New York Times on HANK, and questions

By the standards of mainstream media coverage of technical economics, Peter Coy's coverage of HANK (Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian) models in the New York Times was actually pretty good. 

1) Representative agents and distributions. 

Yes, it starts with the usual misunderstanding about "representative agents," that models assume we are all the same. Some of this is the standard journalist's response to all economic models: we have simplified the assumptions, we need more general assumptions. They don't understand that the genius of economic theory lies precisely in finding simplified but tractable assumptions that tell the main story. Progress never comes from putting more ingredients and stirring the pot to see what comes out. (I mean you, third year graduate students looking for a thesis topic.) 

But in this case many economists are also confused on this issue. I've been to quite a few HANK seminars in which prominent academics waste 10 minutes or so dumping on the "assumption that everyone is identical." 

There is a beautiful old theorem, called the "social welfare function." (I learned this in graduate school in fall 1979, from Hal Varian's excellent textbook.) People can have almost arbitrarily different preferences (utility functions), incomes and shocks, companies can have almost arbitrarily different characteristics (production functions),  yet the aggregate economy behaves as if there is a single representative consumer and representative firm. The equilibrium path of aggregate consumption, output,  investment, employment, and the prices and interest rates of that equilibrium are the same as those of an economy where everyone and every firm is the same, with a "representative agent" consumption function and "representative firm" production function.  Moreover, the representative agent utility function and representative firm production function need not look anything like those of any particular individual person and firm. If I have power utility and you have quadratic utility, the economy behaves as if there is a single consumer with something in between. 

Defining the job of macroeconomics to understand the movement over time of aggregates -- how do GDP, consumption, investment, employment, price level, interest rates, stock prices etc. move over time, and how do policies affect those movements -- macroeconomics can ignore microeconomics. (We'll get back to that definition in a moment.) 

Calomiris on Gramm Ekelund and Early on Income Distribution.

Charles Calomiris has a splendid WSJ review of a great book, "The Myth of American Inequality" by by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early.

It is a "'a truth universally acknowledged,' according to the Economist magazine in 2020" that 

little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising 

Most of all the last one. 

All of this is false. Most of all the last one. 

1) Income. The central jaw-dropping, astonishing fact: The statistics you read about income and income inequality ignore taxes and transfers. By doing so, of course, they create a problem that is immune to its purported solution! 

AEA P&P, a measure of an organization

The American Economics Association papers and proceedings are out. This is a selection of the selection of papers presented at the AEA annual meetings. It tells you a lot about where the economics profession is--what papers are submitted--and also where the AEA as our (so far) premier professional organization is--what papers got included -- and perhaps more interestingly, where it isn't. 

Here are the papers. The AEA put the sessions in random order; I reorganized by rough topic. Of course many of the topics have intersectional elements so this isn't perfect either. Comments below, but you should read the raw data first and find your own inferences. 

AEA DISTINGUISHED LECTURE

On the Dynamics of Human Behavior: The Past, Present, and Future of Culture, Conflict, and Cooperation

Race

RACE, GENDER, AND FINANCIAL WELL-BEING

• Black Land Loss: 1920−1997
• Intersectionality and Financial Inclusion in the United States
• At the Intersection of Race, Occupational Status, and Middle-Class Attainment in Young Adulthood
• Child-to-Parent Intergenerational Transfers, Social Security, and Child Wealth Building

RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES: EVIDENCE FROM ECONOMIC HISTORY

• Media Access and Consumption in the Civil Rights Era
• On the Impact of Federal Housing Policies on Racial Inequality
• Sundown Towns and Racial Exclusion: The Southern White Diaspora and the "Great Retreat"
• Discrimination, Segregation, Integration, and Expropriation

Fed Nominees

I salute President Biden's nominations for the Federal Reserve Board, especially Sarah Bloom Raskin and Lisa Cook. (Philip Jefferson seems straightforward and uncontroversial, but other than reading a CV I haven't looked that hard.)

 We can now have an honest conversation about where the Fed is going, and whether and how the Fed should use its tools, primarily regulation, to advance the Administration's agenda on climate, race, and inequality. 

The Wall Street Journal nicely assembled crucial quotes on Ms. Raskin and climate. In 2020,   

The Fed established broad-based lending programs to prevent businesses that were otherwise sound from failing due to the shutdowns. 

Writing in the New York Times in May 2020, 

Ms. Raskin wanted the Fed to exclude fossil-fuel companies from these facilities. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote. ...

“The Fed’s unique independence affords it a powerful role,” Ms. Raskin added. “The decisions the Fed makes on our behalf should build toward a stronger economy with more jobs in innovative industries—not prop up and enrich dying ones.”  

What's in the reconciliation bill? A conversation with Casey Mulligan.

 A podcast discussion with Casey Mulligan. What's in the reconciliation bill? How will it work? 

Link to the podcast page, with lots of other formats. 

Yesterday Casey tweeted that he had read the entire 2,400 page bill. Casey does this sort of thing, as explained in his book "Your'e hired." I have been trying to figure out what's in it for a while. The media coverage is basically absent. (See this great Marginal Revolution post and Bloomberg column (gated, sadly) by Tyler Cowen.) I tried downloading the actual bill too, but promptly fell asleep. (Casey has some good hints on how to read it.) 

But here we are, about to embark on a huge set of new federal programs, really larger than anything since the Johnson Administration, and there is essentially no description of what they are, no debate on how they will work, and especially (my hobby horse) what incentives and disincentives they provide. Many of the previous welfare-state programs were disastrous for the supposed beneficiaries. How are we going to avoid that again? At most we talk about top line numbers. I'm a debt hawk, but if we could heal the planet, end all inequity, bring full social racial and gender justice, wipe out poverty, give every American a life of dignity, prosperity, and opportunity for a mere $3.5 trillion, I'm in. Double it. The real question is whether any of this will happen. 

Well, Casey read the bill and knows what's in it! Tune in to find out.. 

PS, I hope to get the podcast going more regularly this fall,

Update: 

A summary and review from David Henderson. 

Casey writes a detailed blog post on BBB disincentives. 

Inequality/opportunity survey

I was interested by a simple survey run by the Archbridge Institute on attitudes regarding inequality vs. opportunity, and  equality vs. equity issues. 

Reducing inequality, "there should be no Billionaires" is only the top issue for a quarter of people. Equality of opportunity, and help for those on the bottom garner about 60%. The demographic consistency is interesting. Yes, the young and the credentialed skew more left -- our education system is passing on its values. But not nearly as much as you'd think. Minorities are not much different than the rest. Redistributionist opinions are a bit of a luxury belief, but again not as much as you'd think. 

The meaning of "equality," the founding concept of our nation (Jefferson) is even more stark. Equity -- end up in the same place -- scores dismally. Even starting in the same place scores dismally. Extra help for the disadvantaged, something I would choose as #2 goal, scores dismally. "Equality before the law and people have a fair chance to pursue opportunity regardless of where they started" is the overwhelming winner. Again, the demographic consistency is surprising relative to the Standard Narrative. And heart-warming.

What is the best way to get ahead economically? Employment, college degree, and family and social support completely drown out even the fable of "well-designed" government assistance programs. 

The report goes on like this, with a nice executive summary. 

Even around Hoover, I hear passed along a conventional wisdom: Income inequality is a Huge Problem. It will lead to social and political unrest. "We" must do something about it or our country will fall apart. 

Not, apparently, according to vast quantities of survey respondents. Opportunity remains a problem in the US, and if I were to design something to appeal to these survey respondents, that's the word I would be using. 

Garicano's conversations with economists

Luis Garicano has just posted a very interesting free e-book, "Capitalism after covid: Conversations with 21 economists." I was honored to be one of his interviewees, video here. Luis has a VoxEU column summarizing conversations, and twitter thread if you like reading such things. Luis is a great interviewer. 

This is not an endorsement of all the ideas! Luis found a wide spectrum of ideas, and I think that is the strong thing about the project. You can see how really smart people, on top of the latest academic research, come to still widely different conclusions about the current state of affairs and directions we should go. Though Luis is a pretty free-market Chicago guy, he did not impose that view which I find admirable. 

In particular, referring to the VoxEU column, I would take issue with 

The bulk of the shock was absorbed by the public sector budget. 

That the world could produce such a massive, coherent, and rapid economic response to the pandemic had a lot to do with the consensus that quickly emerged among economists on how best to respond to the unprecedented shock...

Unlike during the Great Financial Crisis, when there was an often-acrimonious debate between economists arguing for austerity and those arguing for stimulus, the priorities were clear: 

Central banks should be concerned with maintaining financial stability and providing limitless liquidity to debt markets. 

Governments should prioritise the maintenance of household incomes through generous support for workers’ incomes, albeit with different approaches in the US and Europe: significant expansions of unemployment insurance in the US and the general deployment of ‘Kurzarbeit’ in Europe.  

Governments should provide ample liquidity facilities to firms, making it possible for them to emerge as undamaged as possible by the lockdowns. 

Finally, large, debt-financed public investments would be needed to support the recovery. 

I  disagree loudly with just about all of this, and thereby especially enshrining these expedients as "consensus" ready to be deployed at even larger scale in the next pandemic. 

If there is consensus on anything it is that our governments completely bungled the public health aspect of this crisis, with the exception of a few countries like South Korea and Taiwan. The FDA and CDC are particularly at fault for blocking testing and vaccines. 

Why did covid produce an unprecedented economic collapse, while the 1958 and 1918 flus produced nary a blip of GDP? Because of the completely overdone business lockdowns. The economic shock was caused by the government not by the virus. What good did it do to run up government debts by trillions in order to send checks to retirees and people who were happily working? I'm sure everyone likes more money, but that has nothing to do with covid. Apparently half of expanded unemployment was stolen (I even got notice someone trying to file in my name). " large, debt-financed public investments would be needed to support the recovery." Consensus on that please? Not from here. The recovery is doing fine on its own, and adding more to the abstract sculpture taking place in the Central Valley under the auspices of a high speed train from Bakersfield to Modesto is not going to help. And why is nobody even thinking moral hazard? We now have enshrined a system in which nobody may lose money in a recession, asset prices will be propped up by central banks. Why not lever to the hilt? Why keep some cash around, as there will be no more buying opportunities? 

But that Luis interviews such good and prominent economists and finds support for this sort of boondoggle policy is interesting. 

Tackling inequality. Over the last few decades, inequality in household income and wealth has increased dramatically in the West.  

This is simply not a fact. (See Grumpy coverage of Austen and Spinter here.) Inequality in pre-tax pre-transfer income has increased. Who cares about that? Inequality of mark-to-market wealth has increased as founders stock values have risen. Who cares about that? 

Several interviewees explain the progress economists are making in tackling these problems. Atif Mian argues that to reduce inequality, policies must focus on achieving more equitable growth through a significant increase in public investment, and second, on addressing some of the legacies of the imbalances, particularly through an increase in the progressivity of taxation. 

Well, if you are a grumpy follower you will find there a well articulated points to disagree with. The US already has the most progressive tax system in the world BTW. And back to more high speed trains to nowhere.. 

Stefanie Stantcheva discusses how to design better taxes and how to improve people´s understanding of those issues. Oriana Bandiera highlights a significant shift in our understanding of poverty that implies that social assistance programmes, that traditionally were designed to subsidise consumption, should shift to being geared towards investment. Esteban Rossi-Hansberg discusses the concentration of talent and economic activity in cities and the extent to which the ‘Zoom revolution’ will upend this concentration and wonders whether that would be desirable, given the potential loss of positive externalities of physical proximity.

But here are some good-sounding innovative ideas, to give you a sense that economists don't just line up on typical left-right spectrum. I need to read those. 

Containing the new leviathan.  It is quite likely that, after the unprecedented policy response to the pandemic, governments will grow permanently larger, leading to an increase in interventionism and, potentially, crony capitalism, as Daron Acemoglu argues. Different countries will sharply diverge in their response to this “critical juncture”. The ones who better succeed will introduce stronger democratic institutions to keep governments in check, as both Acemoglu and Lucrezia Reichlin argue. We also need to improve the way public organisations are managed, a focus of the interviews with Raffaela Sadun and Carol Propper.  Wendy Carlin explains how balancing this larger role for the state requires building a stronger and more resilient civil society – strengthening the ‘third pole’.

This all sounds really interesting. Economics and economists are most interesting when out of the political boxes! 

Tackling climate change. ... Reducing carbon emissions, as Michael Greenstone explains in his interview, must be the only priority – not to be confused with delivering the goodies to voters. 

Voters and interest groups. Mother Gaia does not care if the electric car charging stations and solar panels are made in the US by union members or made in China at a tenth of the cost. 

Yet, after the pandemic, as Nick Stern argues, investing in tackling climate change is the best way to invest for the post-pandemic recovery. 

I will not pre-judge, but if this is more broken windows fallacies and create more jobs by using spoons not shovels, I will be skeptical. 

In sum, this looks interesting throughout and a good view into the spectrum of analysis that economists are bringing to contemporary issues. 

The list of interviewees is 

Debt sustainability

Markus Brunnermeier: Let’s compare the central bank to a race car
John Cochrane: Throwing money down ratholes
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Economists and the pandemic
Agnès Bénassy-Quéré: How to design a recovery plan

Tackling inequality

Oriana Bandiera: Overcoming poverty barriers
Stefanie Stantcheva: Taxes and social economics
Esteban Rossi-Hansberg: Will working from home kill cities?
Atif Mian: The savings glut of the rich

A more balanced globalisation

Dani Rodrik: Globalisation after the Washington Consensus
Pol Antràs: Is globalisation slowing down?
Michael Pettis: Trade wars are class wars

Containing the new leviathan

Daron Acemoglu: The Great Divergence
Wendy Carlin: The Third Pole
Lucrezia Reichlin: Democratising economic policy
Carol Propper: Targets and terror
Raffaella Sadun: Management for the recovery

Promoting innovation and curbing the power of digital giants

Philippe Aghion: Is ‘cutthroat’ capitalism more innovative?
John Van Reenen: The Lost Einsteins
Fiona Scott Morton: What should we do about big tech?

Combatting global warming

Nicholas Stern: Zero-emissions growth
Michael Greenstone: The real enemy here is carbon

NBER monetary economics is up to date

I just got the program for the upcoming NBER summer institute monetary economics conference program.  Who says academics aren't up to the minute on policy issues? This will be interesting. 

 

More inequality

Paul Graham adds interesting thoughts on inequality, looking at the Forbes 100. Maybe we don't have enough inequality, and maybe the rise in inequality (especially of wealth) since the 1970s represents too little inequality then, not too much now. Contra the usual in politics, a change is not always a problem, but sometimes for the better. How? Read on. 

Contra the mantra of inherited wealth, the super-rich in America today largely earned their way there from middle class, by starting new companies. They did not inherit wealth. The rich did not get richer. They were superseded by the (fabulously) nouveau-riche. 

In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.

Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because inheritance taxes increased. In fact, they decreased significantly during this period. The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them.

How are people making these new fortunes? Roughly 3/4 by starting companies and 1/4 by investing. Of the 73 new fortunes in 2020, 56 derive from founders' or early employees' equity (52 founders, 2 early employees, and 2 wives of founders), and 17 from managing investment funds.

...

 the main source of new fortunes now is starting companies, and when you look at the data, you see big changes there too. ....

Inequality mirage?

David Splinter and Gerald Auten gave last week's Hoover Economic Policy Working Group seminar, summarizing their past and some work in progress on the distribution of income.  Link in case the above embed does not work. A recent paper. Splinter's web page. 

Splinter and Auten are very even handed, just-the-facts, economists. I'll pass on their facts. Grumpy interpretations are my own. 

It is a fact generally accepted that income inequality has grown a lot recently, and this is a "problem" to be "solved." So what if the great inequality crisis simply isn't true? Let's leave aside whether income is a good measure (it isn't), let's just look at the fact, has income inequality substantially increased? 

No. Here is the headline result. In their careful redoing of the numbers, the top 1% share of income has barely budged since the 1970s. (And, by the way, if you think the mid 1970s economy was the great happy prosperity we should try to reestablish, you're too young to remember the 1970s.)

Now we get in to a deep under the hood exercise about costing up income, and where did Piketty and Saez go wrong. The video has some of that. The papers have more, and a long list of back and forth, including comparisons with many other studies. I'll name just a few.

Omitted income.   Piketty Saez leave out many kinds of income. Auten Splinter attribute all national income to somebody.  Before 1986 many wealthy people were incorporated.  Leaving out corporate income biases the early shares down. Auten Splinter fix that. Pre-tax and transfer income! Who cares about pre-tax income! Auten Splinter calculate income after taxes at the top -- lower -- and including transfers at the bottom -- higher. Demographics. Marriage rates have fallen, so Auten Splinter calculate income by individuals. Benefits! They include benefits like employer-provided health insurance.

One can quibble, but one can quibble. At least this cornerstone "fact" of political debate is a lot less sure than it looks. 

If the rich aren't getting richer, the poor aren't getting poorer:

Ip on Bidenomics

Greg Ip has a great column in the WSJ on Bidenomics.  It's not long, it's so well written that it's hard to condense the good parts, and you should really read it all. 

There is an intellectual framework to Bidenomics, and with that a scarily more durable move on economic policy. 

There used to be 

"certain rules about how the world worked: governments should avoid deficits, liberalize trade and trust in markets. Taxes and social programs shouldn’t discourage work."

By contrast President Biden's (really his team's) "embrace of bigger government" is founded on different economic ideas. To wit, abridged: 

Growth

Old view: Scarcity is the default condition of economies: the demand for goods, services, labor and capital is limitless, their supply is limited. ...faster growth requires raising potential by increasing incentives to work and invest. Macroeconomic tools—monetary and fiscal policy—are only occasionally needed to deal with recessions and inflation.

New view: Slack is the default condition of economies. Growth is held back not by supply but chronic lack of demand, calling for continuously stimulative fiscal and monetary policy. J.W. Mason.. said, that “‘depression economics’ applies basically all of the time.”

I guess I'm an old fogie. 

Defining inequality so it can't be fixed

In one of their series of excellent WSJ essays, Phil Gramm and John Early notice that conventional income inequality numbers report the distribution of income before taxes and transfers. After taxes and transfers, income inequality is flat or decreasing, depending on your starting point. 

Source: Phil Gramm and John Early in the Wall Street Journal

If your game is to argue for more taxes and transfers to fix income inequality, that is a dandy subterfuge as no amount of taxing and transferring can ever improve the measured problem! 

Techsodus/Techsit politics.

The tech industry is fed up and leaving San Francisco in particular, the valley and California in general. Covid, like a war, speeds things up. If you're a young economist you could do worse than study this latest chapter in the (likely) decline of great cities (SF, NY, LA? Chicago?) and the movement of people and industries to friendlier, safer, and more welcoming climates. If you're a young political economist, whether they bring with them the politics that destroyed the places they left behind -- slash and burn progressivism -- will be equally interesting to watch. 

I ran across a great essay on this saga by Mike Solana. 

The latest fashion is to claim it's immoral for tech founders and companies to leave, after they have "extracted" so much wealth here. Mike skewers this new fashion, pointing out that tech companies and their founders created wealth here.  Microcode is not mined like gold. 

I take extreme issue with the notion that industry leaders have taken something from the “community,” ...This is precisely the opposite of reality. ... They are the network. Technology workers do not “extract” value from the region, they are what makes the region valuable.

...the Bay Area’s nativist, anti-immigration political climate has certainly not created the tech community, which is populated largely by immigrants, be they from out of the state or out of the country 

But he really digs in on the culture and politics that is going to send this golden goose packing to Austin: 

 the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. ...

"Landed gentry." That's really good.  

Walter Williams and Economics

 "For 40 years Walter was the heart and soul of George Mason’s unique Department of Economics. Our department unapologetically resists the trend of teaching economics as if it’s a guide for social engineers. This resistance reflects Walter’s commitment to liberal individualism and his belief that ordinary men and women deserve, as his friend Thomas Sowell puts it, “elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’" 

My emphasis on the two best parts. This paragraph is from Don Boudreaux' WSJ oped for Walter Williams. The highlighted phrases (my emphasis) stuck out to me as a brilliant encapsulation of where economics research and practice has gone, as well as teaching, in the last few decades. A guide for social engineers, indeed. Most papers end up with "policy conclusions" that amount to intensely complex advice for all-powerful (yes) and all-knowing (ha) "policy-makers" aka social engineers. Economics was once more about how people searching for a little elbow room are empowered to help themselves and their neighbors. 

Walter Williams passed this week and Ed Lazear passed last week. I am not only saddened by their loss, but that stirring bits of  the Chicago - UCLA - George Mason economic philosophy seems to take place increasingly in obituaries.   

One tidbit

OECD talk -- rebuilding institutions in the wake of Covid-19

Friday morning I had the pleasure of participating in a session at the OECD, as part of their program on Confronting Planetary Emergencies - Solving Human Problems. I had the tough job of following brilliant remarks by Acting CEA chair Tyler Goodspeed and Ken Rogoff, and discussing great questions all starting at 5 AM. 

FYI here is the text of my prepared remarks. My focus is how to rebuild the competence of our institutions, which failed dismally in this crisis. 

(Update: Video of the event including Tyler Goodspeed's amazing critique,  plus Ken Rogoff's insightful talk. Thanks to Fahim M. from the comment below. Unknown says the audio is available on the main page, but I couldn't find it. )  

Covid and Beyond

John H. Cochrane

Remarks at the OECD, October 9, 2020

I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Looking at some of the background documents, and listening to Tyler, I recognize that our panel is decidedly contrarian to the main views the OECD is pursuing, and those of the stars that you invited for previous panels. It says good things about the OECD that you want to listen to and understand heretical views.

I will try to answer to your question — what lessons should we take from the Covid experience? Many people say that “Covid changes everything.” I do not think the lesson is so radical. But the Covid  experience does, I think, bring to the fore and make urgent underlying problems that we need to address sooner rather than later. My “we” is global, and international institutions such as the OECD have a key role to play in this institutional regeneration. 

My theme is that we witnessed an outcome of grand institutional failure. We must reform our institutions, restore their basic competence, and thereby trust in that competence. We must de-politicize our institutions and insist that they return to the narrow focus of their competence. Trust must be earned. 

This erosion of our institutions has been going on for a long time now. in my view, the populist eruption, as well perhaps as much of the left-wing authoritarian woke eruption, stems from the view that elites don’t know why they are doing. That was laid bare in financial crisis, in many foreign policy misadventures, and laid bare by covid once again.

We are in a "planetary emergency." It is an emergency coming from the decay, or decadence if you will, of our governing institutions. They need to restore basic competence, not to embark on grand new adventures.  

The disease will pass, likely sooner rather than later due to the extraordinary inventiveness of our pharmaceutical and scientific institutions. The heroic efforts of doctors, and the speed with which they have learned to treat covid is remarkable. Diseases always have passed. And economies and societies returned to normal.

Covid -19 is, however, a fire drill, a wakeup call, a warning sign. It is almost perfectly designed to that purpose. It is just serious enough to get our attention, in a way that H1N1, SARS, and Ebola, were not.  But compared to plague, smallpox, typhus, cholera, 1918 influenza, the death rate is tiny.  

There is a virus out there, natural or engineered, that spreads like this one and kills 20% or more of the population. It will come sooner than we think. And we are wildly unprepared.  Ken Rogoff rightly points to a range of other tail events that we are wildly unprepared for. Antibiotic resistant bacteria.   Massive computer failure. Even a small nuclear war. 

Let us look somewhat chronologically at the list of failures in the last year.

Heckman Haiku

Jim Heckman's interview with Gonazlo Schwartz at the Archbridge Institute is making the rounds of economists. I admire it for how much the interviewer and Heckman pack in so little space, so pithy, well expressed, and so happy to trounce on today's pieties. (As blog readers will have noticed, short does not come easily to me.) It's hard to summarize a Haiku -- go read the whole thing. But I'll try.

Gonzalo Schwarz: Many commentators have said that it is not possible to achieve the American Dream any more in the United States. Do you think the American Dream is alive and well?

Dr. James Heckman: Ask any immigrant. They are grateful for the chances that America has given them. Many came with nothing. They live in decent neighborhoods and their families have better lives than they could have before coming here. Their children go to college and integrate into American society. The progress of African Americans over the past century is staggering. Many have shaken off the legacies of poverty and discrimination....

Social mobility:

G: ...what do you think are the main barriers to income or social mobility?...

H: The main barriers to developing effective policies for income and social mobility is fear of honest engagement in the changes in the American family and the consequences it has wrought. It is politically incorrect to express the truth and go to the source of problems.... Powerful censorship is at play across the entire society....The family is the source of life and growth. Families build values, encourage (or discourage) their children in school and out. Families — far more than schools — create or inhibit life opportunities. A huge body of evidence shows the powerful role of families in shaping the lives of their children. Dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional children. Schools can only partially compensate for the damage done to the children by dysfunctional families.

He is right on the fact, how blissfully it is ignored by those wishing more "policies" to address inequality and other social programs, and censorship against those who say it.

On "current academic and policy discussion on income mobility and inequality, "

A Better Wealth and Taxes

CATO has put out a much-improved version of my "Wealth and Taxes" series on wealth inequality and the wealth tax. Html here and pdf here. Many thanks to Chris Edwards and the CATO staff for editing and formatting it, and getting it out in this nice format. 

********

Alan Reynolds wrote with interesting comments. Among others,

the $18+ trillion now invested in retirement, education and health savings accounts has gradually made middle-income investment income more and more invisible in tax returns as time moved on.   Exemption of $500,000 of capital gains on home sales further reduced the IRS-reported capital income of all but the top 1%.

...the Saez-Zucman methodology is sure to show the rich having a larger and larger share of taxable income from capital, and therefore of wealth based on that taxable income, because income from the savings of middle-income taxpayers has become increasingly unreported. 

Bottom line:

Because tax laws exempted a rising share of investment income (and residential capital gains) of the bottom 95%, the visible portion left showing for the top 1% must appear as a rising share (of a meaningless total). 

I still like my 2006 WSJ title: "The Top 1% of WHAT?"  Pre-tax, pre-transfer income reported on individual income tax returns was never meaningful, and capital income on those tax returns is incomparable over time. 

The Elephant's family

David Brooks essay in the Atlantic "The nuclear family was a mistake" has a lot of interesting ideas. We used to (1800s) largely live with extended family. In the mid 20th century we moved to mom, dad and kids, the nuclear family that David thinks is a mistake. Now we increasingly live the widely parodied Life of Julia (Taranto scathing review at WSJ, guide to parodies at Atlantic), individuals whose main relationship in life is to the federal government.

One aspect, tangential to the main theme, struck me. In all our economic discussions about inequality, when we stop shouting at each other, we come down to a commonsense middle ground: There are lots of obstacles in the way of economic, personal, and social advancement for Americans who start on the lower end of the economic ladder. Free marketers tend to point to government obstacles -- horrible schools in the thrall of teacher unions, land use policies that make it impossible to live near better jobs, social programs whose disincentives to work or move to work make that an impossible choice, and so on. Government-run-things advocates ask for more programs, a 58th job training program, UBI, government jobs, government provided housing, more money to the teachers unions, government-run pre-k and day care, gushers of money, and so on. Still, we get to a comfortable point that we agree on a problem, and we're talking about various ways to fix it.

Into this comfortable discussion, Brooks' essay points to the elephant in the middle of the room.  People on the lower economic end in this country start their lives in chaotic families.

In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married.

 In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

Nothing, nothing, in our pleasant dirigiste anti-inequality debate adds up to these kinds of numbers. A year of government run pre-K while not even talking about these facts is like handing out bandaids to cancer patients.

Grumpy Podcast

We're trying a Grumpy Economist Podcast. The first one talks about my series on wealth inequality and wealth tax. I can't stand listening to myself, as think I always sound dumb and regret all the things I could have said better, so I haven't listened. But I hope it sounds better to the rest of you and provides a useful new grumpy outlet. Thanks to Scott Immergut and Troy Senik who do all the work. 

Wokeademia

I'm working on an economic view of political polarization. One aspect of that project is the extent to which many institutions in our society have become politicized. Today's post is one little data point in that larger story. It tells a little story of how to politicize an institution and silence dissenters.

Jerry Coyne reports on the "diversity equity and inclusion statement" required of anyone hired by the University of California, or desiring a raise or promotion. This is a required statement each candidate must write "Demonstrating Interest in and Ability to Advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion." It's not about whether you are "diverse," meaning belonging to a racial, gender, or sexual-preference group the University wishes to hire. It is a statement, as it says, of your active participation in a  political movement.