The French ruling class is as lazy as their transnational co-conspirators down under. French union membership is in serious decline albeit from a low base. An opportunity lost for the French ruling class. It has not lifted a finger to extract additional labour surplus from the downtrodden French proletariat now stripped of their only line of collective defence against capitalist exploitation.
Source: OECD Stat and Top Incomes Database.
The top 10% and top 1% in France are no better off than two generations ago despite the decline of French unions. The French Left must be most disappointed. No kicking in the rotten door of the permanent revolution anytime soon after the immiserised French proletariat rises up because it has nothing to lose but its chains. The 21st century version of the Marxist call to the barricades would be a proletariat stirred to revolution with nothing to lose but their suburban home, motorcar, IPad and air points
Source: OECD Stat and Top Incomes Database.
The Italian ruling class has had little success in bringing Italian unions down. The top 10% in Italy is earning no more now than back when the Red Brigades were gunning for them.
Source: OECD Stat and Top Incomes Database.
The top 1% in Italy is doing a little bit better than when the Red Brigade was gunning for them, but not much more. Unions don’t figure in explaining that small rise in Italian top 1% incomes over the last 40 years. Italian unions are pretty much a strong as they were 40 years ago in membership. Italian employment protection laws are pretty much as strong as they used to be too.
Source: OECD Stat and Top Incomes Database.
The Canadian ruling classes even more incompetent than their transnational co-conspirators over in Italy. There appears to have been next to no decline in union membership in Canada. The Canadian top 10% is not earning any more than back in the 60s.
Source: OECD Stat and Top Incomes Database.
The Canadian top 1% is doing a little bit better than 25 years ago also but not off the back of unions which are almost as strong as in the past. The Canadian Left will have to look for a different hypothesis than the ravages of the top 1%.
James Cameron is going to film the next three instalments of the Avatar franchise in New Zealand. He promises to spend at least NZ$500 million, employ thousands of Kiwis, host at least one red-carpet event, include a NZ promotional featurette in the Avatar DVDs, and will personally serve on a bunch of Film NZ committees, and probably even bring scones, all in return for a 25% rebate on any spending he and his team do in the country (up from a 20% baseline to international film-makers) that is being offered by the New Zealand Government.
The implication that many media reports are running with is that this is a loss to the Australian film industry, that we should be fighting angry, and that we should hit back at this brilliantly cunning move by the Kiwi’s by increasing our film industry rebates, which currently are about 16.5% (these include the producer and location offsets, and the post, digital and visual effects offset) to at very least 30%. These rebates cost tax-payers A$204 million in 2012, which hardly even buys you a car industry these days.
So what are the economics of this sort of industry assistance? Is this something we should be doing a whole lot more of? Was the NZ move to up the rebate especially brilliant? First, note that James Cameron has substantial property interests in New Zealand already, so this probably wasn’t as up for grabs as we might think. But if that’s how the New Zealand taxpayers want to spend their money, that’s up to them. The issue is should we follow suit?
The basic economics of this sort of give-away is the concept of a multiplier “”), which is the theory that an initial amount of exogenous spending becomes someone else’s income, which then gets spent again, creating more income, and so on, creating jobs and exports and all sorts of “economic benefits” along the way.
People who believe in the efficacy of Keynesian fiscal stimulus also believe in the existence of (>1) multipliers. Consultancy-based “economic impact” reports do their magic by assuming greater-than-one multipliers (or equivalently, a high marginal propensity to consume coupled with lots of dense sectoral linkages). With a multiplier greater than one, all government spending is magically transformed into “investment in Australian jobs”.
So the real question is: are multipliers actually greater-than-one? That’s an empirical question, and the answer is mostly no. (And if you don’t believe my neoliberal bluster, the progressive stylings of Ben Eltham over at Crikey more or less make the same point.)
But to get this you have to do the economics properly, and not just count the positive multipliers, but also account for the loss of investment in other sectors that didn’t take place because it was artificially re-directed into the film sector, which no commissioned impact study ever does.
This is why economists have a very low opinion of economic impact studies, which are to economics what astrology is to physics.
What does make for a good domestic film industry then? Look again at New Zealand, and look beyond the great Weta Studios in Wellington, for Australia and Canada both have world-class production studios and post-production facilities. Look beyond New Zealand’s natural scenery, for Vancouver is an easy match for New Zealand and Australia pretty much defines spectacular.
No, the simple comparison is that New Zealand is about 20% cheaper than Australia and 30% cheaper than Canada. New Zealand has lower taxes, easy employment conditions and relatively light regulations (particularly around insurance and health and safety). It’s just easier to get things done there.
If Australia really wants to boost its film industry, it might look more closely at labour market restrictions (including minimum wages) and regulatory burden and worry less about picking taxpayer pockets and bribing foreigners.
The upshot of the Wellington City Council paying a living wage to employees and including those of sub-contractors is over time the composition of their low skilled labour force will change. The Council will recruit people who can earn in other jobs $19.25. Workers who don’t have the capability of producing at that level of productivity will never be interviewed.
The Council is required by law to recruit on merit and to be a good employer. Workers who would never have previously applied for Wellington City Council jobs covered by the living wage decision because they can earn better pay elsewhere will now do so because of the higher pay of these council jobs.
These higher skilled workers will crowd out the lower skilled workers that currently apply for the low paid jobs covered by the upcoming living wage increase. The workers with the type of skills that currently win those jobs covered by the living wage increase will not be shortlisted because the quality of the recruitment pool will increase because of the living wage. There will be an influx of more skilled workers attracted by the higher wages for council jobs because of the living wage policy. They will go to the head of the queue and displaced workers who currently apply for and win those council jobs.
A living wage is an exclusionary policy where ordinary workers, often with families who are not productive enough to produce $19.25 per hour plus overheads will never be interviewed by the Wellington City Council or council subcontractors for a job covered by the living wage increase.
In a cruel twist of fate, because the council is implementing its living wage on 1 July 2016, higher quality workers will start applying for jobs covered by the living wage increase now. This will further reduce the number of initial beneficiaries of the living wage increase. Council workers recruited between now on 1 July 2016 will be applying in anticipation of that increase.
The living wage adopted by the Wellington City Council is a classic case of rent capitalisation. With the council paying over the odds for a job, workers will have every incentive to compete for the higher wages. The most obvious way of winning that race for these limited number of higher paying jobs is to be a more productive worker than the other job applicants.
The living wage jobs will attract a higher quality pool of job applicants. These higher quality job applicants who would not otherwise applied but for the living wage will outcompete existing low skilled low paid workers who would otherwise benefited from the living wage increase. In some cases, these higher quality, more skilled recruits will be taking a job at the Council or its contractors covered by the living wage increase on much the same pay as they command anywhere else in the labour market. As such, ratepayers are paying about 20% more for no reduction in poverty.
The existing employees of the Wellington City Council and its subcontractors will be locked into golden handcuffs. Workers who lack the labour productivity to command a wage equivalent of the living wage elsewhere in the job market will never quit. Wellington City Council employees covered by the living wage will also have a much reduced incentive to up-skill will seek promotion. There will be no internal reward for undertaking additional training or job responsibilities among low skilled is because the living wage will mean they will not get a wage rise at the Council.
The windfall gains to the current low paid council employees but no future council employees illustrate the folly of a living wage policy at the Wellington City Council. Some of these existing Wellington City Council employees will have children so child poverty rates may improve. That is all that will be gained for a permanent increase of about 20% in the price paid for council services.
Because of the change in the recruitment pool for all future vacancies, the impact on the poverty rates among future council employees will be minimal. These recruits to future council vacancies covered by the living wage increase will be recruited from other jobs where they already earn a similar pay to the living wage paid at the Council. Ratepayers will pay about 20% more for services in return for a small reduction in child poverty among its existing council employees.
As these existing employees move on, and they will one day, ratepayers will continue to pay about 20% more until either the Council sees the errors of its ways or the policy is overturning on judicial review. There will be no reduction in family poverty because new recruits are switching to the Council for the usual wage premium from moving to one job to another and that’s it. As the existing council employees leave, any child poverty reduction from the living wage policy will fade to zero.
As mentioned, potential recruits who are productive enough to earn a competitive market wage equal to the living wage level in their existing jobs will be the most qualified applicants. The best of these higher quality applicants will fill future council vacancies covered by the living wage policy. Workers who are not productive enough to earn the living wage in other jobs simply won’t be shortlisted for council jobs. The Council must by law hire the best qualified applicant for any vacancy.
Any extra labour productivity from a living wage at the Wellington City Council is in doubt because low skilled service sectors are notorious for their low potential for productivity gains. They are the bread-and-butter of Baumol’s disease.
It’s kicking the Wellington City Council when it is down to mention that low paid workers with families will lose a considerable part of the living wage increase because of reductions in their family tax credits – reductions in the Working for Families in-work tax credit. Any living wage increase at the Wellington City Council is the subject of multiple clawbacks by IRD. There is income tax, a 25% abatement rate on Working for Families tax credits on any family income above about $36,000 and 15% GST. All in all, the transfer out of the pockets of ratepayers to IRD would be at least one-third.
I have not included any accommodation supplement, childcare subsidy or community services card the low paid worker is receiving from WINZ. The winding back of these social benefits to the low paid worker and his or her family is a pointless transfer from Wellington City ratepayers to the national taxpayer.
It will be kicking Wellington City Council even further to remind of the enforcement and compliance costs of living wage ordinances in the USA at the city level.
The Wellington City Council this week acted against legal advice to require contractors under joint services agreements with other councils in the Wellington region to pay employees who work within the boundaries of Wellington city the living wage. The American cities had to define the minimum number of hours in a day that minimum wage workers who are mobile for their jobs had to spend within their city limits before their employer was subject to their living wage ordinance.
It is standard to put forward an efficiency wage argument for a living wage. The higher wage paid as result of the introduction of the living wage will motivate workers to work harder and cheer each other on.
These workers paid the efficiency wage will require less supervision because under an efficiency wage, a rate of pay that is more than the going rate for their skills and experience with other employers and in other industries and occupations, these workers paid the efficiency wage have more to lose if disciplined or dismissed. By the way, the theory of the efficiency wages is an American theory where there is employment at will.
This additional effort and greater motivation from the efficiency wage, from the above market rate of pay, will reduce the costs of supervision to the employer of teams of employees as well as increase output per worker. This is supposed to offset some of the costs of the living wage increase.
At bottom, this efficiency wage hypothesis is entrepreneurs are unaware of the higher quality and greater self-motivation of better paid recruits for vacancies but wise bureaucrats and farsighted politicians notice these gaps in the market. Bureaucrats and politicians notice these gaps in the market before those who gain from superior entrepreneur alertness to hitherto untapped opportunities for profit do so and instead leave that money on the table.
I won’t mention that many of the modern theories of the firm focus, in part or in full on reducing opportunistic behaviour, cheating and fraud in employment relationships. The cost of discovering prices and making and enforcing contracts and getting what you pay for are central to the Coase’s theory of the firm put forward in 1937.
In Barzel’s (1982) theory of the firm, measurement costs drive the emergence and organisation of the firm. The firm arose to minimising the cost of measuring what is to be exchanged by bringing some of those measuring tasks in-house. Much of the organisation of the firm, including the degree of vertical and horizontal integration and many different forms of contracting are driven by ensuring owners and managers get what they pay for and are not overcharged through manipulation or cheating.
Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) theory of the firm focused on moral hazard in team production. As they explain
Two key demands are placed on an economic organization-metering input productivity and metering rewards.
The main rationale in personnel economics from everything ranging from employer funding of retirement pensions to the structure of promotions and executive pay including stock options is around better rewarding self-motivating employees and reducing the costs of monitoring employee effort.
Source: Department of Labour (2009).
The profits of entrepreneurs for running a firm is directly linked from their successful policing of the efforts of employees and sub-contractors to ensure the team and each member perform as promised and individual rewards matched individual contributions (Alchian and Demsetz 1972; Barzel 1987). The entrepreneur is a residual claimant to the revenues of the firm net of paying all other inputs. Entrepreneurs must successfully police the contributions of their employers and contractors if they are to survive in competition. The better they are at this, the more the alert entrepreneur profits.
Every profit minded entrepreneur seeks to hire the group of workers with the lowest cost per unit of output produced by them. Those that do not will not survive in competition with more alert rivals. The trade-off between worker quality and wages in setting hiring standards is a routine entrepreneurial decision in every firm when recruiting:
Managers often say that their goal in hiring is to obtain the best quality workers. It sounds like a good idea, but is it? The most productive workers are also likely to be the most expensive. Should the goal instead be to hire the least expensive workers? …The best worker is not the cheapest, nor the most productive, but the one with the highest ratio of productivity to cost. We should hire as long as the marginal productivity of the last worker hired is greater than or equal to the cost of the worker.
1. There will be no countries that attain symmetrical organization of all groups with a common interest and thereby attain optimal outcomes through comprehensive bargaining.
2. Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.
3. Members of “small” groups have disproportionate organizational power for collective action, and this disproportion diminishes but does not disappear over time in stable societies.
4. On balance, special-interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.
5. Encompassing organizations have some incentive to make the society in which they operate more prosperous, and an incentive to redistribute income to their members with as little excess burden as possible, and to cease such redistribution unless the amount redistributed is substantial in relation to the social cost of the redistribution.
6. Distributional coalitions make decisions more slowly than the individuals and firms of which they are comprised, tend to have crowded agendas and bargaining tables, and more often fix prices than quantities.
7. Distributional coalitions slow down a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby to reduce the rate of economic growth.
8. Distributional coalitions, once big enough to succeed, are exclusive, and seek to limit the diversity of incomes and values of their membership.
9. The accumulation of distributional coalitions increases the complexity of regulation, the role of government, and the complexity of understandings, and changes the direction of social evolution.
It is time for the environmental movement to face up to the fact that there never will be an international treaty to restrain carbon emissions. The practical way to respond to global warming is healthier is wealthier, richer is safer. Faster economic growth creates more resources for resilience and adaptation to a changing environment.
New Zealand housing prices were pretty stable until the passage of the Resource Management Act in 1993. After that, prices took off New Zealand and didn’t slow that much for the recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis.
American prices just had a bubble because of loose monetary policy by the Fed and loose lending criteria by banks at the behest of regulators. Real housing prices in the USA started to rise again last year after a dramatic fall.
Australian prices were rising steadily until about 2000 but then took off with a strong economy and the usual restrictions on land supply by local governments at the behest of the existing homeowners.
The Labour Party and the Greens both plan to build 100,000 affordable houses as a way of offsetting soaring housing prices in Auckland and other New Zealand cities. These plans were announced in the 2014 Election in New Zealand.
A trite but insurmountable objection to the proposal to build 100,000 affordable houses is there are no plans to increase the supply of land. That would require RMA reform which both Labour and the Greens oppose. They oppose RMA reform partly for ideological reasons and partly to cultivate middle-class home owner votes.
Unless there is an increase in the supply of land in Auckland and the other New Zealand cities, the government under the plans of the Labour Party and the Greens are building houses the private sector would have built anyway but for the government bought from the same new supply of land released every year by local councils.
The proposals of Labour and the Green to build affordable houses simply changes the identity of who builds the same number of new houses in New Zealand. There is no net increase in this supply of houses so there will not be any improvement in housing affordability.
If the supply of land were to be increased through RMA reforms, there be no need to for the government to build the houses. This is because the market will take care of building the houses on the additional land released by local councils if there is a demand for them and they’re obviously is.
Attempts by a Labour and Green Government to build affordable houses is no more than displace the efforts of private developers to supply houses but in configurations more closely aligned with market demand in terms of the quality and size of the house.
Another insurmountable but still minor objection to supplying 100,000 affordable houses is Friedman’s second law of economics: you can’t give anything away for free because people will queue up for access.
If the government is selling cheap houses to ordinary families, people change that circumstances to make themselves more eligible for the house, which presumably will be targeted by income. Easiest way to do that is to fund a low income family member such as a student to buy the house and sell it to you. Alternatively, you could make an advanced of them against their inheritances as a way of them buying a house.
The classic New Zealand example of the inability to give anything away for free was the introduction of school zoning. People now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more for a house if it is in a favourable school zone.
A more serious objection that can never be overcome is as soon as the lucky ordinary family buys the affordable house, they will renovate it to the proper standing reflecting the underlying value of the land. Affordable houses under the plans of the New Zealand Labour Party and the Greens is to build a cheap house on expensive land in Auckland. Land in Auckland is 60% of the price of a house. Land use to be 40% of the value of the house in Auckland.
Plenty of people are in the game of home renovation; some do it as a full-time occupation. They buy an old rundown house on good land and a good location and renovate the house to match the value of the underlying land and location.
The possibility of subsequent renovation to the cheap house on the good land is the death knell of any attempt to sell affordable housing in Auckland or the other New Zealand cities where house prices are spiralling upwards because of restrictions on the supply of land.
Building 100,000 affordable houses were simply present 100,000 renovation opportunities to entrepreneurs. The families who are lucky enough to be first to buy the affordable house will get a marvellous windfall. There will be no long-term impact on the price of land in Auckland because you can’t give anything away for free. Any undervalued good as quickly resold at a profit by budding entrepreneurs after renovating the house to bring it up to market standard given the value of the underlying land.
If the Labour Party and the Greens want more affordable housing, they must support RMA reforms that will increase the supply of land. They won’t do out of sheer political expediency. Labour and the Greens want to win the votes of disgruntled National party voters who already own homes.
Rashbrooke then goes on to discuss how housing costs were not a main driver of the growing gap between the top 10% and the bottom 10% of the income distribution in New Zealand. My point is he is more concerned with the politics of envy than with building political support for action against poverty.
Rashbrooke showed that the main driver of poverty in New Zealand is rising housing costs. That is easy to redress but for the opposition of the left-wing parties to reforms to the Resource Management Act that will increase the supply of land and thereby drive down housing costs and rents.
Housing costs gobbled up much of the rising incomes of the poor for many years now in New Zealand as Rashbrooke showed today. The New Zealand Labor Party and New Zealand Greens are doing nothing about it. The regulatory constraints on the supply of land could be gone by lunchtime if the self-proclaimed champions of the poor and social justice supported the reform of the RMA.
The proposals of the New Zealand Labour Party and Greens for the government to build more houses is pointless unless there is more land is supplied. If there is no increase in land supply, all the building of more houses by government does is build the same houses of private developers would have built on the same fixed supply of land. There must be an increase in the supply of land to drive housing costs down for the poor.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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