Category: Economics Page 27 of 90

Or, as the original title said, “The Real Economy vs. The Fictional Economy.”

You may have heard that the Federal Reserve intends to create a trillion dollars a day for thirty days to support the financial markets.

This is a grim and determined attempt to make sure that at the end of this crisis, the same people control the economy that control it today.

The correct action is mostly legislative: A halt to all mortgage payments, rent, utility bills, and other bills due for the duration of the crisis. Then give a UBI to everyone. Businesses which need to keep running and need help can be given enough money (given, not loaned, not market operations) to continue for the duration. Those that don’t shutter, and their fixed costs like rent, mortgages, loans, etc. are all simply put on hiatus. For the duration that they are not operative, no interest is accrued, etc.

Those businesses which cannot survive on this basis, and which are not needed during the isolation period, are therefore obviously not critical. Let them go bankrupt. The shareholders will be wiped out, the bondholders will become shareholders. That’s how capitalism works.

This may seem unfair, as an epidemic is an act of God, but the industries asking for bailouts are ones that instead of putting aside a rainy day fund, spent all of their profits on stock buybacks, then in many cases also took out loans and made stock buybacks.

Stock buybacks are ostensibly to “return value to shareholders,” but really they are done in such large amounts because executives are granted share options, and they want the price to go up so their shares are worth more. If they wanted to return value to shareholders, they would simply pay dividends or perhaps reinvest. Companies which have been smart, for example Apple, have huge warchests and can survive a long period. Companies like Boeing who thought their job was to enrich their executives and who cares if planes fall out of the sky because they have gone to the cheapest engineers possible, well, they deserve to die. Same is true of Airlines. GE is a shell of itself, and should be allowed to go into receivership.

Companies that are important once isolation is over, and which the government doesn’t want broken up or consolidated can simply be bought up by the government. “If we’re giving you a bailout, you belong to us.” Give it a few years, sell them back for a profit, or keep them if they are natural monopolies.

But let’s move back to the original question of real economies vs. fictional ones. The real economy is the people, the buildings, and the capital equipment. The fictional one is the financial ledgers which determine who owns what and owes what. These are entirely made up by us, by rules we created and we can change those numbers and rules any time we want, as the Federal Reserve is illustrating yet again.

The job is not to preserve the fictional numbers, or to preserve incompetent ownership and control. The job is protect the real economy: people, buildings, and capital equipment.

These are two separate things. As long as the people and the stuff is still there, we can reconstitute the economy any time we decide. So we protect the people first, and the numbers last, if at all.

This crisis is also making clear who actually is important: grocery workers, logistics workers, farmers, utilities workers, people maintaining the internet, doctors, nurses, garbagemen, health assistants, etc.–people who maintain the actual goods and services we need or really, really want up at all times (like the internet).

Most of the work we do, most of the economy, is unnecessary, and a lot of it is filled with people who hate their jobs.

So perhaps this is an opportunity to see what jobs matter, make them into good jobs that people like (because essential jobs should not be done by miserable people), and then look at the other jobs and get rid of the ones that mostly create misery or pollution or goods or services we really don’t need.

This is a chance to see what actually matters, and reorient our society towards that.

More one what that would look like in future articles.

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Lessons of the Virus: Who Creates Value and What the Good Life Is

By Ian Welsh

On March 18, 2020

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So, we’re going into a recession, and will likely soon be in a depression. Why? Because the workers have to stay home. It seems that the workers, do, after all, create the value.

Marx giggles in his grave.

We notice also who actually matters, who is actually necessary in society. The people who grow food. The people who take care of sick people. The people who make medicine. The people who distribute food and goods. The grocery and drug store workers. The garbage men. The people who work in sewage, water, power, and keeping the telecom backbone up.

Everyone else? Might be nice to have, but they aren’t necessary, and that includes most of the bosses. Some coordination is needed, yes, but it’s not as rare a skill as bosses like to pretend.

Meanwhile, we have makers making ventilator valves, as firms threaten to sue them stop them. It turns out that a valve which can be made for $1, normally costs $11,000.

There’s your capitalism, children: Ghouls who vastly overprice goods so they can get rich off of other people’s death and suffering.

Nations are scrambling to give workers forced to stay home money, because if they don’t, the economy will slide off a cliff. It turns out, as we should have learned in the Depression (and did, but forgot) that it is people who buy things; the demand, that matters if you want a great economy.

Over in China, it has been calculated that seventy-seven thousand lives were saved by the decrease in pollution caused by all the factories shutting and taking the cars off the road. Coronavirus may have saved more lives than it killed.

Now, some of what those factories produce we need (ventilators, for one, but remember the price markups), but a lot of it we don’t. We could work half as much, not have stuff we don’t need, and spend time with our friends and families. Maybe even see our kids. Wouldn’t have to have school babysit them for most of the day, because parents are away.

Just do less, divide the money more equally, and do without shit we don’t actually need.

We’d be healthier, guaranteed, as the pollution dies down and stress drops through the floor. We’d be happier, and in their spare time a lot of people would make the cool stuff they always wanted to make, but couldn’t, because they were doing corporate drone jobs.

Coronavirus is going to suck more than anything most people still alive in the West can remember (though older gays will understand.) But there’s a lesson here, if we’re willing to take it.

This is going to be a hard lesson to take, because central banks and politicians are moving to bail out the rich (they did so first, and are still doing so), and so they will retain their money and power and try to use it to buy up assets on the cheap after smaller business go bankrupt, but focus on the problem. Everything the rich have they have not because they “earned it” or because they actually create more value than a janitor or nurse, but because the laws are written to allow and the politicians and central banks funnel them endless money, while picking them up every time they fall, wiping the boo-boos off and giving them trillions of dollars.

It’s all politics, in the end. It’s all power.

Now the politicians they own, in their incompetent handling of the coronavirus, are going to be responsible for the death of millions.

These are unnecessary deaths. Countries which acted promptly and competently did not and are not seeing large numbers of deaths.

This means the politicians are guilty, at best, of negligent homicide. Death from incompetence, by corrupt, venal politicians owned by billionaires and mega-corps.

A better way is possible. But not if these people stay in power. They must be removed.

If we don’t remove these politicians and business leaders more of us will die. Many, many more.

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Economics of a Flu Pandemic: Part II

By Ian Welsh

On March 15, 2020

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Republication of this article from 2010

I just finished reading the Nesbitt Burns Investors Guide to Avian Flu. It’s a good report, but the advice to investors is limited (basically, expect a flight to safety such as gold and US treasuries and keep money on the side to buy up distressed properties after the pandemic.) They do a very good job of detailing the history of flu pandemics, the current state of preparedness and the likely consequences. (They’re essentially the same as the ones I discuss in my essay in the FluWiki, but Sherry Cooper and Donald Coxe run through them in much more detail and style.)

The more I look into this the more pathetic it all seems. Our society, as a whole, has no surge protection – no ability to take shocks. We have no excess beds, no excess equipment, no excess ability to produce vaccines or medicines, nothing. Everybody has worshiped at the altar of efficiency for so long that they don’t understand that if you don’t have extra capacity you have no ability to deal with unexpected events. And now some people are suing the Ontario government for their SARS handling, which I fear will perversely make the government less willing to do what needs to be done when a crisis hits.

Public healthcare in a pandemic or epidemic is a triage operation. You isolate people and you shut things down deliberately, and people are going to die because of the decisions you make. If nurses and doctors decide that their own lives are more important than those of the sick, or if ordinary citizens decide to break quarantine or travel restrictions, then there could be complete disaster. The moment of the SARS outbreak that caused me the most fear was when there were reports of people fleeing Beijing. In a real pandemic situation, all that would do is spread the disease further and kill even more people.

In a pandemic, no one should be out and doing things who doesn’t need to be. Take food – it should be delivered to each person’s door and left there, once the delivery person leaves, the occupant comes out to get the food. No interpersonal contact other than that which is unnecessary.

When I was approached to write about the economics of a pandemic, my first thought was: “Find out what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic.” Apparently, Coxe thought the same thing and his conclusion is that because our society and economy is so much more integrated and so much more connected (for example the flu had to spread by ship back then), and so much more “just in time” that it isn’t really a model you can use. We’ll likely get hit harder, faster, and because many locations have such limited inventories, relying on getting it as they need it, the supply disruptions are likely to be much worse. I can’t find any flaw with his argument.

The lack of urgency on the part of governments is rather distressing:

It is hoped the Canadian studies will begin late next summer. February’s federal budget set aside $34 million for production of trial batches of an H5N1 vaccine. But Canada’s flu vaccine manufacturer, ID Biomedical, still has not been given the go-ahead to do the work.”We’re close to entering into a contract. Hopefully it will be done shortly,” Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said Monday.

The company has said it would take 12 months from contract signing to vaccine delivery, because it must build and license a special high-biosecurity facility within its existing vaccine plant.

Now, I don’t know the details of what is required to set up such facilities, but I’m not getting a huge sense of urgency from the government here. The contract should be signed now and whatever is necessary to build extra facilities should be done, as well as whatever is necessary to get them up and operating faster. I do understand that biosafety is an absolute necessity, but getting these facilities up too late is as good as “never.” Let’s be frank, 34 million is peanuts. How much money did they lose trying to create the gun registry (a database no larger than many commercial databases successfully brought in for much less)?

I would suggest to politicians that if an influenza pandemic does occur, and people decide you didn’t do everything you could have to prepare for it, that, at the very least, you will no longer have a political career. At the worst, well, you won’t be alive to worry about it.

There aren’t enough respirators, there aren’t enough hospital beds, there isn’t enough vaccine production capacity or antiviral production capacity. There is so little being done to deal with those deficiencies that there might as well be nothing being done. Doubling production isn’t what is necessary, production needs to be ramped up by orders of magnitude. If it’s never used, oh well, it’s better than building a bridge to nowhere in Alaska which even Alaskans don’t want.

I don’t know when there will be an influenza pandemic. No one does. It’s an odds game. But right now, the odds aren’t so good. It’s time to spend some money and buy some insurance against the possibility. Put the facility in your riding and tell your constituents how you just got them some jobs.

But do it.

(This is a reprint, at a reader’s request. You can find part one of Economics of a Flu Pandemic here.)

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The Justification for Great Wealth

By Ian Welsh

On February 27, 2020

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Great wealth is great power. If you have money, many people will do what you want them to do. This should be uncontroversial: Most of us have spent our lives doing tasks we wouldn’t do unless someone was giving us money.

Well, that and being scared of losing everything and dying on the street.

Great wealth is a matter of law. Property rights beyond, “What I can carry” are not natural. They require force and a series of professional classes–from accountants to cops–to maintain. Property rights, then, are actually a drag on the economy; they come with a cost. They doubtless have some benefits, but whatever those may be, they are not pure benefit. Whether any particular set of property rights is a net benefit is unclear; it might be the economy would do better with less.

Property rights are justified because they are supposed to lead to better outcomes. So are wealth and income differentials. If someone is earning more, they supposedly do more good in the economy.

The Wall Street bankers who crashed the world economy say “Hi!” and remind you that if they don’t get bonuses bigger than the rest of the country’s raises, they may not keep working.

So, let’s simplify this.

If you have a lot of money, say $64 billion, the question is “Are you doing more good with that money than would be done by simply splitting it up and giving it to everyone else in society.”

Or, better yet, what if you took that income and equalized it among all citizens?

Seems like the cost of having an overclass is rather high, isn’t it? Are they producing enough human welfare (any net human welfare?) to justify all that income they are taking?

When, of course, they actually crashed the economy in 2008 and when economic performance has been inversely proportionate to the amount we’ve taxed them?

Anyway, is having this elite worth $50K a year to you?

Hope you’re getting your money’s worth.

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New Hope for a New Year

By Tony Wikrent

On January 6, 2020

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This post is by Tony Wikrent.

I do not remember the New Deal, even though it’s probably what has had the greatest impact on my political memory. I’m 63 now, so I wasn’t even alive during the First Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. For me, memory of the New Deal was transmitted by those who had lived it and embodied it: My foremost, formative experience of government was John Kennedy beckoning the nation to put men on the moon.

In Chicago, the Democratic Party took pride in getting things done. The construction of O’hare Field was completed while I was a toddler, as well as the Kennedy expressway connecting ORD to the Loop downtown. Construction of a new home for the University of Illinois at Chicago began in 1963; the 244 acre campus opened two years later. Today, UIC is the largest university in the Chicago area, with more than 33,000 students enrolled in 16 colleges. As a kid, I got to watch construction crews working to extend the CTA subway line down the middle of the Kennedy to O’Hare.

John Kennedy said, “The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder, who builds best when called upon to build greatly.”

Unlike conservatives and libertarians, I have always had faith that government can be an active force for good.

But over two thirds of my fellow citizens are younger than I. They have not had the same experiences. They have not, I fear, the same long-term optimism, which I think may have been the greatest achievement of the New Deal. In the world I grew up in:

Interest rates were strictly regulated
The average holding period in the stock market was eight years.
There was no retail means for investing in foreign economies.
The only futures contracts in existence were based on physical commodities.
Foreign exchange trading was only for individuals actually traveling overseas, paying the US military and for base leases, and companies importing and exporting.
the Cayman Islands were basically unknown: there were no tens of billions of dollars of dirty money scrambling around the globe for a place to hide.

In other words, well over 200 million of the 327 million Americans alive today have no idea what a well regulated financial and monetary system looks like.

It’s Not OK to Think Everything Is OK or Getting Better and Better

By Ian Welsh

On November 13, 2019

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Globe on Fire I’ve discussed the “better-than-ever world” argument before. I find it questionable, for a number of reasons and if that interests you, read the linked article and the articles to which it links.

What I’ve been paying attention to lately is WHO likes and buys into this argument.

They fall into two groups: the first are techies, the second are neoliberals.

We’ll start with neoliberals first. Neoliberals want to claim that everything’s going great so they don’t have to make serious changes. If even the poorest are getting better off rapidly (50K a week, I saw as a recent claim, for improvements in “dire poverty”), then all that is required to the current system are tweaks: It’s working.

More importantly for the neoliberals, if the world is better than ever, the people who have the most don’t have to give anything up–not money, or power, or the way they do things. What they’re doing is basically working, their being rich and powerful isn’t hurting the poor; in fact, it’s lifting the poor up!

So statistics have to show that poor people are getting better off, and if a few show that the poor in parts of the first world aren’t (like certain groups in the US having decreased life expectancy), well that cost has been far outstripped by all the people lifted out of poverty elsewhere and why care more about Americans than people objectively worse off in other countries?

The world order is basically fine. No need to do more than “bend the curve,” as Obama famously said.

Techies have some of the same reasons, especially those who are doing well, like the ones who run Silicon Valley, or who are very well paid. The world is fine, no need to change what’s working.

But there’s something deeper to it for the techies. While neoliberals want to defend neoliberal capitalism–which is why they get offended when one points out that China used mercantalist capitalism to lift people out of poverty. Almost all poverty gains, no matter how you slice the numbers, have been made in China and China DID NOT do what economic orthodoxy says you’re supposed to do.

Techies don’t care about that. Instead they want to defend their legacy and current actions. Forget capitalism, communism, fascism, and all that guff: Really, virtually all the gains of the last 250 years come down to using hydrocarbons to power various engines.

Technological progress is the actual driver of what’s happened. Modern techies identify with the engineers and scientists of the past, especially now that programmers like to call themselves engineers.

Likewise, the computer/internet/telecom revolution which has been driving new industries (I wouldn’t quite say “growth”) since the mid 70s or so is their child, their project. They either worked on it or are still working on it. The world must be doing well because they created it or are creating it, or are maintaining the technology it runs on, the technology that is really responsible for supposed welfare gains.

They believe they are good people, who do good work, and therefore the results of their work must be good.

We all want to believe that the order for which we are responsible, the work we do, and the economics that works to our benefit, is justified, because we want to believe we are good people.

Neoliberals, elites, and techies feel they have created this world. Therefore, this world must be a good one.

Techies also want to think that technology can solve everything, because it’s what they’re good at. And hey, it does demonstrably work. It’s just not clear that it can do everything, or do everything soon enough, since we all will, well, die.

Anyway, the larger point of this is simple: We argue over these things because they are about legitimacy and people’s self-esteems and self-images.

Of course those (like myself) who oppose the current neoliberal order want these figures to be BS. We want to be able to argue that change is urgent, and needed, and that the existing order has failed.

It’s good to understand that, no matter what side you’re on. What do you WANT to believe. Then see if you’re still justified.

Of course, I think I am. This doesn’t mean there’s been no progress, there has. I just think the numbers are wildly over-inflated outside of China, and the progress is unsustainable due to climate change and the impending environmental collapse. I can live like a king if I have a ten million dollar credit card limit, but if I can’t pay it back, eventually that ends.

Also I grew up in the development community. My father worked for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Bangladesh, and had worked before in various other developing countries. I spent time in India, and so on. I listened to development workers talk about what worked and (mostly) what didn’t. There are more cynical (or rather, realistic) groups in the world, but not many.

So there’s always been an off-smell to these numbers to me. I know what works for development (mercantalist policies with the cooperation of the current hegemonic powers, and virtually nothing else, unless you’re a city state) and what doesn’t (anything orthodox development economists tell you to do).

I know who’s been allowed to actually bootstrap up and industrialize (American allies and China–because they bribed American leaders), and who hasn’t (almost everyone else).

And I know something else: If you’re forced off your land into a slum, you make more money, but you’re worse off. The economic and Western obsession with $$$$ as a measure of quality of life is unwise. Even calories (though better) are not great, because for example, when NAFTAs tortilla manufacturers were bought out after NAFTA, their nutritional content plummeted.

So it all smells off, to me.

But even if it didn’t, even if it was all true–that the world was “never better,” radical change is needed because climate change and ecological collapse are on their way, with the leading edge already causing problems. We can’t even keep industrializing the way we have been. If every developing country was allowed to industrialize properly, and we gave them what they needed to do it, we’d just bury ourselves deeper.

The fundamental WAY we have run our economies, both in terms of any type of capitalism (and communism back when, but they’ve been gone for 30 years now, so grow up) and in terms of technology is fucked. Fucked. It cannot continue or we risk civilization collapse. Worse case scenarios are great die-offs which take us down too. Good case scenarios are one or two billion deaths.

No matter what, we are past the point where we aren’t going to be able to change the environment in a way that prevents the climate from being fundamentally warmer and different from the environment and climate which has existed for the entirety of human civilization.

That’s not an economic or technological system which is more or less OK, or producing more or less good results even IF the triumphalists were right about everything.

It requires change, and radical change, if we are to avoid, not disaster (we’ve already had those), but multiple catastrophes of civilization-shaking levels.

It’s not OK to think everything is OK.

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There Are No Good Billionaires (Bill Gates Edition)

By Ian Welsh

On November 7, 2019

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So, Elizabeth Warren has a two percent wealth tax plan with three percent on people with more than a billion dollars. She’s suggested raising the over a billion percentage to six percent… And Bill Gates says….

I’m all for super-progressive tax systems,” he said. “I’ve paid over $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine.

“But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” he added. “You really want the incentive system to be there without threatening that.”

Mr. Gates is the second-richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of $106.2bn.

Well, of course, she didn’t say that, she said six percent. A little over six billion in the first year. Bill’s 64, and of course, the actual nominal amount will decrease each year unless he can grow his money faster than six percent, in which case, what’s the problem?

Elizabeth Warren

He’ll never, ever be anything less than a multi-billionaire, in other words. His bullshit about 100 billion is just that, fear-mongering bullshit.

And if he’s paid ten billion on 106 billion, well his tax rate was about ten percent. Most middle class families would love to have that low a tax rate. (Yes, I know it’s on income, not wealth, but the point is he obviously paid very low income taxes. Which, actually, is what the data shows–the middle and working classes pay a higher percentage than the rich.)

Bill, of course, is the “good” billionaire.” But he’s the guy who gave straight-up fascist Modi a reward. He’s the guy who spent millions to change the educational system in the US, then admitted that the model he successfully pushed doesn’t actually work. He’s the guy who used brutal, monopolistic practices to build Microsoft.

And he doesn’t want to pay a six percent wealth tax that will be used to provide universal healthcare.

Billionaires are bad, and, as an even more radical and willing-to-take-on-billionaires candidate, Bernie Sanders, said, they shouldn’t even exist.

As for Billy, he thinks he deserves to be one of the richest people in the world because he created the Wintel monopoly and crushed rivals with practices which were, under black-letter law, illegal.

But one can understand why he might prefer a Republican president. After all, it was George Bush, Jr. who withdrew the anti-trust suit which would have broken up Microsoft and left Bill worth a lot less than a 106 billion dollars.

Trump, of course, massively dropped tax rates on the rich.

Money comes first, ethics come second. Bill’s always understood that.

Republicans have been pretty good to Bill. Performative wokeism and his good image aren’t worth a six percent wealth tax. As for people without healthcare, welll, better they die than he pay taxes which would leave him a multi-billionaire for the rest of his life.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Is California a Third World State?

By Ian Welsh

On October 31, 2019

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So, there are fires again in California and it turns out the largest fire was caused by a downed PG&E power wire–despite the fact that PG&E cut power from vast swathes of the state to try and make sure that didn’t happen.

What’s hilarious about this is that PG&E has, ummm, a record:

As early as 1990, years before worsening drought and higher temperatures began pushing wildfire season into apocalyptic overdrive, PG&E was facing criminal charges for failing to trim the trees growing alongside its power lines as required by state law. In 1997, the utility was convicted of no fewer than 739 counts of criminal negligence for a fire that burned 500 acres and leveled 12 homes in the High Sierra town of Rough and Ready. State regulators later charged PG&E with more than 500,000instances, between 1994 and 1998, of failing to trim trees near their electric lines. (my emphasis)

This is mind-boggling. The sheer fucking incompetence, venality, and stupidity of both the government and PG&E. Half a million times they were fined, so obviously the fines weren’t working; PG& simply viewed them as part of the cost of doing business. This was going on in the 90s and the government DID NOTHING.

You have two acceptable choices in this case: You either nationalize the utility, or you change the law from requiring the imposition of fines to require criminal sentences for executives and board members (and probably anyone earning more than X dollars, so they don’t try and silo people from criminal penalties).

As with bankers, where the fines for widespread fraud (including stealing people’s houses by falsely signing documents), were far less than the gain, PG&E had no reason to stop.

This was especially exacerbated by an ideological choice: The decision that the only responsibility corporations had was to their shareholders, and not to anyone else. (This choice also wound up enriching executives far more than shareholders.)

Corporations are bundles of vastly valuable rights, the most important of which is that shareholders and executives are largely insulated from both bankruptcy and the law. In every case, it should be necessary for a corporation to make clear what the public gets in return for granting these rights.

But in the case of PG&E, only a moron would think that the proper solution is anything other than nationalization. Utilities are, in fact, natural monopolies.

But more to the point, they are critical infrastructure. How can California, the home of Silicon Valley, be so fucking incompetent as to have power outs because they aren’t doing basic maintenance? This is third world shit. This is Nigeria. This is pathetic.

In any actually functional society, this shit would get sorted out ASAP and heads would roll, metaphorically or literally.

Instead, we have California governor Gavin Newsom whining about how he’d like Warren Buffet to buy PG&E. Pathetic doesn’t cut it. He’s the governor of a state with an economy larger than most countries. Take it over and sort it out.

Frankly, this is the sort of incompetence that ought to have him thrown out of office, if he isn’t lynched–along with PG&E’s executives. But Americans have become the sort of people who just take abuse by their “betters” lying down, so I’m sure everyone involved will stay rich and important and live in a house with backup generators.

Pathetic.

(Note that this is categorized under “class warfare.” And yes, I know some rich people are getting hit too. Maybe they should realize they aren’t /that/ rich.)

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 27 of 90

Protect People, Not Financial Ledgers

Lessons of the Virus: Who Creates Value and What the Good Life Is

Economics of a Flu Pandemic: Part II

The Justification for Great Wealth

New Hope for a New Year

It’s Not OK to Think Everything Is OK or Getting Better and Better

There Are No Good Billionaires (Bill Gates Edition)

Is California a Third World State?