Let parents pay to take kids out of school

Joy Buchanan7 Comments

Elementary school kids can miss a day of school. If they are doing something wholesome and constructive on their day off, no one would claim that it hurts the child who is doing the alternate activity.

Does it hurt other people? There is an ungated section of this Matt Yglesias post concluding that when rich people pull their kids out of school it “… ultimately harms less-privileged children.” For now, assume that is true. We could internalize the externality, like surge pricing on toll roads. Let parents pay a fine to take their kids out of school. The fine would fund programs that help everyone. Let parents pay back into the public good. Charge $25/day which could go toward buying classroom supplies for the inconvenienced teacher.

This flexibility might lead to richer families keeping their kids in conventional schools, which seems like a good thing. No one would have to pay the fine. There is and would still be a system for excusing absences due to unavoidable things like surgery.

Requiring a doctor’s note for excused absences is already a tax. Requiring a parent to miss half a day of work to go take a child to the doctor is more punishing than paying a $25 fine, for many families.

The fine could even increase with the number of missed days. Only super rich families would be able to afford to take 2 children on a 3-week trip. I wouldn’t be able to afford it. But I wouldn’t mind if our school generated revenue off of those who can. Those people would probably donate a new playground in exchange for a plaque.

Is another example where it would be reasonable to charge people to not use something? In a way, insurance companies try to fine people for not using the gym. Running with this example, paid private schools could easily call this a tuition reimbursement for high attendance. Unfortunately, I think it would be politically impossible to implement in public schools.

The Money Value of Time

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

Economists rightly make a big deal out of specialization and trade. They proceed to go one step further and say that it’s better to pay someone else to perform some service, even if you can perform it yourself. One the assumptions underlying this advice is that time and money are both fungible and convertible.

How are economists right and wrong about the convertibility of time and money? In one sense, we can change how much we work and change how much income we have. That seems plain. But it also requires some start-up costs to have an easy go-to means of earning more income. For example, Uber drivers are registered with Uber already.  Joe from the street can’t start driving tomorrow without substantial preparation.

If economists are wrong about the convertibility of earned time and earned money, then they still have standing. We all have an endowment of time, if not money. But there are plenty of goods that have a money price and a time price that have an inverse relationship.  The advantage of having a time budget is that you can offset some of the money price of goods with time such that more of the money budget can be spent otherwise.

For example, I had to buy a new golf cart battery. One option was to spend $2,400 for a guy to come replace my old battery for me. The other option was for me to spend $1,500 and one evening to do it myself. Given that I typically do chores in the evening anyway, the time-cost to me didn’t feel all that imposing.

Further, if I free up some time, then what happens to it? I can leisure. That’s what economists call any time spent that isn’t working. But after that leisure, it’s gone. There some saving your time for later in the form of bringing other chores earlier in time. But there’s certainly no allowing your time to earn compound interest. That’s where the advantage of self-service really shines IMO. I can give up $900 and enjoy one evening of leisure. Or, I can given up an evening of leisure, put the savings into an investment account, and then reap double the evening’s worth seven years later. Then I’ll have two nights of leisure rather than one. To me, that’s the biggest difference between time and money. I can earn interest on my money in a way that I can’t earn interest on my time.

When Will the Fed Raise Rates?

James Bailey4 Comments

Everyone else keeps asking when the Fed will cut rates, and yesterday Chair Powell said they will likely cut this year. Either they are all crazy or I am, because almost every indicator I see indicates we are still above the Fed’s inflation target of 2% and are likely to remain there without some change in policy. Ideally that change would be a tightening of fiscal policy, but since there’s no way Congress substantially cuts the deficit this year, responsibility falls to the Federal Reserve.

Source: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/

Lets start with the direct measures of inflation: CPI is up 3.1% from a year ago. The Fed’s preferred measure, PCE, is up 2.4% from a year ago. Core PCE, which is more predictive of where inflation will be going forward, is up 2.8% over the past year. The TIPS spread indicates 2.4% annualized inflation over the next 5 years. The Fed’s own projections say that PCE and Core PCE won’t be back to 2.0% until 2026.

The labor market remains quite tight: the unemployment rate is 3.7%, payroll growth is strong (353,000 in January), and there are still substantially more job openings than there are unemployed workers. The chattering classes underrate this because they are in some of the few sectors, like software and journalism, where layoffs are actually rising. Real GDP growth is strong (3.2% last quarter), and nominal GDP growth is still well above its long-run trend, which is inflationary.

I do see a few contrary indicators: M2 is still down from a year ago (though only 1.4%, and it is up over the past 6 months). The Fed’s balance sheet continues to shrink, though it is still trillions above the pre-Covid level. Productivity rose 3.2% last quarter.

But overall I am still more worried about inflation than about a recession, as I was 6 months ago. Financial conditions have changed dramatically from a year ago, when the discussion was about bank runs and a near-certain recession. Today the financial headlines are about all time highs for Bitcoin, Gold, Japan, and US stocks, with an AI-fueled boom (bubble?) in tech pushing the valuation of a single company, Nvidia, above the combined valuation of the entire Chinese stock market. All of this screams inflation, though it could also indicate a recession in a year or so if the bubble pops.

At least over the past year I think fiscal policy is more responsible than monetary policy for persistent inflation. But I can’t see Congress doing a deficit-reducing grand bargain in an election year; the CBO projects the deficit will continue to run over 5% of GDP. That means our best chance for inflation to hit the target this year is for the Fed to tighten, or at least to not cut rates. If policy continues on its current inflationary path, our main hope is for a deus-ex-machina like a true tech-fueled productivity boom, or deflationary events abroad (recession in China?) lowering prices here.

Shrinkflation: Not Just for Cookies

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

Cookie monster is mad:

But he’s not the only one. President Biden is mad too.

By now, hopefully we’ve all heard of shrinkflation. But if you haven’t, it’s when the unit price (e.g., the cost per pound) increases not because the price of the good went up, but because the product shrank in size.

Let’s be clear about a few things. First, this is nothing new. Here’s an Economist story from 2019 (pre-pandemic and pre-Bidenflation) talking about shrinkflation. You can find many such anecdotal stories back even further.

Second, the BLS is aware of this. They track it, and price it into the CPI. Take a look at the price data which underlies the CPI: it’s all stated in units. Price per pound, price per dozen, etc.

Moreover, the BLS also recently gave us some data on how frequently this happens. It’s pretty rare. Even among food items, which are a category the includes a fair amount of shrinkflation, only about 3 percent of products experienced any downsizing or upsizing from 2015-2021. That’s right, sometimes packages get larger, not smaller, which effectively lowers the unit price. “Shrinkdeflation” anyone?

Continue reading →

A Contrarian View from Apollo: No Rate Cuts in 2024

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

The mainstream view for the last 18 months has been that Fed rates cuts are always right around the corner. Markets are acting like the cutting cycle has already begun.

Apollo Global Management is a well-regarded alternative investment firm. (Disclosure: I own some APO stock). Their Chief Economist, Torsten Sløk, recently published his outlook, which differs sharply from the mainstream view. He notes that by various measures, the economy is heating up (or at least staying hot), and inflation has started to creep back up, not down. In his words:

The market came into 2023 expecting a recession.

The market went into 2024 expecting six Fed cuts.

The reality is that the US economy is simply not slowing down, and the Fed pivot has provided a strong tailwind to growth since December.

As a result, the Fed will not cut rates this year, and rates are going to stay higher for longer.

How do we come to this conclusion?

1) The economy is not slowing down, it is reaccelerating. Growth expectations for 2024 saw a big jump following the Fed pivot in December and the associated easing in financial conditions. Growth expectations for the US continue to be revised higher, see the first chart below.

2) Underlying measures of trend inflation are moving higher, see the second chart.

3) Supercore inflation, a measure of inflation preferred by Fed Chair Powell, is trending higher, see the third chart.

4) Following the Fed pivot in December, the labor market remains tight, jobless claims are very low, and wage inflation is sticky between 4% and 5%, see the fourth chart.

5) Surveys of small businesses show that more small businesses are planning to raise selling prices, see the fifth chart.

6) Manufacturing surveys show a higher trend in prices paid, another leading indicator of inflation, see the sixth chart.

7) ISM services prices paid is also trending higher, see the seventh chart.

8) Surveys of small businesses show that more small businesses are planning to raise worker compensation, see the eighth chart.

9) Asking rents are rising, and more cities are seeing rising rents, and home prices are rising, see the ninth, tenth, and eleventh charts.

10) Financial conditions continue to ease following the Fed pivot in December with record-high IG issuance, high HY issuance, IPO activity rising, M&A activity rising, and tight credit spreads and the stock market reaching new all-time highs. With financial conditions easing significantly, it is not surprising that we saw strong nonfarm payrolls and inflation in January, and we should expect the strength to continue, see the twelfth chart.

The bottom line is that the Fed will spend most of 2024 fighting inflation. As a result, yield levels in fixed income will stay high.

[END OF EXCERPT]

The big question, of course, is whether these recent signs of increased inflation are just blips of  noise, or the start of a new trend. Time will tell if Sløk’s contrarian view is correct, but I have to respect his intestinal fortitude in putting it right  out there, without any weaselly qualifications. He refers to many charts which are in his original article. I will reproduce four of these charts below:

What I’ve been watching

mdmakowskyLeave a comment

The nature of power, the stories people tell about us, and the stories we tell ourselves is a current throughline within seemingly everything I’ve been watching lately.

Dune Part 2. Loved it, IMAX recommended. The sheer scale of story isn’t just something exposited, you feel the crushing weight of it throughout. The film is trimmed to the point where some detail is skipped over, but the upside is the story never loses momentum. The underlying political economy remains relevant at all times.

Shogun feels true to the source material. Beautifully rendered. The possibility of power, and in turn the taking of power from others, can force your hand. How many coups are forced by the expectation of a coup? Funny how a world can hinge on an inelastic resource, be it a planet’s worth of hallucinogen or a single sailor’s navigational human capital.

The Great. Funny, decadent, ludicrous, and pitch dark at different times, I see a shocking amount of my own worldview in the writing. The alchemy of fear and self-interest swirling around power makes for an incredible comedic substrate. I recommend this to anyone who will listen and I’m probably going to write more about it.

The Kid Detective. How did none of you tell me about this movie? Much like Confess Fletch, it is an absolute gem that fell through the cracks of a theater-less pandemic. A dark comedy about the tragedy of being labeled a prodigy and how that can short-circuit a young person’s development, set within a town short-circuited by a crime. It’s not a happy movie, so don’t expect a happy ending, but it felt honest at every step.

Videos for Teaching Inflation in 2024

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

I’m teaching principles of macro this semester. Making macroeconomics sound important to students is partly about explaining that recessions are painful and significant.

As Alex Tabarrok says, “The Great Depression is Over!”  Maybe Gen Z can appreciate the significance of the Great Depression, but it is history. Gen Z has heard of the Great Recession, but keep in mind that a student who is 20-y-o in 2024 was 4 in 2008. It’s a weird one, but there has been a recession more recently. The Covid Recession is what I like to link to, when possible, in class.

To teach the inflation chapter this week, I’m using video clips that I’ll put up here as resources for others.

To start off the inflation chapter and bring in a more global perspective, I show: “Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hits triple digits”  This 2-minute news clip was produced by Al Jazeera. They talk about lending and policy in addition to retail price increases.

After we have gone through some definitions, I show two clips of an economic forecast that was recorded in 2021. I don’t usually show such long clips in class, but I’m relying on dramatic irony to make it interesting. The students know the path that inflation took from 2020 to 2024, but Dr. Doti in the video does not. I stop the video occasionally to point out connections to our textbook.

Chapman University’s 2021 Economic Forecast Update was presented virtually on Wednesday, June 16, 2021.

Dr. Jim Doti predicts that an unprecedented increase in the money supply after Covid will lead to inflation. He’s not right about everything, but that’s what makes it so interesting. Right after showing students the quantity theory of money equation, I can show them someone trying to apply it from about minute 25 to about minute 35. (don’t start the video from minute 1)

Then, I go back to my lecture and introduce the Fisher effect. Next, we watch about minute 38 to minute 43 of the 2021 forecast because of the direct connection of inflation to interest rates. Partly this just helps illustrate how messy the real world is.

Also, I pull from one of Jeremy’s 2023 posts to illustrate the long run neutrality of money. “The Rate of Inflation is Falling, But Prices are Still Rising (And So are Wages)“

How This Economist Cares for a Baby

Zachary Bartsch2 Comments

I have four children, and all them were or are babies. As an economist, I know that becoming more productive includes contributions to labor, capital, and technology. Caring for and pacifying babies is no different. Here are some of my methods for pacifying and employing babies who are 4-18 months old.

Own a pacifier. You don’t need to use it or even force it into your baby’s mouth. But just have it around. Paul Romer said that we learn and innovate by interacting with capital. So, let’s get the capital.

Employ your baby’s labor. Children as small as 2 or 3 can go get the eggs from the hen house. But what about a smaller baby? Of course we need to stimulate, feed, water, change, and rest the baby. But sometimes, you just need them to be quiet. What to do? Babies respond to Pavlovian stimulus at a very early age. If they’re crying or even just somewhat bored, then place the pacifier in their hand and say, in a very low but normal voice, ‘pacifier’. Babies will instinctively put the pacifier in their mouth. If you have it clipped on, then eventually, they’ll be able to find it when they need it. Developing physical human capital takes work experience and time. I always insist that my older children place the pacifier in the baby’s hand rather than the baby’s mouth. Greater human capital will yield productivity gains.

There came a point when my baby would awaken at night. I wouldn’t even get out of bed. I’d just calmly, and dispassionately say ‘pacifier’. And our baby would pop the pacifier in their own mouth. Employ your baby’s labor. Innovation happens when you interact with capital.

In the same vein, I’d balance the baby bottle on my child’s front side, and place their hands on it. Next thing I knew, my baby was holding their own bottle earlier than the internet said that I should expect them to. Those little hands aren’t useless. They’re low marginal product labor just waiting to be employed. Given that home production is a team effort and labors have interaction effects, that small marginal product for the baby frees your labor to have a larger marginal product for the household. Take advantage of interaction effects, specialization, and comparative advantage.

How do you produce sleep in a baby? Let’s examine the production function. It typically includes: warmth, a clean diaper, darkness, a full belly, maybe some motion, and a lack of disruptive noise. Once the baby is asleep, you really only need the warmth, darkness, and peaceful noise. Leverage your capital to make yourself more productive. Capital may not be able to replace you in helping your baby fall asleep. But it can replace you to help keep them asleep. Repurpose your current stock of capital. If only there was a warm, dark, white noise chamber in your house already. There is. It’s called a bathroom. Get your infant to fall asleep, then put them in the dark bathroom with the fan on. Now you can grade your papers, clean the house, or write your articles.

Addendum on diaper changing:

When it comes to changing a diaper, you should act like you have a low discount rate. That is, you should bear the cost of preparing a changing space so that your future self is thankful. This means preparing the changing pad, opening the new diaper, unfolding the wipes, preparing for diaper disposal, and preparing any new clothes. This makes the diaper changing process much easier and mitigates stochastic costs like leaks, mid-change accidents, etc. Further, your MPL is lower when you have to mind a baby who’s on an elevated surface. Employ your labor when it’s more productive – before you lay them down.

Do you have a baby who fights or cries during diaper changes? Take a hint from the Fed and engage in forward guidance. Did you know that if you blow in a baby’s face, that they instinctively close their eyes and mouth and stop flailing? Early on this can act as a reset and interrupt crying. As a baby gets older, they’ll learn to anticipate the blown air. But only if you build your reputation.

When my 12 month old would start to fight, I’d audibly inhale. My baby would immediately stop fighting and clothes her eyes and mouth, and stop flailing in preparation of me blowing in her face. That’s called forward guidance. Building a reputation of action means that signaling action is often just as good as the act itself. But be careful, if you always blow in their face, they grow accustomed to it due to expectations augmented responses. So, I introduce stochastic bluffs wherein I audibly inhale, but then neglect to blow in their face. Stimulus only works repeatedly if you can violate their expectations.

Stay tuned for more economist parenting tips.

Pistol Squats Complete the Home Workout

James Bailey2 Comments

A good strength workout includes a push, a pull, and legs. When I can get to the gym I like to alternate bench press and incline press for the push; rows and pulldowns for the pull; and squats and deadlifts for the legs. But with a baby to take care of at home, its been hard to find time for the gym. Between driving, waiting for equipment, and the actual lifts, the gym takes an hour. Doing a similar workout at home can take just 10 minutes, and has the advantage that you can watch a baby while doing it.

But the big challenge with home workouts was finding a good leg exercise. Pushes are easy: just do pushups. Pulls are pretty easy: just buy a $15 pullup bar to hang over a door. But how to do a good leg workout without costly barbells and plates that take up lots of space? Enter the pistol squat.

The idea is simply to start from a stand and lower yourself down almost to the ground on a single leg, then come back up on one leg, with the other leg out front for balance:

Source: Snapshot from this video, which shows how to do the standard pistol plus many variations

I find this to be about as difficult as doing a traditional two-legged barbell squat with 1x bodyweight on the bar. The traditional squat has two legs lifting 2x bodyweight (your body itself, plus 1x bodyweight on the bar); the pistol squat has one leg lifting 1x bodyweight (just your body itself), which is about equal. This was perfect for me because I was doing about 3 sets of 5 reps of squats with 1x bodyweight on the bar, so I just do the same number of pistol squats. But what if you’re not exactly at that weight?

Going lighter is easy– just put one hand on something sturdy nearby like a table and lean on it until it takes enough of your weight that you can do the squat. This helps with balance too if that is an issue. Going heavier is harder, but you could carry something heavy in your hands, turn the rise into more of an explosive jump, or just do more reps.

I’d still rather be at the gym, but the complete home workout seems like a good application of the Pareto Principle– you get most of the benefits of the gym while paying only a small fraction of its time and money costs.

Alabama’s Homicide Rate is More than Double New York City

Jeremy Horpedahl2 Comments

A lot of people think New York City is an especially high-crime city. Including some US Senators. Here’s senior Senator from Alabama:

Ignore the weird obsession with Biden’s ice cream habit. The Senator is concerned that NYC is not safe.

But what’s the reality? Here’s a map showing the homicide rate in each state, and its relative position to NYC (data is from the CDC for 2022, the most recent complete year available right now).

The light-colored states have a lower homicide rate than NYC (5.2 deaths per 100,000). There’s 18 of those states. But most states have higher homicide rates than NYC. Some are a lot higher, even triple NYC in a few states (colored purple). Alabama’s homicide rate of 13.9 deaths per 100,000 people is about 2.5 times as high as New York City.

But perhaps the homicide rates in these states are being driven by high homicide rates in cities in those states? Comparing a city to a state is perhaps a little strange to do, but I also often hear this retort: well, it’s those cities, especially “Democrat-controlled” cities, that are driving the high homicide rate in Alabama and elsewhere. And while this is true to a certain extent, comparing rural counties to New York City doesn’t make Alabama and the South look much better:

For this map I combined 2021 and 2022 data, because the CDC doesn’t report very small numbers (usually under 10 deaths), so grouping two years is needed to get more data. Even so, there are still a handful of states that don’t have enough homicides for CDC to report them over that two-year period, and they are shown in gray on the map (as well as states that have no rural counties: Delaware, Rhode Island, and New Jersey).

Notice that even focusing on just the rural counties, there are almost 20 states with higher murder rates than New York City. Again, some are double or even triple. Rural Alabama, at 11 deaths per 100,000 people, is exactly double NYC. Notably, the entirety of the rural South is higher than NYC.

If this is all true, why might New York City feel less safe? There are a number of possible explanations, but I’ll offer a few. First, homicide isn’t the only kind of crime. While it does correlate with other crimes, it’s not a 1:1 relationship, so it’s likely that some places with higher homicide rates than NYC have lower levels of assault, rape, or property crimes. These are even more challenging to compare across jurisdictions, but it’s a possible explanation. Related, NYC is a relatively safe big city! Other big cities wouldn’t compare as favorably to Alabama. But folks just seem to love NYC as a punching bag.

The other explanation is just the sheer number of people, and therefore homicides. According to the CDC, NYC had 434 homicides in 2022, that’s an average of more than one per day. You could literally turn on the news every single day and hear about a murder, and perhaps you had even been in the neighborhood where it happened recently. Contrast rural Alabama, which had 65 homicides in 2022. That’s only about one per week. And it might be happening in a completely different part of the state from you, so you either don’t hear about it or think “that’s somewhere else.”

But rural Alabama only has about 600,000 people. NYC has fourteen times as many people. So if we are trying to answer the question “What are the odds that a random person is murdered in a given year?”, we need to take population into account. That’s the logic of reporting homicide rates. Indeed it may feel like NYC is less safe, and that’s a natural human reaction. But that’s why the data is so important, to give us a sense of proportion.