an amount when we’re talking about global policy over several years.

What does all that mean? I don’t know. It’s a mess. There just don’t seem to be any really compelling empirical studies on the economic impact of copyrights and patents. The preponderance of the evidence, such as it is, would seem to suggest that copyrights provide a benefit as long as they aren’t too strong, while patents provide a benefit but it is quite small and likely offset by the rent-seeking of the corporations that own them. The few studies that found really large effects (like 0.7% annual GDP growth) don’t seem very credible to me; if the effect were really that large, it shouldn’t be so ambiguous. 0.7% per year over 25 years is a GDP 20% larger. Over 50 years, GDP would be 42% larger. We would be able to see that.

Does this ambiguity mean we should do nothing, and wait until the data is better? I don’t think so. Remember, the burden of proof for intellectual property should be high. It’s a fundamentally bizarre notion of property, one which runs against most of our standard concepts of real property; it restricts our rights in very basic ways, making literally the majority of our population into criminals. Such a draconian policy requires a very strong justification, but such a justification does not appear to be forthcoming. If it could be supported, that 0.7% GDP growth might be enough; but it doesn’t seem to be replicable. A free society does not criminalize activities just in case it might be beneficial to do so—it only criminalizes activities that have demonstrable harm. And the harm of copyright and patent infringement simply isn’t demonstrable enough to justify its criminalization.

We don’t have to remove them outright, but we should substantially weaken copyright and patent laws. They should be short-term, they should provide very basic protection, and they should never be owned by corporations, always by individuals (corporations should be able to license them—but not own them). If we then observe a substantial reduction in innovation and economic output, then we can put them back. But I think that what defenders of intellectual property fear most is that if we tried this, it wouldn’t be so bad—and then the “doom and gloom” justification they’ve been relying on all this time would fall apart.

The facts will not speak for themselves, so we must speak for them

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 3, JDN 2457604

I finally began to understand the bizarre and terrifying phenomenon that is the Donald Trump Presidential nomination when I watched this John Oliver episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-l3IV_XN3c

These lines in particular, near the end, finally helped me put it all together:

What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. Because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week; it was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts.

The facts against Donald Trump are absolutely overwhelming. He is not even a competent business man, just a spectacularly manipulative one—and even then, it’s not clear he made any more money than he would have just keeping his inheritance in a diversified stock portfolio. His casinos were too fraudulent for Atlantic City. His university was fraudulent. He has the worst honesty rating Politifact has ever given a candidate. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied for some of the best.)

More importantly, almost every policy he has proposed or even suggested is terrible, and several of them could be truly catastrophic.

Let’s start with economic policy: His trade policy would set back decades of globalization and dramatically increase global poverty, while doing little or nothing to expand employment in the US, especially if it sparks a trade war. His fiscal policy would permanently balloon the deficit by giving one of the largest tax breaks to the rich in history. His infamous wall would probably cost about as much as the federal government currently spends on all basic scientific research combined, and his only proposal for funding it fundamentally misunderstands how remittances and trade deficits work. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and would roll back what little progress we have made at reducing carbon emissions, thereby endangering millions of lives. He could very likely cause a global economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression.

His social policy is equally terrible: He has proposed criminalizing abortion, (in express violation of Roe v. Wade) which even many pro-life people find too extreme. He wants to deport all Muslims and ban Muslims from entering, which not just a direct First Amendment violation but also literally involves jackbooted soldiers breaking into the homes of law-abiding US citizens to kidnap them and take them out of the country. He wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, the largest deportation in US history.

Yet it is in foreign policy above all that Trump is truly horrific. He has explicitly endorsed targeting the families of terrorists, which is a war crime (though not as bad as what Ted Cruz wanted to do, which is carpet-bombing cities). Speaking of war crimes, he thinks our torture policy wasn’t severe enough, and doesn’t even care if it is ineffective. He has made the literally mercantilist assertion that the purpose of military alliances is to create trade surpluses, and if European countries will not provide us with trade surpluses (read: tribute), he will no longer commit to defending them, thereby undermining decades of global stability that is founded upon America’s unwavering commitment to defend our allies. And worst of all, he will not rule out the first-strike deployment of nuclear weapons.

I want you to understand that I am not exaggerating when I say that a Donald Trump Presidency carries a nontrivial risk of triggering global nuclear war. Will this probably happen? No. It has a probability of perhaps 1%. But a 1% chance of a billion deaths is not a risk anyone should be prepared to take.

 

All of these facts scream at us that Donald Trump would be a catastrophe for America and the world. Why, then, are so many people voting for him? Why do our best election forecasts give him a good chance of winning the election?

Because facts don’t speak for themselves.

This is how the left, especially the center-left, has dropped the ball in recent decades. We joke that reality has a liberal bias, because so many of the facts are so obviously on our side. But meanwhile the right wing has nodded and laughed, even mockingly called us the “reality-based community”, because they know how to manipulate feelings.

Donald Trump has essentially no other skills—but he has that one, and it is enough. He knows how to fan the flames of anger and hatred and point them at his chosen targets. He knows how to rally people behind meaningless slogans like “Make America Great Again” and convince them that he has their best interests at heart.

Indeed, Trump’s persuasiveness is one of his many parallels with Adolf Hitler; I am not yet prepared to accuse Donald Trump of seeking genocide, yet at the same time I am not yet willing to put it past him. I don’t think it would take much of a spark at this point to trigger a conflagration of hatred that launches a genocide against Muslims in the United States, and I don’t trust Trump not to light such a spark.

Meanwhile, liberal policy wonks are looking on in horror, wondering how anyone could be so stupid as to believe him—and even publicly basically calling people stupid for believing him. Or sometimes we say they’re not stupid, they’re just racist. But people don’t believe Donald Trump because they are stupid; they believe Donald Trump because he is persuasive. He knows the inner recesses of the human mind and can harness our heuristics to his will. Do not mistake your unique position that protects you—some combination of education, intellect, and sheer willpower—for some inherent superiority. You are not better than Trump’s followers; you are more resistant to Trump’s powers of persuasion. Yes, statistically, Trump voters are more likely to be racist; but racism is a deep-seated bias in the human mind that to some extent we all share. Trump simply knows how to harness it.

Our enemies are persuasive—and therefore we must be as well. We can no longer act as though facts will automatically convince everyone by the power of pure reason; we must learn to stir emotions and rally crowds just as they do.

Or rather, not just as they do—not quite. When we see lies being so effective, we may be tempted to lie ourselves. When we see people being manipulated against us, we may be tempted to manipulate them in return. But in the long run, we can’t afford to do that. We do need to use reason, because reason is the only way to ensure that the beliefs we instill are true.

Therefore our task must be to make people see reason. Let me be clear: Not demand they see reason. Not hope they see reason. Not lament that they don’t. This will require active investment on our part. We must actually learn to persuade people in such a manner that their minds become more open to reason. This will mean using tools other than reason, but it will also mean treading a very fine line, using irrationality only when rationality is insufficient.

We will be tempted to take the easier, quicker path to the Dark Side, but we must resist. Our goal must be not to make people do what we want them to—but to do what they would want to if they were fully rational and fully informed. We will need rhetoric; we will need oratory; we may even need some manipulation. But as we fight our enemy, we must be vigilant not to become them.

This means not using bad arguments—strawmen and conmen—but pointing out the flaws in our opponents’ arguments even when they seem obvious to us—bananamen. It means not overstating our case about free trade or using implausible statistical results simply because they support our case.

But it also means not understating our case, not hiding in page 17 of an opaque technical report that if we don’t do something about climate change right now millions of people will die. It means not presenting our ideas as “political opinions” when they are demonstrated, indisputable scientific facts. It means taking the media to task for their false balance that must find a way to criticize a Democrat every time they criticize a Republican: Sure, he is a pathological liar and might trigger global economic collapse or even nuclear war, but she didn’t secure her emails properly. If you objectively assess the facts and find that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats, maybe that’s something you should be reporting on instead of trying to compensate for by changing your criteria.

Speaking of the media, we should be pressuring them to include a regular—preferably daily, preferably primetime—segment on climate change, because yes, it is that important. How about after the weather report every day, you show a climate scientist explaining why we keep having record-breaking summer heat and more frequent natural disasters? If we suffer a global ecological collapse, this other stuff you’re constantly talking about really isn’t going to matter—that is, if it mattered in the first place. When ISIS kills 200 people in an attack, you don’t just report that a bunch of people died without examining the cause or talking about responses. But when a typhoon triggered by climate change kills 7,000, suddenly it’s just a random event, an “act of God” that nobody could have predicted or prevented. Having an appropriate caution about whether climate change caused any particular disaster should not prevent us from drawing the very real links between more carbon emissions and more natural disasters—and sometimes there’s just no other explanation.

It means demanding fact-checks immediately, not as some kind of extra commentary that happens after the debate, but as something the moderator says right then and there. (You have a staff, right? And they have Google access, right?) When a candidate says something that is blatantly, demonstrably false, they should receive a warning. After three warnings, their mic should be cut for that question. After ten, they should be kicked off the stage for the remainder of the debate. Donald Trump wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But instead, they not only let him speak, they spent the next week repeating what he said in bold, exciting headlines. At least CNN finally realized that their headlines could actually fact-check Trump’s statements rather than just repeat them.
Above all, we will need to understand why people think the way they do, and learn to speak to them persuasively and truthfully but without elitism or condescension. This is one I know I’m not very good at myself; sometimes I get so frustrated with people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old (over 40% of Americans) or don’t believe in climate change (35% don’t think it is happening at all, another 30% don’t think it’s a big deal) that I come off as personally insulting them—and of course from that point forward they turn off. But irrational beliefs are not proof of defective character, and we must make that clear to ourselves as well as to others. We must not say that people are stupid or bad; but we absolutely must say that they are wrong. We must also remember that despite our best efforts, some amount of reactance will be inevitable; people simply don’t like having their beliefs challenged.

Yet even all this is probably not enough. Many people don’t watch mainstream media, or don’t believe it when they do (not without reason). Many people won’t even engage with friends or family members who challenge their political views, and will defriend or even disown them. We need some means of reaching these people too, and the hardest part may be simply getting them to listen to us in the first place. Perhaps we need more grassroots action—more protest marches, or even activists going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps we need to establish new media outlets that will be as widely accessible but held to a higher standard.

But we must find a way–and we have little time to waste.

Whose tax plan makes the most sense?

pnrj current events, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457496

The election for the President of the United States has now come down to four candidates; the most likely winner is Hillary Clinton, but despite claims to the contrary Bernie Sanders could still win the Democratic nomination. On the Republican side Donald Trump holds a small lead over Ted Cruz, and then there’s a small chance that Kasich could win or a new candidate could emerge if neither can win a majority and they go to a brokered convention (I’ve heard Romney and Ryan suggested, and either of them would be far better).

There are a lot of differences between the various candidates, and while it feels partisan to say so I really think it’s pretty obvious that Clinton and Sanders are superior candidates to Trump and Cruz. Trump is a plutocratic crypto-fascist blowhard with no actual qualifications, and Cruz seems to extrude sleaze from his every pore—such that basically nobody who knows him well actually likes him.

In general I’ve preferred Sanders, though when he started talking about trade policy the other day it actually got me pretty worried that he doesn’t appreciate the benefits of free trade. So while I think a lot of Clinton’s plans are kind of lukewarm, I wouldn’t mind if she won, if only because her trade policy is clearly better.

But today I’m going to compare all four candidates in a somewhat wonkier way: Let’s talk about taxes.

Specifically, federal income tax. There are a lot of other types of taxes of course, but federal income tax is the chief source of revenue for the US federal government, as well as the chief mechanism by which the United States engages in redistribution of wealth. I’ll also briefly discuss payroll taxes, which are the second-largest source of federal revenue.
So, I’ve looked up the income tax plans of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz respectively, and they are summarized below. The first column gives the minimum income threshold for that marginal tax rate (since they vary slightly I’ll be rounding to the nearest thousand). For comparison I’ve included the current income tax system as well. I’m using the rates for an individual filing singly with no deductions for simplicity.

Current system Hillary Clinton Bernie Sanders Donald Trump Ted Cruz
0 10% 10% 10% 0% 0%
9,000 15% 15% 15% 0% 0%
25,000 15% 15% 15% 10% 0%
36,000 25% 25% 25% 10% 10%
37,000 25% 25% 25% 10% 10%
50,000 25% 25% 25% 20% 10%
91,000 28% 28% 28% 20% 10%
150,000 28% 28% 28% 25% 10%
190,000 33% 33% 33% 25% 10%
250,000 33% 33% 37% 25% 10%
412,000 35% 35% 37% 25% 10%
413,000 39.6% 35% 37% 25% 10%
415,000 39.6% 39.6% 37% 25% 10%
500,000 39.6% 39.6% 43% 25% 10%
2,000,000 39.6% 39.6% 48% 25% 10%
5,000,000 39.6% 43.6% 48% 25% 10%
10,000,000 39.6% 43.6% 52% 25% 10%

As you can see, Hillary Clinton’s plan is basically our current system, with some minor adjustments and a slight increase in progressivity.In addition to these slight changes in the income tax code, she also proposes to close some loopholes in corporate taxes, but she basically doesn’t change the payroll tax system at all. Her plan would not change a whole lot, but we know it would work, because our current tax system does work.

Despite calling himself a social democrat and being accused of being a far more extreme sort of socialist, Bernie Sanders offers a tax plan that isn’t very radical either; he makes our income tax system a bit more progressive, especially at very high incomes; but it’s nothing out of the ordinary by historical standards. Sanders’ top rate of 52% is about what Reagan set in his first tax cut plan in 1982, and substantially lower than the about 90% top rates we had from 1942 to 1964 and the about 70% top rates we had from 1965 to 1981. Sanders would also lift the income cap on payroll taxes (which it makes no sense not to do—why would we want payroll taxes to be regressive?) and eliminate the payroll tax deduction for fringe benefits (which is something a lot of economists have been clamoring for).

No, it’s the Republicans who have really radical tax plans. Donald Trump’s plan involves a substantial cut across the board, to rates close to the lowest they’ve ever been in US history, which was during the Roaring Twenties—the top tax rate was 25% from 1925 to 1931. Trump also proposes to cut the corporate tax in half (which I actually like), and eliminate the payroll tax completely—which would only make sense if you absorbed it into income taxes, which he does not.

Ted Cruz’s plan is even more extreme, removing essentially all progressivity from the US tax code and going to a completely flat tax at the nonsensically low rate of 10%. We haven’t had a rate that low since 1915—so these would be literally the lowest income tax rates we’ve had in a century. Ted Cruz also wants to cut the corporate tax rate in half and eliminate payroll taxes, which is even crazier in his case because of how much he would be cutting income tax rates.

To see why this is so bonkers, take a look at federal spending as a portion of GDP over the last century. We spent only about 10% of GDP in 1915; We currently take in $3.25 trillion per year, 17.4% of GDP, and spend $3.70 trillion per year, 19.8% of GDP. So Ted Cruz’s plan was designed for an era in which the federal government spent about half what it does right now. I don’t even see how we could cut spending that far that fast; it would require essentially eliminating Social Security and Medicare, or else huge cuts in just about everything else. Either that, or we’d have to run the largest budget deficit we have since WW2, and not just for the war spending but indefinitely.

Donald Trump’s plan is not quite as ridiculous, but fact-checkers have skewered him for claiming it will be revenue-neutral. No, it would cut revenue by about $1 trillion per year, which would mean either large deficits (and concomitant risk of inflation and interest rate spikes—this kind of deficit would have been good in 2009, but it’s not so great indefinitely) or very large reductions in spending.

To be fair, both Republicans do claim they intend to cut a lot of spending. But they never quite get around to explaining what spending they’ll be cutting. Are you gutting Social Security? Ending Medicare? Cutting the military in half? These are the kinds of things you’d need to do in order to save this much money.

It’s kind of a shame that Cruz set the rate so low, because if he’d proposed a flat tax of say 25% or 30% that might actually make sense. Applied to consumption instead of income, this would be the Fair Tax, which is 23% if calculated like an income tax or 30% if calculated like a sales tax—either way it’s 26 log points. The Fair Tax could actually provide sufficient revenue to support most existing federal spending,

I still oppose it because I want taxes to be progressive (for reasons I’ve explained previously), and the Fair Tax, by applying only to consumption it would be very regressive (poor people often spend more than 100% of their incomes on consumption—financing it on debt—while rich people generally spend about 50%, and the very rich spend even less). It would exacerbate inequality quite dramatically, especially in capital income, which would be completely untaxed. Even a flat income tax like Cruz’s would still hit the poor harder than the rich in real terms.

But I really do like the idea of a very simple, straightforward tax code that has very few deductions so that everyone knows how much they are going to pay and doesn’t have to deal with hours of paperwork to do it. If this lack of deductions is enshrined in law, it would also remove most of the incentives to lobby for loopholes and tax expenditures, making our tax system much fairer and more efficient.

No doubt about it, flat taxes absolutely are hands-down the easiest to compute. Most people would probably have trouble figuring out a formula like r = I^{-p}, though computers have no such problem (my logarithmic tax plan is easier on computers than the present system); but even fifth-graders can multiply something by 25%. There is something very appealing about everyone knowing at all times that they pay in taxes one-fourth of what they get in income. Adding a simple standard deduction for low incomes makes it slightly more complicated, but also makes it a little bit progressive and is totally worth the tradeoff.

His notion of “eliminating the IRS” is ridiculous (we still need the IRS to audit people to make sure they are honest about their incomes!), and I think the downsides of having no power to redistribute wealth via taxes outweigh the benefits of a flat tax, but the benefits are very real. The biggest problem is that Cruz chose a rate that simply makes no sense; there’s no way to make the numbers work out if the rate is only 10%, especially since you’re excluding half the population from being taxed at all.

Hopefully you see how this supports my contention that Clinton and Sanders are the serious candidates while Trump and Cruz are awful; Clinton wants to keep our current tax system, and Sanders wants to make it a bit more progressive, while Trump and Cruz prize cutting taxes and making taxes simple so highly that they forgot to make sure the numbers actually make any sense—or worse, didn’t care.

Free trade is not the problem. Billionaires are the problem.

pnrj development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457468

One thing that really stuck out to me about the analysis of the outcome of the Michigan primary elections was that people kept talking about trade; when Bernie Sanders, a center-left social democrat, and Donald Trump, a far-right populist nationalist (and maybe even crypto-fascist) are the winners, something strange is at work. The one common element that the two victors seemed to have was their opposition to free trade agreements. And while people give many reasons to support Trump, many quite baffling, his staunch protectionism is one of the stronger voices. While Sanders is not as staunchly protectionist, he definitely has opposed many free-trade agreements.

Most of the American middle class feels as though they are running in place, working as hard as they can to stay where they are and never moving forward. The income statistics back them up on this; as you can see in this graph from FRED, real median household income in the US is actually lower than it was a decade ago; it never really did recover from the Second Depression:

US_median_household_income

As I talk to people about why they think this is, one of the biggest reasons they always give is some variant of “We keep sending our jobs to China.” There is this deep-seated intuition most Americans seem to have that the degradation of the middle class is the result of trade globalization. Bernie Sanders speaks about ending this by changes in tax policy and stronger labor regulations (which actually makes some sense); Donald Trump speaks of ending this by keeping out all those dirty foreigners (which appeals to the worst in us); but ultimately, they both are working from the narrative that free trade is the problem.

But free trade is not the problem. Like almost all economists, I support free trade. Free trade agreements might be part of the problem—but that’s because a lot of free trade agreements aren’t really about free trade. Many trade agreements, especially the infamous TRIPS accord, were primarily about restricting trade—specifically on “intellectual property” goods like patented drugs and copyrighted books. They were about expanding the monopoly power of corporations over their products so that the monopoly applied not just to the United States, but indeed to the whole world. This is the opposite of free trade and everything that it stands for. The TPP was a mixed bag, with some genuinely free-trade provisions (removing tariffs on imported cars) and some awful anti-trade provisions (making patents on drugs even stronger).

Every product we buy as an import is another product we sell as an export. This is not quite true, as the US does run a trade deficit; but our trade deficit is small compared to our overall volume of trade (which is ludicrously huge). Total US exports for 2014, the last full year we’ve fully tabulated, were $3.306 trillion—roughly the entire budget of the federal government. Total US imports for 2014 were $3.578 trillion. This makes our trade deficit $272 billion, which is 7.6% of our imports, or about 1.5% of our GDP of $18.148 trillion. So to be more precise, every 100 products we buy as imports are 92 products we sell as exports.

If we stopped making all these imports, what would happen? Well, for one thing, millions of people in China would lose their jobs and fall back into poverty. But even if you’re just looking at the US specifically, there’s no reason to think that domestic production would increase nearly as much as the volume of trade was reduced, because the whole point of trade is that it’s more efficient than domestic production alone. It is actually generous to think that by switching to autarky we’d have even half the domestic production that we’re currently buying in imports. And then of course countries we export to would retaliate, and we’d lose all those exports. The net effect of cutting ourselves off from world trade would be a loss of about $1.5 trillion in GDP—average income would drop by 8%.

Now, to be fair, there are winners and losers. Offshoring of manufacturing does destroy the manufacturing jobs that are offshored; but at least when done properly, it also creates new jobs by improved efficiency. These two effects are about the same size, so the overall effect is a small decline in the overall number of US manufacturing jobs. It’s not nearly large enough to account for the collapsing middle class.

Globalization may be one contributor to rising inequality, as may changes in technology that make some workers (software programmers) wildly more productive as they make other workers (cashiers, machinists, and soon truck drivers) obsolete. But those of us who have looked carefully at the causes of rising income inequality know that this is at best a small part of what’s really going on.

The real cause is what Bernie Sanders is always on about: The 1%. Gains in income in the US for the last few decades (roughly as long as I’ve been alive) have been concentrated in a very small minority of the population—in fact, even 1% may be too coarse. Most of the income gains have actually gone to more like the top 0.5% or top 0.25%, and the most spectacular increases in income have all been concentrated in the top 0.01%.

The story that we’ve been told—I dare say sold—by the mainstream media (which is, lets face it, owned by a handful of corporations) is that new technology has made it so that anyone who works hard (or at least anyone who is talented and works hard and gets a bit lucky) can succeed or even excel in this new tech-driven economy.

I just gave up on a piece of drivel called Bold that was seriously trying to argue that anyone with a brilliant idea can become a billionaire if they just try hard enough. (It also seemed positively gleeful about the possibility of a cyberpunk dystopia in which corporations use mass surveillance on their customers and competitors—yes, seriously, this was portrayed as a good thing.) If you must read it, please, don’t give these people any more money. Find it in a library, or find a free ebook version, or something. Instead you should give money to the people who wrote the book I switched to, Raw Deal, whose authors actually understand what’s going on here (though I maintain that the book should in fact be called Uber Capitalism).

When you look at where all the money from the tech-driven “new economy” is going, it’s not to the people who actually make things run. A typical wage for a web developer is about $35 per hour, and that’s relatively good as far as entry-level tech jobs. A typical wage for a social media intern is about $11 per hour, which is probably less than what the minimum wage ought to be. The “sharing economy” doesn’t produce outstandingly high incomes for workers, just outstandingly high income risk because you aren’t given a full-time salary. Uber has claimed that its drivers earn $90,000 per year, but in fact their real take-home pay is about $25 per hour. A typical employee at Airbnb makes $28 per hour. If you do manage to find full-time hours at those rates, you can make a middle-class salary; but that’s a big “if”. “Sharing economy”? Robert Reich has aptly renamed it the “share the crumbs economy”.

So where’s all this money going? CEOs. The CEO of Uber has net wealth of $8 billion. The CEO of Airbnb has net wealth of $3.3 billion. But they are paupers compared to the true giants of the tech industry: Larry Page of Google has $36 billion. Jeff Bezos of Amazon has $49 billion. And of course who can forget Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and his mind-boggling $77 billion.

Can we seriously believe that this is because their ideas were so brilliant, or because they are so talented and skilled? Uber’s “brilliant” idea is just to monetize carpooling and automate linking people up. Airbnb’s “revolutionary” concept is an app to advertise your bed-and-breakfast. At least Google invented some very impressive search algorithms, Amazon created one of the most competitive product markets in the world, and Microsoft democratized business computing. Of course, none of these would be possible without the invention of the Internet by government and university projects.

As for what these CEOs do that is so skilled? At this point they basically don’t do… anything. Any real work they did was in the past, and now it’s all delegated to other people; they just rake in money because they own things. They can manage if they want, but most of them have figured out that the best CEOs do very little while CEOS who micromanage typically fail. While I can see some argument for the idea that working hard in the past could merit you owning capital in the future, I have a very hard time seeing how being very good at programming and marketing makes you deserve to have so much money you could buy a new Ferrari every day for the rest of your life.

That’s the heuristic I like to tell people, to help them see the absolutely enormous difference between a millionaire and a billionaire: A millionaire is someone who can buy a Ferrari. A billionaire is someone who can buy a new Ferrari every day for the rest of their life. A high double-digit billionaire like Bezos or Gates could buy a new Ferrari every hour for the rest of their life. (Do the math; a Ferrari is about $250,000. Remember that they get a return on capital typically between 5% and 15% per year. With $1 billion, you get $50 to $150 million just in interest and dividends every year, and $100 million is enough to buy 365 Ferraris. As long as you don’t have several very bad years in a row on your stocks, you can keep doing this more or less forever—and that’s with only $1 billion.)

Immigration and globalization are not what is killing the American middle class. Corporatization is what’s killing the American middle class. Specifically, the use of regulatory capture to enforce monopoly power and thereby appropriate almost all the gains of new technologies into into the hands of a few dozen billionaires. Typically this is achieved through intellectual property, since corporate-owned patents basically just are monopolistic regulatory capture.

Since 1984, US real GDP per capita rose from $28,416 to $46,405 (in 2005 dollars). In that same time period, real median household income only rose from $48,664 to $53,657 (in 2014 dollars). That means that the total amount of income per person in the US rose by 49 log points (63%), while the amount of income that a typical family received only rose 10 log points (10%). If median income had risen at the same rate as per-capita GDP (and if inequality remained constant, it would), it would now be over $79,000, instead of $53,657. That is, a typical family would have $25,000 more than they actually do. The poverty line for a family of 4 is $24,300; so if you’re a family of 4 or less, the billionaires owe you a poverty line. You should have three times the poverty line, and in fact you have only two—because they took the rest.

And let me be very clear: I mean took. I mean stole, in a very real sense. This is not wealth that they created by their brilliance and hard work. This is wealth that they expropriated by exploiting people and manipulating the system in their favor. There is no way that the top 1% deserves to have as much wealth as the bottom 95% combined. They may be talented; they may work hard; but they are not that talented, and they do not work that hard. You speak of “confiscation of wealth” and you mean income taxes? No, this is the confiscation of our nation’s wealth.

Those of us who voted for Bernie Sanders voted for someone who is trying to stop it.

Those of you who voted for Donald Trump? Congratulations on supporting someone who epitomizes it.

Free trade, fair trade, or what?

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

JDN 2457271 EDT 11:34.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, almost all economists are opposed to protectionism. In a survey of 264 AEA economists, 87% opposed tariffs to protect US workers against foreign competition.

(By the way, 58% said they usually vote Democrat and only 23% said they usually vote Republican. Given that economists are overwhelmingly middle-age rich White males—only 12% of tenured faculty economists are women and the median income of economists is over $90,000—that’s saying something. Dare I suggest it’s saying that Democrat economic policy is usually better?)

There are a large number of published research papers showing large positive effects of free trade agreements, such as this paper, and this paper, and this paper, and this paper. It’s hard to find any good papers showing any significant negative effects. This is probably why the consensus is so strong; the empirical evidence is overwhelming.

Yet protectionism is very popular among the general public. The majority of both Democrat and Republican voters believe that free trade agreements have harmed the United States. For decades, protectionism has always been the politically popular answer.

To be fair, it’s actually possible to think that free trade harms the US but still support free trade; actually there are some economists who argue that free trade has harmed the US, but has benefited other countries like China and India so much more that it is worth it, making free trade an act of global altruism and good will (for the opposite view, here’s a pretty good article about how “free trade” in principle is often mercantilism in practice, and by no means altruistic). As Krugman talks about, there is some evidence that income inequality in the First World has been exacerbated by globalization—but it’s clearly not the primary reason for rising inequality.

What’s going on here? Are economists ignoring the negative impacts of free trade because it doesn’t fit their elegant mathematical models? Is the general public ignorant of how trade actually works? Does the way free trade works, or its interaction with human psychology, inherently obscure its benefits while emphasizing its harms?

Yes. All of the above.

One of the central mistakes of neoclassical economics is the tendency to over-aggregate. Instead of looking at the impact on individuals, it’s much easier to look at the impact on aggregated abstractions like trade flows and GDP. To some extent this is inevitable—there are simply too many people in the world to keep track of them all. But we need to be aware of what welose when we aggregate, and we need to test the robustness of our theories by applying different models of aggregation (such as comparing “how does this affect Americans” with “how does this affect the First World middle class”).

It is absolutely unambiguous that free trade increases trade flows and GDP, and for small countries these benefits can be mind-bogglingly huge. A key part of the amazing success story of economic development that is Korea is that they dramatically increased their openness to global trade.

The reason for this is absolutely fundamental to economics, and in grasping it in 1776 Adam Smith basically founded the field: Voluntary trade benefits both parties.

As most economists would put it today, comparative advantage leads to Pareto-improving gains from trade. Or as I’d tend to put it, more succinctly yet just as thoroughly based in modern game theory: Trade is nonzero-sum.

When you sell a product to someone, it is because the money they’re offering you is worth more to you than the product—and because the product is worth more to them than the money. You each lose something you value less and gain something you value more—so you are both better off.

This mutual benefit occurs whether you are individuals, corporations, or nations. It’s a fundamental principle of economics that underlies the operation of markets at every scale.

This is what I think most people don’t understand when they say they want to “stop sending jobs overseas”. If by that all you mean is ensuring that there aren’t incentives to offshore and outsource, that’s quite reasonable. Even some degree of incentive to keep businesses in the US might make sense, to avoid a race-to-the-bottom in global wages. But I get the sense that it is more than this, that people have a general notion that jobs are zero-sum and if we hire a million people in China that means a million people must lose their jobs in the US. This is not simply wrong, it is fundamentally wrong; it misses the entire point of economics. If there is one core principle that defines economics, I think it would be that the universe is nonzero-sum; gains for some can also be gains for others. There is not a fixed amount of stuff in the world that we distribute; we can make more stuff. Handled properly, a trade that results in a million people hired in China can mean an extra million people hired in the US.

Once you introduce a competitive market, things get more complicated, because there aren’t just winners—there are also losers. When you have competitors, someone can buy from them instead of you, and the two of them benefit, but you are harmed. By the standard methods of calculating benefits and harms (which admittedly leave much to be desired), we can show quite clearly that in general, on average, the benefits outweigh the harms.

But of course we don’t live “in general, on average”. Despite the overwhelming, unambiguous benefit to the economy as a whole, there is some evidence that free trade can produce a good deal of harm to specific individuals.

Suppose you live in the US and your job is to assemble iPads. You’re good at it, you like it, it pays pretty well. But now Apple says that they want to “reduce labor costs” (they are in fact doing nothing of the sort; to really reduce labor costs in a deep economic sense you’d have to make work easier, more productive, or more fun—the wage and the cost are fundamentally different things), so they outsource production to Foxconn in China, who pay wages 1/30 of what you were being paid.

The net result of this change to the economy as a whole is almost certainly positive—the price of iPads goes down, we all get to have iPads. (There’s a meme going around claiming that the price of an iPad would be almost $15,000 if it were made in the US; no, it would cost about $1000 even if our productivity were no higher and Apple could keep their current profit margin intact, both of which are clearly overestimates. But since it’s currently selling for about $500, that’s still a big difference.) Apple makes more profits, which is why they did it—and we do have to count that in our GDP. Most importantly, workers in China get employed in safe, high-skill jobs instead of working in coal mines, subsistence farming, or turning to drugs and prostitution. More stuff, more profits, better jobs for some of the world’s poorest workers. These are all good things, and overall they outweigh the harm of you losing your job.

Well, from a global perspective, anyway. I doubt they outweigh the harm from your perspective. You still lost a good job; you’re now unemployed, and may have skills so specific that they can’t be transferred to anything else. You’ll need to retrain, which means going back to school or else finding one of those rare far-sighted companies that actually trains their workers. Since the social welfare system in the US is such a quagmire of nonsensical programs, you may be ineligible for support, or eligible in theory and unable to actually get it in practice. (Recently I got a notice from Medicaid that I need to prove again that my income is sufficiently low. Apparently it’s because I got hired at a temporary web development gig, which paid me a whopping $700 over a few weeks—why, that’s almost the per-capita GDP of Ghana, so clearly I am a high-roller who doesn’t need help affording health insurance. I wonder how much they spend sending out these notices.)

If we had a basic income—I know I harp on this a lot, but seriously, it solves almost every economic problem you can think of—losing your job wouldn’t make you feel so desperate, and owning a share in GDP would mean that the rising tide actually would lift all boats. This might make free trade more popular.

But even with ideal policies (which we certainly do not have), the fact remains that human beings are loss-averse. We care more about losses than we do about gains. The pain you feel from losing $100 is about the same as the joy you feel from gaining $200. The pain you feel from losing your job is about twice as intense as the joy you feel from finding a new one.

Because of loss aversion, the constant churn of innovation and change, the “creative destruction” that Schumpeter considered the defining advantage of capitalism—well, it hurts. The constant change and uncertainty is painful, and we want to run away from it.

But the truth is, we can’t. There’s no way to stop the change in the global economy, and most of our attempts to insulate ourselves from it only end up hurting us more. This, I think, is the fundamental reason why protectionism is popular among the general public but not economists: The general public sees protectionism as a way of holding onto the past, while economists recognize that it is simply a way of damaging the future. That constant churning of people gaining and losing jobs isn’t a bug, it’s a feature—it’s the reason that capitalism is so efficient in the first place.

There are a few ways we can reduce the pain of this churning, but we need to focus on that—reducing the pain—rather than trying to stop the churning itself. We should provide social welfare programs that allow people to survive while they are unemployed. We should use active labor market policies to train new workers and match them with good jobs. We may even want to provide some sort of subsidy or incentive to companies that don’t outsource—a small one, to make sure they don’t do so needlessly, but not a large one, so they’ll still do it when it’s actually necessary.

But the one thing we must not do is stop creating jobs overseas. And yes, that is what we are doing, creating jobs. We are not sending jobs that already exist, we are creating new ones. In the short run we also destroy some jobs here, but if we do it right we can replace them—and usually we do okay.

If we stop creating jobs in India and China and around the world, millions of people will starve.

Yes, it is as stark as that. Millions of lives depend upon continued open trade. We in the United States are a manufacturing, technological and agricultural superpower—we could wall ourselves off from the world and only see a few percentage points shaved off of GDP. But a country like Nicaragua or Ghana or Vietnam doesn’t have that option; if they cut off trade, people start dying.

This is actually the main reason why our trade agreements are often so unfair; we are in by far the stronger bargaining position, so we can make them cut their tariffs on textiles even as we maintain our subsidies on agriculture. We are Mr. Bumble dishing out gruel and they are Oliver Twist begging for another bite.

We can’t afford to stop free trade. We can’t even afford to significantly slow it down. A global economy is the best hope we have for global peace and global prosperity.

That is not to say that we should leave trade completely unregulated; trade policy can and should be used to enforce human rights standards. That enormous asymmetry in bargaining power doesn’t have to be used to maximize profits; it can be used to advance human rights.

This is not as simple as saying we should never trade with nations that have bad human rights records, by the way. First of all that would require we cut off Saudi Arabia and China, which is totally unrealistic and would impoverish millions of people; second it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Instead we should use sanctions, tariffs, and trade agreements to provide incentives to improve human rights, rewarding governments that do and punishing governments that don’t. We could have a sliding tariff that decreases every time you show improvement in human rights standards. Think of it like behavioral reinforcement; reward good behavior and you’ll get more of it.

We do need to have sweatshops—but as Krugman has come around to realizing, we can make sweatshops safer. We can put pressure on other countries to treat their workers better, pay them more—and actually make the global economy more efficient, because right now their wages are held down below the efficient level by the power that corporations wield over them. We should not demand that they pay the same they would here in the First World—that’s totally unrealistic, given the difference in productivity—but we should demand that they pay what their workers actually deserve.

Similar incentives should apply to individual corporations, which these days are as powerful as some governments. For example, as part of a zero-tolerance program against forced labor, any company caught using or outsourcing to forced labor should have its profits garnished for damages and the executives who made the decision imprisoned. Sometimes #Scandinaviaisnotbetter; IKEA was involved in such outsourcing during the Cold War, and it is currently being litigated just how much they knew and what they could have done about it. If they knew and did nothing, some IKEA executive should be going to prison. If that seems extreme, let me remind you what they did: They used slaves.

My standard for penalizing human rights violations, whether by corporations or governments, is basically like this: Follow the decision-making up the chain of command, stopping only when the next-higher executive can clearly show to the preponderance of evidence that they were kept out of the loop. If no executive can provide sufficient evidence, the highest-ranking executive at the time the crime was committed will be held responsible. If you don’t want to be held responsible for crimes committed by people who work for you, it’s your responsibility to bring them to justice. Negligence in oversight will not be exonerating because you didn’t know; it will be incriminating because you should have. When your bank is caught laundering money for terrorists and drug lords, it isn’t enough to have your chief of compliance resign; he should be imprisoned—and if his superiors knew about it, so should they.

In fact maybe the focus should be on corporations, because we have the legal authority to do that. When dealing with other countries, there are United Nations rules and simply the de facto power of large trade flows and national standing armies. With Saudi Arabia or China, there’s a very real chance that they’ll simply tell us where we can shove it; but if we get that same kind of response from HSBC or Goldman Sachs (which, actually, we did), we can start taking out handcuffs (that, we did not do—but I think we should have).

We can also use consumer pressure to change the behavior of corporations, such as Fair Trade. There’s some debate about just how effective these things are, but the comparison that is often made between Fair Trade and tariffs is ridiculous; this is a change in consumer behavior, not a change in government policy. There is absolutely no loss of freedom. Choosing not to buy something does not constitute coercion against someone else. Maybe there are more efficient ways to spend money (like donating it directly to the best global development charities), but if you start going down that road you quickly turn into Peter Singer and start saying that wearing nicer shoes means you’re committing murder. By all means, let’s empirically study different methods of fighting poverty and focus on the ones that work best; but there’s a perverse smugness to criticisms of Fair Trade that says to me this isn’t actually about that at all. Instead, I think most people who criticize Fair Trade don’t support the idea of altruism at all—they’re far-right Randian libertarians who honestly believe that selfishness is the highest form of human morality. (It is in fact the second-lowest, according to Kohlberg.) Maybe it will turn out that Fair Trade is actually ineffective at fighting poverty, but it’s clear that an unregulated free market isn’t good at that either. Those aren’t the only options, and the best way to find out which methods work is to give them a try. Consumer pressure clearly can work in some cases, and it’s a low-cost zero-regulation solution. They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions—but would you rather we have bad intentions instead?

By these two methods we could send a clear message to multinational corporations that if they want to do business in the US—and trust me, they do—they have to meet certain standards of human rights. This in turn will make those corporations put pressure on their suppliers, all the way down the supply chain, to uphold the standards lest they lose their contracts. With some companies upholding labor standards in Third World countries, others will be forced to, as workers refuse to work for companies that don’t. This could make life better for many millions of people.

But this whole plan only works on one condition: We need to have trade.