Naked Economics

by Wheelan, Charles

  But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, “Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns.”3 The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers’ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, “Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us,” he said. Then he added, “Of course, that may not be the worst thing.” The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.

  Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he “spoke to some farmers” and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race. Since then, every mainstream presidential candidate has supported the ethanol subsidy, except one: John McCain. To his credit, Senator McCain generally opposed ethanol subsidies during his presidential runs in both 2000 and 2008. While Senator McCain’s “straight talk” is admirable, let us remind ourselves of one important detail: John McCain is not currently president of the United States. That would be Barack Obama—an ethanol subsidy supporter.

  Ethanol is not a case of a powerful special interest pounding the rest of us into submission. Farmers are a scant 2 or 3 percent of the population; even fewer of them actually grow corn. If squeezing favors out of the political process were simply a matter of brute strength, then those of us who can’t tell a heifer from a steer should be kicking the farmers around. Indeed, America’s right-handed voters could band together and demand tax breaks at the expense of the lefties. And we could really have our way with those mohair farmers. But that’s not what happens.

  Economists have come up with a theory of political behavior that fits better with what we actually observe. When it comes to interest group politics, it pays to be small. Gary Becker, the same University of Chicago Nobel Prize winner who figured so prominently in our thinking about human capital, wrote a seminal paper in the early 1980s that nicely encapsulated what had become known as the economics of regulation. Building on work that went all the way back to Milton Friedman’s doctoral dissertation, Becker theorized that, all else equal, small, well-organized groups are most successful in the political process. Why? Because the costs of whatever favors they wrangle out of the system are spread over a large, unorganized segment of the population.

  Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties.

  Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we’ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group.

  In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy.

  Death by a thousand subsidies. The cost of Dan Rostenkowski’s underground parking garage at the Museum of Science and Industry is insignificant in the face of our $14 trillion economy. So is the ethanol subsidy. So is the trade protection for sugar producers, and the tax break for pharmaceutical companies with operations in Puerto Rico, and the price supports for dairy farmers. But in total, these things—and the tens of thousands of others like them—are significant. Little inefficiencies begin to disrupt the most basic function of a market economy: taking inputs and producing goods and services as efficiently as possible. If the government has to support the price of milk, the real problem is that there are too many dairy farmers. The best definition I’ve ever heard of a tax shelter is some kind of investment or behavior that would not make sense in the absence of tax considerations. And that is exactly the problem here: Governments should not be in the business of providing incentives for people to do things that would not otherwise make sense.

  Chapter 3 outlined all the reasons why good government is not just important, but essential. Yet it is also true that when Congress turns its attention to a problem, a lot of ornaments end up on the Christmas tree. The late George Stigler, a University of Chicago economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1982, proposed and defended a counterintuitive notion: Firms and industries often benefit from regulation. In fact, they can use the political process to generate regulation that either helps them or hobbles their competitors.

  Does that sound unlikely? Consider the case of teacher certification. Every state requires public school teachers to do or achieve certain things before becoming licensed. Most people consider that to be quite reasonable. In Illinois, the requirements for certification have risen steadily over time. Again, that seems reasonable given our strong emphasis on public school reform. But when one begins to scrutinize the politics of certification, things become murkier. The teachers’ unions, one of the most potent political forces in America, always support reforms that require more rigorous training and testing for teachers. Read the fine print, though. Almost without exception, these laws exempt current teachers from whatever new requirement is being imposed. In other words, individuals who would like to become teachers have to take additional classes or pass new exams; existing teachers do not. That doesn’t make much sense if certification laws are written for the benefit of students. If doing certain things is necessary in order to teach, then presumably anyone standing at the front of a classroom should have to do them.

  Other aspects of certification law don’t make much sense either. Private school teachers, many of whom have decades of experience, cannot teach in public schools without jumping through assorted hoops (including student teaching) that are almost certainly unnecessary. Nor can university professors. When Albert Einstein arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, he was not legally qualified to teach high school physics.

  The most striking (and frustrating) thing about all of this is that researchers have found that certification requirements have virtually no correlation with performance in the classroom whatsoever. The best evidence on this point (which is consistent with all other evidence that I’ve seen) comes from Los Angeles. When California passed a law in the late 1990s to reduce class size across the state, Los Angeles had to hire a huge number of new teachers, many of whom were uncertified. Los Angeles also collected classroom-level data on the performance of students assigned to any given teacher. A study done for the Hamilton Project, a public policy think tank, looked at the performance of 150,000 students over three years and came to two conclusions: (1) Good teachers matter. Students assigned to the best quarter of teac
hers ended up 10 percentile points ahead of students given the worst quarter of teachers (controlling for the students’ initial level of achievement); and (2) certification doesn’t matter. The study “found no statistically significant achievement differences between students assigned to certified teachers and students assigned to uncertified teachers.” The authors of the study recommend that states eliminate entry barriers that keep talented people from becoming public schoolteachers.4 Most states are doing the opposite.

  Mr. Stigler would have argued that all of this is easy to explain. Just think about how the process benefits teachers, not students. Making it harder to become a teacher reduces the supply of new entrants into the profession, which is a good thing for those who are already there. Any barrier to entry looks attractive from the inside.

  I have a personal interest in all kinds of occupational licensure (cases in which states require that individuals become licensed before practicing certain professions). My doctoral dissertation set out to explain a seemingly anomalous pattern in Illinois: The state requires barbers and manicurists to be licensed, but not electricians. A shoddy electrical job could burn down an entire neighborhood; a bad manicure or haircut seems relatively more benign. Yet the barbers and manicurists are the ones regulated by the state. The short explanation for the pattern is two words: interest groups. The best predictor of whether or not a profession is licensed in Illinois is the size and budget of its professional association. (Every profession is small relative to the state’s total population, so all of these groups have the mohair advantage. The size and budget of the professional association reflects the extent to which members of the profession have organized to exploit it.) Remarkably, political organization is a better predictor of licensure than the danger members of the profession pose to the public (as measured by their liability premium). George Stigler was right: Groups seek to get themselves licensed.

  Small, organized groups fly under the radar and prevail upon legislators to do things that do not necessarily make the rest of us better off. Economists, particularly those among the more free-market “Chicago school,” are sometimes perceived to be hostile toward government. It would be more accurate to describe them as skeptical. The broader the scope of government, the more room there is for special interests to carve out deals for themselves that have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government described in Chapter 3.

  Tyranny of the status quo. If small groups can get what they want out of the legislative process, they can also stop what they don’t want, or at least try. Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the term “creative destruction,” described capitalism as a process of incessantly destroying the old structure and creating a new one. That may be good for the world; it is bad for the firms and industries that make up the “old structure.” The individuals standing in capitalism’s path of progress—or destruction, from their standpoint—will use every tool they have to avoid it, including politics. And why shouldn’t they? The legislative process helps those who help themselves. Groups under siege from competition may seek trade protection, a government bailout, favorable tax considerations, limitations on a competing technology, or some other special treatment. With layoffs or bankruptcy looming, the plea to politicians for help can be quite compelling.

  So what’s the problem? The problem is that we don’t get the benefits of the new economic structure if politicians decide to protect the old one. Roger Ferguson, Jr., former vice chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, explains, “Policymakers who fail to appreciate the relationship between the relentless churning of the competitive environment and wealth creation will end up focusing their efforts on methods and skills that are in decline. In so doing, they establish policies that are aimed at protecting weak, outdated technologies, and in the end, they slow the economy’s march forward.”5

  Both politics and compassion suggest that we ought to offer a hand to those mowed over by competition. If some kind of wrenching change generates progress, then the pie must get bigger. And if the pie gets bigger, then at least some of it ought to be offered to the losers—be it in the form of transition aid, job retraining, or whatever else will help those who have been knocked over to get back on their feet. One of the features that made the North American Free Trade Agreement more palatable was a provision that offered compensation to workers whose job losses could be tied to expanded trade with Mexico. Similarly, many states are using money from the massive legal settlement with the tobacco industry to compensate tobacco farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by declining tobacco use.

  There is a crucial distinction, however, between using the political process to build a safety net for those harmed by creative destruction and using the political process to stop that creative destruction in the first place. Think about the telegraph and the Pony Express. It would have been one thing to help displaced Pony Express workers by retraining them as telegraph operators; it would have been quite another to help them by banning the telegraph. Sometimes the political process does the equivalent of the latter for reasons related to the mohair problem. The economic benefits of competition are huge but spread over a large group; the costs tend to be smaller but highly concentrated. As a result, the beneficiaries of creative destruction hardly notice; the losers chain themselves to their congressman’s office door seeking protection, as any of us might if our livelihood or community were at risk.

  Such is the case in the realm of international trade. Trade is good for consumers. We pay less for shoes, cars, electronics, food, and everything else that can be made better or more cheaply somewhere else in the world (or is made more cheaply in this country because of foreign competition). Our lives are made better in thousands of little ways that have a significant cumulative effect. Looking back on the Clinton presidency, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin reflected, “The economic benefits of the tariff reductions we negotiated over the last eight years represent the largest tax cut in the history of the world.”6

  Cheaper shoes here, a better television there—still probably not enough to get the average person to fly somewhere and march in favor of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Meanwhile, those most directly affected by globalization have a more powerful motivation. In one memorable case, the AFL-CIO and other unions did send some thirty thousand members to Seattle in 1999 to protest against broadening the WTO. The flimsy pretext was that the union is concerned about wages and working conditions in the developing world. Nonsense. The AFL-CIO is worried about American jobs. More trade means cheaper goods for millions of American consumers and lost jobs and shuttered plants. That is something that will motivate workers to march in the streets, as it has been throughout history. The original Luddites were bands of English textile workers who destroyed textile-making machinery to protest the low wages and unemployment caused by mechanization. What if they had gotten their way?

  Consider that at the beginning of the fifteenth century, China was far more technologically advanced than the West. China had a superior knowledge of science, farming, engineering, even veterinary medicine. The Chinese were casting iron in 200 B.C., some fifteen hundred years before the Europeans. Yet the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe while Chinese civilization languished. Why? One historical interpretation posits that the Chinese elites valued stability more than progress. As a result, leaders blocked the kinds of wrenching societal changes that made the Industrial Revolution possible. In the fifteenth century, for example, China’s rulers banned long-sea-voyage trade ventures, choking off trade as well as the economic development, discovery, and social change that come with them.

  We have designed some institutions to help the greater good prevail over narrow (if eminently understandable) interests. For example, the president will often seek “fast-track authority” from Congress when the administration is negotiating international trade agreements. Congress must still ratify whatever agreement is reached, but only with an up or down vote. The normal process by which legislators can add am
endments is waived. The logic is that legislators are not allowed to eviscerate the agreement by exempting assorted industries; a trade agreement that offers protection to a few special interests in every district is no trade agreement at all. The fast-track process forces politicians who talk the talk of free trade to walk the walk, too.

  The unfairly maligned World Trade Organization is really just an international version of the fast-track process. Negotiating to bring down trade barriers among many countries—each laden with domestic interest groups—is a monumental task. The WTO makes the process more politically manageable by defining the things that countries must do in order to join: open markets, eliminate subsidies, phase out tariffs, etc. That is the price of membership. Countries that are admitted gain access to the markets of all the existing members—a huge carrot that gives politicians an incentive to say no to the mohair farmers of the world.

  Cut the politicians a break. In the fall of 2000, a promising political career was launched. I was elected president of the Seminary Townhouse Association. (Perhaps “elected” is too strong a word; the outgoing president asked if I would do it, and I was too naive to say no.) At about that time, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) announced plans to expand an elevated train station very close to our homes. The proposed expansion would bring the station into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and allow the CTA to accommodate more riders. It would also move the elevated train tracks (and all the accompanying noise) thirty feet closer to our homes. In short, this plan was good for Chicago public transportation and bad for our townhouse association. Under my excellent leadership, we wrote letters, we held meetings, we consulted architects, we presented alternative plans (some of which would have required condemning and demolishing homes elsewhere in the neighborhood). Fullerton Avenue eventually got a new elevated train station, but not before we did everything in our power to disrupt the project.