Why does the son rise?

John Cochrane recently gave a speech where one of the main threads involved talking down the importance of income and wealth inequality. Poverty, and generally not having as much as we would like are bad, he says, but is there anything bad about inequality per se? That is: is there at least one respect in which things would be better if some people who are very well off were made worse off? He argues that there isn't, or if there is, it is of only trivial importance, and outweighed by all of the costs of actually 'doing something' about inequality.

In a response on Bloomberg View, Noah Smith argued that economists should respect people's actual preferences, and since people show strong preferences against wealth and income inequality, we should respect them. He uses the example of how people prefer to take nothing over free money when they are made offers they perceive as 'unfair' in the Ultimatum Game. On top of that, he says, inequality leads to socio-political unrest, which we can all agree is very bad and costly, citing a 1993 paper.

Finally, Tony Yates adds some extra arguments on his blog. He says luck has a big role to play in success, but success can also buy some of the non-luck factors in success (e.g. education), meaning that it can 'set off path dependence'—according to Yates this can lead to inefficient outcomes by distorting the allocation of talent. He says inequality reduces public good provision (e.g. education—although I'm not sure that is really a public good). And he says that inequality might make 'crony capitalism' more likely.

I've written twice about equality before: once saying that Rawlsian-style justice demands inequality of wealth/income in certain very relevant circumstances; another time arguing that Hayekian-style information economics militates towards equality of wealth. There are lots more things to say in this debate, but here I intend to take issue only with one of Yates' claims: the idea that luck + path-dependence means inequality is passed down through the generations (I can't see why exactly he thinks this distorts the allocation of talent, but here I'm only questioning the mechanism).

Luck is certainly a huge factor in success. And people do pay big money for better education to try and make sure their kids are more likely to succeed. But does this work? Let's look at some studies. Random selection into a better school in Beijing has no effect, random selection into a better school in Chicago has close to no effect, random selection into a better Kenyan school has no effect, nor does it in Missouri, nor in New York City. Once you control for student characteristics, Australian private schools didn't outperform state schools on the 2009 PISA. Conscription into extra education didn't much affect life outcomes in late 1970s France. In 1950s England, going to an elite school made no difference to a youth's job market outcomes. The literature is huge and there are many many more examples.

And other literatures point to the same conclusion. For example, we now know that the heritability of intelligence increases through life (to hit around 50-90% in adulthood), while 'shared environment'—upbringinging, parental inputs and schooling—falls to around zero. This is supported by traditional twin studies, twins reared apart studies, adoption studies, and now whole-genome analysis.

So it should not be surprising that it's actually really really really really hard to make sure your descendants stay rich with the proceeds of luck. In fact, we know that that's not why the descendants of the rich often are rich because we have a couple of pretty good experiments showing it! For example:

We track descendants of those eligible to win in Georgia’s Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, which had nearly universal participation among adult white males. Winners received close to the median level of wealth – a large financial windfall orthogonal to parents’ underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children’s human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than non-winners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

The same is true for modern lottery winners—the truest example of pure luck in success. And it took only two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up with the much more advantaged & wealthy free blacks. Whether rich parents split an inheritance between eighteen kids or one, their grandkids are equally rich. Basically luck mixed with path dependance explains almost nothing.

Copyright reform is not a joke

Yesterday was a good day for mischief-makers, for it saw an amendment in the law to permit the use of copyrighted material 'for the purposes of parody, caricature or pastiche' without having to first seek permission from the rights holder.

Indeed as if to celebrate, the infamous Cassetteboy released a (NSFW!) glorious mash-up as a homage to our dear PM in the form of Cameron's Conference Rap.

Given so much of the great British humour, it's bizarre to think that permissionless piss-taking has up to now been verboten. Tools like parody and caricature are part of our cultural heritage, used to make important political statements and hold the powerful to account just as much as they are employed for light relief. Nevertheless sketchwriters for the BBC and student drama societies alike have had think carefully about their work or else risk court action, whilst takedown and infringement notices litter the remix, remake channels of YouTube.

This exemption allows copyright law to better reflect people's actual habits and cultural opinions. It also lends intellectual property regimes a greater overall legitimacy, which could prove valuable when encouraging behavioural changes and in tackling issues like piracy.

It will enhance our cultural commons, thanks to the new (and newly-legitimized) avenues of expression and unleashed creativity. Lifting the restriction on social and commercial innovation will also yield economic benefits, with the government's Hargreaves Review suggesting that it could boost the economy by between £130-650m per annum.

Works will still be subject to the 'fair dealing' criteria, which only allows for a limited amount amount of a copyrighted material to be used. No doubt this will prove problematic at times- for example, do Downfall parodies involve only a limited amount of the original film? Copyright holders will still also be able to legally challenge a work for infringement, then requiring the artist to prove in court that their work is in fact actually side-splittingly hilarious or a devastating work of satire.

Depressingly, as insignificant as the exemption seems, it is one of the very few pieces of sensible copyright policy to emerge in recent years (and it still took the ORG 9 years of campaigning to achieve it). Modern copyright law is beyond a parody. It is overlong, over-broad, a drain on resources and a chill on innovation. It is no longer a vehicle to foster creativity, but a monster caused by rent-seeking and lobbying by vested interests. And the excessive, damaging ideas - from extending copyright further, to imposing harsher criminal sanctions on infringers and threatening search engines with anti-piracy legislation - continue.

There are a number ways in which we could radically reform copyright law whilst maintaining the commercial incentives to create (many of which are for another blog!)  However, given the number of international agreements on intellectual property the UK is signed up to, the gradual expansion of 'fair dealing' exceptions (say, to cover all non-commercial uses of copyrighted work) could be the most politically viable way of reducing the deadweight loss caused by current copyright laws.

Even this seems like a long-shot though, particularly given how long it has taken to get such a reasonable exemption applied. Copyright laws might be a farce, but they certainly aren't very funny.

The latest attempt from the booze wowsers

We do love this latest attempt at justifying minimum alcohol prices:

Minimum alcohol pricing of 45 pence per unit would be 50 times more effective in targetting harmful drinking than current policies which only ban the selling of alcohol as a loss leader, research suggests.

Really?

Researchers at the University of Sheffield compared the effects of the two policies on public health using a mathematical model alongside General Lifestyle Survey data to estimate changes in alcohol consumption, spending, and related health harms among adults.

What did that model look at?

In their findings, published by bmj.com, they estimated that below cost selling would increase the price of just 0.7 per cent of alcohol units sold in England, whereas a minimum unit pricing of 45p would increase the price of 23.2 per cent of units sold.

They estimated that below cost selling would reduce harmful drinkers' mean annual consumption by just 0.08 per cent - or around three units per year. By contrast, a 45 pence minimum unit price would reduce consumption by 3.7 per cent or 137 units a year - a 45 times greater effect.

So they plugged the price change into their estimate of the elasticity of demand and found that....wait for it, wait for it....higher prices reduce demand and or consumption?

Gosh, do we really need a team of highly trained and expensive alcohol researchers to tell us that?

Unfortunately this latest paper fails to tell us the three things we'd actually like to know about minimum alcohol pricing.

This first being should we be attempting to reduce consumption in the first place? Current levels of booze taxation more than cover the public costs of boozing. There are, indeed, substantial private costs remaining: but those are being carried by the people doing the boozing which is just where they should be. Is there actually a reason or justification left for public policy action in this case?

The second is whether that rise in prices actually reduces harmful drinking, or just deters the occasional tippler from a small pleasure. There is, after all, fairly convincing evidence that the addict will always feed their addiction while the diletante is more amenable to price signals.

And thirdly, even if the above can be answered in a manner that leads to our wanting to increase the price, why on earth would anyone want to have minimum pricing? Not only is it illegal under EU law but it puts the extra cash into the hands of the retailers and manufacturers. Rather than into the Treasury as would be the case if prices were raised through higher taxation.  Minimum alcohol pricing just doesn't make sense.

A reminder to Bill of Rights drafters: all we need is one right

"It's not just the European Union that needs sorting out," UK Prime Minister David Cameron told his Party Conference this week, "it's the European Court of Human Rights." This is not the first time he has said that: he said it to the judges' faces a couple of years back, at the ECHR's gleaming headquarters in leafy Strasbourg. They were not overly impressed. But his audience this week thinks he is spot on, and most people in the UK probably agree. The ECHR is not an EU body but emerged out of the postwar European Convention on Human Rights. In other words, no Parliament agreed to it, no British citizen voted for it, no Prime Minister signed a treaty authorizing its power. Like Topsy, it 'just growed.'

We are all in favour of human rights, of course, but countries disagree on exactly what those rights should be and how they should be enforced. The UK, in particular, has a very different legal tradition from other European countries – one that has served them a long time, and which they are justly proud of. But being empowered to overturn the decision of the courts in the UK and other countries, the ECHR is effectively imposing one legal regime – a judge-led regime – on everyone.

But why do we want the law of different countries to be identical? We can learn a lot from different countries running their affairs in different ways, then looking to see which way is preferable. Imposing a single legal view on a large number of countries prevents that learning from taking place.

And why should an unelected body deign to override the decisions of different countries' courts and legislators anyway? Originally, the plan was that the ECHR would simply influence governments to 'do the right thing'. But now, though it has no democratic legitimacy, it can override the decisions of UK courts and elected UK representatives. So in effect, law is being made by ECHR judges, and countries like the UK are bound by its decisions. That, as Lord Judge pointed out, gives us "a very serious problem with sovereignty".

That is a particularly serious problem when a country thinks that its entire security is at risk. More than once, the ECHR stopped the deportations of suspects to face serious charges, including terrorism and genocide charges, to face trial overseas. Indeed, the ECHR has stopped deportations of foreign nationals already found guilty of serious offences abroad. Often, the grounds for such decisions have been the UK family ties of the accused, or their 'right' to the UK's generous healthcare system. But what really got ministers' goat was the Court's blocking, for a long time, of the deportation of the radical Abu Qatada, wanted on terrorism charges in Jordan.

So now, the UK is to have its own new Bill of Rights, passed by Parliament. Actually, our old one, dating from 1689, has served us pretty well. I only hope that in drafting the new Bill, ministers do not fall for the nonsense perpetrated in the postwar settlement – things like the 'right' to free education. Because every right is someone else's responsibility to provide. You can be sure that every lobby group will be out there, campaigning for 'rights' to this or that or the other, all at taxpayers' expense of course, to be included in the Bill.

But in fact, all we need is one right - the right to be left alone without other people, and especially governments, pushing us around.

If Mr Cameron calls, I will gladly give him a draft.

Greenpeace really is getting desperate here

Desperate in the sense that they're now claiming that if the people whose lives get disrupted by fracking get a share of the money from fracking then this would be bribery. Rather than what we might normally call it, compensation:

Jim Ratcliffe, the 61-year-old industrialist who founded the chemical giant Ineos, is promising to hand more than 6% of future shale gas revenues to those sitting on the reserves or affected by their extraction, in an effort to replicate efforts in the US where shale gas has created scores of new millionaires. The situation in America contrasts starkly with that of the UK, where efforts to develop the controversial new energy source have been delayed by landowners, environmental groups and the planning system.

Simon Clydesdale, UK energy campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “This is just more of the same bribes and bulldozers approach that has already proved a failure. With one hand the fracking industry goads the government into steamrolling people’s right to oppose fracking under their homes, with the other it offers cash incentives.

“The industry forgets people have legitimate concerns about fracking that won’t be easily assuaged by cash sweeteners."

It's all very Dave Spart isn't it?

Leaving the Trotskyist Hippies aside the interesting part of this is that we seem to have reversed, to some extent, the nationalisation of fossil fuel reserves that happened many decades ago. It's a standard of landowning law that the landowner owns the minerals underneath it. Except for gold and solver and then later we added fossil fuels to the list nationalised. Given that there would therefore be no benefit to landowners of fracking under their land there's been a certain resistance to allowing it.

However, the government has lowered the tax rate on gas and oil brought up through fracking: allowing that Coasean bargain to be struck again between the drillers and the landowners. There's now room in the sums for compensation to be offered: and thus compensation is being offered.

Politics: It's a funny old game

Is there anything more off-putting to people outside the Westminster Bubble than witnessing the carnival of party conference season? If you don’t support a party, you’ll be as perplexed as an ornithologist at the Manchester derby. Everywhere you turn, discussions rage about the latest transfer news with rumours of the latest Conservative MPs to migrate to Ukip, and tactics discussed in intricate detail about how to defeat the opposition. You'll even hear chanting: “Five more years!”

The football analogy can only be stretched so far though. While support for football clubs remains as popular as ever, people are becoming less interested in political parties – at least the top three:

“Membership of the three main political parties is at a historic low: less than 1% of the UK electorate is now a member of the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat Party, compared to 3.8% in 1983. Latest estimates suggest that the Conservative Party claimed 134,000 members, the Labour Party 190,000 and the Liberal Democrat Party 44,000.”

And don’t expect this to change any time soon: Less than a third of young people express interest in politics, according to a recent ONS survey. It found that only 31% of 16 to 24-year-olds were fairly or very interested in the subject.

This decrease in interest in established parties and politics is offset by one trend though – a growing interest in small parties:

“[M]embership of smaller, often nationalist parties has risen markedly since the new millennium. In June 2014 membership of the UK Independence Party was around 39,000; in September 2014 membership of the Scottish National Party was around 64,000; in December 2013 membership of the Green Party was around 14,000. Though none of these parties can claim to equal either the Conservatives or Labour in size, their rise nonetheless represents a notable change in the make-up of the UK’s political landscape.”

There is plenty wrong with all major political parties, but there is a lot more wrong with these smaller parties. Ukip represents the worst of Little Englanders and the SNP the worst of Little Scotlanders. The Green Party has a more international outlook, but one in which the entire globe returns to a utopic state of nature; a time where our lives were very nasty, very brutish and all too short.”

In the long run, I don’t think this matters very much. In Britain, our lives – from money to morals – will increasingly become disconnected from political decisions. The next generation is more open to others doing what makes them happy, while Bitcoin and blockchain technology offers the prospect of capital accumulation and exchange without the state. This, in part, might be why so few young people care about politics. But whether or not tolerance and tech trumps politics, we have a few elections between now and then; elections where the result will greatly impact the wealth and happiness of us all.

So what can be done? You don’t necessarily need to rush out and join a political party, but I think we would benefit from smarter, more open-minded people in politics and the policy process. For example, we know immigration is a hot topic, but we should also know that removing all barriers to migration throughout the world is calculated to increase global GDP by between 67% and 147.3%. This isn't going to happen, but it should be the sort of data to inspire a generation. Perhaps not Steven Woolfe's generation though; Ukip’s spokesman on migration and financial affairs thinks we should cap net immigration at 50,000 per year.

It might not be rational or feel particularly empowering to vote but occasional elections aren’t the only way of engaging in politics and policy. For example, if you're a student on a gap year, you could apply to work for the Adam Smith Institute.

The game of politics isn’t always beautiful but the key players influence the result – even if they aren’t sitting in the House of Commons.

Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.

Are the markets wrong about CEO pay and the recovery?

CEO pay has risen by 937% since 1978 in the US, compared to a rise of just 10.2% for the average American worker, according to a centre-left American think tank. That feels like markets must be wrong, but as Scott Sumner points out, when market decisions and our intuitions clash, we're often the ones at fault:

CEO pay has been controversial for two reasons. It has risen very rapidly in recent years, and it often seems unlinked to performance. But pay is very closely linked to expected performance, which matters when contracts are signed. A few months ago Steve Ballmer resigned as CEO of Microsoft and the stock rose by billions of dollars. More recently, Larry Ellison (sort of) stepped aside from Oracle, and the stock plunged by billions of dollars. This shows that CEOs have a huge impact of stock valuations. Whether the market is rational in believing that is a trickier question, but it's the job of corporate boards to put people in place that will maximize shareholder value. That means they need to at least try to get the very best, even if it costs a lot of money in terms of higher salary. If they aren't paying obscene salaries then the board of directors isn't doing its job.

Back in the 1960s, corporate decisions were much easier. You allocated capital to new auto factories, steel mills, appliance makers, and churned out product for which you knew consumers were waiting. Even IBM was fairly predictable for a time. In contrast, a modern CEO at a high tech firm might find the company quickly destroyed by new technology if he doesn't keep on his or her toes. Think how much Sony would have benefited in the past 10 years if it had had the Samsung management team. Perhaps an extra $100 billion in shareholder wealth? And that's also why the finance sector is so much more important today, decisions over where to allocate capital are both more difficult and much more important.

In other words, CEO pay may have risen a lot because CEOs matter a lot more, relative to the average worker, than they did in 1978. You could just deny this, because nobody is 'worth more' than others, and so on, but that's an emotionally biased response. In terms of cold, hard cash, people are worth different amounts.

The market's valuation of CEOs might turn out to be wrong, of course – markets misjudged the future returns of a lot of assets in the run-up to 2008, but then, so did virtually everyone else. The question is what, in a world where anyone can be wrong, we can look to as the least-bad way of collecting and judging existent information.

Pundits on Twitter and in the media can make a living by being wrong. Look at, say, the Guardian's editorial writers or, if you tend to agree with them, the Telegraph's. Or look at any think tank – except us, of course. Or financial advisors. Pundits don't really suffer if they add 'noise' (a nice word for bullshit) to the sum of information that's out there, so it's hard to know if the pundit you're listening to is telling you what you want to hear, or what's actually true.

Markets – the people who make financial decisions that are aggregated in stock exchanges and the like – do. If you have a 'false belief' as a trader or business owner, you'll lose money; if you have enough false beliefs, you'll go bankrupt. And markets are utterly brutal in bankrupting people with false beliefs. We might have a good reason to ignore markets if we know something that they don't, but if that's the case, we should be making money from that private knowledge. Doing so will add that knowledge to the sum total of the market's knowledge.

This is why I'm an optimist. Lots of my friends and people I agree with on nine out of ten issues think that the markets are wrong and that some economic catastrophe is coming. If they're right, markets are wrong and they should be in line to make a lot of money (he said sarcastically).

So how can I judge? I look at who has more to lose, and who has a better track record. Through that lens, markets come out top – and my doomsaying friends sound just as biased as their opponents who just can't imagine why a CEO would be worth paying a lot.

An interesting little story about path dependence

There's no particular theoretical reason why the Burnley Miner's Social Club should be the world's largest consumer of the Benedictine liquer. There's also no theoretical reason why it shouldn't be: which is good for the fact is that it is. It's a useful reminder of two things, the first being path dependence:

A working men's club in the north of England is the world's biggest consumer of French Benedictine liqueur, downing 1,000 bottles a year of the alcoholic beverage.

The golden tipple has been a favourite at the Burnley miners' working men's social club for more than a century after being popular among soldiers who developed a taste for it during the First World War and drank it to keep warm.

Since then the drink has become a best seller at the 600-member club – which has even introduced a 'Bene Bomb' in a bid to keep it popular among the younger members.

There really isn't going to be any other 600 member club that gets through a 1,000 bottles a year of the stuff. The fist of our wider points being to point once again to the idea of path dependence. Things that happen today are often as they are because of some other thing that happened in the past. Perhaps the Dvorjak keyboard is better than he qwerty, perhaps it isn't, but the reason we don't use it today is because it definitely wasn't better with mechanical typewriters. Qwerty was deliberately designed, for purely mechanical reasons, to stop people typing too quickly. How we do things today is dependent upon things long irrelevant but important at the time we started the activity.

The second of course being that sometimes things just happen. You can see how the Benedictine story started: someone in one of those regiments got ahold of a bottle and told his mates how good it was. A century later it's still going on. The habit survives just because of that original happenstance and the social reinforcement of it over time. As with driving on the left or the right. Unlike Dvorjak there's no particular merit to either system, no basic reason to choose one or the other: and different places have chosen differently over the years (Sweden changed over from one to the other in, umm, the 1950s. Sadly, the story about the buses changing sides a week before the cars isn't true).

The world can make a lot more sense if we keep in mind that stuff really does just happen sometimes and the effects can be with us centuries later.

Should we legalise commercial mercenaries?

Vishal was the 2014 winner of the Adam Smith Institute’s Young Writer on Liberty competition. Commercial mercenary activities have been deemed illegal globally and have significantly dwindled in the 21st century. Legalisation may be useful in the short and long-term.

Currently, the extremist ISIS militants threaten to overthrow the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government requested assistance but limited support was offered. This is partly because we are reluctant to risk servicemens’ lives and spend money. For example, the American and British public may despise ISIS but lack the will to send their own servicemen on such an endeavour; Mercenaries could negotiate their assistance in the conflict for money, debt, natural resources etc. This prevents risking servicemens’ lives and costing taxpayers.

In The Anatomy of the State, Murray Rothbard wrote that wars fought with mercenaries were shorter and had fewer casualties. He quotes the jurist F.J.P Veale who claims that “civilized warfare” flourished briefly in 15th century Italy: “the rich burghers and merchants of medieval Italy were too busy making money and enjoying life to undertake the hardships and dangers of soldiering themselves. So they adopted the practice of hiring mercenaries to do their fighting for them, and, being thrifty, businesslike folk, they dismissed their mercenaries immediately after their services could be dispensed with. Wars were, therefore, fought by armies hired for each campaign… For the first time, soldiering became a reasonable and comparatively harmless profession. The generals of that period manoeuvred against each other… but when one had won the advantage, his opponent generally either retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized rule that a town could only be sacked if it offered resistance: immunity could always be purchased by paying a ransom… As one natural consequence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious that a government too weak to defend its citizens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had little to fear from dangers of war which were the concern only of professional soldiers.”

Finally, many NATO member-states are cutting defence spending and enemies have noticed. In future, NATO may find its defensive capabilities severely impaired when a war occurs and it may be difficult to compensate for this lost capacity at such short notice, especially when hostiles have been building their own forces in the meantime. Rushed conscription of civilians hardly compares to contracting seasoned warriors. In those circumstances, Governments struggling to fight public enemies can turn to mercenaries (even foreign ones if foreign governments don’t lend direct support) to pick up the slack.

The ASI is hiring paid gap year employees

The Adam Smith Institute is looking to hire two 18-19 year olds in between A-levels and university as paid gap year employees, working with the think tank on organising events, putting out publications, managing our database, handling merchandise, and running the office. The role is open to applicants of all political stripes (lively debate is welcomed), and they need have no specific experience. It is, however, crucial that the candidate is open-minded, inquisitive, friendly, eager to learn and curious about politics and think-tanking.

The specific duties will be split evenly across the two successful applicants, and will include:

☻Organising lunches and dinners ☻Keeping a database up to date ☻Selling ASI merchandise ☻Doing secretarial work for the directors ☻Setting up and cleaning up events ☻Mailing publications out to subscribers ☻Logging RSVPs for events ☻Supporting donor relations ☻Meeting a wide range of interesting & important people ☻Learning about social & political science ☻Socialising with the staff ☻Carrying out self-directed research ☻Writing blog posts

Previous interns have gone on to work with the Adam Smith Institute, including the ASI's current Research Director, Sam Bowman, and Head of Digital Policy, Charlotte Bowyer, who was a Gap Year intern in 2009-10.

The role will pay £700-1000/month (depending on experience), and is strictly limited to students on a gap year. It will last 2-9 months, starting from late October. All applicants will interview with President Madsen Pirie and Research Director Sam Bowman at the Adam Smith Institute offices in Westminster in mid-October and successful applicants will start from late October.

Please send a CV and cover letter of around 500 words to gapyear@old.adamsmith.org by 13th October