jamesz

Where have all the socialists gone?

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Over at Cato Unbound the health care debate rages on. David Cutler and Dana Goldman reply to Robin Hanson’s original article by almost agreeing with him. They both begin by acknowledging that much of our current health care spending is wasted. The gist of their criticism is that when you reduce health care consumption then you reduce necessary as well as ‘wasted’ health care. Consequently they call for increases in the effectiveness of spending rather than cuts to it. Note that Hanson never claims that the spending that does happen shouldn’t be controlled by doctors to ensure that necessary procedures still get performed.

Moreover, the criticism really seems to be an attempt to avoid the problem by simply wishing it away. Nobody denies that it would be nice if no health spending were wasted and it were all highly effective for treatment purposes: the fact is that it’s not and it probably never has been. As Hanson asks in his reply, “why must this distant possibility [of better health care] stop us from publicizing and acting now on our consensus that we expect little net health harm from crude cuts?”

Ezra Klein claims that some of the spending might be justified in order to raise peoples’ quality of life showing that we care. This might be a valid point, but I question whether that money couldn’t have a greater impact on peoples’ quality of life if it were spent elsewhere in the government’s budget. I have never been one to call for slashing social spending indiscriminately, but I’m surprised by how weak the replies to Hanson’s rather radical essay have been. The overwhelming response seems to be a knee-jerk rejection of such extreme spending cuts without a real refutation of the reasoning behind them.

jamesz

Carbon taxes again…

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It looks like Matt’s not the only brilliant economist campaigning for Pigovian taxation of carbon emissions. Now Greg Mankiw’s weighed in on the side of taxation. To those who claim a carbon tax is regressive because poor people are forced to live in the suburbs and drive more than the wealthy, Mankiw says

Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged.

In addition, the Economist points out that

…it’s possible that a carbon tax might sharply reduce carbon output without any fall in oil consumption, so long as consumers of other fuels affected by the tax reduce their use of such pollutants and their consequent emissions,

although this seems like a bit of a long shot.
In NZ, the government has preferred a cap-and-trade system to carbon taxes. Mankiw mentions that this is equivalent to a carbon tax only if the permits are auctioned off. If they are allocated for free based on previous emissions, as I believe the case will be in NZ (please correct me here if I’m completely mistaken), then “…the prices of energy products would rise as they would under a carbon tax, but the government would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.” In other words, a cap-and-trade with grandfathered permits IS regressive and it’s expensive to redress the burden on the poor.

Matt Nolan

Fed cuts rates to 4.75%

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I don’t have time to say much, but I will say that the Fed’s decision to cut rates 50 basis points was silly. They are pretty much telling the market that they will bail them out when the shit hits the fan from taking on overly risky investments. Although this decision may forestall a recession in the US, how many future recessions will be the result of the relatively new Fed governor Ben Bernanke showing that he will follow the whim of the asset market.

People are comparing this situation to 2000/2001 when Alan Greenspan cut rate significantly to stop a recession. If this was even true it would be an indictment of today’s decision, as in some ways the ease with which rates were cut in 2000/2001 lead to the asset bubble we are now facing.

However, todays decision is even worse than the 2000/2001 decision, as inflationary pressures are HIGHLY elevated. A good central bank should first and foremost control inflationary pressures. However, it seems that many central banks are starting to forget their primary goal.

jamesz

Slavery and growth

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Many writers have noted that colonisation contribute to the sad state of many African economies today. Now Nathan Nunn claims that the slave trade may also have had a long-term impact on economies. The author

…find[s] a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables.

This analysis indicates that “…it was actually the most developed areas of Africa that tended to select into the slave trades”, which points to a causal relationship running from slavery to poor economiic performance. The author suggests that the reason might be that “…procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.”

Yet another reason why the West is morally required to help African nations out of their current strife?

jamesz

A framework for normative economics

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This is a post that Matt really should have written, but unfortunately he’s snowed under at work at the moment. Having said that, it’s not really much more than a plug for Steven Landsburg’s fascinating new paper entitled “The Methodology of Normative Economics”. Economists tend to shy away from making normative judgments: when constructing a social welfare function they claim to be maximising efficiency. Yet the form of that welfare function determines the form of the efficient solution. Moreover, people clearly have strong feelings about what constitutes an appropriate welfare function for a regulator to maximise.

Given that people feel strongly about what form this function takes it makes sense to model people as having preferences over different forms of the welfare function. For a welfare function to be ‘consistent’ it must predict that it is itself the optimal welfare function to use. Landsburg shows that, if rich people care about equity, there is only one such function that exists. Even if people are selfish and don’t care about equitable distribution of income, there are only a limited number of consistent welfare functions.

What I really like about Landsburg’s paper is that it forces economists to confront the normative judgments that they inevitably make when they talk about welfare. Yet it forces them to do so by using an analytical framework that they are comfortable with. Rather than forcing them to make value judgments, it allows them to talk about the normative framework of their model without having to resort to moral or philosophical discourse that they are ill-equipped to deal with.

Check out another of Landsburg’s methodology papers here if this stuff dings your bell.

jamesz

An alternative ‘fat tax’

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Matt’s talked in the past about fuel taxes to reduce emissions and reduce the time cost of congestion. This paper suggests that there may be further benefits to a fuel tax. Using US data the author estimates that

…a $1 increase in gasoline prices would reduce obesity by 15% in the U.S., saving 16,000 lives and $17 billion per year. These monetary savings would offset approximately 16% of the increased expenditures on gasoline. Additionally, …13% of the recent rise in obesity from 1979 to 2004 can be attributed to the decline in real gas prices.

He attributes this to both an increased time spent on incidental exercise and a reduction in eating at restaurants. It seems almost too good to be true, and perhaps it is, but it’s certainly an interesting alternative to taxing unhealthy foods.