Consumption Rules

From WSJ.com

This is an opinion article written by Edward C. Prescott, who is senior monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and professor of economics at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He is a co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in economics.

He prefaces the article by saying:

The sky is not falling. No need to panic and start playing around with all sorts of policy responses. Despite the impression created by some economic pundits, the U.S. economy is not a delicate little machine that needs to be fine-tuned with exact precision by benevolent policymakers to keep from breaking down. Rather, it is large and complex, with millions of people making billions of decisions every day to improve their lives, the lives of their families and the health of their businesses.

The five myths he debunked are as follows:

Myth No. 1: Monetary policy causes booms and busts.

One of the mysteries of the 1990s is how to explain the economic boom when the increase in capital investments — as measured by the national accounts — grew at a subdued pace. The numbers simply don’t add up. However, it turns out that something special happened in the 1990s, and it wasn’t monetary policy. In a recent paper, Minneapolis Fed senior economist Ellen McGrattan and I show that intangible capital investment — including R&D, developing new markets, building new business organizations and clientele — was above normal by 4% of GDP in the late 1990s.

This difference is key to understanding growth rates in the 1990s: Output, correctly measured, increased 8% relative to trend between 1991 and 1999, which is much bigger than the U.S. national accounts number of 4%. Associated with this boom in unmeasured investment is the huge amount of unmeasured savings that showed up in the wealth statistics as capital gains. This was the people’s boom, the risk-takers’ boom. We should hang gold medals around these entrepreneurs’ necks. So indeed, it does seem that Mr. Greenspan was lucky in that a boom happened under his watch; but we can at least say that he did a pretty good job of keeping inflation in check. Here’s hoping for the same performance from our current chairman.

Myth No. 2: GDP growth was extraordinary in the 1990s.

Even though I referred to the expansion of the ’90s as a boom, inasmuch as it was a period of above-trend growth, and I noted the strong gains due to unmeasured investment, we have to put things into historical context. So let’s return to the data. GDP growth relative to trend in the early 1960s was 12%, and in the famous 1980s boom (from the end of 1982 to mid-1989) it was a very impressive 9.7%.

And how about the boom from the previous decade? From 1996 to 1999, GDP grew 3.8%, about in line with the 3.9% growth of the early 1970s and less than the 5.5% growth of the mid-1970s expansion. Even when we account for unmeasured investment and add four percentage points, the 1990s growth spurt — fueled by rapid growth in tech industries — still falls short of the 1980s boom and does not approach the 1960s, both of which were fueled by tax cuts.

Myth No. 3: Americans don’t save.

This is a persistent misconception owing to a misunderstanding of what it means to save. To get a complete picture of savings we need to investigate economic wealth relative to income. Our traditional measures of savings and investment, the national accounts, do not include savings associated with tangible investments made by businesses and funded by retained earning, government investments (like roads and schools) and business intangible investments.

If we want to know how much people are saving, we need to look at how much wealth they have. People invest themselves in many and varied ways beyond their traditional savings accounts. Viewing the full picture — economic wealth — Americans save as much as they always have; otherwise, their wealth relative to income would fall. We’re saving the right amount.

Myth No. 4: The U.S. government debt is big.

The key measure here is privately held interest-bearing federal government debt, which includes debt held by foreign central banks, and does not include debt held by the Fed or government debt held by the government. So let’s turn to the historical data once again.

Privately held interest-bearing debt relative to income peaked during World War II, fell through the early 1970s, rose again through the early 1990s, and then fell again until 2003. Even though that number has been rising in recent years (except for the most recent one), it is still at levels similar to the early 1960s, and lower than levels in most of the 1980s and 1990s. This debt level was not alarming then, and it is not alarming now. From a historical perspective, the current U.S. government debt is not large.

Myth No. 5: Government debt is a burden on our grandchildren.

There’s no better way to get people worked up about something than to call on their sympathies for their beloved grandkids. The last thing that I want to do is to burden my own grandchildren with the sins of profligacy. But we should stop feeling guilty — at least about government debt — because we are in better shape than conventional wisdom suggests.

Theory and practice tell us that the optimal amount of public debt that maximizes the welfare of new generations of entrants into the workforce is two times gross national income, or GDP. This assumes 1% population growth, 2% productivity growth, 4% real after-tax return on investments, and that people work to age 63 and live to age 85. Currently, privately held public debt is about 0.3 times GDP, and if we include our Social Security obligations, it is 1.6 times GDP. In either case, we could argue that we have too little debt.

What’s going on here? There are not enough productive assets — tangible and intangible assets alike — to meet the investment needs of our forthcoming retirees. The problem is that the rate of return on investment — creating more productive assets — decreases as the stock of these assets increases. An excessive stock of these productive assets leads to inefficiencies.

Total savings by everyone is equal to the sum of productive assets and government debt, and if there is an imbalance in this equation it does not mean we have too little or too many productive assets. The fix comes from getting the proper amount of government debt. When people did not enjoy long retirements and population growth was rapid, the optimal amount of government debt was zero. However, the world has changed, and we in fact require some government debt if we care about our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

If we should worry about our grandchildren, we shouldn’t about the amount of debt we are leaving them. We may even have to increase that debt a bit to ensure that we are adequately prepared for our own retirements.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

(Somewhat) Similar Posts: