Category - Political Economy

[See part one]
Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

It’s worth remembering that commons already exist, lots of them, in various places and parts of the world’s economies. Most often, however, they are informal arrangements—holdovers from before the rise of modern market capitalism. In general, commons are not recognized formally by governments as a type of property arrangement deserving protection, the way conventional private property is legally protected.

It is this lack of protection that enables the famous “tragedy of the commons.” Barnes argues that, contrary to the standard perception, commons aren’t undermined by internal tragedies—they are victims of infringement from the outside. Marx described the enclosure of common land into private land as “the primitive accumulation of capital”; today, Barnes is primarily concerned with the ability of corporations to horn in on remaining commons as they seek new resources to exploit for private gain. A recent example is with the digital TV broadcast spectrum, with an estimated value of $70 billion but which the U.S. government gave away for free in 1996 to media conglomerates, even though the airwaves are supposed to be the shared property of all Americans.

The main finding of Peter Lindert’s intriguing 2003 paper, “Why the welfare state looks like a free lunch” (a warm-up for his 2004 book Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century is that generous social democratic welfare states, with a variety of universalist and means-tested safety net and family support programs, grow just as robustly as stingy laissez-faire states. Here’s the key summary from the abstract:

There is no clear net GDP cost of high tax-based social spending on GDP, despite a tradition of assuming that such costs are large.

The finding should obviously be plastered on bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room walls and played continuously on a loudspeaker outside the Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, Council on Competitiveness, etc. The welfare state doesn’t just look like a free lunch, it is a free lunch, at least from the standpoint of national aggregates.

Class conflict may mean that it’s hard for us to order that free lunch in the U.S. anytime soon, but the barrier between us and the free lunch doesn’t come in the obvious way.

Just a quick note from Atlanta. It’s the end of the second day of the first US Social Forum. Due to travel ‘difficulties’,  I was not here yesterday. My spies on the ground tell me the march yesterday morning to kick off the Social Forum was 10 to 20 thousand people strong. Always hard to say, exactly, but a quick examination of the program (with over fifty workshops and panels going on at once for three days) and taking in the attendance at the panels I’ve attended, and just the sheer number of people on the streets of downtown Atlanta with their USSF ID badges, this is clearly the largest such gathering I’ve ever seen in the US. Thousands of people together to discuss and strategize a different US, something so necessary for the world as a whole, and no less so for us US’ers.

And the conversations happening go far beyond simple critiques of today’s neoliberal capitalism (too easy, anyway). They’re talking about concrete alternatives that are working on the ground now, and strategizing about scaling them up going forward. Of course there’s still a long way to go, but this forum represents a most welcome development: the coming together of disparate ’single-issue’ groups to hammer out common ground and devise strategies to move forward as one. I’m sorry you’re not here!

More specifics later, must sleep….

Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

A few weeks ago, CPE Staff Economist Jerry Friedman wrote an Econ-Atrocity reviewing Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy. Though he says McKibben “has written a clear attack on much of what ails us,” Friedman nonetheless criticizes McKibben for approaching the environmental and social problems of the day from an individualist perspective. For all that McKibben wants to promote and revive “community,” he has the attitude (says Friedman) of a “personal Salvationist . . . [who thinks that] the enemy [is] ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.” What McKibben misunderstands or ignores, Friedman argues, is the power of social institutions to drive behavior, regardless of the desires and seemingly free choices of individuals.

I think that Friedman will find solace in Peter Barnes’ recent book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, since Barnes’ approach is definitively institutional. The problem, according to Barnes, is that the structure of the economy and society leave too much power in the hands of corporate capitalism. Even if all the CEOs and boards of directors and politicians were replaced with kind-hearted souls like McKibben, we would still face pretty much the same issues of environmental decay, economic inequality, and other social ills—the logic of capitalism and the legal structure of private property rights force the leaders of corporations to do what they currently do. He learned this from personal experience as co-owner and manager of several business ventures, most famously Working Assets (a telephone and credit card company that donates one percent of gross revenues to progressive charitable organizations). “I’d tested the system for twenty years, pushing it toward multiple bottom lines [that consider social and environmental impacts in addition to profit concerns] as far as I possibly could. I’d dealt with executives and investors who truly cared about nature, employees, and communities. Yet in the end, I’d come to see that all these well-intentioned people, even as their numbers grew, couldn’t shake the larger system loose from its dominant bottom line of profit.” (Ironically, Bill McKibben is quoted on the front cover of Capitalism 3.0 helping to promote Barnes’ book.)

A recent article in Psychological Science describes experiments aimed at understanding the psychology of accepting, or not, social inequalities. (If the abstract seems a bit abstract, try this slightly more reader-friendly summary from Science.)

The gist: people who accept justifications for inequality experience less emotional stress when confronted by evidence of the inequality. The more a person believes that there are good reasons for inequality, the less emotional stress they’ll have. (Stress in the form of moral outrage, existential guilt, and support for changing things to help out the disadvantaged.) So acceptance looks to be a self-protection mechanism. Also, showing people stories, propaganda, what-have-you, that feeds ideas of justification (for example, “rags-to-riches” stories) increases their acceptance of the justifications, and so decreases their emotional reaction to evidence of inequality.

As the authors abstract, “system-justifying ideology appears to undercut the [urge to bring about] redistribution of social and economic resources by alleviating moral outrage.”

I guess this helps explain why people are likely to accept that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Giving a rat’s ass that the world ain’t so great is hard to do. It’s stressful. That’s why those of us who think otherwise have got to help each other keep our spirits up. More potlucks!

By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist

At the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the Environmental Movement straddled two approaches to addressing environmental problems, approaches rooted in two alternative theories. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed the first Earth Day to “force this issue onto the political agenda,” to promote changed government policy to protect the environment. But many of the 20 million Americans who took part in this first Earth Day were deeply suspicious of organized politics or state action. “Personal salvationists,” they blamed environmental troubles on our weaknesses as individuals. Instead of failed social policy, the enemy was ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.

Twenty seven years later, the Environmental Movement confronts the same division between personal salvation and political action, a division nicely illustrated by a new book, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. A prominent environmentalist, McKibben has written a clear attack on much of what ails us; but he misses the underlying cause of these ills and, therefore, his prescription for remedial action is necessarily off. In many ways, a pleasure to read, the book also left me so frustrated that I threatened to throw it against the wall.

Two weeks ago, after complaining to my daughter about how much I would dislike it, I bought Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (New York, Henry Holt: 2007) from my local Amherst book store. Already familiar with his ideas from his various other writings (including The End of Nature; Staying Human in an Engineered Age; and various New Yorker articles), I suspected that his new book would be well written, an effective attack on much that ails us as a society, and would miss the point. It is this last that led me to threaten to throw the book against the wall in frustration. And that frustration led me to write this note. (Actually, it was my wife who wanted me to write this so that I would stop ranting to her.)

What could be wrong with a book that criticizes the Bush Administration, big oil, Cargill, Monsanto, and the Economics profession (among many many other villains)? Especially when the author has such good heroes: including farmers’ markets, urban gardens, organic farmers, Heifer International, and the Indian state of Kerala. Among economists, environmentalists like Herman Daly and Bob Costanza get most of the Kudos but a few, like Amartya Sen, make friendly cameo appearances. Individualism is bad; society is productive; and I agree that would all be better off, and the world a lot better off, if we listened to Bill McKibben.

The problem I have is that McKibben not only reads orthodox economists but believes them.

Scientific American is reporting on a an article in the journal Neuron that describes brain scanning experiments intended to see if poorer people react differently than richer people to opportunities to gain a little extra money.

The microeconomic law of diminishing marginal utility states that while accumulating a good—pretzels, pencils, nickels, whatever—each successive unit of that good will be less satisfying to acquire than the one before it. Finding a shiny quarter on the street is a real thrill. But, if you are carrying around a bag of coins, acquiring another one does not seem nearly as exciting. In fact, would you even bother to pick it up?

That hesitation is what researchers at the University of Cambridge in England were banking on when they designed a study to see if the haves catch on more slowly than the have-nots when it comes to reward-based learning. Reporting in the current issue of Neuron, the scientists reveal that when a small sum of money is on the line, poorer people learn quickly how to maximize their profits, leaving their wealthier counterparts in the dust.

The Washington Post reported a couple days ago on the dwindling and precarious situation among the big accounting firms. As the opening paragraph asks, “With only four major firms left in the business, are there too few to let any fail?” The article goes on to list numerous troubling and legally challenged activities by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte & Touche, KPMG, and Ernst & Young in recent years, all in the shadow of Arthur Anderson’s undoing as an enabler of Enron’s mishigas.

The CBC reports

Alberta carbon dioxide pipeline could cost $5B
Last Updated: Thursday, March 15, 2007 | 12:19 PM MT
CBC News

A plan to pipe carbon dioxide from Alberta’s oilsands and store it underground could cost as much as $5 billion, says Alberta’s environment minister.

The province wants to capture carbon dioxide and send it through a 400-kilometre pipeline. Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Guy Boutilier said earlier this month that the pipeline would cost $1.5 billion and the carbon dioxide would be used to help get more oil out of low-producing wells.

He was pushing for the federal government and industry to split the cost of the project.

But Environment Minister Rob Renner suggested Wednesday it could cost much more.

“The number of $1.5 billion has been floated,” Renner said. “I suspect that the number — all costs included — will be significantly higher than that.

“I’ve seen estimates as high as $5 billion by the time it has taken into account the cost to industry to implement the [carbon] capture facilities.”

[cont’d]

Wow. Just a thought here, and ignoring that the carbon dioxide would be sequestered (for how long and how securely?) in an effort to bring yet more fossil fuel to the surface so it can be burned and converted to carbon dioxide, most of which won’t be captured but will add to the greenhouse mix; so my thought is, just how much energy conservation technology could be implemented with $5 billion (even if it is Canadian dollars), or even the lower estimate of $1.5 billion? I’d definitely bet a dollar that it’d be enough to cancel out way more CO2 emissions than the pipeline would help sequester (and I repeat, for how long, and how securely?).

Ex-chair of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, was frequently criticized for throwing his weight around in favor of those whose economic position is based on owning financial capital, at the expense of the vast majority of the public. Congress loved everything about Greenspan and would have made him chair-for-life if they could, so it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that his replacement, Ben Bernanke, tends towards the same bias. Dean Baker paints a “hypothetical” scenario that would lead to just that conclusion. How else to explain why Bernanke would be so eager to smooth the rough waters of the financial markets? Aren’t they just natural expressions of the rational free-market system? To paraphrase Marilynne Robinson from one of her essays in Mother Country, if the markets are natural systems, like rivers, what obligation is there to flatten out the waterfalls and smooth over the rapids? The answer seems to be the obligations of class.

By Heidi Garrett-Peltier, CPE Staff Economist

You are what you eat. And according to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that means we’re corn. Corn has now made its way into our diet in the form of fillers, sweeteners, oils, alcohols, pills, and breakfast cereals, not to mention of course the indirect path it takes through animal feed. Why should we care? Because cheap corn has been linked to obesity, and obesity will soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death.

By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist
Dec. 1, 2006

A recent article in the New York Times (October 25, 2006) entitled “Hospitals Try Free Basic Care for Uninsured” raises an intriguing possibility. The Times reports how some local governments and hospitals have found that by providing primary care, supportive services, and preventive care for the uninsured they can save money by avoiding higher costs when conditions worsen down the road. Following the experience of a diabetic patient at Seton, a Roman Catholic hospital network in Texas, the Times shows how preventive care reduced “costs for the hospital” by helping the woman avoid expensive emergency room visits. By improving her health, preventive care cut her medical bills nearly in half. “The money we save,” Dr. Melissa Smith, medical director of three Seton clinics, “money that is not hemorrhaging through the I.C.U., is money we can do so much more with to help her upfront.”

We could all hope that there will be enlightened insurers who will respond to these stories. The Times is certainly hoping to promote a free-market win-win where the poor will receive care that will help them stay healthy, and health insurers and providers will increase their profits by reducing total expenditures. But this worthy goal misses the fundamental flaw of for-profit health insurance: Capitalist businesses, including America’s health insurers, are not eleemosynary institutions. They do not set out to produce useful things. Instead, they seek to create profits; any social value or use is purely coincidental. In the specific case here, our capitalist health care industry is organized to produce profits; any quality health care that it provides is a desirable, but secondary, product.

Over at the Boston Review, Michael Piore and Andrew Schrank’s recent article (“Trading Up: An embryonic model for easing the human costs of free markets”) on labor in Latin America offers a spot of good news. They’ve been studying labor inspections throughout the region, from the Dominican Republic to Mexico to Brazil and Chile, and say they’ve found “an emergent model for reconciling market and social forces.”

The following post is the text of a radio commentary I (Mike Meeropol) delivered over WAMC radio in early October.

Did you know that the US Congress has rejected efforts to punish, investigate and criminalize war profiteering?

Yes, that’s right. This past February, the House on a mostly party-line vote rejected an effort to forbid expenditures from going to any contractor, “…if the Defense contractor audit agency has determined that more than $100,000.000 of the contractor’s costs involving work in Iraq … were unreasonable.”[1]

Meanwhile, the Senate on an equally party-line vote, rejected an amendment to an appropriation bill “to prohibit profiteering and fraud relating to military action, relief and reconstruction…”[2]

What’s going on here?

By Michael Ash, CPE Staff Economist

A recent finding from two researchers at the Federal Reserve Board implies that rich people did all of the extra consuming during the 1990s “boom.”

They reached their conclusion by looking at savings, the flip side of consuming. While the historic pattern has been that the rich save and the poor eat hand-to-mouth, the pattern of savings stratified by income class reversed over the past decade. The savings rate of high-income households declined very sharply, and the increased savings of the poor partly paid for the upper-class consumption spree.

The overall savings rate (savings as a percent of income) fell from 5.9 to 1.3 percent over the 1990s. Table 1 shows savings stratified by income class.

By Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

In the U.S., talk of tax reform usually means debates about taxes on income and wealth. A little less common are discussions of flat taxes and a shift from payroll, income, investment, or property taxes to consumption taxes—that is, a federal sales tax.

We’ve seen the miserable results of lowering taxes on the rich, and we’ll be dealing with the massive government debts for decades to come. Flat taxes are simply another way to lower taxes on the rich, under the guise of simplifying the tax system. (To be sure, simplifying taxes is not exactly something to dismiss out of hand—the system is far more intimidating than it should be.) The supposed advantage of a shift to consumption taxes is that the shift away from payroll and/or other taxes should lead to more jobs. This is because a payroll tax makes it “expensive” for a business to have an employee. If the payroll tax is reduced or eliminated, the business will have more money available to hire additional workers. The problem with consumption taxes is that they tend to be regressive—meaning that they fall hardest on lower-income members of society.

Another type of tax reform that deserves more attention is the environmental tax shift (ETS), also known as the green or ecological tax shift. The idea here is to increase taxes on activities that result in environmental damage and use the money generated to reduce other taxes by the same amount. As with the consumption tax idea, most proposals center around reducing payroll taxes.

By Thomas Masterson, CPE Staff Economist

The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is just what it sounds like: a guaranteed basic level of income. Most proposals suggest that it be distributed to every adult citizen without regard to income or wealth. BIG would replace all of the social programs currently in place that attempt to reduce or eliminate poverty, such as welfare, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid, with a monthly payment sufficient to lift an individual out of poverty.

Interestingly, this proposal is drawing support from the right as well as the left (leftists have long supported versions of this proposal). Even Charles Murray (think “The Bell Curve”) likes it: he has written a book about it in which he seems to say that he thought it up, calling it “The Plan.” By eliminating the need to monitor for fraud and abuse of the system, BIG would actually be cheaper than our current system of multiple benefits and eligibility criteria. BIG would also get rid of the disincentive to work built into the welfare system–often working for pay leads to a decrease in benefits, making work a less attractive option. And, by allowing people to decide on their own what to use the money for (though Murray’s plan calls for $3,000 of his $10,000 annual grant to be spent for health insurance), BIG would increase efficiency. Lefties like it because it frees people from dependence on employers and gives them more bargaining power to demand good working conditions and better pay.

by Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

After eighteen years holding the reigns of power, Alan Greenspan has finally ended his career as chair of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as a result of legal limitations on the length of his term. As the person in charge of monetary policy in the U.S., Greenspan was, by some accounts, the single most powerful person in the world economy. His term as chair coincided with the early 1990s recession that contributed to George H. W. Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton; continued through the longest continuous period of economic growth in U.S. history; included the multi-billion dollar bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998; persisted through the internet-inflated stock market boom and bust as the new century began; and has finished in the current period of feeble recovery.

By Léonce Ndikumana, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

American interest in Africa has been traditionally peripheral, opportunistic at best. In the past, aid to African countries supported client regimes that the United States and its allies needed to prevent the expansion of communism on the continent, as in the case of former Zaire under the late Mobutu Sese Seko. In these circumstances, the objective of economic aid was not economic development of African countries, but instead aid often contributed to propping up dictatorships that catered to the interests of the West.

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond. The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value. The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.