Long-Term Structural Change in the US Economy: Manufacturing is Simply Following the Path of Agriculture

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A.  Introduction

A major theme of Trump, both during his campaign and now as president, has been that jobs in manufacturing have been decimated as a direct consequence of the free trade agreements that started with NAFTA.  He repeated the assertion in his speech to Congress of February 28, where he complained that “we’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved”, but that because of him “Dying industries will come roaring back to life”.  He is confused.  But to be fair, there are those on the political left as well who are similarly confused.

All this reflects a sad lack of understanding of history.  Manufacturing jobs have indeed been declining in recent decades, and as the chart above shows, they have been declining as a share of total jobs in the economy since the 1940s.  Of all those employed, the share employed in manufacturing (including mining) fell by 7.6% points between 1994 (when NAFTA entered into effect) and 2015 (the most recent year in the sector data of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, used for consistency throughout this post), a period of 21 years. But the share employed in manufacturing fell by an even steeper 9.2% points in the 21 years before 1994.  The decline in manufacturing jobs (both as a share and in absolute number) is nothing new, and it is wrong to blame it on NAFTA.

It is also the case that manufacturing production has been growing steadily over this period.  Total manufacturing production (measured in real value-added terms) rose by 64% over the 21 years since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.  And this is also substantially higher than the 42% real growth in the 21 years prior to 1994.  Blaming NAFTA (and the other free trade agreements of recent decades) for a decline in manufacturing is absurd.  Manufacturing production has grown.

For those only interested in the assertion by Trump that NAFTA and the other free trade agreements have killed manufacturing in the US and with it the manufacturing jobs, one could stop here.  Manufacturing has actually grown strongly since NAFTA went into effect, and there are fewer manufacturing jobs now than before not because manufacturing has declined, but because workers in manufacturing are now more productive than ever before (with this a continuation of the pattern underway over at least the entire post-World War II period, and not something new).  But the full story is a bit more complex, as one also needs to examine why manufacturing production is at the level that it is.  For this, one needs to bring in the rest of the economy, in particular services. The rest of this blog post will address this broader issue,

Manufacturing jobs have nonetheless indeed declined.  To understand why, one needs to look at what has happened to productivity, not only in manufacturing but also in the other sectors of the economy (in particular in services).  And I would suggest that one could learn much by an examination of the similar factors behind the even steeper decline over the years in the share of jobs in agriculture.  It is not because of adverse effects of free trade.  The US is in fact the largest exporter of food products in the world.  Yet the share of workers employed in the agricultural sectors (including forestry and fishing) is now just 0.9% of the total.  It used to be higher:  4.3% in 1947 and 8.4% in 1929 (using the BEA data).  If one wants to go really far back, academics have estimated that agricultural employment accounted for 74% of all US employment in 1800, with this still at 56% in 1860.

Employment in agriculture has declined so much, from 74% of total employment in 1800 to 8.4% in 1929 to less than 1% today, because those employed in agriculture are far more productive today than they were before.  And while it leads to less employment in the sector, whether as a share of total employment or in absolute numbers, higher productivity is a good thing.  The US could hardly enjoy a modern standard of living if 74% of those employed still had to be working in agriculture in order to provide us food to eat. And while stretching the analysis back to 1800 is extreme, one can learn much by examining and understanding the factors behind the long-term trends in agricultural employment.  Manufacturing is following the same basic path.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  Indeed, that is exactly what one would hope for in order for the economy to grow and develop.

Furthermore, the effects of foreign trade on employment in the sectors, positive or negative, are minor compared to the long-term impacts of higher productivity.  In the post below we will look at what would have happened to employment if net trade would somehow be forced to zero by Trumpian policies.  The impact relative to the long term trends would be trivial.

This post will focus on the period since 1947, the earliest date for which the BEA has issued data on both sector outputs and employment.  The shares of agriculture as well as of manufacturing in both total employment and in output (with output measured in current prices) have both declined sharply over this period, but not because those sectors are producing less than before.  Indeed, their production in real terms are both far higher. Employment in those sectors has nevertheless declined in absolute numbers.  The reason is their high rates of productivity growth.  Importantly, productivity in those two sectors has grown at a faster pace than in the services sector (the rest of the economy).  As we will discuss, it is this differential rate of productivity growth (faster in agriculture and in manufacturing than in services) which explains the decline in the share employed in agriculture and manufacturing.

These structural changes, resulting ultimately from the differing rates of productivity growth in the sectors, can nonetheless be disruptive.  With fewer workers needed in a sector because of a high rate of productivity growth, while more workers are needed in those sectors where productivity is growing more slowly (although still positively and possibly strongly, just relatively less strongly), there is a need for workers to transfer from one sector to another.  This can be difficult, in particular for individuals who are older or who have fewer general skills.  But this was achieved before in the US as well as in other now-rich countries, as workers shifted out of agriculture and into manufacturing a century to two centuries ago.  Critically important was the development of the modern public school educational system, leading to almost universal education up through high school. The question the country faces now is whether the educational system can be similarly extended today to educate the workers needed for jobs in the modern services economy.

First, however, is the need to understand how the economy has reached the position it is now in, and the role of productivity growth in this.

B.  Sector Shares and Prices

As Chart 1 at the top of this post shows, employment in agriculture and in manufacturing have been falling steadily as a share of total employment since the 1940s, while jobs in services have risen.

[A note on the data:  The data here comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which, as part of its National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), estimates sector outputs as well as employment.  Employment is measured in full-time equivalent terms (so that two half-time workers, say, count as the equivalent of one full-time worker), which is important for measuring productivity growth.

And while the BEA provides figures on its web site for employment going all the way back to 1929, the figures for sector output on its web site only go back to 1947.  Thus while the chart at the top of this post goes back to 1929, all the analysis shown below will cover the period from 1947 only.  Note also that there is a break in the employment series in 1998, when the BEA redefined slightly how some of the detailed sectors would be categorized. They unfortunately did not then go back to re-do the categorizations in a consistent way in the years prior to that, but the changes are small enough not to matter greatly to this analysis.  And there were indeed similar breaks in the employment series in 1948 and again in 1987, but the changes there were so small (at the level of aggregation of the sectors used here) as not to be noticeable at all.

Also, for the purposes here the sector components of GDP have been aggregated to just three, with forestry and fishing included with agriculture, mining included with manufacturing, and construction included with services.  As a short hand, these sectors will at times be referred to simply as agriculture, manufacturing, and services.

Finally, the figures on sector outputs in real terms provided by the BEA data are calculated based on what are called “chain-weighted” indices of prices.  Chain-weighted indices are calculated based on moving shares of sector outputs (whatever the share is in any given period) rather than on fixed shares (i.e. the shares at the beginning or the end of the time period examined).  Chain-weighted indices are the best to use over extended periods, but are unfortunately not additive, where a sum (such as real GDP) will not necessarily equal exactly the sum of the estimates of the underlying sector figures (in real terms).  The issue is however not an important one for the questions being examined in this post.  While we will show the estimates in the charts for real GDP (based on a sum of the figures for the three sectors), there is no need to focus on it in the analysis.  Now back to the main text.]

The pattern in a chart of sector outputs as shares of GDP (measured in current prices by the value-added of each sector), is similar to that seen in Chart 1 above for the employment shares:

Agriculture is falling, and falling to an extremely small share of GDP (to less than 1% of GDP in 2015).  Manufacturing and mining is similarly falling from the mid-1950s, while services and construction is rising more or less steadily.  On the surface, all this appears to be similar to what was seen in Chart 1 for employment shares.  It also might look like the employment shares are simply following the shifts in output shares.

But there is a critical difference.  The shares of workers employed is a measure of numbers of workers (in full-time equivalent terms) as a share of the total.  That is, it is a measure in real terms.  But the shares of sector outputs in Chart 2 above is a measure of the shares in terms of current prices.  They do not tell us what is happening to sector outputs in real terms.

For sector outputs in real terms (based on the prices in the initial year, or 1947 here), one finds a very different chart:

Here, the output shares are not changing all that much.  There is only a small decline in agriculture (from 8% of the total in 1947 to 7% in 2015), some in manufacturing (from 28% to 22%), and then the mirror image of this in services (from 64% to 72%).  The changes in the shares were much greater in Chart 2 above for sector output shares in current prices.

Many might find the relatively modest shifts in the shares of sector outputs when measured in constant price terms to be surprising.  We were all taught in our introductory Economics 101 class of Engel Curve effects.  Ernst Engel was a German statistician who, in 1857, found that at the level of households, the share of expenditures on basic nourishment (food) fell the richer the household.  Poorer households spent a relatively higher share of their income on food, while better off households spent less.  One might then postulate that as a nation becomes richer, it will see a lower share of expenditures on food items, and hence that the share of agriculture will decline.

But there are several problems with this theory.  First, for various reasons it may not apply to changes over time as general income levels rise (including that consumption patterns might be driven mostly by what one observes other households to be consuming at the time; i.e. “keeping up with the Joneses” dominates).  Second, agricultural production spans a wide range of goods, from basic foodstuffs to luxury items such as steak.  The Engel Curve effects might mostly be appearing in the mix of food items purchased.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Engel Curve effects, if they exist, would affect production only in a closed economy where it was not possible to export or import agricultural items.  But one can in fact trade such agricultural goods internationally. Hence, even if domestic demand fell over time (due perhaps to Engel Curve effects, or for whatever reason), domestic producers could shift to exporting a higher share of their production.  There is therefore no basis for a presumption that the share of agricultural production in total output, in real terms, should be expected to fall over time due to demand effects.

The same holds true for manufacturing and mining.  Their production can be traded internationally as well.

If the shares of agriculture and manufacturing fell sharply over time in terms of current prices, but not in terms of constant prices (with services then the mirror image), the implication is that the relative prices of agriculture as well as manufacturing fell relative to the price of services.  This is indeed precisely what one sees:

These are the changes in the price indices published by the BEA, with all set to 1947 = 1.0.  Compared to the others, the change in agricultural prices over this 68 year period is relatively small.  The price of manufacturing and mining production rose by far more.  And while a significant part of this was due to the rise in the 1970s of the prices of mined products (in particular oil, with the two oil crises of the period, but also in the prices of coal and other mined commodities), it still holds true for manufacturing alone.  Even if one excludes the mining component, the price index rose by far more than that of agriculture.

But far greater was the change in the price of services.  It rose to an index value of 12.5 in 2015, versus an index value of just 1.6 for agriculture in that year.  And the price of services rose by double what the price of manufacturing and mining rose by (and even more for manufacturing alone).

With the price of services rising relative to the others, the share of services in GDP (in current prices) will then rise, and substantially so given the extent of the increase in its relative price, despite the modest change in its share in constant price terms.  Similarly, the fall in the shares of agriculture and of manufacturing (in current price terms) will follow directly from the fall in their prices (relative to the price of services), despite just a modest reduction in their shares in real terms.

The question then is why have we seen such a change in relative prices.  And this is where productivity enters.

C.  Growth in Output, Employment, and Productivity

First, it is useful to look at what happened to the growth in real sector outputs relative to 1947:

All sector outputs rose, and by substantial amounts.  While Trump has asserted that manufacturing is dying (due to free trade treaties), this is not the case at all.  Manufacturing (including mining) is now producing 5.3 times (in real terms) what it was producing in 1947.  Furthermore, manufacturing production was 64% higher in real terms in 2015 than it was in 1994, the year NAFTA went into effect.  This is far from a collapse.  The 64% increase over the 21 years between 1994 and 2015 was also higher than the 42% increase in manufacturing production of the preceding 21 year period of 1973 to 1994. There was of course much more going on than any free trade treaties, but to blame free trade treaties on a collapse in manufacturing is absurd.  There was no collapse.

Production in agriculture also rose, and while there was greater volatility (as one would expect due to the importance of weather), the increase in real output over the full period was in fact very similar to the increase seen for manufacturing.

But the biggest increase was for services.  Production of services was 7.6 times higher in 2015 than in 1947.

The second step is to look at employment, with workers measured here in full-time equivalent terms:

Despite the large increases in sector production over this period, employment in agriculture fell as did employment in manufacturing.  One unfortunately cannot say with precision by how much, given the break in the employment series in 1998.  However, there were drops in the absolute numbers employed in manufacturing both before and after the 1998 break in the series, while in agriculture there was a fall before 1998 (relative to 1947) and a fairly flat series after.  The change in the agriculture employment numbers in 1998 was relatively large for the sector, but since agricultural employment was such a small share of the total (only 1%), this does not make a big difference overall.

In contrast to the falls seen for agriculture and manufacturing, employment in the services sector grew substantially.  This is where the new jobs are arising, and this has been true for decades.  Indeed, services accounted for more than 100% of the new jobs over the period.

But one cannot attribute the decline in employment in agriculture and in manufacturing to the effects of international trade.  The points marked with a “+” in Chart 6 show what employment in the sectors would have been in 2015 (relative to 1947) if one had somehow forced net imports in the sectors to zero in 2015, with productivity remaining the same. There would have been an essentially zero change for agriculture (while the US is the world’s largest food exporter, it also imports a lot, including items like bananas which would be pretty stupid to try to produce here).  There would have been somewhat more of an impact on manufacturing, although employment in the sector would still have been well below what it had been decades ago.  And employment in services would have been a bit less. While most production in the services sector cannot be traded internationally, the sector includes businesses such as banking and other finance, movie making, professional services, and other areas where the US is in fact a strong exporter.  Overall, the US is a net exporter of services, and an abandonment of trade that forced all net imports (and hence net exports) to zero would lead to less employment in the sector.  But the impact would be relatively minor.

Labor productivity is then simply production per unit of labor.  Dividing one by the other leads to the following chart:

Productivity in agriculture grew at a strong pace, and by more than in either of the other two sectors over the period.  With higher productivity per worker, fewer workers will be needed to produce a given level of output.  Hence one can find that employment in agriculture declined over the decades, even though agricultural production rose strongly. Productivity in manufacturing similarly grew strongly, although not as strongly as in agriculture.

In contrast, productivity in the services sector grew at only a modest pace.  Most of the activities in services (including construction) are relatively labor intensive, and it is difficult to substitute machinery and new technology for the core work that they do.  Hence it is not surprising to find a slower pace of productivity growth in services.  But productivity in services still grew, at a positive 0.9% annual pace over the 1947 to 2015 period, as compared to a 2.8% annual pace for manufacturing and a 3.3% annual pace in agriculture.

Finally, and for those readers more technically inclined, one can convert this chart of productivity growth onto a logarithmic scale.  As some may recall from their high school math, a straight line path on a logarithmic scale implies a constant rate of growth.  One finds:

While one should not claim too much due to the break in the series in 1998, the path for productivity in agriculture on a logarithmic scale is remarkably flat over the full period (once one abstracts from the substantial year to year variation – short term fluctuations that one would expect from dependence on weather conditions).  That is, the chart indicates that productivity in agriculture grew at a similar pace in the early decades of the period, in the middle decades, and in the later decades.

In contrast, it appears that productivity in manufacturing grew at a certain pace in the early decades up to the early 1970s, that it then leveled off for about a decade until the early 1980s, and that it then moved to a rate of growth that was faster than it had been in the first few decades.  Furthermore, the pace of productivity growth in manufacturing following this turn in the early 1980s was then broadly similar to the pace seen in agriculture in this period (the paths are then parallel so the slope is the same).  The causes of the acceleration in the 1980s would require an analysis beyond the scope of this blog post. But it is likely that the corporate restructuring that became widespread in the 1980s would be a factor.  Some would also attribute the acceleration in productivity growth to the policies of the Reagan administration in those years.  However, one would also then need to note that the pace of productivity growth was similar in the 1990s, during the years of the Clinton administration, when conservatives complained that Clinton introduced regulations that undid many of the changes launched under Reagan.

Finally, and as noted before, the pace of productivity growth in services was substantially less than in the other sectors.  From the chart in logarithms, it appears the pace of productivity growth was relatively robust in the initial years, up to the mid-1960s.  While slower than the pace in manufacturing or in agriculture, it was not that much slower.  But from the mid-1960s, the pace of growth of productivity in services fell to a slower, albeit still positive, pace.  Furthermore, that pace appears to have been relatively steady since then.

One can summarize the results of this section with the following table:

Growth Rates:

1947 to 2015

Employment

Productivity

Output

Total (GDP)

1.5%

1.4%

2.9%

Agriculture

-0.7%

3.3%

2.6%

Manufacturing

-0.3%

2.8%

2.5%

Services

2.1%

0.9%

3.0%

The growth rate of output will be the simple sum of the growth rate of employment in a sector and the growth rate of its productivity (output per worker).  The figures here do indeed add up as they should.  They do not tell us what causes what, however, and that will be addressed next.

D.  Pulling It Together:  The Impact on Employment, Prices, and Sector Shares

Productivity is driven primarily by technological change.  While management skills and a willingness to invest to take advantage of what new technologies permit will matter over shorter periods, over the long term the primary driver will be technology.

And as seen in the chart above, technological progress, and the resulting growth in productivity, has proceeded at a different pace in the different sectors.  Productivity (real output per worker) has grown fastest over the last 68 years in agriculture (a pace of 3.3% a year), and fast as well in manufacturing (2.8% a year).  In contrast, the rate of growth of productivity in services, while positive, has been relatively modest (0.9% a year).

But as average incomes have grown, there has been an increased domestic demand in what the services sector produces, not only in absolute level but also as a share of rising incomes.  Since services largely cannot be traded internationally (with a few exceptions), the increased demand for services will need to be met by domestic production.  With overall production (GDP) matching overall incomes, and with demand for services growing faster than overall incomes, the growth of services (in real terms) will be greater than the growth of real GDP, and therefore also greater than growth in the rest of the economy (agriculture and manufacturing; see Chart 5).  The share of services in real GDP will then rise (Chart 3).

To produce this, the services sector needed more labor.  With productivity in the services sector growing at a slower pace (in relative terms) than that seen in agriculture and in manufacturing, the only way to obtain the labor input needed was to increase the share of workers in the economy employed in services (Chart 1).  And depending on the overall rate of labor growth as well as the size of the differences in the rates of productivity growth between the sectors, one could indeed find that the shift in workers out of agriculture and out of manufacturing would not only lead to a lower relative share of workers in those sectors, but also even to a lower absolute number of workers in those sectors.  And this is indeed precisely what happened, with the absolute number of workers in agriculture falling throughout the period, and falling in manufacturing since the late 1970s (Chart 6).

Finally, the differential rates of productivity growth account for the relative price changes seen between the sectors.  To be able to hire additional workers into services and out of agriculture and out of manufacturing, despite a lower rate of productivity growth in services, the price of services had to rise relative to agriculture as well as manufacturing. Services became more expensive to produce relative to the costs of agriculture or manufacturing production.  And this is precisely what is seen in Chart 4 above on prices.

To summarize, productivity growth allowed all sectors to grow.  With the higher incomes, there was a shift in demand towards services, which led it to grow at a faster pace than overall incomes (GDP).  But for this to be possible, particularly as its pace of productivity growth was slower than the pace in agriculture and in manufacturing, workers had to shift to services from the other sectors.  The effect was so great (due to the differing rates of growth of productivity) that employment in services rose to the point where services now employs close to 90% of all workers.

To be able to hire those workers, the price of services had to grow relative to the prices of the other sectors.  As a consequence, while there was only a modest shift in sector shares over time when measured in real terms (constant prices of 1947), there was a much larger shift in sector shares when measured in current prices.

The decline in the number of workers in manufacturing should not then be seen as surprising nor as a reflection of some defective policy.  Nor was it a consequence of free trade agreements.  Rather, it was the outcome one should expect from the relatively rapid pace of productivity growth in manufacturing, coupled with an economy that has grown over the decades with this leading to a shift in domestic demand towards services.  The resulting path for manufacturing was then the same basic path as had been followed by agriculture, although it has been underway longer in agriculture.  As a result, fewer than 1% of American workers are now employed in agriculture, with this possible because American agriculture is so highly productive.  One should expect, and indeed hope, that the same eventually becomes true for manufacturing as well.

Delusional: Is This What We Are to Expect from the New Trump Administration?

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Definition of delusional in English:

delusional

ADJECTIVE

Characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder:

‘hospitalization for schizophrenia and delusional paranoia’

‘he was diagnosed with a delusional disorder’

 Based on or having faulty judgement; mistaken:

‘their delusional belief in the project’s merits never wavers’

‘I think the guy is being a bit delusional here’

Source:  Oxford English Dictionary

 

Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States at 12:00 noon on January 20.  A day later, his new White House Press Secretary and Communications Director Sean Spicer in his very first press briefing of the new administration, launched a tirade against the press, for reporting (falsely he claimed) that attendance at the inauguration was less than the number who had attended Obama’s inauguration in 2009 (or indeed any prior inauguration). And he was visibly angry about this, as can be seen both in the transcript of the press briefing, and in a video of it.  He charged that “some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting” and claimed that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

Furthermore, after many reports challenged Spicer’s assertions, the new administration doubled down on the charges.  Reince Priebus, the new White House Chief of Staff, vowed on Sunday that the new administration will fight the media “tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday” over what they see as unfair attacks on Trump (by claiming, falsely they say, that the crowds had been larger at Obama’s inauguration).  And Kellyanne Conway, a spokesman for the White House and Counselor to the President, said on Sunday that what Press Secretary Spicer had asserted was not wrong but rather “alternative facts”.

Finally, one has Donald Trump himself, who claimed that he saw what “looked like a million, a million and a half people” present at his inauguration as he took the oath of office. One does not know how he was able to make such a count, and perhaps he should not be taken too seriously, but his administration’s senior staff appear to be obliged to back him up.

What do we know on the size of the crowds?  One first has to acknowledge that any crowd count is difficult, and that we will never know the precise numbers.  Unless each person has been forced to pass through a turnstile, all we can have are estimates.  But we can have estimates, and they can give some sense as to the size.  Most importantly, while we might not know the absolute size, we can have a pretty good indication from photos and other sources of data what the relative sizes of two crowds likely were.

So what do we know from photos?  Here we have a side-by-side photo (taken at Obama’s first inauguration and then at Trump’s) from the top of the Washington Monument, of the crowd on the Mall witnessing the event.  They were both taken at about the same time prior to the noon swearing-in of the new president, where the ceremony starts at 11:30:


inaugeration-attendance-2017-vs-2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The crowd in 2017 is clearly far smaller.  This has nothing to do with the white mats laid down to protect the grass (which was also done in 2013 for Obama’s second inauguration).  There are simply far fewer attendees.

There is also indirect evidence from the number of Metrorail riders that day.  Spicer said in his press briefing “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”  Actually these numbers are wrong, as well as misleading (since the comparison at issue is to Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, not to his second in 2013). As the Washington Post noted (with this confirmed by CNN) the correct numbers from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (which operates the Metro system) are that there were 570,500 riders on Metro on Trump’s inauguration day, 1.1 million riders in 2009 on Obama’s first inauguration day, and 782,000 riders in 2013 on Obama’s second inauguration day.  What Trump’s press secretary said “we know” was simply wrong.

It is also simply not true that Trump drew a larger estimated TV audience than any president before.  Nielsen, the TV ratings agency, estimated that Trump drew 30.6 million viewers, while Obama drew 38 million viewers at his first inauguration.  And Reagan drew more, at 42 million viewers, for his first inauguration.  Furthermore, both Nixon (in 1973) and Carter (in 1977) drew more viewers than Trump, at 33 million and 34 million respectively. The Trump figure was far from a record.

So how many people attended Trump’s inauguration, and how does that figure compare to the number that Obama drew for his first inauguration?  A widely cited figure is that Obama drew an estimated 1.8 million for his first inauguration, but, as noted above, any such estimate must be taken as approximate.  But based on a comparison of the photos, experts estimate that Trump drew at most one-third of the Obama draw in terms of the number in attendance just on the Mall.  There were in addition many others at the Obama inaugural who were not on the Mall because they could not fit due to the crowding.

Why does this matter?  It matters only because the new Trump administration has made it into an issue, and in doing so, has made assertions that are clearly factually wrong.  Trump did not draw a record number to his inauguration, nor a record number of viewers, nor were there a record number of riders on the Washington Metro system.  These are all numbers, and they can be checked.  While we may not be able to know the precise number of those who attended, we can come to a clear conclusion on the relative size of those who attended this year versus previous recent inaugurations.  And Trump’s attendance was not at all close to the number who attended Obama’s first inaugural.

What is disconcerting is that Trump, his new Press Secretary, his Chief of Staff and others in his administration, should feel compelled to make assertions that are clearly and verifiably wrong, and then to attack the press aggressively for pointing out what we know. And this on his second day in office.  While this is not inconsistent with what the Trump team did during his campaign for the presidency, one would have hoped for more mature behavior once he took office.  And especially so for an issue which is fundamentally minor. It really does not matter much whether the number attending Trump’s inauguration was more or less than the number who had attended prior inaugurations.

Presumably (and assuming thought was given to this) they are setting a marker for what they intend to do during the course of the presidential term, with aggressive attacks on the press for reporting errors in their assertions or on contradictions with earlier statements.  If so, such a strategy, including denial of facts that can readily be verified, is truly worrisome. Facts should matter.  Not all that we will hear from the new administration will be so easy to check, and the question then is what can be believed.

Perhaps, and more worrying, they really believe their assertions on the numbers attending. If so, they are truly delusional.

Tax Cuts Do Not Spur Growth – There Are Income as well as Substitution Effects, and Much More Besides: Econ 101

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gdp-growth-and-top-marg-tax-rate-1930-to-2015

A.   Introduction, and a Brief Aside on the Macro Issues

While there is much we do not yet know on what economic policies Donald Trump will pursue (he said many things in his campaign, but they were often contradictory), one thing we can be sure of is that there will be a major tax cut.  Republicans in Congress (led by Paul Ryan) and in the Senator want the same.  And they along with Trump insist that the cuts in tax rates will spur a sharp jump in GDP growth, with the result that net tax revenues in the end will not fall by all that much.

But do tax cuts spur growth?  The chart above suggests not.  Marginal tax rates of those in the top income brackets have come down sharply since the 1950s and early 1960s, when they exceeded 90%.  They reached as low as 28% during the later Reagan years and 35% during the administration of George W. Bush.  But GDP growth did not jump to some higher rate as a result.

This Econ 101 post will discuss the economics on why this is actually what one should expect.  It will focus on the microeconomics behind this, as the case for income tax cuts is normally presented by the so-called “supply siders” as a micro story of incentives.  The macro case for tax cuts is different.  Briefly, in times of high unemployment when the economy is suffering from insufficient demand in the aggregate to purchase all that could be produced if more labor were employed, a cut in income taxes might spur demand by households, as they would then have higher post-tax incomes to spend on consumption items.  This increase in demand could then spur production and hence GDP.

Critically, this macro story depends on allowing the fiscal deficit to rise by there not being simultaneously a cut in government expenditures along with the tax cuts.  If there is such a cut in government expenditures, demand may be reduced by as much as or even more than demand would be increased by households.  But the economic plans of both Trump and Congressman (and Speaker) Paul Ryan do also call for large cuts in government expenditures.  While both Trump and Ryan have called for government expenditures to increase on certain items, such as for defense, they still want a net overall reduction.

The net impact on demand will then depend on how large the government expenditure cuts would be relative to the tax cuts, and on the design of the income tax cuts.  As was discussed in an earlier post on this blog on the size of the fiscal multiplier, If most of the income tax cuts go to those who are relatively well off, who will then save most or perhaps all of their tax windfall, there will be little or no macro stimulus from the tax cuts.  Any government expenditure cuts on top of this would then lead not to a spur in growth, but rather to output growing more slowly or contracting.  And the tax plan offered by Donald Trump in his campaign would indeed direct the bulk of the tax cuts to the extremely well off.  A careful analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center found that 71% of the tax cuts (in dollar value) from the overall plan (which includes cuts in corporate and other taxes as well) would go to the richest 5% of households (those earning $299,500 or more), 51% would go to the top 1% (those earning $774,300 or more), and fully 25% would go to the richest 0.1% (those earning $4.8 million or more).

[A side note:  To give some perspective on how large these tax cuts for the rich would be, the 25% going to the richest 0.1% under Trump’s plan would total $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, under the Tax Policy Center estimates.  By comparison, the total that the Congressional Budget Office projects would be spent on the food stamp program (now officially called SNAP) for the poor over this period would come to a bit below $700 billion (see the August 2016 CBO 10-year budget projections).  That is, the tax breaks to be given under Trump’s tax plan to the top 0.1% (who have earnings of $4.8 million or more in a year) would be more than twice as large as would be spent on the entire food stamp program over the period.  Yet the Republican position is that we have to cut the food stamp program because we do not have sufficient government revenues to support it.]

The macro consequences of tax cuts that mostly go to the already well off, accompanied by government expenditure cuts to try to offset the deficit impact, are likely therefore to lead not to a spur in growth but to the opposite.

The microeconomic story is separate, and the rest of this blog post will focus on the arguments there.  Those who argue that cuts in income taxes will act as a spur to growth base their argument on what they see as the incentive effects.  Income taxes are a tax on working, they argue, and if you tax income less, people will work longer hours.  More will be produced, the economy will grow faster, and people will have higher incomes.

This micro argument is mistaken in numerous ways, however.  This Econ 101 post will discuss why.  There is the textbook economics, where it appears these “supply siders” forgot some of the basic economics they were taught in their introductory micro courses. But we should also recognize that the decision on how many hours to work each week goes beyond simply the economics.  There are important common social practices (which can vary by the nature of the job, i.e. what is a normal work day, and what do you do to get promoted) and institutional structures (the 40 hour work week) which play an important and I suspect dominant role. This blog post will review some of them.

But first, what do we know from the data, and what does standard textbook economics say?

B.  Start with the Data

It is always good first to look at what the data is telling us.  There have been many sharp cuts in income tax rates over the last several decades, and also some increases.  Did the economy grow faster after the tax cuts, and slower following the tax increases?

The chart at the top of this post indicates not.  The chart shows what GDP growth was year by year since 1930 along with the top marginal income tax rate of each year.  The top marginal income tax rate is the rate of tax that would be paid on an additional dollar of income by those in the highest income tax bracket.  The top marginal income tax rate is taken by those favoring tax cuts as the most important tax rate to focus on.  It is paid by the richest, and these individuals are seen as the “job creators” and hence play an especially important role under this point of view.  But changes in the top rates also mark the times when there were normally more general tax cuts for the rest of the population as well, as cuts (or increases) in the top marginal rates were generally accompanied by cuts (or increases) in the other rates also.  It can thus be taken as a good indicator of when tax rates changed and in what direction.  Note also that the chart combines on one scale the annual GDP percentage growth rates and the marginal tax rate as a percentage of an extra dollar of income, which are two different percentage concepts.  But the point is to compare the two.

As the chart shows, the top marginal income tax rate exceeded 90% in the 1950s and early 1960s.  The top rate then came down sharply, to generally 70% until the Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980s, when they fell to 50% and ultimately to just 28%.  They then rose under Clinton to almost 40%, fell under the Bush II tax cuts to 35%, and then returned under Obama to the rate of almost 40%.

Were GDP growth rates faster in the periods when the marginal tax rates were lower, and slower when the tax rates were higher?  One cannot see any indication of it in the chart. Indeed, even though the highest marginal tax rates are now far below what they were in the 1950s and early 1960s, GDP growth over the last decade and a half has been less than it what was when tax rates were not just a little bit, but much much higher.  If cuts in the marginal tax rates are supposed to spur growth, one would have expected to see a significant increase in growth between when the top rate exceeded 90% and where it is now at about 40%.

Indeed, while I would not argue that higher tax rates necessarily lead to faster growth, the data do in fact show higher tax rates being positively correlated with faster growth.  That is, the economy grew faster in years when the tax rates were higher, not lower.  A simple statistical regression of the GDP growth rate on the top marginal income tax rate of the year found that if the top marginal tax rate were 10% points higher, GDP growth was 0.57% points higher.  Furthermore, the t-statistic (of 2.48) indicates that the correlation was statistically significant.

Again, I would not argue that higher tax rates lead to faster GDP growth.  Rather, much more was going on with the economy over this period which likely explains the correlation. But the data do indicate that very high top marginal income tax rates, even over 90%, were not a hindrance to growth.  And there is clearly no support in the evidence that lower tax rates lead to faster growth.

The chart above focuses on the long-term impacts, and does not find any indication that tax cuts have led to faster growth.  An earlier post on this blog looked at the more immediate impacts of such tax rates cuts or increases, focussing on the impacts over the next several years following major tax rate changes.  It compared what happened to output and employment (as well as what happened to tax revenues and to the fiscal deficit) in the immediate years following the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts, and following the Clinton and Obama tax increases.  What it found was that growth in output and employment, and in fiscal revenues, were faster following the Clinton and Obama tax increases than following the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts.  And not surprisingly given this, the fiscal deficit got worse under Reagan and Bush II following their tax cuts, and improved following the Clinton and Obama tax increases.

C.  The Economics of the Impact of Tax Rates on Work Effort

The “supply siders” who argue that cuts in income taxes will lead to faster growth base their case on what might seem (at least to them) simple common sense.  They say that if you tax something, you will produce less of it.  Tax it less, and you will produce more of it. And they say this applies to work effort.  Income taxes are a tax on work.  Lower income tax rates will then lead to greater work effort, they argue, and hence to more production and hence to more growth.  GDP growth rates will rise.

But this is wrong, at several levels.  One can start with some simple math.  The argument confuses what would be (by their argument) a one-time step-up in production, with an increase in growth rates.  Suppose that tax rates are cut and that as a result, everyone decides that at the new tax rates they will choose to work 42 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week before.  Assuming productivity is unchanged (actually it would likely fall a bit), this would lead to a 5% increase in production.  But this would be a one time increase. GDP would jump 5% in the first year, but would then grow at the same rate as it had before.  There would be no permanent increase in the rate of growth, as the supply siders assert.  This is just simple high school math.  A one time increase is not the same as a permanent increase in the rate of growth.

But even leaving this aside, the supply sider argument ignores some basic economics taught in introductory microeconomics classes.  Focussing just on the economics, what would be expected to happen if marginal income tax rates are cut?  It is true that there will be what economists call “substitution effects”, where workers may well wish to work longer hours if their after-tax income from work rises due to a cut in marginal tax rates. But the changes will also be accompanied by what economists call “income effects”.  Worker after-tax incomes will change both because of the tax rate changes and because of any differences in the hours they work.  And these income effects will lead workers to want to work fewer hours.  The income and substitution effects will work in opposite directions, and the net impact of the two is not clear.  They could cancel each other out.

What are the income effects, and why would they lead to less of an incentive to work greater hours if the tax rate falls?:

a)  First, one must keep in mind that the aim of working is to earn an income, and that hours spent working has a cost:  One will have fewer hours at home each day to enjoy with your wife and kids, or for whatever other purposes you spend your non-working time. Economists lump this all under what they call “leisure”.  Leisure is something desirable, and with all else equal, one would prefer more of it.  Economists call this a “normal good”.  With a higher income, you would want to buy more of it. And the way you buy more of it is by working fewer hours each day (at the cost of giving up the wages you would earn in those hours).

Hence, if taxes on income go down, so that your after-tax income at the original number of hours you work each day goes up, you will want to use at least some portion of this extra income to buy more time to spend at home.  This is an income effect, and will go in the opposite direction of the substitution effect of higher after-tax wages leading to an incentive to work longer hours.  We cannot say, a priori, whether the income effect or the substitution effect will dominate.  It will vary by individual, based on their individual preferences, what their incomes are, and how many hours they were already working.  It could go either way, and can only be addressed by looking at the data.

b)  One should also recognize that one works to earn income for a reason, and one reason among many is to earn and save enough so that one can enjoy a comfortable retirement. But in standard economic theory, there is no reason to work obsessively before retirement so that one will then have such a large retirement “nest egg” as to enjoy a luxurious life style when one retires.  Rather, the aim is to smooth out your consumption profile over both periods in your life.

Hence if income tax rates are cut, so that your after-tax incomes are higher, one will be able to save whatever one is aiming for for retirement, sooner.  Hence it would be rational to reduce by some amount the hours one seeks to work each day, and enjoy them with your wife and kids at home, as your savings goals for retirement can still be met with those fewer hours of work.  This is an income effect, and acts in the direction of reducing, rather than increasing, the number of hours one will choose to work if there is a general tax cut.

c)  More generally, one should recognize that incomes are earned to achieve various aims. Some of these might be to cover fixed obligations, such as to pay on a mortgage or for student debt, and some might be quasi-fixed, such as to provide for a “comfortable” living standard for one’s family.  If those aims are being met, then time spent at leisure (time spent at home with the family) may be especially attractive.  In such circumstances, the income effect from tax cuts might be especially large, and sufficient to more than offset the substitution effects resulting from the change in the after-tax wage.

Income effects are real, and it is mistake to ignore them.  They act in the opposite direction of the substitution effect, and will act to offset them.  The offset might be partial, full, or even more than full.  We cannot say simply by looking at the theory.  Rather, one needs to look at the data.  And as noted above, the data provdes no support to the suppostion that lower tax rates will lead to higher growth.  Once one recognizes that there will be income effects as well as substitution effects, one can see that this should not be a surprise.  It is fully consistent with the theory.

One can also show how the income and substitution effects work via some standard diagrams, involving indifference curves and budget constraints.  These are used in most standard economics textbooks.  However, I suspect that most readers will find such diagrams to be more confusing than enlightening.  A verbal description, such as that above, will likely be more easy to follow.  But for those who prefer such diagrams, the standard ones can be found at this web posting.  Note, however, that there is a mistake (a typo I assume) in the key Figures 2A and 2B.  The horizontal arrows (along the “leisure” axis) are pointed in the opposite direction of what they should (left instead of right in 2A and right instead of left in 2B).  These errors indeed serve to emphasize how even the experts with such diagrams can get confused and miss simple typos.

D.  But There is More to the Hours of Work Decision than Textbook Economics

The analysis above shows that the supply-siders, who stress microeconomic incentives as key, have forgotten half of the basic analysis taught in their introductory microeconomics classes.  There are substitution effects resulting from a change in income tax rates, as the supply-siders argue, but there are also income effects which act in the opposite direction. The net effect is then not clear.

However, there is more to the working hours decision than the simple economics of income and substitution effects.  There are social as well as institutional factors.  It the real world, these other factors matter.  And I suspect they matter a good deal more than the standard economics in explaining the observation that we do not see growth rates jumping upwards after the several rounds of major tax cuts of the last half century.

Such factors include the following:

a)  For most jobs, a 40 hour work week is, at least formally, standard.  For those earning hourly wages, any overtime above 40 hours is, by law, supposed to be compensated at 50% above their normal hourly wage.  For workers in such jobs, one cannot generally go to your boss and tell him, in the event of an income tax increase say, that you now want to work only 39 1/2 hours each week.  The hours are pretty much set for such workers.

b)  There are of course other workers compensated by the hour who might work a variable number of hours each week at a job.  These normally total well less than 40 hours a week.  These would include many low wage occupations such as at fast food places, coffee shops, retail outlets, and similarly.  But for many such workers, the number of hours they work each week is constrained not by the number of hours they want to work, but by the number of hours their employer will call them in for.  A lower income tax rate might lead them to want to work even more hours, but when they are constrained already by the number of hours their employer will call them in for, there will be no change.

c)  For salaried workers and professionals such as doctors, the number of hours they work each week is defined primarily by custom for their particular profession.  They work the hours that others in that profession work, with this evolving over time for the profession as a whole.  The hours worked are in general not determined by some individual negotiation between the professional and his or her supervisor, with this changing when income tax rates are changed.  And many professionals indeed already work long hours (including medical doctors, where I worry whether they suffer from sleep deprivation given their often incredibly long hours).

d)  The reason why one sees many professionals, including managers and others in office jobs, working such long hours probably has little to do with marginal income tax rates.  Rather, they try to work longer than their co-workers, or at least not less, in order to get promoted.  Promotion is a competition, where the individual seen as the best is the one who gets promoted.  And the one seen as the best is often the one who works the longest each day.  With the workers competing against each other, possibly only implicitly and not overtly recognized as such, there will be an upward spiral in the hours worked as each tries to out-do the other.  This is ultimately constrained by social norms.  Higher or lower income tax rates are not central here.

e)  Finally, and not least, most of us do take pride in our work.  We want to do it well, and this requires a certain amount of work effort.  Taxes are not the central determinant in this.

E.  Summary and Conclusion

I fully expect there to be a push to cut income tax rates early in the Trump presidency.  The tax plan Trump set out during his campaign was similar to that proposed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, and both would cut rates sharply, especially for those who are already well off. They will argue that the cuts in tax rates will spur growth in GDP, and that as a consequence, the fiscal deficit will not increase much if at all.

There is, however, no evidence in the historical data that this will be the case.  Income tax rates have been cut sharply since the Eisenhower years, when the top marginal income tax rate topped 90%, but growth rates did not jump higher following the successive rounds of cuts.

Tax cuts, if they are focused on those of lower to middle income, might serve as a macro stimulus if unemployment is significant.  Such households would be likely to spend their extra income on consumption items rather than save it, and this extra household consumption demand can serve to spur production.  But tax cuts that go primarily to the rich (as the tax cuts that have been proposed by Trump and Ryan would do), that are also accompanied by significant government expenditure cuts, will likely have a depressive rather than stimulative effect.

The supply-siders base their argument, however, for why tax cuts should lead to an increase in the growth rate of GDP, not on the macro effects but rather on what they believe will be the impact on microeconomic incentives.  They argue that income taxes are a tax on work, and a reduction in the tax on work will lead to greater work effort.

They are, however, confused.  What they describe is what economists call the substitution effect.  That may well exist.  But there are also income effects resulting from the changes in the tax rates, and these income effects will work in the opposite direction.  The net impact is not clear, even if one keeps just to standard microeconomics.  The net impact could be a wash.  Indeed, the net impact could even be negative, leading to fewer hours worked when there is a cut in income taxes.  One does not know a priori, and you need to look at the data.  And there is no indication in the data that the sharp cuts in marginal tax rates over the last half century have led to higher rates of growth.

There is also more to the working hours decision than just textbook microeconomics. There are important social and institutional factors, which I suspect will dominate.  And they do not depend on the marginal rates of income taxes.

But if you are making an economic argument, you should at least get the economics right.