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    David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens Win Nobel in Economics 2021

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    David Card has made a career of studying unintended experiments to examine economic questions — like whether raising the minimum wage causes people to lose jobs.Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens have developed research tools that help economists use real-life situations to test big theories, like how additional education affects earnings.On Monday, their work earned them the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.All three winners are based in the United States. Mr. Card, who was born in Canada, works at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Angrist, born in the United States, is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. Imbens, born in the Netherlands, is at Stanford University.“Sometimes, nature, or policy changes, provide situations that resemble randomized experiments,” said Peter Fredriksson, chairman of the prize committee. “This year’s laureates have shown that such natural experiments help answer important questions for society.”The recognition was bittersweet, many economists noted, because much of the research featured in the prize announcement was co-written by Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist and former White House adviser who died in 2019. The Nobels are not typically awarded posthumously. Despite that note of sadness, the economics profession celebrated the news, crediting the winners for their work in changing the way that labor markets in particular are studied.“They ushered in a new phase in labor economics that has now reached all fields of the profession,” Trevon D. Logan, an economics professor at Ohio State, wrote on Twitter shortly after the prize was announced.Mr. Card’s work has challenged conventional wisdom in labor economics — including the idea that higher minimum wages led to lower employment. He was a co-author of influential studies on that topic with Mr. Krueger, including one that used the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania to test the effect of a minimum wage change. Comparing outcomes between the states, the research found that employment at fast food restaurants was not negatively affected by an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage.Mr. Card has also researched the effect of an influx of immigrants on employment levels among local workers with low education levels — again finding the impact to be minimal — and the effect of school resource levels on student education, which was larger than expected.“I’m sure that if Alan were still with us, that he would be sharing this prize with me,” Mr. Card said in a news conference, after recognizing Mr. Krueger’s contributions. He also noted that initially, when it came to the minimum wage study, “quite a few economists were quite skeptical of our results.”David Neumark, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who co-wrote a paper contesting Mr. Card and Mr. Krueger’s findings in the minimum wage study, said he still thought the work had data issues — but added that there was no doubt that the methodology was important.“They’ve all done great work — they’ve changed the way that labor economists do research,” Mr. Neumark said of the three winners.Mr. Angrist and Mr. Krueger tried in the early 1990s to gauge how much benefit people derive from extra years of education. To figure it out, they took advantage of the fact that students born earlier in the year can legally leave school earlier than those born later in the year. Those born earlier tended to get less education and also earned less later on. The effect of an additional year of education, they estimated, was a 9 percent increase in income.That study helped spur the additional work on research methods that Mr. Angrist and Mr. Imbens later carried out. That contribution has reshaped the way researchers think about and analyze natural experiments, according to the Nobel committee.The pair showed that it was possible to identify a clear effect from an intervention in people’s behavior — like a subsidy that might encourage people to ride bicycles to work — even if a researcher could not control who took part in the experiment, and even if the impact varied across individuals. They also came up with a transparent framework for such research that has increased trust in it.“The challenge, for me, has always been trying to understand, when people do empirical work, what exactly the methodological challenges are,” Mr. Imbens said via telephone in a news conference for the announcement.Two American economists affiliated with Stanford, Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, won the 2020 Nobel in economics for improvements to auction theory. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of M.I.T. and Michael Kremer of Harvard University won in 2019 for their experiment-based research in development economics.The award, formally called the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, has been given out since 1969.Because the award is announced in the middle of the night on the United States’ West Coast, two of this year’s recipients were woken up by phone calls from Sweden informing them of their prize.Mr. Imbens said he was asleep when he received the call from the prize committee — around 2 a.m. — and was “absolutely stunned” to hear the news. He said he was pleased to win it alongside friends, noting that Mr. Angrist was the best man at his wedding.Mr. Card thought that a friend of his — whom he identified only as Tim — was pulling a prank on him, he said.“But then the phone number actually was a Swedish phone number,” he said. More

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    Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign.

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    Many experts are rethinking longstanding core ideas, including the importance of inflation expectations.It has long been a central tenet of mainstream economic theory that public fears of inflation tend to be self-fulfilling.Now though, a cheeky and even gleeful takedown of this idea has emerged from an unlikely source, a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve named Jeremy B. Rudd. His 27-page paper, published as part of the Fed’s Finance and Economics Discussion Series, has become what passes for a viral sensation among economists.The paper disputes the idea that people’s expectations for future inflation matter much for the level of inflation experienced today. That is especially important right now, in trying to figure out whether the current inflation surge is temporary or not.But the Rudd paper is part of something bigger still. It reflects a broader rethinking of core ideas about how the economy works and how policymakers, especially at central banks, try to manage things. This shift has also included debates about the relationship between unemployment and inflation, how deficit spending affects the economy, and much more.In effect, many of the key ideas underlying economic policy during the Great Moderation — the period of relatively steady growth and low inflation from the mid-1980s to 2007 that also seems to be a high-water mark for economists’ overconfidence — increasingly look to be at best incomplete, and at worst wrong.It is vivid evidence that macroeconomics, despite the thousands of highly intelligent people over centuries who have tried to figure it out, remains, to an uncomfortable degree, a black box. The ways that millions of people bounce off one another — buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us — amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it.“Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. “We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus,” just figuring out the basics of how the universe works.“It requires more humility and acceptance that not everything fits into one model yet,” he said.Or put less politely, as Mr. Rudd writes in the first sentence of his paper, “Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.”One reason for this, he posits: “The economy is a complicated system that is inherently difficult to understand, so propositions like these” — the arrant nonsense in question — “are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.”And from that starting point, a staff economist at the world’s most powerful central bank went on to say, in effect, that his own employer has been focused on the wrong things for the last few decades.Dockworkers unloading cars in Baltimore in 1971. Importers were worried about the effect of the 10 percent duty imposed by President Nixon on foreign-made items as part of his new economic “game plan” to halt inflation.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMainstream policymakers, very much including Mr. Rudd’s bosses at the Fed, believe that inflation is, in large part, self-fulfilling — that what people expect future inflation to look like has an ability to shape how much prices rise in the near term.In the common telling, the Great Inflation of the 1970s got going because people came to believe inflation would keep spiraling. The surge in gasoline prices wasn’t simply a frustrating development, but a harbinger of things to come, so people needed to demand higher raises, and businesses could feel confident charging higher prices for most everything.In this story, the great achievement of the Fed in the early 1980s was to break this cycle by re-establishing credibility that it would not allow sustained high inflation (though at the cost of a severe recession).That is why today’s discussions over the inflation outlook often spend a lot of time focusing on things like what bond prices suggest inflation will be five or 10 years from now, or how people answer survey questions about what they expect.Mr. Rudd argues that there is no solid evidence that the conventional story of the 1970s describes the real mechanism through which inflation takes place. He says there’s a simpler explanation consistent with the data: that businesses and workers arrive at prices and wages based on the conditions they’ve experienced in the recent past, not some abstract future forecast.For example, when inflation has been low in the recent past, workers might not demand raises as they would in a world where inflation was high; after all, their existing paychecks go pretty much as far as they used to. You don’t need some theory involving inflation expectations to get there.Some economists who are sympathetic to the idea that central bankers have overly fetishized precise measurements of inflation expectations aren’t ready to fully dismiss the idea.For example, Mr. Posen, a former Bank of England policymaker, says there remains a simple and hard-to-dispute idea about inflation expectations supported by lots of history: that if people distrust a country’s monetary system, inflation shocks can spiral upward. Economic policy credibility matters. But that isn’t the same as assuming that some survey or bond market measure of what will happen to inflation in the distant future is particularly meaningful for forecasting the near future.“It has been a noble lie that has become a critical part of the catechism of global monetary policy, that long-term inflation expectations are not just interesting but are a decisive determinant of real-time inflation,” said Paul McCulley, a former Pimco chief economist, commenting on Mr. Rudd’s paper.This isn’t the only way in which basic precepts underlying economic policy are shifting beneath economists’ feet.Particularly prominently, for years central bankers believed there was a tight relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation, known as the Phillips Curve. Over the course of the 2000s, though, that relationship appeared to weaken and become a less reliable guideline for how to set policy.Similarly, interest rates and inflation fell worldwide, for reasons that scholars are still trying to understand fully. That implied a lower “neutral interest rate,” or the rate that neither stimulates nor slows the economy, than was widely believed to be the case as recently as the mid-2010s.In many ways, the Fed’s policies just before the pandemic were aimed at incorporating those lessons and embracing sustained lower interest rates — and the possibility of lower unemployment — than many in the mainstream thought reasonable a few years earlier.In the realm of fiscal policy, some conventional wisdom has also been upended in the last few years. It was thought that large government debt issuance would risk causing a spike in interest rates and crowd out private sector investment. But in that period, huge budget deficits have been paired with low interest rates and abundant credit for businesses.All of this makes it a challenging time for central bankers and other shapers of policy. “If you’re a policymaker and you don’t have robust confidence in the parameters of the game you are managing, it makes your job a whole lot more difficult,” Mr. McCulley said.But if you are in charge of making economic policy that affects the lives of millions, you can’t simply shrug your shoulders and say, “We don’t know how the world works, so what are we supposed to do?” You look at the evidence available, and make the best judgment you can.And then, if you think it turns out you were wrong about something, publish a sassy paper to try to get it right. More

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    Biden and the Fed Wanted a Hot Economy. There’s Risk of Getting Burned.

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    So far, in a real-world test of a new approach to economic policy, prices have been rising faster than wages.Seen at a U-Haul in Overland, Mo., earlier this summer. A “high-pressure” economy has brought more people into the labor market and pushed up wages at the lower end of the income scale. Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesThere is a big idea in economic policy that has become ascendant in recent years: Great things can be achieved for American workers if the economy is allowed to run hot.The notion of creating a “high-pressure” economy is that government should be willing to risk a bit of inflation in the near term to achieve conditions that will over the long run lift people out of poverty, prevent the scars of recessions from becoming permanent, and make the nation’s economic potential stronger.This idea has origins in a 1973 paper by Arthur M. Okun, and was largely confined to think tank conferences in the 2010s. Now, it is the intellectual underpinning of American economic policy, embraced at the highest levels by the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve.It makes for a real-world test of a new approach to economic policy. The results so far show that pushing the economic accelerator to the floor has trade-offs, specifically the combination of trillions in federal spending with interest rates held near zero.While that combination has some created some important beneficial effects, the summer of 2021 has not produced quite the high-pressure economy its enthusiasts were hoping for.The good news is that job openings are abundant, wages for people at the lower end of the pay scale are rising quickly, and it appears that the post-pandemic recovery won’t be like the long slog that followed the three previous recessions.But consumer prices have been rising faster than average wages — meaning that, on average, workers are seeing the purchasing power of their paycheck fall. People looking to buy a car or build a house or obtain a wide variety of other products are finding it hard to do so. And while much of that reflects temporary supply disruptions that should abate in coming months, other forces could keep prices rising. These include soaring rents and the delayed effects of higher prices from companies having to pay higher wages.“I don’t think of the last few months as either vindication or repudiation, yet,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute and a longtime enthusiast of policymakers seeking a high-pressure economy.In effect, unlike the slow-moving developments of the 2010s, when the debates over running the economy hot took shape, things are moving so fast right now that it is hard to be sure how things will look as conditions stabilize.Still, “I think the benefits of carrying on the go-for-growth strategy will come,” Mr. Bivens said, noting exceptionally strong job creation in recent months.A more traditional view has been that it is unwise for policymakers to try to push unemployment too low, because doing so will generate inflation. That thinking lost credibility as the 2010s progressed — the jobless rate fell ever lower, with few signs of an inflation spike.But while the tight labor market from 2017 to 2019 generated strong inflation-adjusted wage gains for workers, especially at the lower end of the pay scale, there is nothing automatic about that process. In a booming economy, if companies raise prices more rapidly than they increase worker pay — taking a higher markup on the products they sell — it will mean workers are effectively making less for each hour of work.In the past, it has cut both ways. In the strong economies of the late 1960s and late 1990s, average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial workers persistently rose faster than inflation. In the late 1980s, the reverse was true.And it is also true now. Wages and salaries in the private sector were up 3.6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to Employment Cost Index data, the strongest since 2002. But the Consumer Price Index was up 4.8 percent in that same span, meaning workers lost ground. Other measures of compensation and inflation tell a similar story.One big question is whether elevated inflation is simply an unavoidable consequence of the reopening of the economy after a pandemic, or is at least partly a result of the aggressive use of fiscal and monetary policy to heat up the economy quickly.For example, automobile prices are through the roof, which analysts attribute mainly to microchip shortages caused by production decisions made during the pandemic. But is part of the spike in prices also a result of high demand, spurred by stimulus checks the government has sent and low interest rates that make car loans cheap?Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, points out that the United States is experiencing significantly higher inflation than other countries that are facing the same supply problems. Consumer prices rose 2.2 percent in the year ended in July in the euro area, compared with 5.4 percent in the United States.“My guess is that real wage growth is faring better right now in Europe than it is in the United States, and it’s faring better because there is less demand and thus less inflation,” Mr. Furman said.The story is better when you look at how lower-paid workers in the United States are doing. The shortages of workers, especially in service industries, are translating into raises for people who don’t make a lot. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta shows that median hourly wages for people in the bottom 25 percent of earners have risen at a 4.6 percent rate over the last year, compared with 2.8 percent for the top 25 percent.And many of the benefits of a hot economy come in the form of pulling more people into the work force and enabling them to work more hours. Employers have added an average of 617,000 jobs a month so far in 2021, versus 173,000 a month in 2011, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. If sustained, the United States is on track to return to its prepandemic employment level two years after the recession ended. Such a recovery took five years after the previous recession.Advocates of running a hot economy emphasize that a rapid recovery is good for reducing inequality, in part by ensuring there are plenty of job opportunities so that people don’t have to be out of work for long stretches.“We are seeing ongoing stimulus and expanded income support programs doing what they’re supposed to do,” said J.W. Mason, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a longtime proponent of running the economy hot. “The numbers we should really be looking at are employment growth and wage growth, especially at the low end, and those trends are positive and encouraging. They’re the numbers we would have hoped to see at the beginning of the year.”In the late years of the last expansion, employment gains were particularly strong for racial minorities, people with low levels of education, and some others who often have a hard time getting hired.“The thing we know for certain is that when you run a hot economy, people get jobs who wouldn’t otherwise get jobs,” Mr. Furman said. “That by itself is sufficient reason to want to run a hot economy. You’re talking about some of the most vulnerable workers getting hired, and that’s a wonderful thing.”Still, even some supporters of running the economy hot see risk that the scale and pace of stimulus actions have been too much.“It’s not that my commitment to a tight labor market has weakened,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the center-right voices who favored the approach. “It’s that the specific policy mix is a mistake, for a bunch of reasons. There is such a thing as too much stimulus, which becomes counterproductive, either because inflation eats away wage gains or the supply side of the economy can’t keep up.”Even people who believe in a high-pressure economy, in other words, would do well to keep an eye on just how high that pressure is getting, and how sustainable it really is. More

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    Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?

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    William Spriggs, a professor at Howard University, wrote an open letter last year to his fellow economists. Reacting to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began the letter with a question: “Is now a teachable moment for economists?”Slamming what he saw as attempts to deny racial discrimination, Dr. Spriggs argued that economists should stop looking for a reason other than racism — some “omitted variable” — to account for why African Americans are falling further behind in the economy.“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” wrote Dr. Spriggs, who is Black. “Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal.”After a year in which demands for racial justice acquired new resonance, Dr. Spriggs and others are pushing back against a strongly held tenet of economics: that differences in wages largely reflect differences in skill.While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.In 2020, the typical full-time Black worker earned about 20 percent less than a typical full-time white worker. And Black men and women are far less likely than whites to have a job. So the median earnings for Black men in 2019 amounted to only 56 cents for every dollar earned by white men. The gap was wider than it was in 1970.Lost ProgressEarnings of Black men, as a percentage of the earnings of white men, are at the same place they were in the 1960s and 1970s. More

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    Is It Time to Panic About Inflation? Ask These 5 Questions First.

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    Focus on exactly how and why prices are changing over time, and how these shifts might affect you.A price list at a bakery in 2017. Some price increases are more worrisome than others.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTo understand why inflation is so worrying to so many people, you could look at price charts for lumber or used cars or New York strip steaks. There is no doubt that the prices of many of the things people buy are rising at an uncomfortably rapid rate.But to really understand why there is a persistent longer-term buzz of inflation concern, you have to wrestle with the ways in which money itself is fundamentally ephemeral.Ultimately, most money is a mere electronic entry in the ledger of a bank. It is worth only what it will buy, and what it will buy changes all the time. Or as the humor publication The Onion once wrote, money is “just a symbolic, mutually shared illusion.”When prices move abruptly — as when an economy that has been partly shut down for more than a year tries to reboot — that inherent uncertainty becomes all too real. When wild swings like these can happen, what else might be possible?But inflation isn’t so scary if you focus on the precise mechanics by which the value of a dollar changes over time — and how it might affect you. In an inflation-scare moment like this one, you can boil that down to five essential questions:Is this a change in relative prices, or a change in overall prices? Are the prices of items becoming more expensive likely to rise further, stay the same, or go down? Are wages also rising? Is inflation so high and erratic that it is hard to plan ahead? And is this really inflation at all, or is it a shift in the price of investments like stocks and bonds?Let’s take these questions in turn, and look at what aspects of the current price surge look more benign, and which are worrying. Relative prices vs. overall pricesAt any given moment, some things are becoming more expensive and others are getting cheaper. That is how a market economy works; prices are what ensure that supply and demand eventually meet.Sometimes, this happens quickly. Airlines constantly adjust ticket prices; the prices of fresh vegetables bounce around depending on whether they are plentiful or scarce. Other times it happens more gradually. A hair salon may not raise prices the first day there is a line of customers out the door, but it will do so if it is consistently overbooked.Those shifts can be annoying — nobody wants to pay $1,000 for a short-haul plane ticket or see the price for a haircut double. But they are a healthy part of an economy working as it should.Typically, these relative price changes are not a problem of macroeconomics — something best solved by the Federal Reserve (by raising interest rates) or Congress (by raising taxes) — but a problem of the microeconomics of those industries.The core challenge of an economy emerging from a pandemic is that numerous industries are going through major shocks in demand and supply simultaneously. That means more big swings in relative price than usual.Last year, relative price changes cut in both directions (prices for energy and travel-related services fell, while prices for meat and other groceries rose). But this spring, the overwhelming thrust is toward higher prices. There are fewer goods and services with falling prices to offset the rises.Still, many of the most vivid and economically significant examples of price inflation so far, like for used cars, have unique industry dynamics at play, and therefore represent relative price changes, not economywide price rises. One important thing to watch is whether that changes — whether we start seeing uncomfortably high price increases more dispersed across the full range of goods and services.That would be a sign that we were in a period not simply of an economy adjusting itself, but one of too much money chasing too little stuff.One-off prices vs. long-term trendsNot all price changes have equal meaning for inflation. Much depends on what happens next.If the price of something rises but then is expected to fall back to normal, it will act as a drag on inflation in the future. This often happens when there is a shortage of something caused by an unusual shock, like weather that ruins a crop. In an opposite example, in 2017 a price war brought down the price of mobile phone service, pulling down inflation. But when the price war was over, the downward pull ended.On the other hand, a price that is expected to rise at exceptional rates year after year has considerably greater implications. Consider, for example, the multi-decade phenomenon in which health care prices rose faster than prices for most other goods, creating a persistent upward push on inflation.So an essential question for 2021 is in which bucket the inflationary forces now unleashed should be put.One piece of good news if you’re worried about an inflationary spiral: Futures prices for major commodities — including, oil, copper and corn — all point to falling prices in the years ahead.But then there are the labor-intensive service industries, those with no choice but to raise prices if workers are able to consistently demand higher pay. They bring us to a different essential question.Wage inflation vs. price inflationMedia coverage of inflation typically focuses on indexes that cover consumer prices: numbers that aim to capture what it costs to go to the grocery store, buy a car and obtain all the other things a person wants and needs.But more properly defined, inflation is about the full set of prices in the economy — including what people are paid for their labor. Whether there is wage inflation goes a long way to determining how people feel about the economy.Even relatively high price inflation is bearable if wages are rising faster. From 1995 to 2000, inflation averaged 2.6 percent a year. But the average hourly earnings of nonmanagerial workers were rising 3.7 percent a year, so it should be no surprise that workers felt good about the state of the economy.It is too soon to show up clearly in the data, but there are anecdotes aplenty that companies are rapidly increasing pay. Just this week, Bank of America said it would start a $25-per-hour minimum wage by 2025, up from $20, and major chains like McDonald’s, Starbucks and Chipotle have announced significant moves toward higher pay in recent weeks.For individuals who benefit from bigger paychecks, that will take the sting out of higher prices for goods. Some may end up better off financially than they had been in lower-inflation environments.Wages play an essential role in the linkage between higher prices and continuing inflation. In the 1970s, workers demanded­ — and received — higher pay. Then companies raised prices, which fueled further demands for pay raises.To experience a wage-price spiral like that, both parts of the equation need to come into play. That means it’s worth watching for evidence of whether pay raises are a one-time adjustment to an unusual job market, or the beginning of a shift in power toward workers after years of meager gains.Steady inflation vs. erratic inflationMany people take it for granted that high inflation is a bad thing.But in truth, it’s not obvious why a country couldn’t comfortably have prices rise significantly faster than they have in the United States in recent decades. Imagine a world where consumer prices rose 5 percent every year; workers’ wages rose 5 percent, plus a little more to account for rising productivity; and interest rates were consistently higher than Americans are accustomed to.In theory, the only problem would be what economists call “menu” costs, the inconvenience of companies having to revise their price lists frequently. (In a way, the pandemic shift away from physical menus in restaurants might even make that concern moot.)In practice, though, not many countries have managed to have higher inflation like that arrive steadily year after year. And there can be big negative consequences when inflation is erratic, swinging from 2 percent one year to 10 percent the next and so on.When inflation is erratic, it creates economic upheaval, essentially offering a windfall to either creditors (in the event of a surprise fall in inflation) or debtors (with rising prices).Over time, lenders would demand higher interest as compensation — an inflation risk premium. And that means that an economy with high and volatile inflation may get less investment, and hence less economic growth.So far, there is not much sign of that happening in the United States. Bond investors appear confident that whatever inflation takes place in the next year or two is a one-off event, not a new normal in which the value of a dollar is unpredictable.But keep an eye on markets for any evidence that is changing.Price inflation vs. asset inflationEven when consumer price inflation is low, some financial commentators may point to a worrying surge in asset inflation, meaning rising prices of stocks, bonds and other investments.Economists generally don’t think of asset price swings as a form of inflation at all. If stock prices rise, it may change the future returns on your savings, but it doesn’t change what a dollar can buy in terms of the goods and services you need to live.But semantics aside, it certainly seems apparent that millions of people have been plowing money into meme stocks and cryptocurrencies (as well as more traditional investments) that might otherwise have gone to bid up the price of home grilling equipment or other things in short supply.And while there is plenty to worry about in terms of bubbly signs in financial markets — and what it would mean if they corrected downward, as major cryptocurrencies did on Wednesday — that doesn’t mean they are making ordinary consumers worse off. You can’t eat Bitcoin; you can’t clothe yourself in shares of GameStop.Sometimes asset prices rise while consumer prices stand still, as in much of the 2010s. Sometimes consumer prices soar while financial assets languish, as in much of the 1970s. Other times, they move together.The implication: High asset prices and rising price inflation aren’t the same thing. Whether with asset prices or other aspects of inflation, being precise and detailed is a way to make the essential ephemerality of money a little more concrete. More

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    Middle-Class Pay Lost Pace. Is Washington to Blame?

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    A new paper by liberal economists presents evidence that policymakers helped hold down wages for four decades.One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.“If you think about a person who’s dissatisfied with their situation, what are their options?” Dr. Mishel said. “Almost every possibility has been foreclosed. You can’t quit and get a good-quality job. If you try to organize a union, it’s not so easy.”The slowdown in workers’ pay increases happened rather abruptly. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, hourly compensation for the typical worker grew roughly as quickly as productivity. If the value of the goods and services that workers provided rose by 2 percent in a year, then their wages and benefits tended to go up by roughly 2 percent as well.Since then, productivity has continued to grow, while hourly compensation largely flattened. According to the paper, the typical worker earned $23.15 an hour in 2017, far less than the $33.10 that worker would have earned had compensation kept up with productivity growth.In the 1980s and 1990s, economists increasingly argued that technology largely explained this flattening of wages. They said computers were making workers without college degrees less valuable to employers, while college graduates were becoming more valuable. At the same time, the growth in the number of college graduates was slowing. These developments dragged down wages for those in the middle of the income distribution (like factory workers) and increased wages for those near the top (like software engineers).The technology thesis largely relied on a standard economic analysis: As the demand for lower-skilled workers dropped, their wages grew less quickly. But in recent years, many economists have gradually de-emphasized this explanation, focusing more on the balance of power between workers and employers than on long-term shifts in supply and demand.The idea is that setting pay amounts to dividing the wealth that workers and employers create together. Workers can claim more of this wealth when institutions like unions give them leverage. They receive less when they lose such leverage.Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue that a decades-long loss of leverage largely explains the gap between the pay increases that workers would have received had they benefited fully from rising productivity, and the smaller wage and benefit increases that workers actually received.To arrive at this conclusion, they examine numerical measures of the impact of several developments that hurt workers’ bargaining power — some of which they generated, many of which other economists have generated over the years — then sum up those measures to arrive at an overall effect.For example, when surveying the economic literature on the unemployment rate, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens find that it was frequently below the so-called natural rate — the rate below which economists believe a tight job market could cause inflation to accelerate uncontrollably — in the three decades after World War II, but frequently above the natural rate in the last four decades.This is partly because the Federal Reserve began to put more emphasis on fighting inflation once Paul Volcker became chairman in 1979, and partly because of the failure of state and federal governments to provide more economic stimulus after the Great Recession of 2007-9.Drawing on existing measures of the relationship between unemployment and wages, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens estimate that this excess unemployment lowered wages by about 10 percent since the 1970s, explaining nearly one-quarter of the gap between wages and productivity growth.They perform similar exercises for other factors that undermined workers’ bargaining power: the decline of unions; a succession of trade deals with low-wage countries; and increasingly common arrangements like “fissuring,” in which companies outsource work to lower-paying firms, and noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which make it hard for workers to leave for a competitor.Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens conclude, these factors explain more than three-quarters of the gap between the typical worker’s actual increases in compensation and their expected increases, given the productivity gains.If that figure is in the right ballpark, it is a crucial insight. Underlying most of the explanations for anemic wages that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens cite is the idea that wage growth depends on policy choices, not on the march of technology or other irreversible developments. Government officials could have worried less about inflation and erred on the side of lower unemployment when setting interest rates and passing economic stimulus. They could have cracked down on employers that aggressively fought unions or foisted noncompete agreements onto fast-food workers.And if policymakers are to blame for wage stagnation, they can also do a lot to reverse it — and more quickly than many economists once assumed. Among other things, the conclusion of the paper would suggest that President Biden, who has enacted a large economic stimulus and sought to increase union membership, may be on the right track.“One of the biggest things about the American Rescue Plan,” said Dr. Mishel, referring to the pandemic relief bill Mr. Biden signed, “is first and foremost its commitment to getting to full employment quickly. It’s willing to risk overheating.”The paper’s conclusions suggest that economic programs embraced by President Biden may be useful in raising wages.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesSo is the paper’s number plausible? The short answer from other economists was that it pointed in the right direction, but may have overshot its mark.“My sense is that things like fissuring, noncompetes have become very important in the 2000s, along with unions that have gotten to the point where they’re so weak,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard who is a longtime proponent of the idea that the higher wages earned by college graduates have increased inequality.But Dr. Katz, who has also written about unions and other reasons that workers have lost leverage, said the portion of the wage gap that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens attribute to such factors probably overstated their impact.The reason, he said, is that their effects can’t simply be added up. If excessive unemployment explains 25 percent of the gap and weaker unions explain 20 percent, it is not necessarily the case that they combine to explain 45 percent of the gap, as Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens imply. The effects overlap somewhat.Dr. Katz added that education plays a complementary role to bargaining power in determining wages, citing a historical increase in wages for Black workers as an example. In the first several decades of the 20th century, philanthropists and the N.A.A.C.P. worked to improve educational opportunities for Black students in the South. That helped raise wages once a major policy change — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — increased workers’ power.“Education by itself wasn’t enough given the Jim Crow apartheid system,” Dr. Katz said. “But it’s not clear you could have gotten the same increase in wages if there had not been earlier activism to provide education.”Daron Acemoglu, an M.I.T. economist who has studied the effects of technology on wages and employment, said Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens were right to push the field to think more deeply about how institutions like unions affect workers’ bargaining power.But he said they were too dismissive of the role of market forces like the demand for skilled workers, noting that even as the so-called college premium has mostly flattened over the last two decades, the premium for graduate degrees has continued to increase, most likely contributing to inequality.Still, other economists cautioned that it was important not to lose sight of the overall trend that Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens highlight. “There is just an increasing body of work trying to quantify both the direct and indirect effects of declining worker bargaining power,” said Anna Stansbury, the co-author of a well-received paper on the subject with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. After receiving her doctorate, she will join the faculty of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management this fall.“Whether it explains three-quarters or one-half” of the slowdown in wage growth, she continued, “for me the evidence is very compelling that it’s a nontrivial amount.” More

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    Biden’s Proposals Aim to Give Sturdier Support to the Middle Class

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    Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you.President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.“When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.”If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market.Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills.That presidents pitch their agendas to the middle class is not surprising given that nearly nine out of 10 Americans consider themselves members. The definition, of course, has always been a nebulous stew of cash, credentials and culture, relying on lifestyles and aspirations as much as on assets.But what cuts across an avalanche of studies, surveys and statistics over the last half century is that life in the middle class, once considered a guarantee of security and comfort, now often comes with a nagging sense of vulnerability.Salaries for teachers, hospital workers and child care providers are determined largely by the government, and do not necessarily reflect their value in an open market.Philip Keith for The New York TimesBefore the pandemic, unemployment was low and stocks soared. But for decades, workers have increasingly had to contend with low pay and sluggish wage growth, more erratic schedules, as well as a lack of sick days, parental leave and any kind of long-term security. At the same time, the cost of essentials like housing, health care and education have been gulping up a much larger portion of their incomes.The trend can be found in rich countries all over the world. “Every generation since the baby boom, has seen the middle-income group shrink and its economic influence weaken,” a 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded.In the United States, the proportion of adults in the middle bands of the income spectrum — which the Pew Research Center defines as roughly between $50,000 and $150,000 — declined to 51 percent in 2019 from 61 percent 50 years ago. Their share of the nation’s income shrank even more over the same period, to 42 percent from 62 percent.Their outlook dimmed, too. During the 1990s, Pew found rising optimism that the next generation would be better off financially than the current one, reaching a high of 55 percent in 1999. That figure dropped to 42 percent in 2019.The economy has produced enormous wealth over the last few decades, but much of it was channeled to a tiny cadre at the top. Two wage earners were needed to generate the kind of income that used to come in a single paycheck.“Upper-income households pulled away,” said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew.Corrosive inequality was just the beginning of what appeared to be a litany of glaring market failures like the inability to head off ruinous climate change or meet the enormous demand for affordable housing and health care. Companies often channeled profits to buy back stock instead of using them to invest or raise wages.The evidence was growing, liberal economists argued, that the reigning hands-off economic approach — low taxes on the wealthy, minimal government — was not producing the broad-based economic gains that sustained and grew the middle class.“The unregulated economy is not working for most Americans,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics. “The government has an important role,” he emphasized, in regulating the private sector’s excesses, redistributing income and making substantial public investments.Skeptics have warned of government overreach and the risk that deficit spending could ignite inflation, but Mr. Biden and his team of economic advisers have, nonetheless, embraced the approach.“It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out,” Mr. Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, a reference to the idea that prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy, but flows out of a well-educated and well-paid middle class.He underscored the point by singling out workers as the dynamo powering the middle class.“Wall Street didn’t build this country,” he said. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”Of course, the economy that lifted millions of postwar families into the middle class differed sharply from the current one. Manufacturing, construction and mining jobs, previously viewed as the backbone of the labor force, dwindled — as did the labor unions that aggressively fought for better wages and benefits. Now, only one out of every 10 workers is a union member, while roughly 80 percent of jobs in the United States are in the service sector.And it is these types of jobs, in health care, education, child care, disabled and senior care, that are expected to continue expanding at the quickest pace.Most of them, though, fall short of paying middle-income wages. That does not necessarily reflect their value in an open market. Salaries for teachers, hospital workers, lab technicians, child care providers and nursing home attendants are determined largely by the government, which collects tax dollars to pay their salaries and sets reimbursements rates for Medicare and other programs.They are also jobs that are filled by significant numbers of women, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.“When we think about what is the right wage,” Mr. Stiglitz asked, “should we take advantage of discrimination against women and people of color, which is what we’ve done, or can we use this as the basis of building a middle class?”Mr. Biden’s spending plans — a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package called the American Jobs Plan, and a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that concentrates on social spending — aim to take account of just how much the work force and the economy have transformed over the past half-century and where they may be headed in the next.The president’s economic team took inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the public programs that followed it.After World War II, for instance, the government helped millions of veterans get college educations and buy homes by offering tuition assistance and subsidized mortgages. It created a mammoth highway system to undergird commercial activity and funneled billions of dollars into research and development that was used later to develop smartphone technology, search engines, the human genome project, magnetic resonance imaging, hybrid corn and supercomputers.Mr. Biden, too, wants to fix roads and bridges, upgrade electric grids and invest in research. But his administration has also concluded that a 21st-century economy requires much more, from expanded access to high-speed broadband, which more than a third of rural inhabitants lack, to parental leave and higher wages for child care workers.The basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force, like child care and parental leave, are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times“We’ve now had 50 years of the revolution of women entering the labor force,” and the most basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. She paused a few moments to take it in: “It’s absolutely stunning.”Right before the pandemic, more women than men could be found in paying jobs.Ensuring equal opportunity, Ms. Stevenson noted, includes “the opportunity to get high-quality early-childhood education, the opportunity to have a parent stay home with you when you’re sick, the opportunity for a parent to bond with you when born.”When it comes to offering this type of support, she added, “the United States is an outlier compared to almost every industrialized country.”The administration also has an eye on how federal education, housing and business programs of earlier eras largely excluded women, African-Americans, Asians and others.In the Biden plan are aid for colleges that primarily serve nonwhite students, free community college for all, universal prekindergarten and monthly child payments.“This is not a 1930s model any more,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a political science professor at Princeton University.And it’s all to be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the top 1 percent.Passage in a sharply polarized Congress is anything but assured. The multitrillion-dollar price tag and the prospect of an activist government have ensured the opposition of Republicans in a Senate where Democrats have the slimmest possible majority.But public polling from last year showed widening support for the government to take a larger role.“What is so remarkable about this moment is this notion that public investment can transform America, that these are things government can do,” said Felicia Wong, president of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “This is fundamentally restructuring how the economy works.”The middle class today differs in significant ways from the middle class of 50 years ago and perhaps the most striking is a loss of confidence.Evan Jenkins for The New York Times More

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    Biden's Spending Plans Could Start to Tackle Inequality

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    The Biden administration is relying on Congress instead of just the Fed to fix the economy. That mix could lead to a less wealth-unequal future.The coronavirus pandemic has threatened to rapidly expand yawning gaps between the rich and the poor, throwing lower-earning service workers out of jobs, costing them income, and limiting their ability to build wealth. But by betting on big government spending to pull the economy back from the brink, United States policymakers could limit that fallout.The $1.9 trillion economic aid package President Biden signed into law last month includes a wide range of programs with the potential to help poor and middle-class Americans to supplement lost income and save money. That includes monthly payments to parents, relief for renters and help with student loans.Now, the administration is rolling out additional plans that would go even further, including a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and about $1.5 trillion in spending and tax credits to support the labor force by investing in child care, paid leave, universal prekindergarten and free community college. The measures are explicitly meant to help left-behind workers and communities of color who have faced systemic racism and entrenched disadvantages — and they would be funded, in part, by taxes on the rich.Forecasters predict that the government spending — even just what has been passed so far — will fuel what could be the fastest annual economic growth in a generation this year and next, as the country recovers and the economy reopens from the coronavirus pandemic. By jump-starting the economy from the bottom and middle, the response could make sure the pandemic rebound is more equitable than it would be without a proactive government response, analysts said.That is a big change from the wake of the 2007 to 2009 recession. Then, Congress and the White House passed an $800 billion stimulus bill, which many researchers have concluded did not do enough to fill the hole the recession left in economic activity. Lawmakers instead relied on the Federal Reserve’s cheap-money policies to coax the United States’ economy back from the brink. What ensued was a halting recovery marked by climbing wealth inequality as workers struggled to find jobs while the stock market soared.“Monetary policy is a very aggregated policy tool — it’s a very important economic policy tool, but it’s at a very aggregated level — whereas fiscal policy can be more targeted,” said Cecilia Rouse, who oversees the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In the pandemic crisis, which disproportionately hurt women of all races and men of color, she said, “If we tailor the relief to those who are most affected, we are going to be addressing racial and ethnic gaps.”From its first days, the pandemic set the stage for a K-shaped economy, one in which the rich worked from home without much income disruption as poorer people struggled. Workers in low-paying service jobs were far more likely to lose jobs, and among racial groups, Black people have experienced a much slower labor market rebound than their white counterparts. Globally, the downturn probably put 50 million people who otherwise would have qualified as middle class into lower income levels, based on one recent Pew Research analysis.But data suggest the U.S. policy response — including relief legislation that passed last year under the Trump administration — has helped mitigate the pain.“The CARES Act to the American Rescue Plan have helped to support more households than I would have imagined,” Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, told reporters this month during a call, referring to the pandemic relief packages passed in early 2020 and early 2021.Wealth has recovered nearly across the board after slumping early last year, foreclosures have remained low, and household consumption has been shored up by repeated stimulus checks.While the era has been fraught with uncertainty and people have slipped through the cracks, this downturn looks very different for poorer Americans than the post-financial crisis period. That recession ended in 2009, and America’s wealthiest households recovered precrisis wealth levels by 2012, while it took until 2017 for the poorest to do the same.At a food bank in Phoenix last month. The $1.9 trillion economic aid package signed into law includes a wide range of programs with the potential to help poor and middle-class Americans.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesThe government’s policy response is driving the difference. In the 2010s, Republicans cited deficit worries and curtailed spending early, at a time when the economy remained far from healed after the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Interest rates were already near zero and not offering much of an economic lift, so the Fed engaged in several rounds of large-scale bond purchases to try to bolster the economy.The Fed policies did help. But low rates and huge bond-buying bolstered the economy slowly, and by first increasing prices on financial assets, which rich households are much more likely to own. As companies gain access to cheap capital to expand and hire, the workers who secure those new jobs have more money to spend, and a happy cycle unfolds.By 2019, that prosperous loop had kicked into gear and unemployment had dropped to half-century lows. Black and Hispanic as well as less-educated workers were working in greater numbers, and wages at the bottom of the income distribution had begun to steadily climb.Poverty fell, and there were reasons to hope that if that had continued, income inequality — the gap between how much the poor and the rich earn each year — might soon decline. Lower income inequality could, in theory, lead to lower wealth inequality over time, as households have the wherewithal to save more evenly.But getting there took nearly a decade and when the pandemic hit in 2020, it almost certainly disrupted the trend. The data are released on a lag.As those divergent trends between labor and capital played out, the rich rebuilt their savings — which are heavily invested in stocks and businesses — much faster. Poorer households eventually reaped benefits as the years wore on and people landed jobs. The bottom half of America’s wealth holders ended up better off than they had been before the crisis, but farther behind the rich.At the start of 2007, the bottom half of the wealth distribution held 2.1 percent of the nation’s riches, compared to 29.7 percent for the top 1 percent. By the start of 2020, the bottom half had 1.8 percent, while the top 1 percent held 31 percent.Researchers debate whether monetary policy actually worsens wealth divides in the long run — especially since there’s the hairy question of what would have happened had the Fed not acted — but monetary policymakers generally agree that their policies can’t stop a pre-existing trend toward ever-worse wealth inequality.By offering a more targeted boost from the very start of the recovery, fiscal policy can. Or, at a minimum, it can prevent wealth gaps from deepening so much.Monetary policy “is naturally trickle-down,” said Joseph Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia and Nobel laureate. “Fiscal policy can work from the bottom and middle up.”That’s what the Biden administration is gambling on. Paired with packages from December and last April, Congress’s recent package will bring the amount of economic relief that Congress has approved during the pandemic to more than $5 trillion. That dwarfs the amount spent in the last recovery.The legislation is a mosaic of tax credits, stimulus checks and small-business support that could leave families at the lower end of the income and savings distribution with more money in the bank and, if its provisions work as advertised, with a better chance of returning to work early in the recovery.There is no guarantee Mr. Biden’s broader economic proposals, totaling about $4 trillion, will clear a narrowly divided Congress. Republicans have balked at his plans and this week offered a counterproposal on infrastructure that is only a fraction the size of what Mr. Biden wants to spend. A bipartisan group of House moderates is pushing the president to finance infrastructure spending through an increased gas tax or something similar, which hits the poor harder than the rich.Still, the president’s new proposals could have long-term effects, working to retool workers’ skills and lift communities of color in hopes of putting the economy on more equal footing. The president is set to outline his so-called American Family Plan, which is focused on the work force, before his first address to a joint session of Congress next week.While details have yet to be finished, programs like universal prekindergarten, expanded subsidies for child care and a national paid leave program would be paid for partly by raising taxes on investors and rich Americans. That could also affect the wealth distribution, shuffling savings from the rich to the poor.The plan, which must win support in a Congress where Democrats have just a narrow margin, would raise the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent, and raise taxes on capital gains — the proceeds of selling an asset, like a stock — for people making more than $1 million to 39.6 percent from 20 percent. Counting in an Obamacare-related tax, the taxes they pay on profits would rise above 43 percent.If the Biden package helps a wide swath of people to get back to earning and saving money faster this time, there’s hope that it might set the economy on a different trajectory.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe new policies will not necessarily cut wealth inequality, which has been on an inexorable upward march for decades, but they could keep poorer households from falling behind by as much as they would have otherwise.Betting big on fiscal policy to return the economy to strength is a gamble. If the economy overheats, as some prominent economists have warned it could, the Fed might have to rapidly lift interest rates to cool things down. Rapid adjustments have historically caused recessions, which consistently throw vulnerable groups out of jobs first.But administration officials have repeatedly said the bigger risk is underdoing it, leaving millions on the labor market’s sidelines to struggle through another tepid recovery. And they say the spending provisions in both the rescue package and the infrastructure could help to fix longstanding divides along racial and gender lines.“We think of investment in racial equity, and equity in general, as good policy, period, and integral to all the work we do,” Catherine Lhamon, a deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council, said in an interview. More