Signals vs. Causes: Reynolds’ Law

I hadn’t realized that someone had dubbed confusing signals with causes, Reynolds’ Law. Glenn Reynolds does a nice job of summing up the disease:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Yes. And by undermine, I believe he means changes.

Home ownership, for example, was once a reward for making tough choices to live beneath your means, save for a down payment and protect the value of your equity stake in your home by keeping it up.

By bending the rules to make ‘home ownership’ a participation trophy that anybody could get by signing theirs’ (or their dog’s) name on the dotted line, it changed what home ownership meant. As someone (can’t remember who) correctly put it, someone with no equity in their home is a renter with a mortgage, not a home owner.

So true

This week’s EconTalk podcast, with guest Anat Admati, is worth a listen. She explains, in an easy-to-understand way, how recklessness about risk contributed to the banking crisis. But, I especially appreciated this quote of her’s from near the end of the interview:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Walter Williams: Good Intentions

Walter Williams makes a good case that the war on poverty was making things worse in 1985. This was a PBS documentary now available to all of us through the wonders of the Internet and Youtube. I recommend watching all 28 minutes.

Part I:

 

Part II:

 

Part III:

 

Here’s Walter Williams home page to see more of his work. I recommend adding his weekly column to your normal reading rotation. You will learn a lot.

Thanks to Wally & Mike for — as usual — a good and productive discussion in the comments.

Money for nothing

I learned a few things from this EconTalk podcast with guest Casey Mulligan discussing his book, The Redistribution Recession.

One argument from the right against unemployment benefits is that it encourages people to stay unemployed so they can keep receiving it.

A standard retort from the left to that argument is that the unemployment payout is so small that nobody would choose that paltry sum over getting a job.

Mulligan points out that the sum is not trivial. Here’s Mulligan from about 24 minutes into the podcast (bold is mine):

Typically before the recession, unless you are well into the upper half of earnings, when you lost a job you got half of your earnings replaced. So if you used to earn $600 a week, you’d get an unemployment check for $300 a week. And I guess you are referring to kind of that $300 dollar number–it seems $300 isn’t very big. Well, if you earn $600–I earn more than $600 myself–but if you earn $600, then $300 is not all that trivial. Number one.

…number two: There’s all kinds of taxes you don’t have to pay when you are unemployed. Payroll taxes–forget about it. You don’t pay it when you are unemployed. A big chunk of income taxes you are not going to pay when you are unemployed. So when you put all of that together, without even getting to other help you might get from food stamps or Medicaid, put it all together, before the recession about 70%, maybe a little more, of your earnings would be replaced. Not half. And that’s without getting into, like I said, other types of programs.

And when you start with 70% as your baseline–so you are going to get 70% on the old rule, and you are going to put a bunch of new rules* in there–it pushes the 70% up to 85 or 90%. I don’t think we can call that trivial any more.

*The new rules Mulligan mentions earlier in the podcast are expansions made in other programs during in the recession like food stamps, mortgage payment relief and health insurance subsidies.

So, think about these choices:

Choice 1: Get a job making 70% – 100% of what you use to make and give up 40+ hours a week. After paying taxes and paying for more of your food, mortgage and health insurance, you are really making about 50% – 80% of what you use to make.

Choice 2: Don’t get a job (or at least not an official job). Keep making 70%+ of what you use to make.This includes unemployment and other programs. Keep the 40 or more hours of free time during the week, where you might find things to do for others off-the-books for extra cash (which maybe brings you to more than what you use to make).

After learning this, the ‘the unemployment payout is so small that nobody would choose that paltry sum over getting a job’ argument seems much less compelling. I’d say that it would be more of a surprise for someone to give up Choice 2 for Choice 1.

The whole podcast is worth a listen.  There are a couple other points Mulligan makes that I’d like to mention.

One (and some of this may be a mix of Mulligan’s points and my own). Unemployment is more of a choice than a condition that folks find themselves in ‘through no fault of their own.’

He contends that use to be the social norm. If you lost a job, there was more expectation on you to not burden your fellow citizens and to do something productive. So, for example, you were expected to have been responsible and saved for a rainy day when you did have a job. You were expected to make tough choices in your own budget to trim the fat. And, you were expected to find another job and take it and make ends meet, even if it was for less pay that what you used to make. At least you were being productive, responsible and continuing to add to your own work experience and skill set that may lead to bigger and better things.

The ‘social norm’ seems to have shifted to view what you use to earn and the budget choices you made then were things you were entitled to keep and that being out of job is something that you have absolutely no control over.

Two. The cost-benefit analysis of unemployment benefits has shifted. Unemployment benefits use to be viewed as a stop-gap to help folks in transition. It wasn’t really thought of something that would help the economy. Now the benefit-side of the cost-benefit analysis includes stimulative effects to the economy. But, Mulligan does a good job of addressing that belief:

It does put money in a group of people’s hands; it takes it out of another group of people’s hands. And the net reduction in the economy is actually less spending. Because, you know, you have less work going on. So there’s less total income to be spent. And so the people who are going to suffer from that, depending on the industry they work in, they are going to see the drop in demand for what they make. And they may not appreciate my story; but they don’t understand–they need to appreciate: Why aren’t their customers spending? If you drill down to the bottom of that you are going to see that the safety net expansions are a big part of it.

Here Mulligan makes an atomic connection that so few others do. Income and spending derives from wealth creation (i.e. doing productive things), not the other way around. All unemployment benefits do is shift who is spending the wealth that is being created, so since you have fewer people creating wealth, there will be less overall spending.

In fact, this reminds me of a post of mine from 2011, Government is overhead.

Thoughts on taxes III: Social Engineering

In my original Thoughts on taxes post, I listed this as the second reason I prefer a simple tax system:

• We don’t get the social engineering benefits that we think we do from the cleverly designed tax code that we have. We may only get bad outcomes.

I would prefer that we only think of taxes as a way to fund government, but many folks can’t resist the temptation to make the tax code serve double duty by also trying to use it for social engineering. That is, to encourage more behavior that we think of as good (like owning homes, earning income and going to college) and less behavior we think of as bad (like earning high income and making short-term investments:)).

Well, it’s not that we think earning a high income is bad. It’s that many people believe income inequality is bad and they think tax rates can balance that out, but as we’ll see shortly, progressive tax rates may contribute to income inequality.

I believe this desire to use the tax code for social engineering has two problems. First, and most important, we don’t actually realize the social engineering benefits. Those just get pushed to other margins through by distorting natural incentives. More on that in bit.

Second, it stands to reason that the natural rewards for good behavior (like buying homes, going to college and long-term investing) should be enough to encourage that behavior without any special tax treatment.

To think about how trying to reward good behavior in the tax code pushes the supposed benefits to other margins, consider the home mortgage interest deduction. We’ve been brainwashed to believe this is good because it encourages home ownership.

We’ve also been brainwashed to believe that home ownership is a good thing.

But, why exactly is home ownership something that we should encourage? Arnold Kling wonders this as well. What’s wrong with renting?

Home ownership isn’t for everyone. Home ownership doesn’t necessarily make one wealthier, wiser or more responsible, despite that conventional wisdom that fed the housing bubble.

Have you heard how much ownership the mortgage interest deduction has encouraged? I haven’t. If there is research on this topic, I haven’t seen it and a couple (admittedly quick) Google searches didn’t immediately turn up anything. If you can point me to any research on the topic, please do so in the comments.

But, even if there is research, I’m skeptical that it would thoroughly consider all the possible distortions to natural incentives the mortgage interest deduction could be causing and how those distortions have moved the benefits of home ownership to other margins.

Even I can’t know all the distortions caused by this part of the tax code, but I am willing to bet that the my following list of possibilities is something most folks haven’t ever considered. I know this because I bring it up to folks all the time and the response so far has always been “Wow, I never thought of that.”

I think, perhaps, the biggest distortion that may offset most of the social benefit of the deduction is higher home prices. Believe it or not, the value of the mortgage interest deduction benefit is accounted for in higher home prices.

Some folks I’ve discussed this with have a hard time believing it. They tell me that they didn’t explicitly consider that when making an offer on their home.

How market prices work is hard to understand. While my friends may not have explicitly considered it, the folks they were bidding against may have and they had to beat those bids to get the house. So, they did not have to explicitly consider this benefit for it to be built into the price.

If you still don’t believe me, you should also consider why the real estate brokers and home lenders actively lobby to keep the mortgage interest deduction. Do you think they are just looking after our best interests? No. Higher home prices means high transaction prices for real estate agents (7% commission x a higher number is a higher number).s.

The mortgage interest deduction also encourages folks to take out larger loans, keep that debt out longer and have less equity in their home than they might have otherwise.

These can weaken someone’s financial position and gives less incentive to be responsible home owners. As we found out in the housing bust, owners with no equity are no more responsible than renters who do not have to pay rent.

If I had not considered how taxes distort natural incentives before, this list of four possible distortions of the mortgage interest deduction would at least make me think more about the topic and possibly consider distortions driven by other socially engineered pieces of the tax code.

Could the most progressive income tax code of all developed countries actually be contributing to income inequality? In other words, does the higher marginal rates on higher income lead high income folks to seek higher rates of gross income to offset those higher tax rates?

Like home prices, this isn’t intuitive, but is the same thing. Labor is price, just like a home price is a price. If home prices adjust to include tax benefits, labor prices can adjust to cover tax costs.

Don’t think so? Imagine one of your favorite Hollywood stars. Even better if he happens to be vocal advocate for increasing taxes on the wealthy (e.g. Matt Damon).

Now, also consider the clout of your highly paid actor. Does he sell tickets? If so, he has some good earnings leverage over the studios that sign him to their projects.

Next, think about what happens in his next movie negotiation if he gets his wish and tax rates on high incomes are increased. Let’s say before he was banking $10 million per movie, or $6 million after tax.

If tax rates increase from 40% to 60%, for example, do you think he’ll settle for taking home $4 million on his next project? Probably not. Why should he? Do you think he would recognize the $2 million hit as a consequence of his advocacy? No.

His agent will ask for $15 million so his client can take home the same $6 million as he did before. And the actor will never connect the dots on how the tax rate actually made his gross income even more “inequal” ($15 million vs. $10 million) to the folks who didn’t see a 50% increase in tax rates.

But, we don’t need to guess how tax rates can distort a rich actor’s incentives. What if a neighbor, who you don’t know well, is planning an extended vacation next summer and offers to pay you to mow his lawn while he’s gone. He tells you it takes an hour to mow.

What price would get you to agree to his offer? $20? $40? $50? $100?

Which price raised your interest level?  I’d have tepid interest for $50 and be much more interested for $100. But, everyone is different because we all have different opportunity costs.

You agree to the offer at your desired price, but then find out that one of the Homeowner Association covenants, that you never read, states that the HOA gets 50% of any such neighbor-to-neighbor dealings. Now we’ve cut the fee your attention-getting-fee in half.

Are you still interested in mowing his lawn? No. Your opportunity costs are higher than that amount, else you would have picked that number the first time.

What would make it all better? If your neighbor doubled the fee to offset the HOA’s 50% tax.

See, our own behavior and incentive distortions are not much different from the rich Hollywood actor and it’s plausible that distortions caused by unequal tax rates winds up being priced into labor, which contributes to the ‘income inequality’ that so many folks get bellyaches over.

Writing this post has made me think about a new game to play on this blog: Guess the incentive distortions. Periodically, I’ll pick a policy and see if I can name a few possible distortions that might make the policy less desirable than it sounds.

Incentive distortions caused by tax rates are rarely discussed. When they are, they are often too quickly discounted.