Worþy Reads: For 2021-10-22 Fr
A preview of my weekly read-around for Equitable Growth <http://equitablegrowth.org>
Worthy Reads from Equitable Growth
1) We are highlighting this from a year and a half ago by our Fearless Leader Michelle Holder:
Michelle Holder: The “Double Gap” & the Bottom Line: African American Women’s Wage Gap & Corporate Profits: ‘Though African American women have historically had the highest labor force participation rate among major female demographic groups in the US, they face both the gender wage gap and the racial wage gap—a reinforcing confluence that I term the “double gap.” Finnoff and Jayadev (2006), as well as Seguino and Braunstein (2017), have shown that both the share of women in the labor force and the crowding of women into low-wage jobs are negatively correlated with the labor income share…
LINK: <https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RIDoubleGapReport_202003.pdf>
2) Most people I talk to have no idea how weak U.S. income-support programs are relative to those of peer yardstick countries:
Liz Hipple & Alix Gould-Werth: Weak Income Support Infrastructure Harms U.S. Workers & Their Families & Constrains Economic Growth: ‘People in the United States access income support from a wide range of programs… [yet] many… who need this support are blocked from accessing it. During the COVID-19 crisis, the existing income support infrastructure has been wholly insufficient…. While… pandemic-specific income supports… blunted some of the worst pain… they also failed to deliver for all… due to sustained underinvestment in these key income support programs over the past half-century…
LINK: <https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/082321-income-support-ib.pdf>
3) This is brilliant! This is great! This is amazing! I am very proud of everyone on the team who has put this together:
Equitable Growth: A Visual Economy: ‘Looking for visuals on a particular topic related to economic inequality and equitable growth? The Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Visual Economy page offers a way to sort through thousands of figures produced since the beginning of 2019. The six “Featured Visualizations” below showcase some of our most recent work and older classics. Filter and download our visuals using 31 different economics topics as well as by our signature “Jobs Day” and “JOLTS Day” features…
Worthy Reads from Elsewhere:
1) This is a conference that I had been looking forward to for months. And it has proven to exceed my expectations. Go watch it!:
NBER: Economics of Mobility Meeting, Fall 2021: ‘Old Boys’ Clubs and Upward Mobility Among the Educational Elite [by] Valerie Michelman [et al.]… Who Benefits from Meritocracy? [by] Santiago Pérez [and] Diana Moreira…. Keynote [by] Hilary W. Hoynes…. Train to Opportunity: the Effect of Infrastructure on Intergenerational Mobility [by] Myra Mohnen [et al.]… Air Pollution and Economic Opportunity in the United States [by] Jonathan M. Colmer [et al.]… The Effect of Income During Infancy, Evidence from a Discontinuity in Tax Benefits [by] Andrew C. Barr [et al.]… The Long-run Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps on Children [by] Daniel Aaronson [et al.]…
LINK: <https://www.nber.org/conferences/economics-mobility-meeting-fall-2021>
2) The very sharp Ryan Avent hammering home the point that the failure of equitable growth to happen in the 2010s was not due to any structural or supply-side failures of human and other resources to exist or be mobilized, but just to prolonged, sustained weakness in aggregate demand:
Ryan Avent: Revenge of the Robots: ‘If the Fed doesn’t overreact to inflation and other events don’t blow up the recovery, then this labor market has some room to run. Workers at the bottom of the distribution are getting better money, which should support continued demand growth, which should keep the economy humming, which should prevent the emergence of lots of new slack—for now…. In many industries we already have in place business models that use less labor more productively, but which have not yet become dominant because broader conditions haven’t been sufficiently encouraging…. The technological capacity to automate the work of large swathes of the labor force has been building over time but hasn’t materially affected labor markets yet because there’s been no incentive to make use of it…. Alternatively, industry shake-ups and the occasional adoption of labor-saving methods and technologies begin to undercut the earning power that workers enjoy, and after a glorious few years wage growth decelerates. As it does, and the share of purchasing power held by those with a high propensity to spend declines, the old macroeconomic malaise sets in again…. The current labor-market boom demonstrates that weak demand was the thing that made the 2010s so crummy…
LINK: <https://ryanavent.substack.com/p/revenge-of-the-robots>
3) Lots of us have been seeing a silver lining in our belief that China’s rapid growth will soon lead it to become a major source of demand for products made by U.S. workers. Here, however, is more evidence that that hope may be vain—that China is already running into the middle-income growth trap:
The Economist: A Triple Shock Slows China’s Growth: ‘From the sublime to the subpar: A triple shock slows China’s growth: Power cuts, the pandemic and a property slowdown: all have taken a toll…
LINK: <https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/a-triple-shock-slows-chinas-growth/21805725>
4) Now from three decades old, on how our private-property system not only does not fit today’s society well, but did not fit the society of the 1730s terribly well either. But it does fit today’s society uch less well:
Bruce Sterling (1992): ’Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge’: ‘The American library system was invented in a different cultural climate. This is how it happened. You’re Benjamin Franklin, a printer and your average universal genius, and it’s the Year of Our Lord 1731. You have this freewheeling debating club called the Junto, and you decide you’re going to pool your books and charge everybody a very small fee to join in and read them. There’s about fifty of you. You’re not big people, in the Junto. You’re not aristocrats or well-born people or even philanthropists. You’re mostly apprentices and young people who work with their hands. If you were rich, you wouldn’t be so anxious to pool your information in the first place. So you put all your leatherbound books into the old Philadelphia clubhouse, and you charge people forty shillings to join and ten shillings dues per annum…. Now forget 1731. It’s 1991. Forget the leatherbound books. You start swopping floppy disks and using a bulletin board system. Public spirited? A benefit to society? Democratic institution, knowledge is power, power to the people? Maybe… or maybe you’re an idealistic nut, Mr. Franklin. Not only that, but you’re menacing our commercial interests. What about our trade secrets, Mr Franklin? Our trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Our intellectual property rights. Our look-and-feel. Our patented algorithms. Our national security clearances . Our export licenses. Our FBI surveillance policy. Don’t copy that floppy, Mr. Franklin! And you’re telling me you want us to pay taxes to support your suspicious activities? Hey, if there’s a real need here, the market will meet it, Mr Franklin. I really think this “library” idea of yours is something better left to the private sector, Mr Franklin. No author could possibly want his books read for free, sir. Are you trying to starve the creative artist? Let’s get real, Mr Franklin. You know what’s real, Mr Franklin? Money is real. You seem to be under the misapprehension that information wants to be free and that enabling people to learn and follow their own interests will benefit society as a whole. Well, we no longer believe in society as a whole. We believe in the economy as a whole…
LINK: <http://bactra.org/Sterling/FreeastheAirFreeasWaterFreeas_Knowledge.html>
5) 5) An old hobby-horse of mine. We all had noticed that Jackie Calmes as an economic reporter at the Wall Street Journal had been much much better than Jackie Calmes later on as an economics reporter at the New York Times. We wondered what it happened. Now she tells us:
Dan Froomkin: Jackie Calmes Proposes a Baby Step for Political Reporters: ‘Why do reporters fail to refute obvious lies? Why do they default to false equivalence? [Jackie] Calmes…. “Part of is the fault of beat reporting,” Calmes said. “I know the pressures you’re under to maintain sources.” And then some reporters are more interested in politics as a game and in appraising political strategy…. Gender seems to play a role…. And of course there’s pressure from editors and the overall newsroom culture…. “I felt more pressure of the bothsidesism sort coming from the New York Times than I did from the Wall Street Journal,” she said, “and I think that’s because the New York Times is sensitive to the fact that it is known to be a liberal paper, so it bends over backwards to give both sides their due.” She described “timeworn” traditions at the Times, such as: “If you’re saying Republicans do something wrong you have to indicate that Democrats bear some blame too.”… Executive editor Dean Baquet “should know better.” The New York Times, she said, “needs to loosen up…
LINK: <https://presswatchers.org/2021/10/jackie-calmes-proposes-a-baby-step-for-political-reporters/>
6) Where the rubber meets the road with respect to "supply chain disruptions”, and the consequent increasing likelihood that the recovery from the coronavirus plague depression will be cut short by a Federal reserve fearing that inflation is getting incorporated into expectations of future price increases. I believe that Flexport’s Ryan Petersen is 100% right here: We could overwhelm at least the Long-Beach/Los Angeles port bottleneck very, very quickly, with an effective and proactive state or national government:
Ryan Petersen: ’Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex…. First off, the boat captain said we were the first company to ever rent his boat to tour the port to see how everything was working up close…. The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded…. There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow…. The bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam…. Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers…. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis. If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed…. Also containers are not fungible between carriers…. With the chassis all tied up storing empties that can’t be returned to the port, there are no chassis available to pick up containers at the port…. And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers… a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control…. Alright how do we fix this, you ask? Simple. And we can do it fast…. When you’re designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t choose it, you aren’t running an operation. It’s running you…. You should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. In a port that’s the ship to shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they’re waiting for another part of the operation to catch up. The bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It’s yard space at the container terminals. And it’s empty chassis to come clear those containers out. In operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t design for it to appear, you must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK!…
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