Can we stop talking about the alleged 'gender wage gap' now?

Many are boasting good news on the ‘gender wage gap’—I agree, it’s great news: the Office for National Statistics’ findings offer more proof that wage gaps have very little to do with gender, and much more to do with choices each gender is prone to make. From the BBC:

The average full-time pay gap between men and women is at its narrowest since comparative records began in 1997, official figures show.

The difference stood at 9.4% in April compared with 10% a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, a gap of about £100 a week.

This as well:

Hourly earnings figures reveal that, in April 2014, women working for more than 30 hours a week were actually paid 1.1% more than men in the 22 to 29 age bracket and, for the first time were also paid more in the 30 to 39 age bracket…

…The government said that, from next year, it was extending the rights for shared parental leave. It had also invested in training and mentoring for women to move into higher skilled, higher paid jobs, and guidance to women looking to compare their salaries with male counterparts.

Women, from the start of their careers, are now earning a higher salary than men; and, if they choose to make the decision to stay in the work force, they are more likely to be promoted than their male counterparts as well.The real gap, it seems, is not between women and men, but between mothers and child-less women. Leaving a job early on in one's career or for an extended period of time to have children will impact a women’s salary when she returns to the work force.

As this is the case, I think the government is probably right to extend rights for shared parental leave (though the money put into training will surely be a waste; women who are ambitious and attracted to careers in science, business, and formerly male-dominated sectors aren’t having much trouble pursuing them). But anything legislated from the top-down can only go so far to change cultural opinions that have been in place for centuries about the role of women and the household.

In reality, women’s choice in their private and home lives will be the greatest determinate as to what further changes we see in wage gaps. It seems there's evidence that good economic climates actually lead more women to stay at home with their kids rather to go out and get jobs - at the same time, we are witnessing an increase in stay-at-home-dads, which, most likely, has multiple reasoning to it: more women are demanding to work, and more men feel comfortable making the choice to stay home.

Either way, it seems there is no obvious discrimination between men and women when they enter the work place; as far the element of motherhood is concerned, we should be less focused on the numbers and far more focused on ensuring that women are not being socially pressured, either way, to make any decision that is not completely their own.

Thomas Piketty ignores government capital

Thomas Piketty’s core argument in Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that the return on capital is (likely to be) greater than GDP growth and therefore those with capital will gain an ever greater share of wealth increasing inequality. This is not true in an individual sense or societally. Gilts returning 4% over an 80 year lifetime, paying 45% income tax, assuming RPI of ~3% and inheritance tax on two transfers would reduce a £100m fortune by 92% in real terms. There are almost no historic fortunes. Crassus was supposedly the wealthiest man to ever live. The de Medici fortune, assuming a zero real return, would be worth about $23bn today. But in practice individual great fortunes have struggled to earn even a zero real return, even without destruction, let alone Piketty's assumed 5% real return, which would have seen them dwarf Bill Gates' paltry billions.

Piketty argues income is increasingly taken by the productive: As he shows on page 200 of his book capital’s share of national income has fallen about 40% from 1850 to 2010 despite a substantial real savings ratio. Piketty argues the productive avoid taxes making inequality greater. According to the ONS the top 10% of income earners pay 39 times more income tax than the average of the other 90%.

Redistribution is materially greater than increased taxes and capital’s falling share of income would suggest. Capital and the entrepreneur have created almost all of the growth in income. The hairdresser has not changed his productivity but has seen his real income grow. The farm workers who produce vastly more than 200 years ago, only do so because of the inventions and innovations of capitalists and entrepreneurs. While he drives a combine harvester he has not improved his skills, capitalists and entrepreneurs taught him how to use their inventions and better processes. Workers work ever fewer less strenuous hours, retiring earlier and nevertheless receive an ever increasing real income.

Piketty argues that the private capital to income ratio has grown materially to about 6, that its distribution is very skewed and government’s capital is zero, all as evidence of the inexorability of ever greater inequality. However, government has vast wealth in the form of the net present value of the tax flows they receive (and expect to receive in the future) to which he ascribes no value. But these flows are worth about 40x national income.

Even if he is correct about private wealth, the overall wealth of society is quite evenly distributed—the government’s 40 is increasingly devoted to welfare (and might usefully be imagined as de facto belonging to those who expect to receive it in the form of welfare and state provision of goods), redistributing from those who earned it to the rest of society. The capital value of transfers to a hypothetical individual who chooses to never work and relies entirely on the state is likely to be in the region of £1.5m.

Is the UK too equal or too unequal?

Whether the UK is too unequal or too equal is not something that actually has a certain answer. Sure, we can posit that some of the things we do to reduce inequality might make us all poorer (and some of the things we do do) but what is the "right" amount of inequality is something that's up to the moral precepts of each observer.

However, what we can do is make sure that we understand how much inequality there actually is. That figure above comes from here. My thanks to Christie Malry for pointing it out. And yes, of course the ONS is telling us the truth here. It might well be that you think that the original inequality in the UK is unfair, something that should be changed. That the top 20% have 15 times the income of the bottom 20%. But do note that things are indeed done to change this. So much so that the final inequality, after all taxes and benefits are accounted for, is only 4 to 1. It's even possible to think that this is still too high but everyone should be able to agree that it's very different from 15:1.

Malry has named my repeated insistence that this difference matters "Worstall's Fallacy". We can't make decisions on whether we should be doing more about something unless we look at the effects upon whatever it is of what we're already doing. We need to know how much we're already changing income inequality before we can demand that more (or less) be done. The same is true of wealth inequality, people living under the poverty line, even the concept of the Living Wage (where the only difference between that Living Wage and the current minimum wage is the amount that we shamefully tax off those earning low wages). We muct look at the current end result before deciding upon any future action. BTW, the TUC did a very similar exercise a couple of years back but looking at the top and bottom 10%s rather than quntiles. Inequality of market income dropped from 30:1 to 6:1 in their results.

We already do a great deal to reduce income inequality in the UK. And the only way we can possibly decide upon what to do next is by acknowledging that fact and discussing whether, after all of the taxes and benefits, we have too much or too little income inequality.

Equality: as cheap as 50p?

Peter Oborne argues that Ed Balls' pledge to raise the 45p top tax rate back up to 50p is a good idea. While the extremely high marginal rates (top main rate 83%, plus a 15% surcharge for "unearned income") of the 1960s and '70s might have been driven by "socialist envy", George Osborne's dropping the rate from 50p to 45p in was "profoundly shaming and offensive", Oborne contends. This is because, echoing Stanley Baldwin and his brand of Toryism, the conservatives should represent the whole country, not the rich or any other factional interest.

Apparently the Coalition has "devoted a great deal of effort to lowering the living standards of the poor", and this move to "make the rich richer" is inappropriate when the poor are getting poorer. I contend this by arguing that inequality is down to 90s levels under chancellor Osborne, while the worst-off in society are the only group to actually see their living standards improve the since the recession hit. And the (ugly, unpleasant, and regrettable) attitudes that have emerged towards benefits claimants are probably driving government rhetoric in that area, rather than vice versa.

In general, it annoys me when a columnist writes something apparently trading on what everyone just knows. Sometimes the common view is incorrect. Funnily enough, politics is the area where people err most profoundly and with the most regularity. And I would argue that Oborne is trading on falsehoods in his piece; would it still be a coherent argument if it started with the factual premise that inequality in the UK fell back below its 1997-8 low in 2011-12, 0.34 measured by the GINI coefficient? That the top 10% of earners endured the biggest blow to their incomes since the onset of the recession? And that the bottom 10% by income were the only one to see a rise in living standards taking inflation into account? I don't think so.

The IFS reports I link above predict that by 2015-16 inequality will rise back to roughly its pre-recession level, so perhaps Oborne could refocus his attack on the future inequality Osborne possibly has a hand in. But in all likelihood there is probably little the government can do about inequality over the long-term, caused as it is by very fundamental trends and robust as it is to institutions even such as the USSR's. Most of the extra inequality since the 60s and 70s has come from couples engaging in much more assortative mating. And very long-term trends are mainly dominated by heritability of social class—those with Norman surnames are 28% more likely than a random sample of similar others to get an Oxford place.

Old Economy Steven would have been better off now

An interesting essay from Chris Maisano over at Jacobin Magazine drifts over many topics—full employment, growth since the 1970s and neoliberalism, worker activism and the 40-hour week. Its essential case is that full employment is important, because it makes workers better off in lots of ways, including giving them more leisure time. There are some interesting points in the piece, and I agree that full-ish employment is an important goal, but overall I think it rests on a huge number of misconceptions—indeed data is used in very weird ways, with what I see as obvious questions left entirely uninterrogated.

Maisano points to the "Old Economy Steven" meme, which looks back to an idealised post-war era:

Steven pays his yearly tuition at a state college—with his savings from his summer job! He graduates with a liberal arts degree—and actually finds suitable entry-level employment! ... But Steven doesn't just enjoy the material comforts of Old Economy abundance. He possesses a degree of everyday power scarcely imaginable by working people today. Steven can tell his boss to shove it, walk out and get hired at the factory across the street.

The contrast with popular views about today's economy, at least since the recession, is obvious. But full employment policies have been demoted—indeed since the late 1970s and especially since central bank independence most developed countries have centred their macroeconomic policies around stable inflation, not high employment. In fact, central banks now see a Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) as the optimal situation. But is this an "ideological response" as Maisano suggests?

There will always be some unemployment, from the numerous supply side restrictions on labour, and from job switching, especially with sectoral shifts. Inducing unexpected inflation can temporarily take unemployment below this "natural" level, for example through money illusion—where workers think nominal pay is actually real pay—but it is unsustainable. Once unions and individual workers compute this level of demand growth into their calculations the natural rate will return and the monetary authorities will need to push inflation yet higher to subvert this equilibrium.

Many economists, including Milton Friedman, argue that something like this caused the rampant, out of control inflation of the 1970s, something that was only reigned in by harsh recessions in both the UK and USA (attempting to control wages and prices was an abject failure everywhere). Acknowledging this means acknowledging that aiming for unemployment as close as possible to zero is a bad idea; it is better to aim for the lowest level of unemployment achievable without acceleration inflation. It's certainly possible to argue that monetary policymakers have failed to do this—but it hardly seems like a specifically ideological development, more like progress in economics.

A second sticking point is how growth has declined since neo-liberalism replaced the post-war consensus as the dominant political framework in at least the US and UK. This is true. But it's also true that every developed country saw a growth slowdown in the 80s and 90s relative to the post-war era. Economic historians are divided on the causes but since the most neo-liberal countries grew much faster than the more left-leaning states, one'd be hard placed to see that as a key cause. But even though growth has slowed down it has not stopped—and despite a few bumps we are much much richer today than in the 1970s. Just think, if had the opportunity to be whizzed to the 1970s to have the same standard of living as someone in your income percentile did then, would you?

My third disagreement is on hours worked. Maisano heavily implies that the consistently looser labour markets since the 1960s and 1970s have resulted in workers forced to work longer hours. He's clearly looked at the numbers, since he compares the US's average 1,778 in 2010 (1,742 on the FRED numbers I've seen) worked unfavourably to "continental European and the Scandinavian social democracies". But is that a germane comparison? To me it seems like the best way to compare the wellbeing of workers now, following decades of neo-liberalism and below-full-employment, and workers then, is to directly compare them. On average, during the 1970s, an employed person worked 1,859 hours (in 1970 it was 1,912 hours), in the ten years up to and including 2011 the average was 1,772.9. Maybe Maisano believes that with a greater focus on full employment incomes would have grown even more and hours would have fallen even faster—but if he thought that maybe he should say it.

The ideal welfare system is a basic income

The British government spends more on welfare than it does on anything else apart from healthcare. The benefits system is arcane and unwieldy, a mish-mash of disparate attempts to address different social problems in a piecemeal fashion. It creates perverse incentives for those on it, such as people stuck in a ‘benefits trap’ where they lose almost as much money in benefits by working as they are earning, and distorts entire markets by inflating prices, as housing benefit does to the housing market.

Most people agree that the system is broken, though solutions differ. The Universal Credit is a fundamentally good idea that is failing because of the difficulty of implementing successful piecemeal reforms to a system as complicated as benefits in the UK, and will ultimately probably not succeed in the way its architects intend because it doesn’t go far enough. Other aspects of the government’s welfare policies, like the work programme, are completely wrong-headed – telling other people how to live their lives is a bad idea because the government is extremely ignorant. That ignorance doesn’t change just because the person being told what to do is on benefits.

The ideal welfare system is a basic income, replacing the existing anti-poverty programmes the government carries out (tax credits and most of what the Department for Work and Pensions does besides pensions and child benefit). This would guarantee a certain income to people who have no earnings from work at all, and would gradually be tapered out according to earnings for people who do have an income until the tax-free allowance point, at which point they would begin to be taxed.

For example, we could set a basic income of £10,000/year by using a cut-off point of £20,000/year, and withdrawal rate of 50%. The basic income supplement would be equal to 50% of the difference between someone’s earnings from work and the £20,000 cut-off point. A person with no earnings would get a basic income of £10,000/year; a person who earned £10,000/year would get a supplementary income of £5,000; a person on £15,000/year would get a supplementary income of £2,500; and a person on £20,000 would get nothing (and begin paying tax on the next pound they earned).

These numbers are representative: no need to tell me that £10,000 is too low or too high. What matters is the mechanism.

This has also been called a Negative Income Tax, usually by advocates on the right like Milton Friedman, but language aside the concepts are basically the same. As a side-note, I think basic incomes that are not tapered out are a complete waste of money, redistributing lots of money to people on high and middle incomes unnecessarily. It amazes me that this anti-progressive approach seems to be popular among some on the left. The exception would be if this flat-rate payment replaced the entire welfare state, as Tim Harford mentions in his column today and Charles Murray proposed some time ago.

Like the current benefits system, this would provide a safety net. But ‘benefits traps’, where people lose as much in benefits as they earn from work, would be eliminated. A basic income system like this would be at least as clear as the PAYE income tax system is, and substantially clearer than the current benefits system. The dog’s breakfast of welfare schemes that currently exist – all to address the symptoms of poverty, rather than the root – would be abolished, and with it the jumble of unanticipated and often undiscernable interactions between schemes that lead to perverse outcomes.

Best of all, a basic income is the least paternalistic welfare scheme possible. Instead of pushing would-be computer programmers into work as Poundland assistants, a scheme like this would leave decisions entirely up to the individuals involved. The discovery process that each of us is engaged in would continue, and now without mass decision-making by a central state authority.

I don’t know what amount a basic income like this should actually be set at. That would be an interesting and useful debate — what do we need for a basic standard of living? What appeals to me is the principle. Ditching most of the DWP, creating a welfare system that never discourages work, and letting people live their lives as they choose? Now that’s a welfare programme I could get behind.

Mean medians

The US Census Bureau has just released a major publication "Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012" that has set much of the US political and economic blogosphere alight. "The incomes of the middle class have stagnated!" they cry, pointing to a statistic that shows the median household income in 2012 down from a real terms peak of $56,080 in 1999 to its pre-recession peak of $55,628 in 2007, to a measly $51,017 last year. That means the median has grown just 3% since 1991, when the last major recession hit the bottom. On the headline measure, incomes are actually below 1989.

I do not doubt that the middle classes (and the poor!) have been hit hard by the recession (although in the UK the story might not work in exactly the same way). But to tell this as a general story of middle-class decline seems to be stretching it massively. I don't just mean because we can now use excellent services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on for free. Having said that, I think Tyler Cowen massively undercounts the importance of free internet services—we now have near-instant, cheap or free access to basically the entirety of human artistic output. A proper measure of consumption or income that included these would give a much more optimistic result.

Still, this isn't my key point. We use median statistics because incomes are very unequally distributed—the US had a Gini coefficient of 0.463 in 2012, while the UK's was 0.32 in 2011-12. A mean (like GDP/capita) does not tell us anything about how gains are distributed, it just tells us how big the gains have been, compared to the size of the population. A median, showing us the middle point, is less easily skewed. But a median can still be extremely misleading under certain circumstances.

One of those circumstances, and an empirically highly relevant one, is when there is mass immigration to a country. According to one official dataset and my simple calculations, legal inward migration to the US was 13m between the 1999 peak and 2011 (inclusive). Presumably illegal migrants aren't counted in the figures, but for completeness we might note they seem to number more than 12m. If we assume that inward migration is typically lower skilled than the US population as a whole (which seems highly plausible), then it's entirely possible that a median falls while every individual in the population becomes much richer. Indeed, this is particularly true if outward migration is largely made of particularly high-skilled people (which also seems plausible). The income per natural concept, developed for a different reason, but relevant, is the number we'd want to check to look at the real trends in incomes when the make-up of the population is changing significantly.

Immigrants to the USA have much higher incomes than they had before. US citizens' incomes also rise, not just because migration boosts their wages but also because of the general effects of economic growth—GDP/capita is significantly up on 1989, 1991 or any of dates picked to generate shocking income statistics. Everyone is better off, but the statistics need not reflect that. Of course, since I haven't picked the statistics apart absolutely conclusively, I can't say for sure that this effect is actually driving the divergence between apparent prosperity for US middle classes and the statistics implying penury. But of course, without that level of digging, neither can the het up US wonks.

Curbing payday lending is a fool's errand

As the ethical debate around ‘payday loans’ continues, local councils have begun to rally against these lenders. Plymouth Council recently became the first local authority in Britain to ban payday companies from advertising across their billboards and bus shelters, while other councils are looking at following suit.  Councils such as Plymouth City, Newcastle, Dundee and Cheshire East have also already blocked access to the top 50 payday loan websites across their public networks of buildings, libraries and  community centers.

This is partially a response to the Office of Fair Trading’s (OFT) report citing widespread regulatory non-compliance throughout the industry, including a prevalence of irresponsible lending. Whilst the new Financial Conduct Authority is soon to start a consultation over beefing-up industry regulation, the OFT has also instructed the Competition Commission (CC) to look for evidence of any prevention, restriction or distortion of competition within the industry. Last week, the CC announced they would be studying the market for evidence of  “impediments to customer’s ability to search, switch and identify the best value product” and any “significant barriers to [firm’s] successful entry or expansion”.

The CC is probably expecting any anti-competitive behavior to stem from firm’s actions or the market’s structure. However, by restricting consumer’s access to information and erecting new barriers to entry, local councils are themselves making the market anti-competitive.

Blocking payday websites in public buildings means that those needing public internet to research loans are prevented from exploring the range of options open to them. These are generally the people most likely to benefit from discovering lower rates of repayment and flexible deals — and the kind of vulnerable people the council’s actions are designed to protect. Furthermore, banning advertising is simply likely to entrench the market share of current top providers who have an established image — regardless of the merits of other companies. The FCA is currently contemplating a cigarette-style nationwide ban on payday loan advertising , which would further compound this problem. Council’s actions may be designed to hurt the loan companies, but they end up harming consumers too.

It is interesting to see what, if anything, the CC will say about this impediment to effective competition. Given current public opinion it seems likely that any action taken to obstruct the publically-defined ‘predatory’ loan companies is here to stay, even if it were to negatively impact on the most vulnerable.

Instead of banning adverts and adding tighter regulation — both of which are designed to make it harder for these payday companies to operate — there are more effective ways to address the rise of payday loans.

Whilst currently only a small source of finance Credit Unions provide a viable and ethical alternative to payday lenders. However, they currently face a monthly interest cap of 2% and are often a loss-making venture. Easing the restrictions on Credit Unions would better allow them to make profits, grow in scope and effectively compete with payday companies.

Secondly, making the benefits system simpler would provide some with greater financial certainty and could eliminate some of the reasons for resorting to a quick loan.  A benefits system better at tracking changes in people’s situations would reduce the delays people face to get the correct benefits and would reduce the number of people having to pay back over- payments. Similarly, tapering the withdrawal rate of benefits in a gradual way would ensure that people entering work aren’t suddenly hit with unexpected surprises and bills.

Tackling what we deem a worrying trend in society doesn’t always require bans and regulation. It is possible to create alternatives to payday loans and reduce the need to use them without demonizing or blaming the lenders themselves.

The poverty we can relieve

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has a new report out today that takes a look at living costs for the poor and the cost of achieving a 'socially acceptable standard of living' in modern Britain. The report continues their excellent approach to poverty measurement, which looks at the cost of a basket of goods that most people would consider necessary to have a decent standard of living.

This approach is very reasonable, and does a good job of contextualising domestic poverty without being led to the sort of absurdities of straightforward relative poverty measures, which, for example, "improve" every time someone wealthy goes bankrupt or leaves the country. The JRF’s method is quite a neat combination of the best elements of relative and absolute measures of poverty.

It's important to remember that poor people in the UK are still very rich by global standards. But that's not to say that their problems aren't still important and worth trying to solve by allowing more wealth to be created. There are some things we can do to help people in poor countries, such as removing barriers to trade and migration, which would also be good for poor people in the UK, but that shouldn’t stop us caring about relatively less poor people in the UK.

The JRF is right to highlight the fact that rises to the cost of living hit the poorest the hardest. I think it's probably a mistake, however, for anyone to assume that benefits cuts are the main causes of the living standards squeeze for the poor. They might be a factor in declining or stagnating incomes (not as much as the overall economic climate, though), but they don't explain why the cost of living is rising so rapidly.

Paradoxically, things like 'affordable housing' requirements can actually end up hurting people in need of affordable housing. They disincentivise higher-end developments and cause the demand for those homes to be pent-up in the existing housing stock – so, in other words, instead of building new houses for the rich, existing affordable homes are converted to accommodate them, reducing available units for people who need cheaper homes. Liberalizing the planning system so that supply can meet demand would do a lot to reduce the cost of living for the poor.

I also think it's crazy and inhumane that we tax minimum wage workers so much. A full time worker on NMW earning just under £13,000 a year will have to pay more than £1,300 of that in tax. That's a scandal.

And of course a lot of the problems facing people on low incomes are due to the overall economic climate. If Mark Carney really does implement a nominal GDP target, the resulting economic recovery and job creation will mitigate some of the worst problems facing people at the bottom of British society.

Think Piece: Good and bad arguments against positive discrimination

The US Supreme Court has just left one Texan affirmative action scheme in place, but it has recently busted schemes elsewhere. I discuss what libertarians should think about positive discrimination and affirmative action.

Many of the arguments libertarians make against affirmative action/positive discrimination do not hold. For example, it neither needs to interfere with equality before the law, nor does it need to imposed by state coercion. And in its favour, affirmative action may be one way to overcome some of unjust forms on inequality in our society. On the other hand, it is clearly not even close to the best way of dealing with unjust inequality. And some evidence suggests that these schemes actually hurt those they are designed to help. But without sufficient evidence perhaps the best short-term approach is to allow universities to experiment with their admissions process, so they can among them discover the best approach.

Read the whole thing.