Austerity and the Reinhart-Rogoff Fiasco

You may have heard recently about how an obscure graduate student from UMass debunked a very influential paper from very influential professors at very influential Harvard recently. Indeed, it was a takedown.

Empirical economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s oft-cited paper “showed” that governments reaching or exceeding a debt-to-GDP figure of 90% experience comparatively much lower growth. Turns out the whole thing was riddled with errors. I happen to agree that bad things are coming to countries that over-leverage themselves, but there is simply no way that a study like this was going to be correct, from its very inception.

Put aside for the moment the fact that the word austerity seems to have no useful meaning outside of rigid ideological parameters, meaning those who care more about politics than reality (read: 99% of economists) are talking at cross purposes. The real problem here is methodological. There is simply no way a spreadsheet of math problems based on aggregations of trillions of data points can tell you anything useful about whether a very general fiscal policy, with no set definition anyway, will have particular effects. It is all fantasy.

The most important point, though, is that we learn the right lesson from this. On the one hand, fancy math does not have the ability to tell us whether austerity, as a general matter, is correct. Anyone who thinks so is probably an idiot.

On the other hand, anyone who thinks that errors in fancy math prove the opposite position, is an even bigger idiot.

This is because they make a compounding error – on top of assuming that the methodology could give us useful evidence if it didn’t have its errors, they also assume that the absence of this evidence is evidence of their opposing position. This is a logical fallacy: absence of evidence for position A will never be evidence for position B. (If you’re interested in seeing a prime example of such massive idiocy, feel free to click on this link. I warn you, it isn’t for those with fragile stomachs.)

Ultimately, it is critical not to get caught up in the economic flame war without evaluating first principles. Neither side is right. And neither side seems to know why. In the meantime, I suppose we could just stand back and enjoy the show.

Driverless Cars and Systemic Vulnerabilities

Sometimes it seems that the uncontrolled and non-systemic is more stable than the systemically controlled environments deliberately aimed at stability.

While the systemic model, with its top-down, consequentialist policies put in place specifically to produce stability, often produces stability over the short run, it at least as often produces unimaginably wild instability over the long run.

This is a problem that crosses platforms. A common analogy is the fires in managed forests. While top-down policies designed to systematically control and extinguish small fires prevent problems in the short run, the lack of fires to clean out the dried brush ultimately leads to uncontrollable infernos.

I am more likely to write about an almost identical problem on this blog: the Federal Reserve. While top-down policies designed to systematically control and extinguish market phenomena like inflation and unemployment often allow for stability in the short run, the lack of market responsiveness ultimately leads to catastrophic crashes, runaway inflation, and heavy unemployment.

This is something that I have been thinking on quite a bit recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we have to embrace the chaos. Ultimately, we’re in for a wild ride no matter what, so why delay the reckoning? Let’s deal with the problems in incremental and manageable ways, preferably at the level of the individual. The only alternative seems to be waiting for intractable problems later.

The reason I bring this up now is because Motor Trend magazine recently published an article called “The Beginning of the End of Driving.” Read the following excerpt and try to tell me you remain unworried about the systemic vulnerabilities.

Continental plans to have autonomous assistance available for limited freeway driving and for construction areas by 2015, says senior vice president Ralf Lenninger. It will add low-speed city capability in 2017, followed by two-lane highway and country road driverless car technology about the end of the decade. The company calls this “the car you can’t crash,” and it will meet the company’s goal for a zero-percent accident rate.

 

Zero percent accident rate? Kind of like the Titanic was unsinkable? The potential for systemic vulnerability to me seems greater than the individual vulnerabilities. If we go to a top-down system of driverless cars, what is to stop a rogue programmer from redirecting all of our vehicles into each other at once?

 

This is not to say that the technology is not potentially useful, or that it can never work. But when the impulse in government is emphatically interference, I doubt the likelihood of independent, individual driverless cars. Far more likely, we will be shunted into a system of “rational regulation,” which may very well end up shunting all of our cars into a ditch one day.

 

By all means, let’s let technology surge forward, but let’s ensure that we avoid the impulse toward systematic regulatory systems to go with it. I would hate to see driverless cars with the same track record as the Fed.

Complexity, the “Do Something” Instinct, and the Sandy Hook Shooting

I have as yet avoided writing about the Sandy Hook shooting, partly because I dislike rushing to rash decisions, and partly because I believe the narrative has focused on unimportant ideology as opposed to the important ideas underlying the situation and the reaction to it. Now, however, with the benefit of some distance, I will weigh in.

What happened was horrible. There is simply no way around that. On the other hand, frantic reactions, calls to political action, and statements claiming that what happened was “obvious” do nothing but exacerbate the problem.

In reality, while it is easy to deconstruct the event with the benefit of hindsight, it is simply impossible to claim some sort of valid foresight. It is not enough to say “I knew that something like this would happen,” because that is a statement without verifiability until the proof is at hand. And when the proof is at hand, such a statement is already useless. If you had any real knowledge, you would have stopped it from happening. If you had no ability to stop it, you had had no real knowledge – simply baseless speculation masquerading as knowledge.

One can analogize this “foresight problem” to other occurrences. For example, if someone gets in a car accident, he might say later on “if only I hadn’t slept in and left 20 minutes later than I usually do, I would never have been in this mess.” This is the functional equivalent of claiming foresight about Sandy Hook. If either were valid, the problematic situation would never have obtained.

Nor is it possible to claim that, despite the lack of specific foresight, there was enough knowledge to have stopped the tragedy via preventive action. This kind of claim usually follows the “if only we had this law…” form, and it is the functional equivalent of the above. This also fails to account for the foresight problem, and it suffers from a debilitating case of confirmation bias.

The foresight problem can be extended through thought experiment. Consider a chess game.* The number of possible chess games that can be played is somewhere in the order of 10^120, or many multiples of the number of atoms in the universe. Once the chess game is, say, 50 moves in, and the chesspieces are arrayed just so, it is relatively easy to reconstruct what happened. Before the game began, however, there was an infinitesimal chance of predicting just such an arrangement. And remember, this is chess: as complicated as its game-tree complexity is, it pales in comparison to the complexity of an hour, even a minute, of human action.

We have no useful foresight, but neither does our hindsight yield much when faced with the multitude of competing and interacting causes and effects that a chessboard simplifies but real life makes manifest. After all, if the “obvious” solutions were actually obvious in hindsight, this would not be a recurring problem. We would have corrected it after the last time.

For example, getting rid of guns does not solve the problem, as countries such as Russia continue to see mass violence despite heavy gun control, while Switzerland’s rate of gun violence is comparatively miniscule despite enormous rates of gun ownership. Britain found that gun violence increased 40% after its gun ban in the late 1990s. Unlike poorly-informed pundits, I will not speculate as to why. And indeed, a majority of the mass shootings that have occurred in the United States have occurred in states, localities, and even schools that are “gun-free” or gun-restricted zones. Real life does not cooperate with our strictures. (QED.)

Nor is lack of guns an obvious problem, as the just-as-reactive NRA has suggested. What earthly purpose would stationing the equivalent of TSA agents (who, by the way, are not armed) at schools be, when the TSA has shown nothing but incompetence? Why would one expect an armed policeman to stop a shooter when armed policemen are already commonly at schools and haven’t helped? Why would a national guardsman or combat veteran be effective? Remember that one of the worst mass shootings in history took place on a military installation in Texas. No shortage of guns on a military base.

What are we to do with ourselves, then, if there are no solutions to the problem? (And, emphatically, there are none.) We do the best we can to defend ourselves, but we also accept that the real world is a dangerous, messy place and circumstances beyond our control may end our lives abruptly.

Callous? I call it realistic.

Indeed, the possibility of being the victim of a mass shooting is quite similar to the possibility of being in a fatal car accident, except for the fact that the latter occurs with startling regularity by comparison. We seem to have no problem processing the idea that, while our lives might end on the road at any moment, we have balanced the risk and accepted that, dangerous as driving may be, we will carry on. We seem to completely lack the capacity to accept the idea that, while our lives may end in a mass shooting at any moment, we are capable of balancing the risks here too. Apparently, when guns are present, rationality goes out the window. This despite the fact that cars can be at least as lethal as guns.

And capable we are of balancing the risks inherent in life. After all, we do it literally all the time. Short of locking down the entire citizenry in individual padded cells, there is simply no way to prevent the next mass shooting. That may be hard to hear. But think of the risks you take every day that are greater. Driving is a good example, but also note that you are about as likely to be killed by lightning than be killed by a mass shooter. Shall we live our lives entirely indoors?

Or can we accept the fact that there is no solution?

Once we have accepted that the risk is intractable, we can begin to accept that calls to action, proposed laws, gun controls, the “do something” instinct – all are useless in the face of a tragedy like this. We can avoid the rush to judgment. We can avoid the poison of baseless ideology. We can begin the healing process. We can resume our lives.

While the complexity of the world denies us the ability to see into the future, we can see that the fruits of the “do something” instinct, be they legal or otherwise, are poisonous to liberty. We are faced with a choice. We can keep our liberties and our dignity intact, and live with a future where mass shootings are possible. Or we could pass laws taking away fundamental individual liberties, making the people servile and impotent, and thereafter live with a future where mass shootings are possible anyway.

These are our only two choices. We should choose wisely.

 

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*I have previously used the chess example to illustrate complexity here.

A perhaps accidental description of why the libertarian perspective beats the major parties’

Amity Shlaes over at Forbes has published an article in the October 22, 2012 issue called “The End of Behaviorism.” (If you’re unfamiliar, Amity Shlaes is the author of the very good “The Forgotten Man,” a realistic history of the Great Depression. She is also the author of a forthcoming biography of Calvin Coolidge, one of my absolute favorite presidents and a sadly all-too-often-ignored figure.)

In this article, Shlaes lays out the contrast between the economic policies of the two major political parties in simplistic terms:

Get the rat to the cheese.

That’s really what each U.S. political party is promising to do if its candidate is elected President. The rat in this analogy is the enervated American worker. The cheese is his reward. If all rats make their way through the maze and to the cheese faster, the economy will grow faster.

The only way that Democrats and Republicans differ is in the manner in which they animate the rat. Democrats take the Habitrail approach: Give the worker the equivalent of a roomy cage with a deluxe wheel, and he’ll be fit enough to pursue his cheese. Republicans focus on incentives: Double the cheddar, and the rat will navigate his turns more quickly. The rat analogy comes from modern economics, a discipline that classes itself as lab science, precious and pure.

Neither approach works particularly well. The article goes on to probe the deeper depths of the human psyche viz. “getting to the cheese.” What is it that really motivates people? I think Shlaes assertion that freedom in and of itself is the goal of many is right on the dot.

But people aren’t lab rats. They are souls, to use a pre-social-science word. Souls, pious or not, make their choices in complex fashion.

Indeed, freedom itself is what motivates many people who are not currently free. We in this country tend to get so caught up in how much money we have, how many things are available to us, whether our material situation is better now than it was four years ago – that we utterly forget to appreciate the necessary condition to material wealth and comfort.

That is freedom.

And thus, I find Shlaes’s article to be a – perhaps unwitting – explication of the libertarian position, and especially of that position’s superiority over the position of the major political parties in this country.

The cheese is not really what matters, although getting rats to cheese is a nice side benefit. What really, truly matters is whether people are free to live their own lives without coercion.

Why are so many single-parent families in poverty? A resort to circular reasoning.

I followed a link to a ridiculously self-serving article by a one Karen Kornbluh at the Atlantic the other day. Just reading her bio is enough to be able to determine exactly what her agenda is, and I find that overwhelmingly sad.

The article is called: “Why Are So Many Single-Parent Families in Poverty?” and the tagline reads: “Because public policy hasn’t kept up with the massive changes in American family structure.” Yep, you read that right. It’s not that there’s anything about single-parenthood that might lead to this effect. It’s lack of government intervention.

What made me happy, though, is the fact that my little sister was able to quickly and eloquently point out the most glaring logical fallacy. I’m justifiably proud of her. Here is her quote:

Am I just reading this really uncoordinated article incorrectly, or does she imply that the reason the problem exists in the first place is that the government isn’t solving it correctly?

Here I thought that the existence of a problem had to logically precede its non-resolution.

I thought so too, sis. I thought so too.

Explaining California “lifers,” or why people stay in a failed state.

I have been a resident of several states across the United States, but two in particular stand out. One is California, to which I moved when I was ten, left at fifteen, and returned to for college. The other is Minnesota, where I was born, but to which I did not return until after college.

Just recently, my total time spent as a Minnesota resident surpassed my time as a Californian, capturing a plurality of my life’s years. Many have found it remarkable that I left a tropical paradise like California for the frigid tundra of Minnesota, but if you can look past the weather, California simply isn’t a great place to live. As I have been saying for years, “it’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t want to die there.”

Many of my friends disagree with me. One has spent nearly 70 years (aside from higher education back east) in the same beach community. Another calls himself a California “lifer,” which I find eerily similar to how prisoners with life sentences describe themselves.

In any case, while California has many things acting in its favor, it is nevertheless a failed state that I simply cannot find attractive as a home. To be fair, Minnesota is also heading in the wrong direction, but if California is just about to break the tape, Minnesota is still putting its running shoes on.

Victor Davis Hanson at the City Journal recently attempted to explain why he is a California “lifer,” in an article entitled “California, Here We Stay.” Many reasons he cites make perfect sense. Family heritage is one, and it is perfectly understandable. Indeed, it is the best reason I can think of for why I live in Minnesota and not Texas. There is the weather, of course. And there are certain cultural and educational institutions that are very attractive.

On the other hand, hegemony and inertia cannot prevail forever – just ask Britain, Rome, Greece, even Akkad. The general rule is that it is better to be present for the incline phase than the decline phase, and I can’t help but think that even the best of California has hit its peak. If UC Berkeley were a stock, it’d be Pets.com.

Hanson is honest about California’s shortcomings. Finances built on rainbows-and-unicorns accounting methods; poor primary and secondary education; hostile business climate running the productive out of state; environmental extremism – all of these things are conspiring to choke off the best of what the state has to offer the world.

On the other hand, he makes a point that I simply cannot get behind:

Another reason to feel hopeful about California is that it’s reaching the theoretical limits of statism. To pay for current pensioners, the state simply can’t continue to bestow comparable defined-benefit pension packages on new workers, no matter how stridently the public-sector unions claim otherwise. And as public insolvencies mount—with Stockton, Mammoth Lakes, and San Bernardino seeking bankruptcy protection a year after Vallejo emerged from it—public blame is finally shifting from supposedly heartless state taxpayers to the unions. The liberal unionism of an aging generation is proving untenable, as we saw in recent ballot referenda in which voters in San Diego and San Jose demanded that public-worker compensation plans be renegotiated.

California is reaching the theoretical limits of statism? This strikes me as remarkably naive, and it sounds hauntingly similar to things like “it couldn’t happen here,” or “it can’t get any worse.” Or perhaps “there are no black swans.”

I for one prefer not to underestimate the statist impulses of a polity that has consistently pushed the once-bright beacon of hope that was California back into the dark ages of economic and social thought. And they did it in less than a century and a half to boot.

In my personal opinion, the decay in California is not over, and it is not close to being over. I know that making predictions is the easiest way to be proven wrong, but here goes nothing.

I think that California will continue to be held in a chokehold by statists until the situation becomes completely untenable on a state level. At that point, the citizens of California will become enraged – not at their elected Judas goats, but at the federal government for not bailing them out. Seeing the practical importance of California’s electoral votes to their parties, the statist kindred spirits in Washington will forge a bipartisan grand bargain to bail out California, complete with all the crony capitalism and blatant corruption that entails. California will then double down on its failed policies and things will get worse. Another bailout will happen in quick succession, and while token gestures may be made to restore fiscal sanity, the damage will have been done.

California’s future is not bright. Perhaps California “lifers” have a reason to stay if they are already wealthy or comfortable enough to avoid the worst of the coming catastrophe. But if you’re a common person, your odds are poor.  I fully expect to see the middle class, whose livelihoods are far more likely to hinge on the day-to-day health of the economy than the wealthy, to continue to flee.

My only hope is that they don’t bring the politics of old California with them when they go.

The best way to entrench the worst? Form a union. TSA approves AFGE union.

When the TSA was first formed in the comparatively innocent times just after September 11, 2001 (yes, you read that right), it was expressly prohibited that the workforce be unionized. Since then, the number of employees has exploded from 16,500 to 62,500. The amount of abuse travelers put up with has risen exponentially, from pat-downs to porno scanners. And the number of terrorists caught by TSA has… Well, that’s still a big, fat zero.

Nonetheless, TSA Administrator John Pistole, who knows which side his bread is buttered on, has allowed the TSA to go forward with an American Federation of Government Employees union contract. And just when you thought the TSA couldn’t get any worse.

While my views on unions are well-known, I think it bears repeating that this can only end in a disaster for both American travel security and Americans’ wallets.

Consider the example of the teachers’ unions. Since 1970, the cost of educating one student from kindergarten through 12th grade has roughly tripled, from $55,000 to $155,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. Since 1970, American students have seen no improvement in math and reading, and regression in science scores.

This is because, once unionized, the workforce becomes entirely caught up in labor concerns to the detriment of their actual jobs. Hence, students suffer once the teachers’ unions begin to treat the public school system as nothing more than a jobs bank.

Using the example of history, it is easy to see that unionization of a workforce entrenches the worst elements of that workforce. Efficiency is sacrificed, goals go unmet, poor performers cannot be fired, and consumers bear the brunt of this failure.

Of course, airport security seems important enough that we should want to avoid these things, but no matter. The screeners pressed ahead with their unionization anyway, the public be damned. After all, the attitude of the unions has always been that the public owes them jobs, not that they owe the public a job well done.

What can be done about political hatred?

Bob Kerrey, loser of a senate race in Nebraska, has pointed out the growing climate of political hatred in the country. He says:

Sitting in his midtown Omaha home a day after Tuesday’s election, Bob Kerrey said a shout from outside made him reflect on what he believes is political hatred that has grown increasingly intense.

… “Hatred is a dangerous thing,” he said.

I completely agree, both about the growth of hatred in politics and about its danger to individuals and the polity itself. In the wake of a presidential election that split the country as never before, we have seen the emergence of class warfare and identity politics writ large.

Instead of changing the almost-universally unpopular status quo, Americans cast their votes as blocs, with blacks almost completely separating from whites, women and men a chasm apart, the wealthy and those of limited means at loggerheads like we haven’t seen in decades. So much for Obama being the great uniter.

However, I get the feeling that Mr. Kerrey and I would not agree about the causes or cure.

I believe it is a simple problem, and it can analogized as follows. If you are infested with mosquitoes, you can kill them one by one. You can curse the gods for plauging you with insects. You can suffer in silence. On the other hand, if you want an end to the problem, you can drain the swamp.

Political hatred is always and everywhere a product of political overreach. When people peacefully and voluntarily exchange without government interference, there is no political hatred. However, when politics reaches into our wallets, our bedrooms, our private lives – that is where hatred begins.

A vote for an intrusive public policy is akin to a personal attack, because although the state is used as proxy, the result is the same. If we do not want people picking our pockets one-on-one, how can it be legitimate just because enough people voted on it? If the natural response to theft is anger, why would we respond the opposite way just because the government is the middleman?

You want less political hatred, Mr. Kerrey? Try less political force.

The incredible vanishing multiplier, and economics as a science

Here is a blast from the past. In this .pdf file, economist Robert Barro talks about the Keynesian multiplier in 2009. 2009, as we recall, was the edge of the precipice. This article was published in February of that year, concurrently with the passage of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” commonly known as the first stimulus, which granted roughly $800 billion of taxpayer money to political cronies.

Here is an excerpt:

If the multiplier is greater than 1.0, as apparently assumed by Team Obama, the process is even more wonderful. In this case, real GDP rises by more than the increase in government purchases. Thus, in addition to the free airplane or bridge, we also have more goods and services left over to raise private consumption or investment. In this scenario, the government spending is a good idea even if the bridge goes to nowhere or if government employees are just uselessly filling holes. This free lunch would make Charles Ponzi proud. If the deal is genuine, why stop with only $1 trillion or so of added government purchases?

It seems as though the best way to judge macroeconomic predictions is with the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, when economists using the same data set come up with estimates that vary by the trillions, one must wonder whether foresight per se exists at all.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the stimulus did not stimulate. Many excuses have been made for the poor performance of ARRA, but the fact remains that it has failed.

In my view this is not surprising. Most economists, whether classical, monetarist, Keynesian, or whatever else, have been consistently missing the point for decades. They have become so caught up with making their math look legitimate that somewhere along the line they forgot that it should have some connection to the real world.

Perhaps when applied to mainstream macro, “voodoo economics” is a tautology.

Why Government Debt Blows Up

Here is a link from the Daily Reckoning of Australia, showing why government debt blows up. It has a liberal dose of Bastiat (pun intended), and it draws some interesting parallels between Japan and the United States.

I suggest that you read the whole thing. (It’s not that long, you whiners!) But here’s an interesting excerpt to pique your interest:

What really happens is this: the private sector gets too deeply in debt (thanks largely to the Fed’s artificially low rates and EZ money policies). Then, it panics. It cuts spending. Lenders – who over-extended credit – should go broke.

Instead, the feds bail them out, shifting the public’s real resources to failed businesses and incompetent managers. The bad debt is transferred to the public. Then, the private sector… attempting to build up savings and improve its financial health… puts its money in the safest possible place – government bonds! Still more debt, in other words.

The government takes the money and gives it to its favourite sectors… its clients… its pets… its campaign contributors and vote-getters. The public would be appalled if it realised how its savings were being thrown around. But it wants safety above all. And it believes the feds will be good for the money; they always have been. After all, if you can’t trust the government, who can you trust?

Who can you trust indeed? I’m not in the business of giving investment advice, but I’d suggest tangible assets. Check out the article to see what the stock market has done relative to tangible assets over the last 15 years or so. It will either shock you or depress you, or possibly both.