Evaluating the Fed's First Woman Chair: How Labor and Stock Markets Performed During Janet Yellen's Tenure

The U.S. got its first Federal Reserve Chair in 1914. 100 years later the first woman was appointed to Chair the Fed. Now, after she has served the shortest tenure in 40 years, the country is once again getting a man as head of the Fed. 100 years of men. 4 years of a woman. Now, at least 4 more years of a man. That seems fair and balanced.

Trump announced the appointment of Jerome Powell to be the Fed Chair, replacing Janet Yellen after the end of her first term in February. It's worth examining how the economy did on her watch.

While the folks appointing Federal Reserve Chairman seem to have a gender bias, the economy apparently does not. Or if it does, it is a positive bias. Even though hers was the shortest tenure in 40 years and the second shortest tenure in 66 years, more wealth was created on her watch than during that of any other Fed Chair: $17.7 trillion and counting. In the nation's first 237 years, it created $78.5 trillion in wealth; in the last 3.5 years it has created an additional $17.7 trillion, an uptick of 22.5% in less than four years. (Yellen's 4 year term does not end until February of 2018.) This is, of course, at least partly due to the simple dynamics of compound interest. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Money makes money and then the money your money makes makes money too." As the nation creates more wealth it creates more wealth. Also, just this month consumer sentiment hit its highest point for the century. (Well, okay. Highest point in 17 years. But century sounds more impressive.) And the economy has created an average of about 2.6 million jobs a year, helping to drive unemployment down from 6.7% to 4.1%.  Things have been good during Yellen's tenure.

The big question facing Janet Yellen throughout her four years was when and at what rate to begin increasing interest rates. The trick is to keep inflation low while creating jobs. How did she do? Well, inflation is still low (it's bounced around 2%  - mostly on the low side - during her time) and the economy has created about 9.6 million jobs thus far into her tenure. Those numbers strike me as  flawless. And already she's begun to unwind the stimulus from the Great Recession; during her watch excess reserves at banks have dropped from $2.7 trillion to $2.1 trillion, a drop of $570 billion. (To put that in perspective, just before the Great Recession excess reserves were at $1.7 billion. Yep. Now it is over $2 trillion and  only a decade ago it was under $2 billion. She has unwound that by vast multiples of what it once was without scaring off investors or consumers. That deserves respect.)

Here is a graph that contrasts the average annual job creation and stock market performance under each of the last seven Fed Chairs.  The numbers are not final for Yellen, of course, because it will be about a half a year before the data is in on her full four year tenure.

In comparison to Yellen, the economy created more jobs per year under William Miller and the stock market did better under Miller and Paul Volker.
Miller wasn't normal, though. He was in office for only 18 months and he refused to raise interest rates to battle inflation during the late 70s oil shock. (Curiously, he was the last Fed Chair who did not have an economics degree; the most recent is Jerome Powell, Trump's new appointment.) Given he deferred addressing a bad situation, the economy did do well during his time but he left a mess to clean up; Volker was his successor and Volker's policies to bring down inflation triggered one of the ugliest recessions in the last half of the 20th century. So putting aside Miller's weird tenure, the punchline is that she did better than the boys in this century's old boys' club; no one else who served four years or more enjoyed the strong combination of labor and stock market performance that she did.

I could throw in all the usual caveats about how the economy is more than the result of fiscal policies defined by the Congress and President and more than monetary policy defined by the Federal Chair. And all of that is true. No president or Fed Chair invented personal computers or pioneered genetic engineering or venture capital. Still, monetary policy does help to determine things like inflation, interest rates and thus stock market performance and unemployment rates. The Fed's mandate is to keep unemployment and inflation low (but not too low) and it takes actions to do that. It is true that the economy is incredibly complex and luck plays a large role in what kind of numbers a Fed Chair presides over. That said, monetary policy matters and no one does more to define it than the Chair. If you are a woman or know one, you might be proud to see that the economy under Janet Yellen did as well as it did under any other Chair. While she did not get offered a second term, she should be proud of how markets - specifically labor and stock markets - performed under her watch.

We should consider appointing another woman someday. And maybe next time we won't wait a century.

Freud, Jung, Hidden Impulses, the Collective Unconscious, Hitler, Putin, Conspicuous Consumption and - Finally - Community

Freud's Couch Was Sort of a Bed

About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using what they were learning about psychology, the Nazis created state propaganda to sway the masses to serve the interests of the state and advertisers in the U.S. used those same insights to serve the interests of the corporation. (A fascinating documentary, the Century of the Self, makes this argument and can be found here.)

William James published what some argue was the first textbook on psychology - the Principles of Psychology - in 1890 and Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. If you visit the apartment in Vienna where Freud pioneered psychotherapy you don't just see that the Freudian couch was actually a bed. (Freud thought that a bed was a safe and  cozy place from which to free associate but perhaps the preponderance of sexual references would have given way to a preponderance of food references had he instead used a kitchen table.) What you get from the museum that once was his office is this very exciting sense of the mind as a new frontier. Rather than blame spirits or madness for weird thoughts and behavior, these early psychologists were taking a scientific approach to the mind, hoping to better understand the impulses that seemed to lay below the seemingly thin veneer of our civility. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious might be suspect but it gets to the reality that something binds us that is almost mystical and that these impulses could be tapped to sway large groups to do strange things - like drive to the mall on a sunny day or shout angry slogans at political rallies.

These insights were exploited with new and transformative technology of that time. The radio was the first technology to allow people across an entire nation to hear about the wonders of the Third Reich or nylons and electric razors and it was quickly followed by TV.

Obviously it made an enormous difference whether a community used these powerful new media technology to promote the interests of the state or the corporation. Someone once said that the book most likely to change minds in the Soviet Union would be the Sears Catalog. Magazines, newspapers, radio and TV shaped minds - and thus communities - as only churches and sacred texts had before. And it was no coincidence that the state and corporation undermined the dominance of the church last century.

This century's transformative media is the internet and the social media it has enabled. The shift in advertising revenue from newspapers to the internet has shattered old business models and forced a scramble to discover new audiences and sources of revenue for reporting and commentary.

And curiously, the choice about whether this model will be funded by the state or the corporation, by advertising for political interest and shared values or great values on products you'll love, is still in question. This week's senate hearings with the social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google gets to the question of how social media has been used to manipulate voters and thus American policy rather than merely focus on getting us to buy more goods.

It's worth noting that this is social media.

About the same time as the emergence of the radio and television, a third really powerful technology emerged: the telephone. This was intimate and personal and allowed two people to communicate and in the process strengthen relationships. I think it's telling that so much of the internet is experienced on a phone. Even though actual talking on the phone is not even in the top ten activities people do with their phones, what they're doing is closer to what was done on the phone last century than what was done with TV and radio. They're creating and feeling part of a community.

Community is a third goal, different from the goals of consumption and propaganda. I think one thing we're seeing in the success of Twitter and Facebook is the strong impulse to belong. You can dismiss this as tribalism but I think it speaks to communities of the mind and shared values, to what it means to be human and feel the part of something larger. It's worth noting that the strength and vulnerability of these brands is that they are platforms. Zuckerberg doesn't make editorial decisions about what posts your Aunt Leola or cousin Curt should make on Facebook. They do. Your friends are rarely selling goods or trying to win votes for the political party they are starting. (Although I admit I would be interested in seeing the posts of someone who was starting a new party; that sounds like an interesting person.) They are simply connecting, sharing what they are proud of, what impresses them, what they are worried about and what made them laugh. The third way beyond media as a tool for conspicuous consumption or political propaganda is media a tool for creating communities of the mind, of shared interests and simple friendships. It's not novel that people would do that; it is novel that people could do that across distances, with a tool more inclusive than the phone or the kitchen table.

Bot Puppets

In the 2016 election, bots were busily posting and reposting weird memes to people who confused cynicism with sophistication, people who found credible claims like, "the Pope endorses Trump!" and "Clinton has used the Clinton Foundation to make Millions!" Millions of bots on Facebook and Twitter were busily forwarding fake news to gullible users who still didn't understand that a brand new site labeled "TrumpWillMakeAGreatPresident.com" or "MelaniaWillBeAMoreBeautifulFirstLadyThanBill.com"  is less likely to be offering objective news than the New York Times. Given they had already believed that the New York Times and other "mainstream media" sites were not to be believed, they actually found this put up overnight sites more credible than the mainstream media that still practiced journalism according to standards that predated the internet.

These bots were particularly busy swaying what the social media algorithms had identified as "soft Clinton" supporters. While they couldn't hope to win many black voters in Philadelphia over to Trump, they could feed rumors to voters likely to vote Clinton and thus convince them there wasn't enough difference between Clinton and Trump to justify voting. Just getting Clinton voters to stay home was enough to tip the election in the three states that gave Trump the national victory while only giving him the edge of 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It was as if someone had concluded that a car salesman and a car thief were no different but it worked.

My elderly mother was having trouble with her computer during the election. After a lot of finagling I got her back online and signed into her Facebook account. This was either late October or early November.  I was aghast at the sheer volume of "news" articles posted to her Facebook feed. Obviously bogus news sites that looked credible to her were decrying Michelle Obama's lack of fashion sense and lauding Melania, showing Trump's promise to restore America or Hillary in an angry face. I honestly scrolled through about 50 of these posts while seeing only a couple of personal posts from her friends or family. And each post seemed to be from yet another fabricated site. It was absurd.

I don't know how many people will ever admit they were swayed by bots. It's not flattering to be duped by computer code. (Although I imagine that by 2017 we all have been at least once.)

My term for the folks who were swayed by bots? Either to believe that Trump somehow cared for them or that Hillary was just as bad? Bot puppets.

If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you to incorporate the term into your daily vocabulary. Here is how you use it.

"Oh don't be just a bot puppet Justin. You've got to be smarter than three lines of code. Your argument doesn't even make sense."

"Did you just forward that argument from a bot? What are you, a bot puppet now? Just doing whatever the computers tell you? Think for yourself Justin."

"Well, Shelley is such a bot puppet that she doesn't know the difference between nytimes.com and notyourtime.com. Seriously, that woman will forward anything from anywhere as long as it blames Bill Clinton for whatever she's upset about today."

The goal is to make it shameful to rely on memes to do your thinking, to make bot puppet have all the stigma of racist.

Wait. That might not be enough to sway some of Trump's base that it's a bad thing to be a bot puppet.

The Most Overlooked Reason for Growing Polarization in Congress

An interesting study here depicts how little overlap there is in voting in Congress compared to what it was decades ago.

As you can see, Republicans and Democrats are more clearly voting along party lines.

Why?

One overlooked reason is likely the reliance on national media and the easy access of anything a politician has said. Once upon a time a politician could say things that let him establish a brand but then go negotiate and vote in ways that might suggest he was insincere about his campaign promises. To win in many districts you have to be clearly conservative or liberal. Then, once the vote comes, you have to vote consistent with those promises or you will be taken down in the primary. And your constituents will know about it because you can't hide your record or speeches in this age of Google and online data.

It is possible that we aren't getting compromise that helps a government to function because politicians aren't allowed leeway to negotiate. Instead, they're expected to be "true" to their principles and promises which means they're unable to compromise and reach agreement. The result? Even when one party owns both houses of congress and the white house it struggles to pass any significant legislation.

George Carlin's Driving Test Applied to Income and Politics

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

What he might have said about household income.

"Have you ever noticed that anybody making less than you is lazy and anyone making more than you is lucky?"

After an interesting exchange with a stranger about household income it occurred to me that this person judged people making more or less than her. She seemed really resentful of people who made more AND less than her. The ones making less were at home slacking off and pumping out babies. 

It was curious that she felt that people making less than her could have easily applied themselves - just by working hard - and increased their income but she apparently didn't think that if only she would work harder that she, too, could double her income.

Here is the thing about income distribution: 20% of your population will always be in the bottom 20% and 20% will always be in the top 20%.

This stranger said she made about $40,000. That means that she makes more than 40% of American households. Households that make under $20,000 are in the bottom 20% and households that make over $100,000 are in the top 20%. When you are talking to a random American there is a 50% chance that their household makes less than $50,000. You should be no more shocked or judgmental about discovering the person you talking with makes less than $50,000 than you are that a coin you flipped was tails. 

Or you could make it all mean something about a person's work ethic and morality.

2016 Distribution of Household Income

The aha I got from the exchange with this woman making about $40,000 is that we do have a tendency to believe that if only the people making $20,000 were to work as hard as we have, they too would make $40,000. And if only the people making $80,000 had fewer lucky breaks, they would be making no more than we are. In this worldview, incomes of the people making less than us would rise if only they worked harder and incomes of the people making more than us are so high only because they are lucky. 

History suggests that hard work doesn't change incomes as much as progress.

In 1900, people worked harder than us. The average work week was 60 hours, not the 37.5 it is today. Yet people in 1900 made an average salary of about $9,000 ($450, actually, but adjusted for inflation of things like groceries and housing), less than one-sixth of what they do today. Not only did they make less but their money could buy less. No one in 1900 was buying an airplane or movie ticket.

At any given point in history there is a distribution of income and half of the households will find themselves in the bottom half of that distribution. Maybe at some point in the future the people in the bottom 10 to 30% will be perfectly comfortable and able to afford housing and food and healthcare but that time isn't now. We can act like those people are in those bottom percentiles because they work only half as hard as people in the 40th or 50th percentiles and are meeting their just reward. Or we can acknowledge that incomes vary and some simply aren't enough. 

Two Urgent Questions The Media Isn't Asking About Trump's Collusion

Some facts:

• Today Trump's campaign manager was indicted and a campaign adviser to Trump plead guilty to lying to the FBI about a contact with ties to the Kremlin.
• The Kremlin definitely meddled in the 2016 election, working to help Trump beat Clinton. 
• Russians invested heavily in Trump's business after his bankruptcies.
• The Trump campaign changed Republican policy to eliminate support for the Ukraine in their battle against Russia over Crimea and other territory.
• Trump has attacked and criticized fellow Republicans, former allies, even his own staff but has never spoken negatively against Putin.
• Trump's son and son-in-law and key officials met with Russians to discuss compromising information on Hillary Clinton shortly before Clinton emails were released by the Russians during the campaign.

Speculation:
It is plausible that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.

It is not too soon to ask two really big questions, questions that will have to be addressed if speculation about Trump stealing the presidency prove true.

If Trump is found guilty of colluding to hijack a presidential election,

Who should then assume the presidency? 

1. Vice President Pence? 

The problem with this is that Pence is only VP because of Trump's victory. If Trump's victory is invalid, so is Pence's claim to replace him.

2. Hillary Clinton?

The obvious argument here is the Olympic's argument: if the gold medal winner has cheated then the official winner is now the silver medal winner. There are so many obvious problems and complications with this that one hardly knows where to start. Suffice to say that it is unprecedented. Suffice to say that a candidate colluding with a foreign power to steal the presidency is also unprecedented.

3. Barack Obama?

The allure of this is that it would return the presidency to the last fairly elected person, and return the presidency to someone obviously experienced in the job and able to quickly take over. Obama could hold office while a new election was called and Americans chose a new president. This is unprecedented within the US but not within countries where elections have obviously been tampered with. (And obviously raises dozens of important questions about how to create a presidential election outside the normal election cycle, or even whether such an election should be arranged or if the replacement for Trump should be allowed to serve the term through 2020.)

4. Paul Ryan?

This makes sense because order of succession gives the speaker the White House in the event that the president and vice president are unable to serve. It also has the obvious problems that Pence has in that it would award the presidency to the party whose head stole the presidency.

5. Joe Biden?

Far fetched but would answer the rebuttal to Obama taking the office after serving 2 terms.

Should all of Trump's executive orders and judicial and cabinet appointments be automatically rescinded?

For instance, would Supreme Court Gorsuch lose his seat? Would any legislation signed by Trump automatically be deemed invalid?

The American people are unprepared for any of these answers. The polarization that we already see in media coverage and arguments could actually escalate into violence if Pence or Obama (or any of the others mentioned above) replace Trump and yet such options are really the only options we have. This can hardly be stressed enough: any option will be unacceptable to many - perhaps most - Americans.

A responsible media would begin processing what is next right now. If it works out that Trump did not collude and is not going to be impeached or resign, then fine. The media exploring these questions would have only explored some fascinating options in a fascinating year. If it works out that Trump did collude and thus cannot hold the office he stole, there will be no such thing as too much time for Americans to work through what has to happen next.

Two Simple Policy Goals

Maybe I'm simple minded but I don't think that policy has to be terribly complex.  

A great test of your economic policy is how easily someone can start a new business that has a legitimate chance of creating wealth and jobs.

A great test of your social policy is how easily a single mom can raise a child who has a legitimate chance to be happy and productive.

Doing well on those tests is not trivial. If you are successful at popularizing entrepreneurship you have a great education system, easy access to capital markets that are well regulated and reward people who invest well and punish people who abuse investors or borrowers, and stable, predictable laws around property and wealth. Your culture embraces disruption and protects losers enough that your community has little resistance to new companies, technologies and industries and welcomes change. You have things like universal healthcare so that would-be entrepreneurs face less risk when they take on the risk of a new business. Your culture sees social invention and product invention the same way: you keep improving what you have and looking for new ways to reach old goals more effectively, whether that goal is to store fresh food for longer like a fridge now does (and like some other technology may do in the future) or create meaning and community like a church now does (and like some new social invention may do in the future). 

If you are successful at making it easy for every parent to raise a child, this again has many policy implications. People have easy access to birth control and abortion so that they can easily control when they become a parent. Maternity and paternity leave is generous without penalizing companies that employ young people who are more likely to be starting careers and families. Childcare is affordable. Jobs can be customized. (The Netherlands has brought birthrates back up by offering more flexible job options: many parents (mostly mothers) work part-time.) You have a vigorous defense of the environment, minimizing the probability that children will be exposed to threats that might not show up for decades.

Rather than penalize entrepreneurs who would create jobs and wealth by making them jump through hoops,or ignoring the fact that their educational needs are just as real as those who would pursue a vocation or white-collar job, the community should make it easier for them in a host of ways, from mentoring programs to bureaucratic aides to help them through necessary legal, financial and regulatory hoops. Rather than penalize young mothers who would raise up the next generation of workers and citizens, the community should make it easier for them in a host of ways, from mentoring programs to childcare along with logistical and emotional support to help them through the various challenges of parenting.

If your mothers are raising the children they aspire to raise, you'll have an emotionally whole and productive citizenry. If your entrepreneurs are creating the businesses they aspire to, you'll have steadily rising wealth and income and strong job markets that enable the community to finance personal things like fine meals and communal things like beautiful parks and good roads. If you focus on making life easier for single mothers and entrepreneurs you will automatically make it easier for two-parent families and no children families. If you focus on making it easier for entrepreneurs, you will automatically make it easier for employees and investors.


The policy implications of these two goals - the various programs and initiatives that would help further us towards these goals - could be continually enhanced by - among other things - running focus groups with real and aspiring entrepreneurs and real or aspiring single moms. Asking them what would make them more successful, what obstacles and frustrations the have, what their needs are and sorts of resources they need would help to inform policies that could make a difference. Tracking the efficacy of these policy initiatives to determine what makes the most difference for the least time and money could be used as further feedback about which policies to continue and which to let die. With these two goals, a community could continuously experiment to see how best to achieve them. It's hard to imagine how such policy experiments wouldn't make the community better for everyone.

A Much Bigger Story Than Benghazi or Niger

Focusing on individual events can distract us from the systems that make those events more probable.

In the 1980s, the Japanese were taking market share from American and European car makers. One study at the time found that German car makers were reaching the same level of quality as the Japanese but needed three times as many employees to do it. Some German car makers were employing as many people at the end of the line to fix cars as some Japanese car makers were to work the line. When Japanese workers encountered an error they had authority to shut down the whole line and initiate an investigation into why the error had occurred. Rather than just fix the error at the place, they might change the upstream flow of work to lower the probability that someone would make that error again. Japanese workers were regularly fixing the system while Germans were regularly fixing cars.

Which brings me, curiously enough, to stories about our military. Right now, media and politicians are focused on the story of how four soldiers were killed in Niger. This is very similar to the focus on the four dead in Benghazi in 2012 and this focus on individuals misses a more important story about policy, the system that makes these tragic events more or less probable.

First of all, let’s assume for a moment that anyone killed in service to our country deserves honor and their families deserve acknowledgement and gratitude. Let’s further assume that whether or not they died in an incident that got an enormous amount of coverage, their families are equally shattered by this loss. Whether they were the only one killed that year in service to their country or one of 2,000, the trauma and grief their families suffer is real and they deserve our support.

Stalin was quoted as saying, “One death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic.” Perhaps it is because we can’t comprehend 2,000 deaths as easily as we do 2, we are made numb by the bigger number and saddened by the smaller. The media is currently gripped by the story of Myeshia Johnson, the pregnant widow of La David Johnson who received a phone call in which Trump’s offer of comfort included the phrase, “He knew what he was signing up for …” Yet a much bigger story is playing out here that is obscured by the odd way the media fixates on a Benghazi or Niger but ignores the bigger story about how many widows and widowers are experiencing what Myeshia Johnson is.

If you appreciate the tragedy of Chris Stevens death (he was the ambassador killed in Benghazi) and the grief of Myeshia Johnson, you have to be humbled by the thought of losing more than a thousand soldiers a year. Between 1980 and 2010, an average of 1,575 American military were killed each year. Each year. During that time the lowest it ever dropped to was 796 (that was in 1999) and it rose as high as 2,465 (in 1983). In only six years during that 31-year stretch did the number killed drop below 1,000. (1996 to 2001.)

Each death involved a real person and deserved its own story but our policy made the number killed each year remarkably consistent. Policy was the bigger story than any one of those deaths because it was policy that made the number of those deaths so remarkably consistent for so long.

And then the most remarkable thing happened. The number killed steadily fell. In 2010 the number killed was 1,485. Then, in 2011 467 died. In 2012 it was 314, 2013 was 132, 2014 was 60, 2015 was 28 and then in 2016 it was 30.  30 is 2% of what it averaged from 1980 to 2010.

It’s not true that each of these numbers are mere statistics. We aren’t equipped to comprehend 1,575 grieving families and all their friends. We can scarcely comprehend one. But the limits of our empathy shouldn’t excuse the obvious: a year in which 2,465 of our military are killed is 82 times worse than a year in which 30 are killed.

Obama deserves criticism for reneging on his threat to intervene in Syria. His decision not to send in American troops may have resulted in more civilian deaths in the last few years. But Obama also deserves respect for his decision. For one thing, he couldn’t see the next move. Who takes power once Assad is out and how does that lower the number of casualties and refugees? (Not only did our invasion of Iraq result in somewhere between 100,000 and a million Iraqi deaths, it created millions of refugees. Attacking a country doesn’t guarantee a fall in casualties.) It is not clear whether his decision to keep troops out of Syria resulted in more Syrian deaths.

It is clear that during Obama’s last six years our American troops were safer. Only a fraction of the number who would have died with previous policies died during his last six years in office. This deserves more attention than it has received. Had our service people died at the same rate in Obama’s last six years as they had in the 31 years prior, 8,418 more of them would have been killed. 8,418 grieving families and their friends. 9 times more grief and tragedy than actually occurred. This is not just a statistic. It is not just a story. It is 8,418 life stories that get to be told in radically different ways. And it is not just their stories. It is the stories of their children who get to grow up with both parents. Or the story of the children who were born because a mother or father lived well past the date they would have if they had been deployed under the policies of a president more eager to put boots on the ground.

Progress doesn’t come from fixing each tragic event after it happens. Progress comes from making changes to the system, or in this case to the policies that determine how our troops are deployed.

Foreign policy that spares the lives of 8,418 soldiers may not seem as gripping as tragedies that take the lives of four but they matter more. If we’re going to be factual about it, they matter 2,000 times more. That, it seems to me, deserves at least as much attention as a tragedy in Benghazi or Niger.

--------------

Data sources on military casualties are harder to find now. Sites that formerly posted data now yield up an error. Here are the places I went for data months ago and just this week. It would seem the Trump administration or someone in DoD wants to make these numbers less transparent.

https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_by_year_manner.xhtml

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/Customrelcat/12003/?Page=3

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf

Who is Poor? Who Should Help? - Poll to test perceptions on what is fair for income redistribution

Per my survey (which likely differs from what you would glean from the general population), people think that households with income of about $40,000 to $50,000 or more should pay additional tax to help households with income of only $30,000 to $40,000 or less. That seems worthy of unpacking.

The survey is here but asked only two questions:
1.

Who should help the poor? Only people whose income puts them in the following categories should be taxed extra to help the poor.

2.

Who do you consider poor? Only people whose income would put them in the following categories should receive income help from richer citizens.

I got 22 responses to the survey. Two (9%) self-identified as conservatives, two (9%) as libertarian, three (14%) as moderates and 15 (68%) as liberals.

Now some data. (Household income calculated from here.) Here is the minimum amount your household would have to make to land in the top [1%, 10%, 20%, etc.] $140,000, for example, means that you are in the top 10% of American households (or, of course, making more than 90% of American households.)

One person (5%) thought that no one should be taxed to help the poor. One of my respondents (5%) thought household income should be higher than $383,000 before paying a special tax to help the poor. Most respondents (7, or 32%) thought that any household making more than $40,000 should pay additional tax for the poor. Cumulatively, 14 respondents (64%) thought that any household making more than $50,000 should pay additional to help the poor.

Curiously, the one respondent who thought no one should be taxed to help the poor nonetheless thought that the poor should be helped. The question, then, is who qualifies as poor and in need of help? Five (23%) of my respondents thought only households making less than $12,000 needed help. (It's worth noting here that in America's 50 biggest cities, a median, one-bedroom apartment costs $15,000 a year. Without any help, $12,000 a year would be tough.) Most respondents (12 or 54%) thought that households making less than $30,000 to $40,000 deserved help.

One of the great things about a democracy is that it has to reconcile so many different views. 12 (55%) of my respondents thought that people making about $40,000 to $50,000 should be taxed to help the poor. 8 (36%) of my respondents thought that those same households were poor and should be helped. It would be tough to tax someone from one pocket and then help them by putting money back in their other pocket.

My opinion, for what it is worth? The top third should help the bottom third. The third in the middle? They get no help and they don't have to help anyone. That essentially means that any households making more than $75,000 are taxed to help the poor and any household making less than $33,000 would get help. If you make between $33,000 to $75,000 - as do a third of American households - you neither pay for the poor nor get help for being poor. Also, I wouldn't argue vigorously with someone arguing that the cutoffs should be at 25% and 75% (which would mean only households making less than $26,000 would get help and only households making more than $90,000 would help them.) (And this would be progressive tax. Income over $75,000 might be taxed at 1% and income over, say, $400,000 might be taxed at 5%. Also, I'm not saying that people wouldn't have other taxes to pay to help finance schools, roads, courts, etc. Those taxes I would apply to at least the top two-thirds of Americans and - again - progressively.)

Here are the results from the poll. Thank you for helping me to get a sense of what people think of as fair.

Podcast - Social Invention, Progress & Trump

Here is my very first podcast:

Social Invention, Progress & Trump, one in a series of Fourth Economy podcasts.

"History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions."

- Voltaire

The simple argument is that it is a struggle to understand politics and policy today without understanding social invention. A wave of social invention is simultaneously creating new opportunities and threatening old identities. Among the major points made in the podcast:

1. Social inventions like banks and nation-states are as important to progress as technological or product inventions like steam engines and computers.
2. 100 years ago the rate of product invention accelerated. Now, the rate of social invention (e.g., the EU, NAFTA, Uber-like employment, same-sex marriages) is accelerating.
3. Progress in the West has come from treating social inventions like tools rather than as either sacred or disposable.
4. The three major social inventions and reinventions that resulted in freedom of religion, democracy, and the American Dream (essentially the democratization of financial markets) inform us as to what strategies and measures result in successful social invention.

What Your Fellow Americans Are Making - And What That Suggests About Minimum Wage Law

13 October, our Social Security Administration released data on last year's wage earners.

An income of $95,000 put you in the top 10%, made you 1 out of 10.

An income of $250,000 put you in the top 1%, 1 out of 100. 

$500,000 put you in the top 0.1%, or 1 out of 1,000.

$50,000,000 - fifty million - put you in the top 0.001%. It made you one in a million. 143 people reported incomes of over $50 million and those 143 people had average incomes of $100 million.

Here's another remarkable stat. Merely having an income put you in the top 50%. When I write, "top 10%," above, I'm writing about the top 10% of wage earners. Social security has data on 163 million wage earners. There are about 325 million Americans, so only about half of Americans reported incomes. Some were too young. (My wife's second grade class is full of slackers who haven't earned a dime in their life.) Some were too old. Some are too rich to work or make their living from investments rather than wages, property or stock owners. Some are too handicapped. Some are working jobs without wages, jobs like caring for their kids or parents. Some depend on family or friends for food and housing, some are in school, some recovering from injury, some permanently disabled, etc.

Now let's get into the normal people, the wage earners who don't make six figure salaries but still work. The 90%.

If you make $15,000, you make more than 30% of all wage earners. $15,000 a year works out to $1,250 a month. Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the country's most expensive 22 cities is higher than $1,250 a month. Assuming that you have to eat, buy clothes, get transportation, etc., what nearly a third of Americans make is not enough. 

If you made $30,557.71 last year, you made more than half of all wage earners. You have as many people who would trade wages with you as you would trade wages with. In some sense, you are the representative American, someone fellow Americans are as likely to pity as envy.

$30,000 a year works out to $15 an hour. Half of wage earners make less than this. Half.

Seattle is a wonderful city. It's both home to two of the richest men in the world and to many liberals who folks in the Midwest would consider more liberal than Scandinavians. They've recently passed a $15 an hour minimum wage. 

I have a problem with that.

I don't have a problem with places like San Francisco and Seattle - places where median wages are $90,000 to $100,000+ a year - saying to employers, "If you want to hire our people you have to pay more than you would elsewhere." That makes perfect sense to me. 

What doesn't make perfect sense to me? Choosing to make that minimum wage $15 an hour - an amount MORE than what half the people in this country make. 

Average wages in Belarus and Armenia are about one-tenth the average wage in the US. You can't just pass legislation requiring all businesses to pay Armenian employees the same as American employees. It's a noble and proper aspiration to lift wages but the way you get there is complicated. Better education. Easier access to foreign markets where they can sell their goods and services. More capital investment that makes their people more productive. 

Minimum wage seems to work as a prod to businesses or industries that aren't keeping up. It can force the folks in the bottom of 10% or 25% of labor productivity to either go out of business, go overseas or to up their game and make their employees more profitable even at a higher wage. What it can't do is force wages up for half the workforce. You need more complicated policies than that.

Policies that make it easier to live when you make only $15,000 a year or less - something that 30% of the workforce is doing - are good, humane and necessary. Minimum wage laws that ignore what the market says about the value of half your workforce seem, by contrast, bad, silly and doomed to backfire. 

What is Likely to Trigger the Next Stock Market Downturn

Watch for legislation that cuts capital gains tax. Once that happens, people with equities will be able to sell with lower tax penalty. If you have a 401(k) that lets you sell without paying taxes, you might want to sell off, say, 20% of the more volatile stocks before the legislation is signed because shortly after it is likely that the market will begin its correction.

Unemployment Rate: What is Next After the Longest Drop in History?

We have data on monthly unemployment rates in the US from January 1948 - shortly after World War 2 - through September of 2017. During that time it has never been lower than 2.5% (which it was in May and June of 1953 at the peak of the post war recovery) and never been higher than 10.8% (which it was in November and December of 1982 in the depth of the Volcker-induced recession during Reagan's first term).

Half the time it is below 5.7% and half the time it is above 5.7%.

Unemployment rates of 3.8% or lower put you in the top 10%; rates of 7.9% or higher put you in the bottom 10%. 80% of the time, unemployment rates have bounced between 3.9% to 7.8%; that range defines normal. Outside of that range things are great or awful.

At the depth of the Great Recession - in October of 2009 - unemployment hit 10%. That's among the worst 1% of all months. (Well, in the worst 1.2%.) Since then it has steadily come down during the longest uninterrupted streak of job creation on record. Last month - the end of the streak - unemployment hit 4.2%, a value in the best 17%. We're in the top 20% but not yet top 10%, really good but still not great.

One simple answer as to whether unemployment will drop further is to say that it's only been lower than its current rate of 4.2% 15% of the time. Again, unemployment rates bounce between 4% to 8% most of the time; it doesn't seem to last long outside of that range. That alone suggests that the unemployment rate will soon stabilize or even rise.

Another interesting thing to note is that this is an exceptionally long recovery. Unemployment peaked 8 years ago this month - in October of 2009. A steady drop in unemployment has never lasted longer. The next longest improvement, the drop from the 10.8% high in December of 1982 to its low of 5% in March of 1989, took just over 6 years before beginning to rise again. Unemployment rates steadily drop for a time and then steadily rise, and steady improvements usually last just a few years, not 8 yerars.

At the start of a recovery people are well aware of all the reasons things can go badly. After all, they are just coming out of a period in which things did, indeed, go badly. Remember how early in the recovery people were anxious about Greece, China's stock market, deficit spending, the mortgage market, Greece, etc. People were looking for reasons that things could go wrong. Now? Now they're looking for reasons that the recovery could continue and less aware of reasons it might not; this makes economies more vulnerable.

There are reasons the unemployment rate could drop further and reasons it won't. 

Among the reasons it could drop further is that our labor force is growing more slowly than it did a decade ago. From 1955 to 2005, US labor force (folks aged about 25 to 65) grew 1.7 percent a year. Since then it has grown about 0.5%. As companies seek to hire, they'll have fewer options; all else being equal, this would translate into lower unemployment.

Another reason it could drop further is because of a drop in immigration. Again, this lowers the number of available workers and could mean that employers will draw from the unemployed rather than the newly available. If immigration rates drop enough, the labor force might even stop growing.

Curiously, the reasons that the unemployment rate could start to rise again include a drop in immigration. Immigrants don't just find work here. They buy houses, clothes, meals and all the things that drive demand for goods and services that, in turn, drives demand for employees here. If Trump's policies are successful at slowing down the flow of immigrants, he'll actually succeed at destroying jobs.

Trade, of course, could still provide jobs for American workers. Assuming, of course that Trump does not ignite trade wars. Simply put, he wants trade wars with our biggest trading partners - threatening to blow up Nafta and trade deals with China - and if he gets his way we'll see a drop in trade with our three biggest trading partners. That will destroy American jobs.

The third reason that the unemployment rate could rise is because Trump is planning to cut spending and taxes. Tax cuts will disproportionately go to the rich. If you give a poor guy a $1,000 in tax cuts, he's likely to spend $900 of it. When you're making only $30,000 a year, you could use that extra $1,000. If, by contrast, you give a rich guy $1,000 in tax cuts, he's likely to save $900 of it. When you're already making $500,000 a year, an extra $1,000 isn't going to change your vacation plans. Government spending ripples throughout the economy in ways simple (the employees of the State Department buy coffee at that little coffee shop across the street) and complex (the Medicare recipient pays a medical bill which enables the hospital to make a down payment on a new imaging technology and the young doctor to make a down payment on a new car). If you cut $1,000 in government spending and then give a $1,000 tax cut to someone rich, you'll reduce spending, reducing demand for the goods and services that drives demand for employees.

What is the punchline? It depends on whether Trump ends trade deals. In either case, unemployment rates are likely to start rising again within 3 to 9 months. If he ends trade deals, they'll begin to rise sharply.

If Trump fails to end trade deals:
Unemployment will fall to no lower than 3.8% within the next six months, after which time it'll start to rise again. Given drops in the growth of the labor force, job creation could turn negative at least one or two more months within the next year even as the unemployment rate remains relatively stable.

If Trump succeeds in ending trade deals like Nafta:
Unemployment will - at best - hit 4% near term but may have already bottomed out at the current 4.2%. We'll have a recession and the unemployment rate will rise to 6% to 8% within a year or two.

Very Good News About What Happened to Household Finances From 2013 to 2016

Great things happened to the finances of American households between 2013 and 2016. Given it is great news, it didn't get reported. So, you've come to a lowly blog to learn what happened.

In the 3 years from 2013 to 2016

Average monthly income for American families rose by $1,000 a month from the start to the end of this period. Think about what new options that gives families. 

Median income rose nearly $400 a month. A family making $48,000 in 2013 was making nearly $5,000 a year more by 2016. $5,000 a year is half the median global family income. Half. That's how much household income rose.

Breaking it down, though, we find some wonderful gains for groups who make less. This might be the coolest thing about this cool news.

Households headed by someone without a high school diploma make the least (compared to households with high school diplomas, some college, and college degrees). They make the least but their incomes rose the most. Median income for households without a high school diploma rose 15% and average income rose 25%!. (Households with college degrees saw median income rise just 2% and average income go up 15%.) That's a big - and needed - boost to the working poor.

Minority families make less than white families but their gains narrowed those gaps too. (There is still plenty of gap to close but at this rate it will close.) Average income for white families rose 14%. Average incomes for Hispanics rose 26%, for blacks they rose 22% and for other / mixed race families average incomes were up 20%. As with different levels of education, everybody gained but the gaps between groups narrowed. 

Finally, the rich did get richer. Families whose wealth put them in the top 10 percent had average income gains of 23% whereas families in the bottom half of net worth experienced gains of only 5 to 6%. I don't know how one would change that. If I have a million in wealth, my money is going to make money for me. Someone without wealth is not going to compete with that - particularly in a bull market for stocks and housing as it was from 2013 to 2016.

Net worth also rose spectacularly in this time.

Net worth fell for families from 2007 to 2010 (thanks to the Great Recession) and changed little from 2010 to 2013. From 2013 to 2016, though, average net worth rose $140,800. That's nearly $4,000 a month through this 36 month period. Median net worth rose only a tenth of that but still works out to a gain of nearly $400 a month for this period. 

To summarize, in the period between 2013 and 2016, at least half of households experienced a gain in net worth and income of $1,500 a year or more. The average of all households was an income gain of  more than $4,000 a year and a gain in net worth of nearly $50,000 a year.

I don't know how you turn that into bad economic news but somehow, sigh, we have. 

All the data for this post comes from this Bulletin from the Federal Reserve.

What Trump Will Do to Continually Raise His Ratings - You Won't Believe What He'll Do Next

It is doubtful that any man has more fiercely craved attention than does Donald Trump. Throughout 2016, his ability to attract and hold our attention seemed to wax and never wane. Just when we thought he had topped himself, he found a way to outrage more. Not content merely to lead his rallies with chants of "Lock her up!" about his political opponent - a tactic more befitting to a banana republic than the world's first modern democracy - he then wound up his crowd with an indictment of Clinton that ended with, "Oh well. Maybe the 2nd amendment people will take care of it." A death threat that even banana republic leaders don't make on camera. And on it went, all throughout his campaign, an escalation of outrage that continued to get him more and more attention. Now that he's president the coverage has become even more intense.

Here, then, is a recap of his amazing ability to get higher and higher ratings. I've added four at the end of the list, forecasting simply based on his repeated ability to raise ratings.

So far (in rough order)
1. Has some success as a NY real estate developer.
2. Builds biggest casino
3. Goes bankrupt
4. Coauthors best-selling book
5. Becomes star of wildly popular reality TV show
6. Stirs up birther controversy, claiming that the nation's first black president must not have been born in the country.
7. Announces run for presidency with claim that Mexicans coming across the border are rapists and murderers.
8. During the campaign, brags about the size of his penis in a presidential debate, threatens to lock up his political opponent at rallies, is caught on tape bragging about sexual assault, asks the Russians to release illegally obtained Clinton emails, insults a series of people, including a gold star, Muslim family,  etc., etc., etc.,
9. After election claims that some neo-Nazis are good people, fires or loses a string of key White House staff (including a speaker who is fired within 10 days), insists Congress pass healthcare legislation that he calls mean, insults a series of Republicans he'll need to pass any legislation, threatens to walk away from NAFTA, NATO, Paris Climate Accords, challenges his secretary of state (who called him a f*ing moron) to an IQ test competition, etc., etc., etc.

Then (a prediction of things he'll do to continue to gain even more attention)
10. Is put on trial by Mueller and Congress for colluding with Russians to win the 2016 election
11. Is found guilty and sentenced to prison
12. Forces an armed standoff before surrendering to federal agents (the most watched TV up to that point)
13. In prison is paired with a black Muslim roommate, something that is aired each week for an hour in the world's most popular TV series ever.

A Simple Proposal for Making Congress Sane and Effective

Budgets are the clearest expression of values. Right now they are negotiated slowly and if a vote comes down to just one or two senators, say, those senators can dictate terms that give their state far more power than the other 48 to 49 states.

If our goal is to have a government that actually represents all 50 states equally - from the most conservative to the most liberal to include everything in between, there is a simple way to do it, as follows.

Require every member of Congress - Representatives and Senators - submit a budget. Don't negotiate. Just submit. Those budgets will be made public to the people in their district. Those budgets will also be averaged together to be the new budget.

This would have so many advantages. One, no one district would have more or less influence than any other. Two, extremists would be marginalized rather than given more power. A person who wants to slash funding for EPA to zero and a person who wants to double its budget would cancel each other out. Three, no one person would be able to hold the budget hostage; members who missed the deadline for submitting a budget would simply have no influence on the new budget.

The result? Less drama, diminished influence for extremists, and more business-like results for the Congress. Most importantly, it would make sure that EVERY district was represented which, it seems, should be the objective of a representative government.

What (New) Word Describes Trump's Administration?

It's not enough that Trump has no interest in policy and experience in governance. Today with Tom Price's resignation we're reminded of the incredibly high levels of turnover in this White House and this fact: between Trump's leadership, his lack of patience for learning, and the fact that his staff is in constant turmoil, we're destined to be led by amateurs this whole time.

And actually, amateur is the wrong word. The ama in amateur comes from the Latin word amator, or lover. An amateur does what they do freely, out of love. The Trump administration has contempt for governance and the public they "serve" so this isn't work done out of love. It's not love but contempt that seems to animate them.  It's worth remembering that a climate change denier is head of NASA and a man (former governor Rick Perry) who vowed to eliminate the Energy Department if only he could remember its name is now head of the Energy Department.

Rather than led by amateurs, perhaps we could use the term contemptuaries. Contempt, too, has Latin roots. Temnere means to slight or scorn. Temp also has the connotation of someone who is just a temp, not a real, dedicated employee concerned with the success of the enterprise but instead someone who is just there to complete some tasks and then get out. Trump's administration - with people like Betsey Devos and Ben Carson - is full of contemptuaries who have little interest in policy, are just passing through, and show contempt for the government and the people their agency is supposed to serve.

Trump's contemptuaries. Not even at the level of amateurs.

What Would We Be Fixating on if Trump Didn't Control the Media Narrative?

Because Americans couldn't look away from Trump, they now can't look away from Trump. A question worth asking is What would Americans be fixating on if it weren't a topic that Trump pointed us towards?

For about a year, Americans (myself included) could not look away from the train wreck of a candidate who was Donald Trump. He offended everyone from veterans (dismissing McCain's sacrifice because he prefers heroes who weren't captured) to women (bragging about how he can grab anyone's pussy because he's a star) to anyone with a triple-digit IQ ("I know more than the generals," "I know all the words, all the best words"). He kept the country incredulous throughout his entire campaign. I honestly thought at one point that he'd made a bet with some friends about all the things he could get away with before finally dropping in the polls. (Of course now we realize he has no friends. He has only sycophants and people who fear him.)

We couldn't look away from the candidate and now the price we pay for our inability to simply dismiss him and move on with a normal campaign is that we now can't look away from the president. He might gut our healthcare. He may start a nuclear war. He might jettison an investigation that would prove he colluded with Putin to seize the White House. He might pardon any racist who has committed any crime. Now he is the most powerful leader in the world and the damage he can do is worse than any hurricane.

One of my beliefs about us is that what we fixate on we head towards. Like a little kid learning to ride a bike, we steer in the direction of the thing that captures our attention. It's worth being careful about what seizes your attention because - whether it's fear of being alone or poverty or looking foolish - what you fixate on could become your reality.

We're living towards the end of the information economy, a time when little seems capable of holding out attention. In every direction there is a new distraction and it seems shiny at first. Trump's genius was knowing how to seize and hold attention. Now, of course, what he does has very real consequences, whether it is failing to initiate aid to Puerto Rico, Florida or Texas or initiating nuclear war. Before we could not look away. Now we can't look away.

One thing we do know about Trump, though, is that he creates the biggest distractions when he has the most to hide. Talking about "fire and fury" with North Korea or tweeting about firing black athletes who protest are topics that are sure to horrify or embolden people and pundits. And as Twitter and the airwaves become full of these topics, less attention is paid to the mounting evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election.

What should the American people and pundits be angrily debating? Not taking a knee in protest. Instead, they should be angrily debating whether the same rules of the Olympics hold with our elections. In the Olympics, if they discover that the gold medal winner cheated, the silver medal winner gets the gold. Once we prove that Trump cheated to win the election, the presidency should go to Clinton. That seems both obvious to me and like a topic that Americans should fixate on. This is unprecedented in our history and, it seems to me, worthy of our focus. Let's start that conversation.

Americans Were Making About $500 a Month More in 2016 than in 2014 (And How Income Growth Changes Voting)

Yesterday the Census Bureau released new data on household income from 2016. There are a variety of interesting things to come out of that and one really interesting thing about how changes in income change how Americans vote. First some data.

Incomes grew at an impressive rate. Earlier in the recovery, while unemployment remained high, income growth was slow. It has been a spectacular recovery. For 83 uninterrupted months now, the economy has created a jobs. A total of 16.4 million. But the economy started from a 10% unemployment rate. As the economy continued to create jobs, detractors continued to say, "Yeah, but wage growth ..." Well when you have 8 million people still standing out in the hallway hoping for a job, there is not much pressure to raise wages. Later in the recovery, as unemployment dropped below 5%, companies had to start offering higher wages. And they have.

Across all households, median income rose 3.2% to $59,039 and average income was up 3.6% to $83,143. Since 2014, average income is up $6,360. Think about that. That work out to $530 a month in extra income. (Median income is up nearly $400 a month.) This strikes me as a big deal. Car payments, an annual vacation, eating out, paying down debt .... $400 to $500 a month extra income makes a very real difference. This is simply great news and actually unsurprising. For years I've been predicting that the first half of the 2010s would be about lowering unemployment and the second half would be about raising wages.

One other bit of great news is that we're narrowing the gap between white men and women and minorities. Everyone's income grew but the incomes of women and minorities grew at an even faster pace. Median income for all households grew 3.2% but for Hispanics it rose 4.3%, for blacks it rose 5.7% and most impressive of all, for households headed by single women, it rose 7.2%. (For those of you alarmed at an erosion of white male privilege, rest assured that while incomes of white households rose at a lower rate - 2% - it is still higher than other groups.)

In all, this income report is great news. It also suggests the possibility that income growth can predict who Americans vote for.

The data reported goes back to 1967 and I used it to analyze how changes in income change how Americans vote. Since 1967, four Republican and three Democratic presidents have taken over from the previous party. (In 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2016 Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Trump took over from Democrats and in 1976, 1992, and 2008 Carter, Clinton, and Obama took over from Republicans.)

On average, Democrats inherit a worse economy than Republicans. The three Democrats were elected in years when median income was falling an average of nearly 1%. The four Republicans were elected in years when median income was rising by 1%. A difference of 2% is a pretty big deal.

What I make that mean is that whether households are more or less inclined to vote for someone who promises a safety net depends on whether they are feeling good about their income or threatened. When incomes are shrinking, Americans are seemingly more aware of the need for government help; when incomes are growing they are less aware. Good times are bad news for politicians who promise to help you through bad times and good news for politicians who tell you that people don't need much help. If that's right, it might not have been economic woes that caused people to pull the trigger on Trump but instead people who were feeling more secure because of higher incomes.

Why Kim Jong-un Isn't Giving Up His Nuclear Arms and Trump Isn't Passing Tax Reform

Kim Jong-un of North Korea is not giving up his nuclear arms. The US demanded that Libya's Gaddafi and Iraq's Hussein give up or stop weapon development programs and then later helped their enemies kill them. Kim Jong-un isn't about to trust the US and will keep his nuclear arms in order to keep the US at (nuclear) arms length. If he gives it any thought - and it seems he has - he never give up the nuclear arms that force the US to take him seriously.

Assuming that Donald Trump is as thoughtful as Kim Jong-un, he won't pass tax reform. Why? Once Republicans have that, they will do far less to resist Mueller's investigation even if that investigation leads to impeachment. Right now the GOP doesn't want to risk losing a rare instance in which they have the House, Senate, and Presidency. At least until they get their very important tax cuts.

Why Even the Experts Vastly Underestimate the Impact of Trade Wars with Developed Countries

I harp on the prospect of a trade war for a host of reasons. For one thing, like the invasion of Iraq or the deregulation of financial markets that helped to set us up for the Great Recession, few people appreciate just how devastating this can be. A trade war has the potential to be as devastating as the Great Recession.

Expert economists worry about the magnitude of this. As someone who regularly works with product development teams in this and other countries, I think even they underestimate it.

A chip maker I worked with this year at a facility in Scotland represents the sort of trade reality that  a simple number like "China represents 4.4% of our trade" does not capture.

This chip company makes chips for cars - everything from the chips that help to control your air conditioner to chips used in self-driving cars. Chips in cars have become ubiquitous and every new car uses more than 100 chips. So what I'm about to describe could be multiplied by 100.

First, a single chip is designed with inputs from design and marketing people from Austin, TX, Germany, Scotland, China, India and Malaysia. Perhaps other sites I was not aware of.

Second, when the chip is physically made it literally travels around the globe in its production process. Value is added in Singapore, Austin, Tianjin, and then Kuala Lumpur.

Third, once the chip is made it still isn't a final product. For that it has to be integrated into a car. The cars it will be incorporated into are assembled in places like Bavaria, Detroit, Seoul, and Puebla.

Fourth, the cars these chips are incorporated into are not made at just one place. A tiny chip that is put into a car comes from half a dozen places. The same is true of the fuel injector, the axle, the pistons, the seat belts, etc. Final assembly just represents a final step in a series of complicated assembly steps for raw materials, intermediate products and final units that are then assembled into a car. Some variation of what I described for the single chip has occurred with most every discrete component in that car.

If you say that 4% of our trade is with China, that may naively refer to the fact that 4% of our products come from there. And that might accurately capture it but I suspect that reality is more like 8% of the value in 60% of our products have some input from China. What I believe the average person wildly underestimates and even expert economists probably somewhat underestimate is the massive complexity in product development and manufacturing and the extent to which any one finished product sitting in your garage, hand or kitchen has design inputs or parts that come from dozens of countries. One of the simplest examples of surprising complexity often used in introductory economics classes is the No. 2 pencil: at one point the lead for the graphite, the rubber for the erasure, and the wood for the pencil came from three different continents.

A trade war would disrupt millions or billions of complex product and design flows that result in the thousands or millions of products that we can buy here in the US. Even disrupting 4% of our GDP would be devastating but a ban on trade from China is likely to impact more than 4% of our GDP. (And of course China is not the only country that trades with North Korea.) If we ban trade with, say, a less developed nation like Cuba an estimate of our trade with them would probably be roughly accurate. Cuba is exporting cigars rather than complex technology made with inputs from knowledge workers scattered all around the globe. But if we ban trade with a country like China that has a complex trading pattern, the ripple effect is incredibly difficult to calculate and could quickly grow beyond casual, initial estimates.

We can only hope that Trump will be less effectual at implementing trade disruption than he was with the Repeal and Replace of Trumpcare. And given that most of Congress is less deluded about how independent we can be of other countries than Trump is, it is unlikely that a trade war will break out. That said, the probability is not zero and the probability is higher than it should be simply because so few people realize how complex are the trading patterns that define even some of our simplest products. It's good that people were outraged at Trump's comments after Charlottesville, but his ignorance there isn't going to cost millions of jobs. A trade war easily could.

Progress, Sex, and the 24 Hour Workweek

About 90% of men had a job in 1900. (The Labor Force Participation Rate, or LFPR is the measure of this.)
The workweek was 60 hours.

Nearly the same percentage of men - 86% - had jobs in 1950.
The workweek was 40 hours.

Between 1900 and 1950, the workweek shortened and roughly the same percentage of men had jobs. Productivity gains translated into a shorter workweek rather than fewer jobs.

In 2017, about 63% of men have jobs.
The work week is about 34 hours.

Since 1950, productivity gains have translated into a slightly shorter workweek and a significantly smaller percentage of men with jobs.

To keep the same percentage of men employed would have meant a workweek of 24 hours instead of 34 (or 40).

Let me briefly digress onto the topic of sex.

Reading history made me deeply sympathetic to people who we would today call prudes. Pregnancy and childbirth could easily kill a woman a century ago. What people today may consider, "regular, healthy sex" could mean supporting a dozen children, a woman's life metaphorically lost to the logistics of child rearing if her life isn't first quite literally lost in the act of childbirth. To find sex alarming a century or two ago seems to me a wildly rational impulse. There was nothing casual about sex in this time, fraught as it was with sobering consequences.

The Pill - and more broadly, a variety of safe contraceptives - has changed sex. Technically speaking, given the rate at which women died in childbirth, a healthy sex life 100 years ago probably meant celibacy. Today, with contraceptives, a healthy sex life can mean sex throughout the week. Sex has been largely separated from childbirth and even when childbirth follows, it is much safer for mother and child. Casual sex is no longer an oxymoron.

The separation of sex from the natural consequence of childbirth caused a sexual revolution. For one thing, premarital sex has become fairly common in the West for the simple reason that sex no longer has to mean pregnancy. Everyone has to find and define their own morality in this time of easy contraception but the consequences of casual sex are far less dire than they were a century ago. This has forced people to rethink what they consider moral. You may have traditional or modern views on sex but whatever drives them it no longer has to be wrestling with the inevitability of childbirth.

Now let me return to the topic of work.

There was a time when 90-some percent of the population had to work simply to feed everyone. To have someone in your group slacking off could translate into starvation or malnutrition after harvest. In this period it made sense to be harsh with folks who weren't working. Today, though, productivity advances mean that we can feed everyone with just 2% of the workforce. No one is going to starve because a few guys in the corner are playing solitaire.

Technology has made it easier to be productive. We have a traditional definition of work ethic that includes - among other things - a 40 hour workweek. Technology and management enhancements have challenged that model in the same way that contraceptives have challenged notions of morality. 4 six-hour days could be to us what 5 eight-hour days were to our grandparents. Proof that we don't need everyone working 40 hours a week is that only 73% as many men are working as did in 1950. It's a fact that we don't need as many hours worked to enjoy our current level of prosperity; the question is whether we adjust to that by having fewer men work 40 hour weeks or having the same percentage of men work 24 hour weeks.

Gains in productivity, like the Pill, have challenged traditional notions of morality and ethics. You may have traditional or modern views on work but whatever drives them, it no longer has to be worry that if someone slacks off we won't have enough to eat.

If we were to lower the workweek to 24 hours, it could result in labor force participation rates of over 80% (assuming the same total number of hours worked as we do now with 63% of men working nearly 40 hour weeks).

How could this help? For one thing, it would result in a broader distribution of wages, a correction to growing income inequality. For another, people working 24 hours a week could have time to engage in creative endeavors that are high-risk and high-return. Pursuit of art, music, business startups or any of a number of efforts that are likely to fail but - should they succeed - have the potential to make the individual rich or gratified and positively change society.  More time outside of work could result in more binge watching of Netflix shows but also more socializing, exercise, startups, sex, and creativity. More people with jobs could even translate into lower incarceration rates.

Having sex need not mean facing the risk of childbirth. Cutting back on hours worked need not mean facing the risk of starvation. Progress has broken old linkages and given us choices that previous generations did not have.

What a 24 hour workweek would mean, of course, is a change in the definition of work ethic. That's not a tough thing, though. There was a time just a century ago when we thought it normal to work 6 ten-hour days. Why not change that again to 4 six-hour days? It could be fascinating to see what might happen.


----------------
Quick acknowledgement.
One reason LFPR for men has dropped is because the LFPR for women has gone up. It might not make sense for men's LFPR to remain closer to 90% when women's LFPR has nearly doubled (rising from 32.4% in 1948 to 57.3% in 2017, roughly 70 years later). Still, the general principle of shorter workweek as a means to sustain higher LFPR holds.