Clement Attlee's Lesson

Biteback Publishing have published a new biography of Clement Atlee.  Authored by Michael Jago, it explores what motivated Atlee and drove him to become one of the most influential of Labour Party leaders. Atlee had a remarkable record in putting through his programme.  In 6 years he achieved major structural reform of Britain's economy and society.  He is thus to be admired dispassionately as an effective Prime Minister.  What he also did was to teach us all an important lesson:  Socialism doesn't work.  While other European nations were renewing themselves after the destruction and exhaustion of a world war, Britain wallowed in nationalization and allowed its industries to stagnate and decay under state ownership and control.  He left a country impoverished, heading down a slope that left it diminished, impoverished and ineffective.  Only in 1979 did Britain begin to shake off his influence, change direction, and once again climb back to prosperity and significance.  Atlee left a legacy that lasted, it is true, but it was a legacy that left his country ruined for decades.

It was an important lesson, though, and one we learned again just 25 years ago when the Communist empire collapsed and left exposed not just the terror that had sustained it, but the squalor it had concealed for so long.  Socialism doesn't work and never has done because it goes against the grain of human nature and the desire of peoples to make free decisions that can improve their lives and better the lives of others in the process.

We can only hope that people will not only read the new book about Atlee, but that they will also remember the lesson and the years of suffering that it took to learn it.

A bankers’ ethics oath risks being seen as empty posturing

The suggestion put forward yesterday by ResPublica think-tank that we can restore consumer trust and confidence in the financial system, or prevent the next crisis by requiring bankers to swear an oath seems excessively naïve. Such a pledge trivializes the ethical issues that banks and their employees face in the real world.  It gives a false sense of confidence that implies that an expression of a few lines of moral platitudes will equip bankers to resist the temptations of short-term gain and rent-seeking behavior that are present in the financial services industry.

In fairness to ResPublica’s report on “Virtuous Baking” the bankers’ oath is just one of many otherwise quite reasonable proposals to address the moral decay that seems to be prevalent in some sections of the banking industry.

I don’t for a moment suggest that banking, or any other business for that matter, should not be governed by highest moral and ethical standards.  Indeed, the ResPublica report is written from Aristotelian ‘virtue theory’ perspective that could be applied as a resource for reforming the culture of the banking industry.  ‘Virtue theory’ recognizes that people’s needs are different and virtue in banking would be about meeting the diverse needs of all, not just the needs of the few.

The main contribution of the “Virtuous Banking” report is to bring the concepts of morality and ethical frameworks into public discourse.  Such discourse is laudable but we should be under no illusion that changing the culture of the financial services industry will be a long process. Taking an oath will not change an individual’s moral and ethical worldview or behaviour.  The only way ethical and moral conduct can be reintroduced back into the banking sector is if the people who work in the industry were to hold themselves intrinsically to the highest ethical and moral standards.

Bankers operate within tight regulatory frameworks; the quickest way to drive behavioural change is therefore through regulatory interventions.  However, banking is already the most regulated industry known to man and regulation has not produced any sustainable change in the banks’ conduct.  One of the key problems with prevailing regulatory paradigms is that regulation limits managerial choice to reduce risk in the banking system, rather than focuses on regulating the drivers for managerial decision-making.

Market-based regulations that do not punish excellence but incentivize bankers to seriously think through the risk-return implications of their business decisions, will be good for the financial services industry and the economy as a whole.  A regulatory approach that makes banks and bankers liable for their decisions and actions through mechanisms such as bonus claw-back clauses will be more effective in reducing moral hazard at the systemic level and improving individual accountability at the micro level than taking a “Hippocratic” bankers’ oath.

What joy, another entrant in the not-think tank stakes

We're just so terribly fortunate to have another entrant in the non-think tank stakes here in London. Welcome to Philip Blond and ResPublica! The last time we looked at these two and their proposals they were suggesting that this Social Credit idea from Major Douglas might be a good idea and then hinting that perhaps Belloc and Chesterton were pretty good economists too. At least one reviewer of this combination pointed out that this was in fact the Fascists economic program: and the real Fascist economic program, not just the usual insult to be bandied about for anyone you don't like.

Recovering from this they've made a new suggestion:

An oath for bankers should be introduced to raise accountability and standards in banking, said the think tank ResPublica.

It said the lack of public trust in banking after numerous scandals was an "ongoing concern" for the industry and the government.

In a new report, ResPublica called for an oath for bankers to "fulfil their proper moral and economic purpose".

Well, yes. We know very well that nearly all people in modern society live in mortal fear of being an oath breaker, don't we? Most unlike olden days when no one believed in an afterlife of the threat of the devil waiting to boil those who broke their word. Most unlike. And of course Harold Shipman would have been stopped in the tracks of his rampage if only doctors did take that Hippocratic Oath.

But maybe Blond has actually got something here. Think how many choirboys would be unsullied if only the Catholic Church insisted that priests took an oath of chastity?

Government bans fracking in 25% of the country

The government has just announced that it's pretty much going to ban fracking for oil and or gas in 25% of the country. This is not actually what they've said, of course not, but it is what they mean. For they're saying that the rules will make fracking in national parks and or areas of outstanding natural beauty much more difficult. To the point that only if a deposit is of great economic importance will drilling be allowed. We might think this is just fine: we'd not drill under Westminster Abbey after all and there might be parts of the country that are simply so beautiful that we wouldn't want anyone to put a couple of shipping containers of equipment behind concealing hedges. That's possible, even if unlikely.

However, the part that people will miss here is quite how much of the country this blocks off. Some 25% of it in fact.

National parks and other areas of important countryside will be protected from fracking, ministers will announce in a move that will head off anger in the Tory heartlands ahead of the election.

While stopping short of a total ban, the Government will unveil new planning guidance to make it harder to drill fracking wells in national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty.

In a significant concession, the new rules state that fracking should only be allowed in the most precious areas of British countryside in “exceptional circumstances”.

Any will say "Oh, how sensible" to that. But then add in quite how much land this covers. National Parks cover some 10% of the country. Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty a further 15%. People don't seem to realise quite how much of the country is already being pickled in aspic.

There're very definitely people who don't want us to have access to this lovely cheap energy for whatever reason. Sadly, some of them are currently in government and making the rules.

Increasing access to private education will add billions to growth

• The UK’s average annual growth rate between 1960 and 2007 would have been almost 1 percentage point higher had it matched the Netherlands' long-term level of independent school enrolment since 1960. This in turn means that UK GDP per capita would have been over £5,800 higher in 2007 than it was.

• Better education boosts economic growth; improving students’ international test scores by 10% raises a country's average annual growth rate by 0.85 percentage points.

• UK GDP per capita would have been almost £5,300 higher in 2007 had it performed as well as Taiwan since the mid-twentieth century.

Britain could add billions of pounds to long-term economic growth if it increased access to private education, a new report released today (Tuesday July 29th) by the free-market Adam Smith Institute has found.

The report, “Incentive to Invest: How education affects economic growth”, illustrates how higher educational achievement boosts long-term economic growth, and the important role of private schooling in this process.

Through the use of existing research and new quantitative evidence, the author of the report, Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, establishes that test scores are closely related to growth. Lifting achievement by 10% hikes a country’s average annual growth by 0.85 percentage points.

Furthermore, the report illustrates how competition from independent schools has proven successful in generating higher international test scores, while also driving costs down. Sending 20 percentage points more 15 year olds to independent schools would raise growth by 0.4pp—or about a sixth—via its positive effect on educational achievement.

Based on his findings, Heller Sahlgren calls for the government to radically reform education policy by encouraging more privatisation and competition in the education sector.

Had the UK matched the Netherlands’ long-term level of independent school enrolment since 1960, its GDP per capita would be over £5,800 higher today, the report argues. At a time when policymakers are trying to cement and broaden the economic recovery, the report suggests that expansion of access to private schooling would be an attractive component of a long-term growth strategy.

Commenting on the report, its author Gabriel Heller Sahlgren said:

My research shows that a focus on increasing the number of pupils taking higher qualifications is misguided. There’s in fact no robust impact of average schooling years in the population on economic growth on average.

On the other hand, education quality, proxied by international test scores, has a consistent and strong effect on growth. According to my calculations, the UK’s real GDP per capita in 2007 would have been over £5,000 higher had we performed on par with Taiwan since the mid-20th century. So the dividend of improving children’s attainment is large indeed.

Yet there are different ways to do achieve this. Unlike expensive resource-driven education reforms, which are rarely cost effective, a good option is to raise the level of independent school competition, which other research shows both increases international test scores as well as decreases costs.

According to my calculations, the indirect economic benefit, via higher achievement, of increasing the number of pupils in independent schools to the Netherlands’ level would be a 0.92 percentage point higher long run GDP per capita growth rate. The government should therefore continue their market-based reforms on education and expand choice as widely as possible.

Sam Bowman, Research Director of the Institute, said:

This report shows that we need greater access to private schooling for all pupils regardless of background, not just to improve the welfare of the children themselves but to boost the UK’s overall standard of living and long-term economic growth.

Expanded access to private education through school vouchers and a revival of the assisted places scheme may be an easy, low cost way for the government to boost growth by improving the human capital of British workers. The results may take some time to materialize but studies like this show just how valuable a long-term strategy for expanding access to private schools could be.

Click here to read “Incentive to Invest: How education affects economic growth”.

For further comments or to arrange an interview, contact Kate Andrews, Communications Manager, at kate@old.adamsmith.org / 07584 778207.

A typically wise observation from Don Boudreaux

This is also a rather clever observation. We're told that both wealth and income inequality are rising strongly, that this is of course terrible, and that this leads to rioting in the streets and the stringing up of plutocrats from lamp posts. Yet when we look out our windows we see a distressing lack of the wealth swinging gently in the breeze, all the Occupy folk have gone home to polish their nose rings and there just doesn't seem to be a mass frustration with matters at all. How can this be? When the clerisy tell us that the world should be in flames and yet it remains resolutely unburning? The answer is, as Boudreaux points out, that wealth and income inequality are a lot less important than we're told they are:

One reason, I’m sure, is that rising inequality in monetary incomes or wealth is NOT the same thing as rising inequality in economic welfare (extra emphasis intentional). It’s not even close – although rare is the “Progressive” who acknowledges the reality that changes in income (or wealth) are not identical to changes in consumption-ability (that is, to changes in real economic well-being). Inequality of monetarily reckoned income or wealth can rise while inequality of consumption opportunities can fall.

We might want to worry about consumption inequality, if that does indeed become too extreme.But we've not particularly got very much of that in our current society. Sure, the plutocrats can have hot and cold running yachts and £10,000 bottles of champagne. But no one thinks that it's particularly important that they can and we don't. We've not particularly got a shortage of even a serious limitation on what we do care about the consumption of. A roof over our heads, decent food, nice clothes and so on and on. The rich may have nicer pants but they still put them on one leg at a time and they're still only wearing one pair at a time too.

The economically important form of inequality is that of consumption opportunities. And one good reason why we've not got those riots in the streets is simply that we've got a lot less of that than we do income or wealth inequality.

At some point we really do need to tell certain politicians to just toddle off

And that point may have been reached for one of them:

“Supersized” food and drinks should be banned by law in a bid to combat Britain’s obesity epidemic, the new head of the Commons health select committee has said.

What? We're going to have a law now where a willing purchaser cannot negotiate with a willing supplier to gain 600 calories in return for folding money instead of 400 calories for a smaller amount?

What?

Dr Sarah Wollaston, a Conservative MP and former GP, said the state had a “duty to intervene” to protect current and future generations from unhealthy habits threatening to shorten their lives.

This sort of proposed lawmaking does not bode well for the efficacy of open primaries, does it?

The former GP called for a direct ban on “supersized” foods and drinks, so that manufacturers would be restricted to producing chocolate bars, junk food meals and fizzy drinks in standard sizes.

She said: “Why aren’t we taking more direct steps around supersizing? You go into the cinema and someone will ask if you want to supersize for an extra 20p - we don’t need that.”

Here's how things work in a free and liberal society: you don't get to decide what we would like to have. We get to decide what we would like to have. And if we want more chopped gristle for a paltry extra sum of money then we are and should be perfectly at liberty to have that. As are people to be allowed to sell that to us.

That moral point being entirely aside from the practical issues of course. For we're not all entirely stupid and if we want more than the Wollaston Burger we'll order two.

And there's an interesting legal point here as well. Clearly she thinks that we're all too damn stupid to be allowed to decide what to put into our own bodies. Despite their being, you know, ours? OK, so she obviously does think that. But she's an elected politician: one, clearly, elected by people too stupid to know what they'd like to eat. At which point she's not really got all that much authority, does she?

Either she's right and we're all morons and thus she should have no power having been elected by said morons or we're not morons and so she has a moral claim to power. But if we're not morons then banning us from eating a handful of extra french fries isn't necessary, is it?

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Dr. Wollaston disappears in a puff of of her own self-contradictory logic as with some of Oolon Colluphid's philosophical creations. but lord forbid that she ever gets to write the law for this country.

Are all macroeconomic models actually wrong?

An excellent little spot by Noah Smith on who uses what sort of economic model to do their forecasting:

Suppose you’re a macro investor. If all you want to do is make unconditional forecasts -- say, GDP next quarter – then you can go ahead and use an old-style SEM model, because you only care about correlation, not causation. But suppose you want to make a forecast of the effect of a government policy change -- for example, suppose you want to know how the Fed’s taper will affect growth. In that case, you need to understand causation -- you need to know whether quantitative easing is actually changing people’s behavior in a predictable way, and how.

This is what DSGE models are supposed to do. This is why academic macroeconomists use these models. So why doesn’t anyone in the finance industry use them? Maybe industry is just slow to catch on. But with so many billions upon billions of dollars on the line, and so many DSGE models to choose from, you would think someone at some big bank or macro hedge fund somewhere would be running a DSGE model. And yet after asking around pretty extensively, I can’t find anybody who is.

One unsettling possibility is that the academic macroeconomists of the '70s and '80s simply bit off more than they could chew. Modeling a big thing (like the economy) as the outcome of a bunch of little things (like the decisions of consumers and companies) is a difficult task. Maybe no DSGE is going to do the job. And maybe finance industry people simply realize this.

And at this point we might be able to work out what's wrong with academic macroeconomics. It's not quite economics to simply shout "Follow the money!" but we can adapt that very useful idea of revealed preferences to tell us what's going on here. That useful idea being that we shouldn't look at what people say they'll do but rather at what they actually do. And we can argue that academic economists are trying to successfully predict what is going to happen as a result of changes in government policy if we should so wish to. But combine that with that follow the money idea and we'd expect the financial markets economists to have been subjecting their models to more rigorous testing. After all, real money is at stake, not just whether you manage to get published in one or another journal.

We should admit that this does rather play to our prejudices here. We're not great fans of macroeonomics at all, agreeing with Keynes that in the long run we're all dead but adapting that to insist that in the long run it's all microeconomics. Get incentives and the price system right and pretty much all other economic problems will either solve themselves or shrink to their not being problems that we want or need to worry about.

This of course enrages macroeconomists but as we don't get invited to their parties anyway we can shoulder this burden well enough.

Underneath that jollity though there is a much more serious point. Macroeconomics is really a very under developed approach of looking at the world. We rather take the Hayekian line that it always will be, given the dispersed nature of information and the impossibility of having enough of it in real time to be able to do anything useful with it. But that there's pretty much no one macro theory that you could get all macroeconomists to sign up to is another indication that it's really just not ready for prime time yet.

And if it's not ready for prime time then we really shouldn't be using it to try and guide our actions on the economy. We should, therefore, concentrate our efforts on those areas where we do know we've largely got the appropriate and necessary knowledge, about those incentives and that price structure.

Remind us again why government should run all the schools

This story might cause a little pause for thought:

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.

That story's too good to want to check if it's actually true or not. But if it is then why would we continue with an education system that has had more than a century to try to get things right but has manifestly failed to do so?

Quite, Gove and others are onto the right sort of policy, freeing the education system as much as possible from that dead hand of said state.

What joy, it's Marianna Mazzucato again

This time she's running a conference telling us all how it's absolutely vital that the UK economy be planned the way that Ms. Mazzucato thinks it ought to be. Which is, if we are fair about it, a plan that rather ignores one of the most basic economic points about economies:

This is encouraging news and shows that the UK is hopefully on the path towards ‘rebalancing’ away from an economy biased towards financial services, towards growth of innovation and productivity in the ‘real economy’.

Hmm. For this to be either true or desirable we'd need to show that we actually have an economy biased towards financial services.

The key problem that he and other international policy makers have is to make sure that such rebalancing tackles finance on two equally important sides. On the one hand, rebalancing so that finance funds the real economy. This means addressing the dire situation that figure 1 shows below, i.e. the degree to which finance has been financing itself leading to the exponential rise in the value added made up of financial intermediation, compared to that of the real economy (everything but finance and agriculture).

Hmm, so, OK, finance has been a greater part of the value added in the economy in recent times. It's still difficult to understand why this is a bad idea.

The second key issue that rebalancing must address is not just how to get more value added from the ‘real economy’ and less from ‘financial intermediation’ (finance financing finance), but also how to de-financialise the real economy itself!

Hmm again.

So, back to this question of whether the UK economy is in fact excessively financialised. And there's two parts to that question. In the general economy we're no more financialised than other advanced economies. We have roughly the same sized pensions industry, insurance and retail and commercial banking industries, mortgages, savings products and all the rest. And we need only invoke Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to see why a richer nation might want more of such financial activity. Once the basic needs are met we move on to wanting to have security which is exactly what savings and insurance do for us.

But it is also true that the total financial sector in the UK is larger than it is in most other countries. Almost nowhere else has anything even remotely comparable to The City. but to say that is a problem would be to make the poor departed spirit of David Ricardo cry. For we do seem to have a comparative advantage in being the financial marketplace for the world and that's an advantage that we should be exploiting.

So if we look at the domestic economy we don't seem to be excessively financialised. And if we look at the total economy that financialisation is about our successfully selling services to Johnny Foreigner. Neither of which are obviously problems that require solutions. Making Ms. Mazzucato's conference, and possibly the good professor herself, somewhat redundant.