Free-market ideology and the burden of proof

I am extremely flattered that John Cochrane considers me "the other Smith" - an honor I certainly don't deserve, with all the other econoSmiths out there. But unfortunately, John was not a big fan of a post I wrote for Bloomberg View, entitled "Growth Fantasy of Tax Cuts and Small Government". Now, remember that I don't get to choose (or even approve) my Bloomberg View post titles, and they are almost always clickbaity - in fact, I don't think tax cuts and small government are always a growth "fantasy". Personally, I'd recommend tax cuts for Europe, smaller government for both Europe and Japan, and corporate tax cuts for the U.S. And I'm also worried that the U.S. has become over-regulated in a number of areas. Personally, I believe that some of the policies Cochrane suggested in his earlier post - for example, an end to agriculture subsidies, more immigration, and the removal of many occupational licenses - would be good for growth, though others (like school vouchers) would reduce it. So the title Bloomberg View gave my post did not reflect the nuance of my personal views. Nor should it be expected to.

My post was about expressing skepticism. We always hear big promises from rightward-leaning economists about the growth-enhancing powers of tax cuts and deregulation, but these policies often fail to deliver. In my post, I noted a prominent example of this - the ALEC rankings. It's not the only example. The Bush tax cuts were followed by a decade of extremely disappointing growth. The Clinton-era financial deregulations don't seem to have done us any good. Why should we trust more of these promises? Why should we keep trusting the people who keep making the promises? Instead, I say we should look to serious, evidence-based analyses by economists who are neither knee-jerk free-marketers nor knee-jerk interventionists. 

Fortunately - and here let me go off on a brief tangent - those sober, middle-of-the-road economists comprise a solid majority. Here's an excerpt from the abstract of a 2007 paper by economists Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, entitled "Is There a Free-Market Economist In the House?":

We surveyed American Economic Association members and asked their views on 18 specific forms of government activism. We find that [only] about 8 percent of AEA members can be considered supporters of free-market principles, and that less than 3 percent may be called strong supporters. The data are broken down by voting behavior (Democratic or Republican). Even the average Republican AEA member is “middle-of-the-road,” not free-market.

So most economists are supporters of a mixed economy. Now granted, some of those economists may support government intervention for reasons not related to economic efficiency. But some of the questions in the survey are pretty clearly not just about redistribution - for example, one question asks about government production of education. There is also other evidence. The Chicago Booth IGM Forum poll of top economists found that 73 percent either agree or strongly agree with the following statement:

Because the US has underspent on new projects, maintenance, or both, the federal government has an opportunity to increase average incomes by spending more on roads, railways, bridges and airports.

Only 3 percent of surveyed top economists disagreed with this statement. 3 percent! For reference, about 26 percent of Americans say that the sun goes around the Earth. So there is overwhelming consensus among top economists that more government provision of public goods would boost economic efficiency. Hardline free-marketers are a small but loud and influential minority. 

But this is a bit of a sidetrack. Let's get back to Cochrane's post.

John writes:

My surprise in reading Noah is that he provided no alternative numbers and no alternative policies. Well, if you don't think Free Market Nirvana will have 4% growth, at least for a decade as we remove all the level inefficiencies, how much do you think it will produce, and how solid is that evidence?

As for numbers, I don't really feel I need to produce an alternative to a number that was made up as a political talking point. Why 4 percent? Why not 5? Why not 8? Why not 782 percent? Where do we get the number for how good we can expect Free Market Nirvana to be? Is it from the sum of point estimates from a bunch of different meta-analyses of research on various free-market policies? No. It was something Jeb Bush tossed out in a conference call because it was "a nice round number", after James Glassman had suggested "3 or 3.5".

You want me to give you an alternative number, using the same rigorous methodology? Sure, how about 3.1. Wait, no. 3.3. There we go. 3.3 sounds good. Rolls off the tongue.

(Ed Prescott, after conducting his own quantitative analysis along with Robert Lucas, politely told Jeb that the economy's "maintainable" rate of growth was only 3 percent. But Prescott is undoubtedly just an incorrigible pessimist.) 

As for justifying the 4 percent number by appealing to past growth, that doesn't make a lot of sense, since our current opportunities for policy-based efficiency improvements will be different from the ones in the past. But we can do that exercise, sure. Here is 10-year trailing annualized real U.S. GDP growth:

In an earlier post, Cochrane showed a similar graph that showed 10-year arithmetic means. I think geometric means are pretty obviously the correct meaning of "average growth". But even if you just eyeball the yearly growth graph, it's obvious that we haven't hit 4% very often since the 1960s. We briefly spiked above it in the early 80s, lingered above it in the late 90s, and never even hit it in the 2000s. 

So...maybe Free Market Nirvana would get us there. Maybe. But it seems to me that even beneficial types of market liberalization, like every other policy improvement, are subject to diminishing returns - the low-hanging fruit gets picked first. The Kennedy tax cuts seemed to produce a burst of growth, the Reagan tax cuts a more modest bump, and the Bush tax cuts basically nothing. There's no reason to think the same isn't true of deregulation. 

And keep in mind that we're facing slower population growth than in the 80s and 90s, and slower productivity growth than in the 90s and 00s. In other words, Free Market Nirvana Version 2.0 will have to do a lot more than Version 1.0 did, when a priori we should probably expect it to do less.

John then takes me to task for not suggesting alternative policies:

More deeply, Noah suggests no alternative policies. He does not claim that more government wage controls,  unions, stricter labor laws (Uber drivers must be employees) heavier and more politicized regulation, cartelizing more industries beyond health and finance, raising taxes to confiscatory levels, larger welfare state, boondoggle public works and so on -- the alternative path in the current policy debate -- will get us back to 4% growth.

To this I reply:

1. There's no logical reason to assume that anything can get us "back" to 4 percent growth, short of a massive increase in immigration (which is politically impossible, thanks to the GOP, but which I would dearly love to see, especially if it were heavily tilted toward high-skilled immigration). 

2. John waves away the idea of public goods provision being a potential source of growth, which seems like it would put him in the 3 percent minority in that IGM poll.

3. If I had to suggest alternative policies to the ones John suggests (and keep in mind I like some of his), I'd recommend A) spending more on road, rail, water, electrical, and broadband infrastructure while dramatically cutting costs, B) spending more on basic and applied research, C) reforming the patent system, especially with regards to software and business-process patents, and D) reforming urban land-use policy, especially by means of land value taxes or close equivalents.

So there you go.

John then accuses me of pessimism:

So, one must only conclude that Noah -- and others voicing the same it's-not-possible complaint -- believes 4% growth is not possible. 2% or less is the new normal. Sustained growth, of the sort that made us all healthier and wealthier, if not wiser, than our grandparents, is a thing of the past.

But my post is all about skepticism. I am not certain that the 4 percent number, pulled out of Jeb's posterior, is unachievable in theory. I merely recognize that free-market "structural reformers" have made many growth promises in the past that have not been kept. And this makes me heavily distrust their current promises, and long for verification by less ideological folks than the people at the conservative think tanks that feed Jeb his talking points.

Also, why is 2% per year such a crappy outcome for living standards? Given that a lot of our headline growth slowdown since the 60s has been due to lower population growth, the per capita slowdown has been much more mild, and it's per capita that we really care about when we're talking about living standards. Total factor productivity - which should include the effects of government policy - is growing faster than it did during Reagan's term in office, and I expect it to continue doing so...so why is John calling me a growth pessimist??

John then says that I'm denying a useful role for economists in society:

If the absolute best economic policies anyone can imagine -- and, again, Noah offered no alternatives -- cannot return us to 4% growth and sustain that growth, why bother being economists?

I kind of see it the other way around. If economists have already figured out The Answer to Everything - if it's just a bullet-point list of simple free-market policies - then why don't we pack up and go home? Why sit there analyzing repeated games, or making DSGE models, or finding natural experiments to analyze, when it's all been figured out and boiled down to a simple canon? 

John continues:

They do not call us the "dismal science" because we think the current world is close to the best of all possible ones...("Dismal" only refers to the fact that good economics respects budget constraints.)

Actually, the name "dismal science" came from a guy making fun of Malthus was invented by a guy making a case for reintroducing slavery in order to regulate the labor market! But anyway, budget constraints seem to me to be exactly the reason that we can't just pull numerical growth targets out of thin air and assume that we can always hit them if we just have the will to do so.

John closes with a potted ideological history of the American economy:

Noah's tired pot-shot has been going on a long time. In 1980 Ronald Reagan announced some pretty radical growth-oriented policies, at least by the standards of the time. (Not much new since Adam Smith, of course.) The standard liberal commentators made the standard objections: voodoo economics, numbers don't add up, it will take generations of unemployment to lower inflation, the debt will explode, and so forth. (Plus, the Soviet Union will be there forever, we might as well get along.)  Reagan offered optimism; won, malaise ended, we won the cold war, and there was an economic boom.

Well, you know, personally I do think Reagan's liberalizations, on balance, were good for the economy. They didn't actually get us to 4 percent growth, even with favorable demographic tailwinds. They didn't end the TFP stagnation (at least not until the mid-1990s, if you want to posit 14-year lags). They luckily coincided with Volcker's taming of inflation. They indeed caused a massive runup in the national debt. But I think that on balance they were necessary and good, and I hope Japan emulates them to some degree in the near future.

But like I said, Reagan probably picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit. Should we expect further government-slashing to do much more than it did for Reagan, as it would have to in order to get us to sustained 4 percent growth? Or should we expect it to do much less? I'm willing to be convinced by evidence, but my prior is on "much less." 

So to sum up, I think we - by which I mean Americans - have repeatedly bought into the promises of free-market ideologues, outlier economists, and conservative think tanks, even as their chosen policies have yielded conspicuously diminishing returns since the early 80s. I'm just saying that before we buy any more such promises, we had better have some solid evidence in favor. The burden of proof is on the free-market ideologues at this point, and "Reagan Reagan rah rah rah" is not proof.