Robots

Economists who work on growth, technology, and productivity:

... Wonder if automation technology is near a tipping point, when machines finally master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable. 

You guys probably need to make sure you make it into the top of the income distribution:

... Rather than killing jobs indiscriminately, Mr. Autor’s research found automation commandeering such middle-class work as clerk and bookkeeper, while creating jobs at the high- and low-end of the market.

This is one reason the labor market has polarized and wages have stagnated over the past 15 years, Mr. Autor said. The concern among economists shouldn’t be machines soon replacing humans, he said: “The real problem I see with automation is that it’s contributed to growing inequality.”

If you've been paying attention in class ... this is the Thanksgiving analogy I talked about in class in "The Future You", and "What's Wrong with America's [sic] Right Now? Is It the Economy, or Is It Us?".

Read the whole thing, entitled "What Clever Robots Mean for Jobs" in the February 24 issue of The Wall Street Journal". 

* This is required, but it's not like there's a huge amount of exam-worthy content you need to worry about. Just some viewpoints on stuff that macroeconomists need to be thinking about.

The Disability Scam That Isn't

There's a (mostly conservative) meme out there that 1) there's record numbers of people claiming disability, and 2) most of those people must be lazy scammers.

Of course there's a record number of people claiming disability: our population gets larger every day, and we add disabled people at roughly the same rate.

So point # 1 falls into the useless and misleading record category, much as the many records (e.g., number of breakfasts I've eaten in my lifetime) I've already set this morning.

But, what about point # 2?

There is a serious problem with disability funding. This comes out of the Social Security Administration, and the money they "set aside" for this is "going to run out". I've put those in quotes because that isn't actually what's going to happen; but there is a lack of political will to allocate more money to this without some pointless grandstanding.

So, here's two facts to think about.

... 5.6% of Americans ages 35-44 reported having a work-limiting disability in 1984, while in 2014 that figure was 5.4%.

... The percentage of the working-age population collecting disability insurance benefits has more than doubled to 5.7% in 2014 from 2.7% in 1984. 

Those statistics don't match up perfectly, but they're pretty close. How is that possible? Let's slice and dice the information and restate it this way:

• In 2014, 5.4% reported having a disability and 5.7% received benefits.
• In 1984, 5.6% reported having a disability and 2.7% received benefits.

This sounds like we're a lot better at giving benefits to people who say they need them (but there isn't much change in people saying they need them).

That sounds like government doing it's social welfare job ... you know ... outreach to people who need help. 

Gee ... government doing its job ... that's not the tone of that conservative meme at all.

And just what happened to all those people in 1984 who said they were disabled but didn't get benefits? No doubt, some of them worked. But presumably that wasn't always a good thing. And then I think a lot of them sat around the house, supported by their families, who weren't supported by the rest of society. 

When you put it that way, it sounds like in the good old days ... we were jerks to each other.

Read the whole thing, entitled "Averting the Disability-Insurance Meltdown" in the February 23 issue of The Wall Street Journal. The author works for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank; like most conservatives he's more interested in how we pay for our government's largesse, but I don't really think he'd understate the number of disabled in a relatively conservative newspaper.

Hopefully, the Last About Greece for a while.

The Greek government filed the final draft of its proposed reforms, and these were accepted this morning.

In related news, Greece's grandmother is feeling much better. ;)

One More Way to Think About Greece (Not Required)

It was inevitable that there'd be a rap video about the Greek crisis:

NSFW (but no worse than most rap).

The Dog Ate Greece’s Homework

Greece was not able to complete a final version of its proposal for reforms today.

Greece had promised, as part of Friday’s agreement, to have that proposal finalized by Monday.

… Even the few extra hours sought by Greece’s new Syriza-led government—in power just four weeks—suggest it is struggling to meet the tough demands of its creditors on the one hand while fending off internal dissension within its ranks on the other.

Over the weekend, the government was locked in feverish deliberations with its bailout inspectors—from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank—as Athens sought their acceptance of alternative reform proposals.

In related news, Greece’s grandmother is very sick

An Observation from Zorba the Greek (Not Required)

We’ve talked a little bit in class about 1) how contemporary Greek society has been … hmmm … not so good for the 180 or so years that Greece has been an independent country, and 2) how we seem to be a little too forgiving towards Greece because … you know … the Greeks get a pass because guys like Plato and Socrates lived there once upon a time.

So I watched a movie called Zorba the Greek this past weekend. This is a movie that people of my parents’ generation used to talk about when I was a kid. My wife thought the same thing, and she hit record on our DVR. I had dim memories of having seen it, but I now think I was wrong. Anyway, I watched it in full. I don’t especially recommend it, but if you’re a movie buff, it did win 3 Oscars, and I can see why … in a sort of generation after World War II, continental European, existentialist, magical realism sort of way.

One scene in the movie though, has relevance to our discussions of Greece’s ongoing problems: wanting to join the big kids club of the EU, lying to get in, finding out the hard way that they may not meet the required standard, and then acting petulant and uncooperative when attempts to rectify their advantage-taking is made by others.

The movie is set in a remote village on the Grecian isle of Crete. The movie was made in 1964, from a novel written in 1946, broadly about a real guy who died of old age in 1941, that the author met between the world wars. It’s not clear what the era portrayed in the movie (or book) is supposed to be, but since there are cars and record players, but no mention of the Nazi’s invading and occupying … I’m thinking it’s supposed to be the 1930’s. 

So this one scene involves the death of an old French woman, who had been some sort of performer and/or courtesan around the eastern Mediterranean*, and who had retired to rural Crete with some evident material wealth.

And the villagers know that she’s 1) rich, and 2) has no family locally. So they start stealing her stuff before she actually dies, and the thievery gets positively orgiastic when she does die. Within the afternoon her house is stripped of everything but her body laying where she died in her bed.

The movie makes very clearly that the villagers do this because, without heirs, “the state” will come and take all her possessions for itself.

Thus, the Greece of 4 generations ago was one in which the unethical rapaciousness of the government was a fixture of reality featured in popular movies.

Flash forward to the last decade, and we have the Greek government unable to pay its own bills, and with a citizenry unwilling to loan it much money, that when given entre into mainstream Europe goes borrowing, and within several years can’t pay the money back, can’t establish where it all went, and then somewhat successfully portrays itself as the victim … because … you know … Aristotle used to live there.

******************************************************

How does this compare to the culture and government that is Cedar City? This is a true story that happened about 10 years ago. There was a lot that was an eyesore in the 600 block of North Main. The building on it was full, but locked up, and abandoned. The city wanted to do something about it, and researched the case. It turned out the guy who’d owned it free and clear, and run a repair shop out of it, had died without heirs. And everyone had left it alone in case someone showed up to claim it. The thing is, he’d died in 1964, and everyone who remembered why the city had left the property alone was long gone.

So in Cedar City, the government is so unrapacious that they’ll let a property sit idle for 4 decades in the hopes that it can stay in private hands, and in Greece the government was so rapacious that the locals would strip a property to keep its chattel in private hands within about 4 hours. It may not be fair, but I’ll point out that taking those cardinal numbers seriously suggests that the Greek government is 85,000 times worse than the one in Cedar City.

* She does make a reference to how popular she’d been in Beirut, which speaks to the setting being somewhat later, since Beirut didn’t begin to thrive as a cultural center until well after being made a provincial capital in 1888, being helped along by the French taking it over in 1923.

Ummm … Some Think the Greeks Have Won

Here’s the official Greek statement about what they agreed to. Is it all spin? Hard to say.

Frances Coppola writing at CoppolaComment thinks that what Syriza really wanted out of this was a chance to be offered trust to do what they think is right. Maybe so. It’s an interesting read.

Here’s a Reuters article, datelined Athens, that surveys some varied viewpoints.

All via Marginal Revolution.