Economist's View

Fed officials to decide on scaling back bond purchases at next few meetings — 21 Nov 2013
(The next FOMC scheduled on 17-18 Dec 2013.)

Desperate to Taper — 20 Nov 2013

If you want to be rich, you can try to set up a brilliantly successful company. Or you can steal money. Trans-parency International, the corruption watchdog, has estimated that Mohamed Suharto embezzled up to $35bn when he was Indonesia’s president, a figure that is in the same league as the entrepreneurial fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. On a humbler scale, we all face the same choice. We can try to earn money by doing something useful, or we can try to steal or extort it from other people. A society where most people are doing something useful has a good chance of being rich; a society full of corruption will be poor.

That is a glib enough explanation of wealth and poverty, but what causes corruption? Many economists believe that corruption is a response to perverse incentives. For example, in Indonesia it takes an average of 151 days to legally establish a small business, according to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” database. This is a large incentive to pay bribes or keep a business unregistered. It is not surprising that there is a strong correlation between red tape and corruption. In general, the harder it is to make money legally the more tempting it will be to do so illegally, and if people are not punished for stealing they will be more likely to steal.

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Tim Harford: Let’s Make More Mistakes — 11 Aug 2013

Asset managers could blow us all up — 12 Dec 2013

The gross distortions of GDP

Tim Harford
17 Dec 2013

‘Are we doomed to live in a commercial society distorted by a concept which leaves out so much that really matters?’

Call it the Christmas paradox. Our seasonal festival is the occasion both for a colossal consumerist blowout and for reflecting on the importance of things money can’t buy: family bonds, friendship, anticipation and nostalgia.

So as the mince pies bake and the sherry flows, whither GDP? GDP – or gross domestic product – measures the size of the economy by adding up all income earned, or all money spent, or the monetary value of everything produced: the three should be equivalent. But they are not, notoriously, equivalent to some deeper measure of what all this stuff is really worth to us.

As the economist Diane Coyle points out in her forthcoming book GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History, the idea that GDP would measure wellbeing was sidelined in the 1930s. Simon Kuznets produced the first serious estimates of US GDP in 1934, and wanted to adjust his calculations to reflect “the elements which, from the standpoint of a more enlightened social philosophy than that of an acquisitive society represent disservice rather than service”. It was a political battle that Kuznets lost: America was focused on ramping up production to escape the Depression and prepare for war.

Why not, then, replace GDP with a measure of what really matters: happiness? This suggestion just won’t go away, despite the fact that happiness is already widely measured. And while the measures of it look useful and are inexpensive to collect, they’re surely too crude for macroeconomic purposes. Imagine calculating national income the same way we do happiness, by asking everyone, “How much money do you make, on a scale of one to seven?” and then averaging the result. I’m not sure we’d learn a great deal.

Yet GDP is problematic, and increasingly so. We seem to have no convincing measure, for example, of what contribution financial services make to the economy. In the wake of the recession, Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England pointed out that according to the UK’s national accounts, this contribution grew at the fastest rate on record in the fourth quarter of 2008 – the quarter that began a fortnight after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Or consider what appears to be an opposite error. According to the economist Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, the information sector of the economy (software, telecoms, publishing, data processing, movies, TV) has scarcely grown over the past 25 years as measured by GDP. This seems bizarre but it’s easy to see the logic: GDP measures the price paid for goods and services, but many valuable digital services are free or cheap. Brynjolfsson and co-author JooHee Oh reckon that every year consumers in the US are enjoying an extra $100bn of services online they don’t have to pay for.

There are plenty of other knotty problems too – from how to measure the losses caused by distracting Facebook posts to how to calculate the gains from antibiotics and super-efficient lighting.

Coyle argues that GDP collection needs to be reformed but not replaced. I agree. But where does that leave Christmas? Are we doomed to live in an increasingly commercial society that’s distorted by a concept which leaves out so much of what really matters?

Perhaps crass commercialism is our fate. But let’s not blame GDP (or its close cousin GNP, gross national product) for that. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy famously declared that GNP “counts napalm and … nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children … the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages”.

Indeed, it does not. But divorces don’t begin at the Office for National Statistics; nor did the Bureau of Labor Statistics start the Vietnam war. GDP has its flaws – but if you give, or receive, a costly, unwanted gift this Christmas, please don’t blame the statisticians.

Why Singapore's Economy Is Heading For An Iceland-Style Meltdown — 13 Jan 2014

All Good Things Come To An End