Mike Konczal

Roosevelt Institute Fellow
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Recent Posts by Mike Konczal

  • Rortybomb

    The Problem of Rents and the Wilt Chamberlain Example

    Apr 4, 2013Mike Konczal

    I wrote a piece at Wonkblog over the weekend about economic rents and the possibilities and limitations of conservatives and liberals coming together to tackle them. The issue of combating rents is interesting because it pushes against an argument that is taken to be a common sense and intuitive example of libertarian thought: the Wilt Chamberlain example. Looking at that example might help us understand some interesting issues about rent income. (This argument is taken from an excellent paper on the topic by Barbara Fried. If this blog does nothing but create a bigger audience for Fried's work, as well as Robert Hale's, I'll call it a huge win.)

    Let’s take your favorite example of rent income. Perhaps it is excessive copyright, criminal sanctions for unlocking your phone, zoning regulations that protect incumbent interests, live-saving drugs that are rationed above a market-clearing price due to patents, utilities that go unregulated, or something else.

    What’s the problem with these situations? At least some of the problem is distributional. People who collect income and wealth off of rents are collecting money that they don’t deserve. Nobody would think the problem of economic rents is that people are willing to pay them. In these situations, people are still buying and selling things. Slipping into a classically liberal mindframe, there's still exchange, and we can assume that both parties are better off by definition, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trade. We don’t locate the problem of rents in the fact that people will pay too much for a phone, or for land, or for something with extensive copyright. And we also don’t think the fact that people are willing to pay a higher price is, by itself, sufficient justification for those rents. The problem is that one person -- the patent holder, the phone company, the land holder, etc. -- is collecting income that he or she shouldn’t.

    To phrase that a different way, the fact that people are willing to pay rents doesn’t justify someone’s ability to collect rents. If you are willing to pay everything you have for a medical drug that costs 5 cents, but it is being priced at a high level due to patent law, your desire to pay doesn’t, by itself, justify the company's profit levels.

    But one of the most famous examples of libertarian thought thinks your desire to pay does in fact justify the rents. Let’s look at the Wilt Chamberlain example from Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

    In this example, we start in a place called D1, where things are generally agreed upon to be just (whatever that definition may be). Then many people decide, voluntarily, to give Wilt Chamberlain their money to watch him play basketball, and he ends up with a lot of it. Can this state D2 be unjust? Nozick:

    If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn’t this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?

    Wilt Chamberlain’s income is justified on the grounds that people are willing to give him their resources.

    Thinking about rents forces us to break exchange into two steps. The first step is the right of someone to give away her resources however she sees fit. This doesn't raise any issues. We want people to have resources precisely because we want them to do what they want with them (“what was it for if not to do something with?”). However, that logic is snuck into doing the work of a second step, which is the right of someone to receive those resources. In the example, the right of someone to give something is doing the entirety of the work. It is presumed that someone giving something away builds in the right for the other to receive it.

    But when it comes to rents, there’s no reason to believe this is true. One can turn the intuitive nature of the exercise upside down. Imagine if you are drowning, and Wilt Chamberlain is walking by and asks for $250,000 to throw you a life preserver (an easy act that would only cost $1 of his time). You agreeing to pay him to save your life, which is a sensible action on your part, doesn't presume that him receiving that money must keep the same level of distributional justice. This same issue will extend to a portion of what you will spend buying a cell phone and a plan in a market dominated by a few monopolistic players with extensive legal protections.

    So where do we draw the line on rents, and what are the appropriate responses? Is receiving a major inheritance a form of rent? Land? Genetic endowments? Perhaps it is best for long-term growth to keep value with the owner, at least for a period, as many argue for copyright and patent. Maybe, like those following Henry George would argue, taxes are the appropriate response. Or maybe there should be active work to try and ensure fewer rents accrue in the first place. But the key thing to remember is that the answers to these questions won't be answered through abstract ideals of liberty, or pointing to the market itself, but instead can only be answered through democratic accountability.

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    I wrote a piece at Wonkblog over the weekend about economic rents and the possibilities and limitations of conservatives and liberals coming together to tackle them. The issue of combating rents is interesting because it pushes against an argument that is taken to be a common sense and intuitive example of libertarian thought: the Wilt Chamberlain example. Looking at that example might help us understand some interesting issues about rent income. (This argument is taken from an excellent paper on the topic by Barbara Fried. If this blog does nothing but create a bigger audience for Fried's work, as well as Robert Hale's, I'll call it a huge win.)

    Let’s take your favorite example of rent income. Perhaps it is excessive copyright, criminal sanctions for unlocking your phone, zoning regulations that protect incumbent interests, live-saving drugs that are rationed above a market-clearing price due to patents, utilities that go unregulated, or something else.

    What’s the problem with these situations? At least some of the problem is distributional. People who collect income and wealth off of rents are collecting money that they don’t deserve. Nobody would think the problem of economic rents is that people are willing to pay them. In these situations, people are still buying and selling things. Slipping into a classically liberal mindframe, there's still exchange, and we can assume that both parties are better off by definition, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trade. We don’t locate the problem of rents in the fact that people will pay too much for a phone, or for land, or for something with extensive copyright. And we also don’t think the fact that people are willing to pay a higher price is, by itself, sufficient justification for those rents. The problem is that one person -- the patent holder, the phone company, the land holder, etc. -- is collecting income that he or she shouldn’t.

    To phrase that a different way, the fact that people are willing to pay rents doesn’t justify someone’s ability to collect rents. If you are willing to pay everything you have for a medical drug that costs 5 cents, but it is being priced at a high level due to patent law, your desire to pay doesn’t, by itself, justify the company's profit levels.

    But one of the most famous examples of libertarian thought thinks your desire to pay does in fact justify the rents. Let’s look at the Wilt Chamberlain example from Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

    In this example, we start in a place called D1, where things are generally agreed upon to be just (whatever that definition may be). Then many people decide, voluntarily, to give Wilt Chamberlain their money to watch him play basketball, and he ends up with a lot of it. Can this state D2 be unjust? Nozick:

    If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn’t this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?

    Wilt Chamberlain’s income is justified on the grounds that people are willing to give him their resources.

    Thinking about rents forces us to break exchange into two steps. The first step is the right of someone to give away her resources however she sees fit. This doesn't raise any issues. We want people to have resources precisely because we want them to do what they want with them (“what was it for if not to do something with?”). However, that logic is snuck into doing the work of a second step, which is the right of someone to receive those resources. In the example, the right of someone to give something is doing the entirety of the work. It is presumed that someone giving something away builds in the right for the other to receive it.

    But when it comes to rents, there’s no reason to believe this is true. One can turn the intuitive nature of the exercise upside down. Imagine if you are drowning, and Wilt Chamberlain is walking by and asks for $250,000 to throw you a life preserver (an easy act that would only cost $1 of his time). You agreeing to pay him to save your life, which is a sensible action on your part, doesn't presume that him receiving that money must keep the same level of distributional justice. This same issue will extend to a portion of what you will spend buying a cell phone and a plan in a market dominated by a few monopolistic players with extensive legal protections.

    So where do we draw the line on rents, and what are the appropriate responses? Is receiving a major inheritance a form of rent? Land? Genetic endowments? Perhaps it is best for long-term growth to keep value with the owner, at least for a period, as many argue for copyright and patent. Maybe, like those following Henry George would argue, taxes are the appropriate response. Or maybe there should be active work to try and ensure fewer rents accrue in the first place. But the key thing to remember is that the answers to these questions won't be answered through abstract ideals of liberty, or pointing to the market itself, but instead can only be answered through democratic accountability.

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  • Rortybomb

    How Congress and the Courts Are Closing in on Dodd-Frank

    Apr 4, 2013Mike Konczal

    What are the serious threats to Dodd-Frank? Last month, Haley Sweetland Edwards wrote "He Who Makes the Rules" at the Washington Monthly, which is the best single piece on Dodd-Frank implementation I've seen. In it, she identifies "three main areas on this gauntlet where a rule can be sliced, diced, gouged, or otherwise weakened beyond recognition." The first is "the agency itself, where industry lobbyists enjoy outsized influence in meetings and comment letters, on rule makers’ access to vital information, and on the interpretation of the law itself." The second is the courts, "where industry groups can sue an agency and have a rule killed on a variety of grounds." And the third is Congress, "where an entire law can be retroactively gutted or poked through with loopholes."

    How important have those three areas been? Looking at the first two and a half years of Dodd-Frank, the courts turned out to be the unexpected danger for financial reform. I have a piece in Bloomberg View today arguing this, as well as the fact that the courts are structurally biased against reform in some very crucial ways.

    That's not to say the lobbying battle is going well. But when the bill passed, people understood that rulewriting would be a difficult battle, and some groups like Americans for Financial Reform and Better Markets could at least help balance the lobbying efforts of financial industry groups. What was less understood was that the D.C. Circuit Court would have so many vacancies, and thus tilted to the far right and a radical agenda. I hope you check out the piece.

    But what about Congress? Erika Eichelberger at Mother Jones has an excellent piece about the ongoing, now biparistan, efforts to roll back parts of Dodd-Frank's derivative regulations that are starting up in the House Agriculture Committee. (I wrote about this effort for Wonkblog here.) This third area Edwards identifies, Congress, is only now becoming a serious battlefield. But isn't the timing off? President Obama and the Democrats lost in 2010 but won in 2012. Yet while the threat of Congress rolling back Dodd-Frank, one of President Obama's major achievements, with new bills wasn't on the radar in 2011, it may be in 2013. Isn't that backwards?
     
    Part of the answer is that the rules are becoming clearer, so financial industry lobbyists have more concrete targets to bring to Congress. But there's a political dimension as well. The general shutdown and polarization that dominated Congress after 2010 made a congressional threat to Dodd-Frank less likely. And ironically, the rise of the Tea Party within the conservative movement, even with its anti-Obama and anti-regulatory zeal, made bills to weaken Dodd-Frank less likely to pass. One reason is that the Tea Party wanted a full repeal of the bill or to gut entire sections, rather than more targeted interventions. Another is that the biggest losers in the 2010 shellacking were centrist “new Democrats,” those that would be more responsive to the needs of the financial industry than the progressive caucus that gained in relative strength afterwards.
     
    It’s possible many more centrist Democrats could have moved a bill through Congress weakening Dodd-Frank as it was being implemented, especially if conservatives were looking to compromise. But remaining centrist Democrats were not going to remove the FDIC's new resolution authority to end Too Big To Fail, which is what the Ryan budget calls for, or knee-cap the CFPB out the door, which is what the Senate GOP wants in exchange for nominating a director, or vote to repeal the bill in its entirety, which was a litmus test for the 2012 GOP presidental candidates. Especially after they just took a lot of heat to pass the bill. Deficit hysteria was the only thing that got momentum, with both parties doing serious damage by cutting the budget of the CFTC.
     
    (The unpopularity of the financial industry probably didn't help either. The congressional change that the financial industry most wanted, the delay of a rule designed to limit the interchange fees associated with debit cards, failed to clear 60 votes in the Senate.)
     
    Now that the GOP is realizing that Dodd-Frank is here to stay, we might see more effort to reach across the aisle to dismantle smaller pieces of it in accordance with what the financial industry wants. Health care is facing a similar situation, where conservatives policy entrepreneurs are currently debating whether or not to work within the framework of Obamacare or continue trying to repeal it. Sadly, conservatives will probably do far more damage if they get to the point of accepting that Dodd-Frank is the law of the land and try to do more targeted repeals rather than wage all-out war.
     
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    What are the serious threats to Dodd-Frank? Last month, Haley Sweetland Edwards wrote "He Who Makes the Rules" at the Washington Monthly, which is the best single piece on Dodd-Frank implementation I've seen. In it, she identifies "three main areas on this gauntlet where a rule can be sliced, diced, gouged, or otherwise weakened beyond recognition." The first is "the agency itself, where industry lobbyists enjoy outsized influence in meetings and comment letters, on rule makers’ access to vital information, and on the interpretation of the law itself." The second is the courts, "where industry groups can sue an agency and have a rule killed on a variety of grounds." And the third is Congress, "where an entire law can be retroactively gutted or poked through with loopholes."

    How important have those three areas been? Looking at the first two and a half years of Dodd-Frank, the courts turned out to be the unexpected danger for financial reform. I have a piece in Bloomberg View today arguing this, as well as the fact that the courts are structurally biased against reform in some very crucial ways.

    That's not to say the lobbying battle is going well. But when the bill passed, people understood that rulewriting would be a difficult battle, and some groups like Americans for Financial Reform and Better Markets could at least help balance the lobbying efforts of financial industry groups. What was less understood was that the D.C. Circuit Court would have so many vacancies, and thus tilted to the far right and a radical agenda. I hope you check out the piece.

    But what about Congress? Erika Eichelberger at Mother Jones has an excellent piece about the ongoing, now biparistan, efforts to roll back parts of Dodd-Frank's derivative regulations that are starting up in the House Agriculture Committee. (I wrote about this effort for Wonkblog here.) This third area Edwards identifies, Congress, is only now becoming a serious battlefield. But isn't the timing off? President Obama and the Democrats lost in 2010 but won in 2012. Yet while the threat of Congress rolling back Dodd-Frank, one of President Obama's major achievements, with new bills wasn't on the radar in 2011, it may be in 2013. Isn't that backwards?
     
    Part of the answer is that the rules are becoming clearer, so financial industry lobbyists have more concrete targets to bring to Congress. But there's a political dimension as well. The general shutdown and polarization that dominated Congress after 2010 made a congressional threat to Dodd-Frank less likely. And ironically, the rise of the Tea Party within the conservative movement, even with its anti-Obama and anti-regulatory zeal, made bills to weaken Dodd-Frank less likely to pass. One reason is that the Tea Party wanted a full repeal of the bill or to gut entire sections, rather than more targeted interventions. Another is that the biggest losers in the 2010 shellacking were centrist “new Democrats,” those that would be more responsive to the needs of the financial industry than the progressive caucus that gained in relative strength afterwards.
     
    It’s possible many more centrist Democrats could have moved a bill through Congress weakening Dodd-Frank as it was being implemented, especially if conservatives were looking to compromise. But remaining centrist Democrats were not going to remove the FDIC's new resolution authority to end Too Big To Fail, which is what the Ryan budget calls for, or knee-cap the CFPB out the door, which is what the Senate GOP wants in exchange for nominating a director, or vote to repeal the bill in its entirety, which was a litmus test for the 2012 GOP presidental candidates. Especially after they just took a lot of heat to pass the bill. Deficit hysteria was the only thing that got momentum, with both parties doing serious damage by cutting the budget of the CFTC.
     
    (The unpopularity of the financial industry probably didn't help either. The congressional change that the financial industry most wanted, the delay of a rule designed to limit the interchange fees associated with debit cards, failed to clear 60 votes in the Senate.)
     
    Now that the GOP is realizing that Dodd-Frank is here to stay, we might see more effort to reach across the aisle to dismantle smaller pieces of it in accordance with what the financial industry wants. Health care is facing a similar situation, where conservatives policy entrepreneurs are currently debating whether or not to work within the framework of Obamacare or continue trying to repeal it. Sadly, conservatives will probably do far more damage if they get to the point of accepting that Dodd-Frank is the law of the land and try to do more targeted repeals rather than wage all-out war.
     
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  • Rortybomb

    Crude Sachsism: The Four Big Flaws in Progressive Attacks on Keynesianism

    Mar 11, 2013Mike Konczal

    Jeffrey Sachs attacks vulgar crude Keynesianism, arguing that it consists of four simplistic elements. Numerous people are pointing out that those four elements misrepresent the entirety of those calling for more action on jobs. Mark Thoma in particular is sharp here.

    Jeffrey Sachs attacks vulgar crude Keynesianism, arguing that it consists of four simplistic elements. Numerous people are pointing out that those four elements misrepresent the entirety of those calling for more action on jobs. Mark Thoma in particular is sharp here.

    I want to do the opposite. When I read people like Sachs, I too notice four crude elements that stand out, all of which are significant problems for a story of what has gone wrong in the Great Recession and what can be done about it. In short, there's (a) no theory of the business cycle and the Great Recession, (b) an odd attack on automatic stabilizers, (c) leaping at any evidence of so-called "structural" unemployment, and (d) a curious absence of full employment as a progressive policy goal.

    Progressive Mellonites

    Even the crudest caricature of Keynesians is nuanced compared to what Sachs is putting forward here when it comes to a theory of the business cycle.

    Sachs calls out crude Keynesianism for being simplistic and reductive about the Great Recession. This ignores the large debates currently happening within Keynesian circles. How much of our problem is a “balance-sheet” issue? Is the Fed in check, and if not, is it better to act through active purchases or forward guidance language? (Sachs thinks QE is just a "gimmick.") This is crucial because predictions about interest rates and the argument about debt are tied to these discussions.

    But as best as I can tell, Sachs appears to believe that this recession is the punishment our country must endure for not listening enough to Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs's position might best be defined as "progressive Mellonite." Mellonite liquidationists are people who think that the work of a recession is purging all the badness and rottenness from the system. Progressive Mellonites, like Sachs, argue the mirror-image of this. We invaded Iraq instead of building green energy; we securitized mortgages instead of investing in education; now we must all suffer until we go back and do right by a progressive set of priorities.

    These problems existed before, but they can’t explain the collapse in GDP. The closest he gets to the actual evidence about the Great Recession is writing that the financial crisis is to blame for part of it and that it was solved through the bailouts. As Ryan Cooper notes, inflation expectations crashed during this time. Indeed, the recession started in December 2007, almost a year before the financial crisis. But this theory is needed to make sense of his proposal.

    Win the Future!

    It is crucial to understand that Sachs isn’t arguing for a “pivot” from direct stimulus and job creation to “winning the future” through a variety of education reforms and long-term investments. If he was, well, then he’d be arguing for the stated position of the Obama administration as of early 2011 -- one that has infuriated progressive economists ever since.

    I read Sachs as saying that long-term investments would have been smarter as stimulus than the "timely, targeted, and temporary" elements of tax cuts that comprised a lot of the stimulus. Fine, sure, I agree. The stimulus did a lot of that, as the book The New New Deal argues.

    But I also read him as being against the significant increased spending on automatic stabilization and preferring that we had done nothing rather than do that. Take things like extended unemployment benefits, the “Making Work Pay” program, or aid to the states. If I read Sachs correctly, we should not have done that, but instead should have done nothing if that money couldn't have been earmarked for energy investments and education programs.

    I’m not sure what to make of this idea. Automatic stabilizers already in place were a large reason why the debt increased during the recession. And contra Jeffrey Sachs, Goldman Sachs (I'm assuming no relation) estimated the collapse in private sector financial balance as greater than that of the Great Depression even with the bailouts, and automatic stabilizers stepped in to help maintain demand.

    Did Someone Say Structural? Sold!

    I'm not sure why Sachs is arguing that in 2009 money should have been spent on job training, or getting more people through higher education, as a way of combating unemployment. Unemployment doubled across all industries, education levels, and occupations. Many people with higher educations are using their human capital as a hedge to get lower-skill jobs. The number of people quitting their jobs has plummeted. Even today, the short-term unemployed have a harder time finding a job than before the recession, while the long-term unemployed are less likely to drop out of the labor force. Wages have been flat for those with jobs.

    Not unlike the crude Keynesians who thought the Phillips curve of unemployment versus inflation was a stable relationship, Sachs argues that the Beveridge curve of unemployment versus job vacancies is all we need to know. But the number of job vacancies is endogenous to expectations of the state of the economy! So a shift certainly isn’t sufficient to make the huge lift he wants to make, especially with so many other factors leaning against this argument.

    I can see focusing more in 2013 on these issues, but the idea that they were the only concerns in 2009 -- which is the core of Sachs's argument -- demands significantly better support.

    Full Employment Uber Alles

    Though Sachs identifies his project as progressive, he never mentions full employment as a goal. There are three obvious reasons why progressives would want to make full employment a goal. First, if we are concerned about the well-being of workers, a tighter labor market will have better wage growth and more opportunities for the worst off than a slack one. The idea that Sachs was worried about job training with unemployment at 10 percent is odd. Second is that a tighter labor market will help us take care of supply issues with our labor force. Employers will promote on-the-job training and work harder to increase the productivity of their labor force, while searching more among the long-term unemployed and trying to bring in people outside the labor force. It will make the task of adjusting the labor force to the work of the future, a key goal for Sachs, significantly easier.

    Third, and most important, is that the political goals he wants to achieve are easier at full employment. There's good empirical evidence that unemployment destroyed people's interest in combating climate change. And that makes sense -- how are you supposed to care about Southeast Asia's coastline in 2080 if you are worried about whether you can make your rent? The idea that we’d focus on how to tax ourselves to move to new energy sources when unemployment was at 10 percent is a problematic one if we are serious about reorienting our goals toward a more progressive future.

     

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    Around the Webs and Traveling

    Mar 7, 2013Mike Konczal

    I've been writing around the internet.

    - I wrote about automatic stabilizers, and how understanding them is important to understand how our deficits worked in the past several years, for the American Prospect.

    - I discused the "ownership society" and how it is holding back conservative thought.

    - I'm now contributing a weekly column to Wonkblog at the Washington Post on Saturdays, with the first one focused on the current debates people are having on Dodd-Frank and Too Big To Fail.

    I've been traveling and on vacation, so sorry for letting this place get dusty. I'll be back on the 18th.

    I've been writing around the internet.

    - I wrote about automatic stabilizers, and how understanding them is important to understand how our deficits worked in the past several years, for the American Prospect.

    - I discused the "ownership society" and how it is holding back conservative thought.

    - I'm now contributing a weekly column to Wonkblog at the Washington Post on Saturdays, with the first one focused on the current debates people are having on Dodd-Frank and Too Big To Fail.

    I've been traveling and on vacation, so sorry for letting this place get dusty. I'll be back on the 18th.

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    It's Alberto Alesina's World and We're All Just Unemployed in It

    Mar 5, 2013Mike Konczal

    In March 2011, the new Tea Party had taken over the House, and it needed a plan for what it would do about the deficit. It proposed that the effects of imposing austerity, even when the economy is weak, "may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term." How did it propose we cut the budget? We can look at Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republican report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," for the answer:

    In March 2011, the new Tea Party had taken over the House, and it needed a plan for what it would do about the deficit. It proposed that the effects of imposing austerity, even when the economy is weak, "may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term." How did it propose we cut the budget? We can look at Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Republican report, "Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy," for the answer:

    The Tea Party's study called for 85 percent spending cuts and 15 percent revenue increases. This was based largely off a 2009 study by Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna of Harvard titled "Large changes in fiscal policy: taxes versus spending." This is the ur-text of expansionary austerity, which made the case, for example, "On the demand side, a fiscal adjustment may be expansionary if agents believe that the fiscal tightening generates a change in regime that 'eliminates the need for larger, maybe much more disruptive adjustments in the future.'"

    Flash forward two years from that report to March 2013. President Obama and Congress have overseen $4 trillion dollars in deficit reduction set for the next ten years. What do the percentages look like? Here's a graphic from a recent New York Times blog post by Steve Rattner on the deficit deals:

    Rattner points out that less than 20 percent has come from tax increases, just like Alesina called for. James Pethokoukis also noted these numbers and their connection to Alesina's work and referred to them as the "right" kind of austerity. But what does "right" mean here? There's a technical definition on changes to debt-to-GDP from the paper, but there's also the argument that the "right" kind of austerity would be "be less recessionary or even have a positive impact on growth."

    That hasn't happened. In fact, the exact opposite is in play. Instead of expanding the economy, or even having little or no short-term effect, economists generally agree that this austerity (e.g. the sequestration) is cutting growth and reducing the number of jobs created. Suzy Khimm collects some numbers here, including Barclay's estimate, "In 2013, the fiscal drag from government austerity is expected to be between 1.5 and 2.0 percentage points." Where's the expansion? Where's the short-term confidence? This has been a complete failure.

    Paul Krugman recently pointed out some choice quotes on who was right and who was wrong about Europe. To give you a sense of the mindset that created this line of reasoning, a set of arguments we are now trying out in the United States, let's look at how Alesina approached initial criticism of his work. In "The Boom Not The Slump: The Right Time For Austerity," my colleague Arjun Jayadev and I found that in virtually all the cases the adjustments were made when the economy was healthy, and in the few cases where it was not there was export-driven growth or interest rates were lowered (see also this Jared Bernstein summary of CRS' critique).

    In a September 2010 paper for the Mercatus Center, here is how Alesina responded (my bold):

    A recent paper by Jayadem and Konzcal [sic] (2010) argues that Alesina and Ardagna’s results do not apply to the current situation because fiscal adjustments on the spending side are expansionary only when they occur when the economy is already expanding. The criticisms of that paper are at best overstated... In addition, what is unfolding currently in Europe directly contradicts Jayadev and Konczal. Several European countries have started drastic plans of fiscal adjustment in the middle of a fragile recovery. At the time of this writing, it appears that European speed of recovery is sustained, faster than that of  the U.S., and the ECB has recently significantly raised growth forecasts for the Euro area.

    I wonder how that ever turned out, even for just their debt-to-GDP ratios? Graph is from 2011-2012:

    You can laugh, and you should, but do keep in mind all that needless suffering and the fact that this assessment of Europe's situation is what is now driving our fiscal policy.

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