Arbeidsproductiviteit als leugen

[Mark Giebels]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl


Uit: RICARDO'S DIFFICULT IDEA, Paul Krugman, 1996
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

De onderstaande passage uit Krugman's paper is wel interessant voor de
discussie. NIet zozeer vanwege de controversie over de
productiviteitsgroei, maar veeleer vanwege de case die Krugman maakt dat
het wel heel eenvoudig en verleidelijk is (verkoopt goed) om
statistische gegevens over de economie vooringenomen te intepreteren.

Groeten,
Mark

2. The cult of the new

One of America's new intellectual stars is a young writer named Michael
Lind, whose contrarian essays on politics have given him a reputation as
a brilliant enfant terrible. In 1994 Lind published an article in
Harper's about international trade, which contained the following
remarkable passage:

"Many advocates of free trade claim that higher productivity growth in
the United States will offset pressure on wages caused by the global
sweatshop economy, but the appealing theory falls victim to an
unpleasant fact. Productivity has been going up, without resulting wage
gains for American workers. Between 1977 and 1992, the average
productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent,
while the average real wage fell by 13 percent. The logic is
inescapable. No matter how much productivity increases, wages will fall
if there is an abundance of workers competing for a scarcity of jobs --
an abundance of the sort created by the globalization of the labor pool
for US-based corporations." (Lind 1994: )

What is so remarkable about this passage? It is certainly a very abrupt,
confident rejection of the case for free trade; it is also noticeable
that the passage could almost have come out of a campaign speech by
Patrick Buchanan. But the really striking thing, if you are an economist
with any familiarity with this area, is that when Lind writes about how
the beautiful theory of free trade is refuted by an unpleasant fact, the
fact he cites is completely untrue.

More specifically: the 30 percent productivity increase he cites was
achieved only in the manufacturing sector; in the business sector as a
whole the increase was only 13 percent. The 13 percent decline in real
wages was true only for production workers, and ignores the increase in
their benefits: total compensation of the average worker actually rose 2
percent. And even that remaining gap turns out to be a statistical
quirk: it is entirely due to a difference in the price indexes used to
deflate business output and consumption (probably reflecting
overstatement of both productivity growth and consumer price inflation).
When the same price index is used, the increases in productivity and
compensation have been almost exactly equal. But then how could it be
otherwise? Any difference in the rates of growth of productivity and
compensation would necessarily show up as a fall in labor's share of
national income -- and as everyone who is even slightly familiar with
the numbers knows, the share of compensation in U.S. national income has
been quite stable in recent decades, and actually rose slightly over the
period Lind describes.

The question here is not why Lind got these numbers wrong. It takes
considerable experience to know where to look and what to worry about in
economic statistics, and one should not expect someone who does not work
in the field to be able to get it right without some guidance. The
question is, instead, why Mr. Lind felt that it was a good idea to make
sweeping pronouncements about this subject, when he clearly was
unwilling to invest time and energy in actually understanding it. The
short answer in this case is surely that Mr. Lind, who is always looking
for ways to enhance his enfant terrible status, saw this as a perfect
opportunity. Free trade is a sacred cow of economists, who are
well-known to be boring, stuffy types; what could be a better way to
reinforce one's credentials as a radical, innovative thinker than to
skewer their most beloved doctrine? (It seems not to have occurred to
him that there might be a reason other than ideological rigidity that
the striking fact he thought he knew has not been noticed by
economists).

This is a fairly extreme case, but by no means unique. Modern
intellectuals are supposed to be daring innovators, not respecters of
tradition. As any publisher will tell you, books about startling new
scientific discoveries always sell better than books about known areas
of science, even though the things science already knows are in many
ways stranger than any of the speculations in the latest cosmological
best-seller. Old ideas are viewed as boring, even if few people have
heard of them; new ideas, even if they are probably wrong and not
terribly important, are far more attractive. And books that say (or seem
to say) that the experts have all been wrong are far more likely to
attract a wide audience than books that explain why the experts are
probably right. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life (Gould 1989) which to
many readers seemed to say that recent discoveries refute Darwinian
orthodoxy, attracted far more attention than Richard Dawkins' equally
well-written The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986), which explained the
astonishing implications of that orthodoxy. (See Dennett for an
eye-opening discussion of Gould). Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New
Mind, which rejects the possibility of explaining intelligence in terms
of computational processes, attracted far more attention than any of the
exciting discoveries of cognitive scientists who are actually trying to
understand the nature of intelligence.

The same principle applies to international economics. Comparative
advantage is an old idea; intellectuals who want to read about
international trade want to hear radical new ideas, not boring old
doctrines, even if they are quite blurry about what those doctrines
actually say. Robert Reich, now Secretary of Labor, understood this
point perfectly when he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs entitled
"Beyond free trade". (Reich 1983). The article received wide attention,
even though it was fairly unclear exactly how Reich proposed to go
beyond free trade (there is a certain similarity between Reich and Gould
in this respect: they make a great show of offering new ideas, but it is
quite hard to pin down just what those new ideas really are). The great
selling point was, clearly, the article's title: free trade is old hat,
it is something we must go beyond. In this sort of intellectual
environment, it is quite hard to get anyone other than an economics
student to sit still for an explanation of the concept of comparative
advantage. Just imagine trying to tell an ambitious, energetic,
forward-looking intellectual who is interested in economics -- William
Jefferson Clinton comes to mind -- that before he can start talking
knowledgeably about globalization and the information economy he must
wrap his mind around a difficult concept that was devised by a
frock-coated banker 180 years ago!


<-----Original Message----->
>From: Mark Giebels
>Sent: 9/17/2004 9:26:18 AM
>To: vreekamp at knoware.nl;D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>Subject: Re: Arbeidsproductiviteit als leugen
>
>REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
>
><-----Original Message----->
>>From: Henk Vreekamp
>
>Beste Henk,
>
>Laat ik eerst zeggen dat ik absoluut niet de Amerikaanse vorm van het
>kapitalisme wil verdedigen, maar gelijkertijd is het door jou
>aangedragen rapport natuurlijk wel erg eenzijdig. Je hebt de
>neo-liberale propagandamachine (en die is zeker sterk), maar je hebt
ook
>

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