Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com

particular race or caste or tribe is leaving a vast resource fallow. Productivity
growth also depends a great deal on innovation and technological progress,
neither of which is understood perfectly. Why did the Internet explode onto the
scene in the mid-1990s rather than the late 1970s? How is it that we have
cracked the human genome yet we still do not have a cheap source of clean
energy? In short, fostering productivity growth is like raising children: We know
what kinds of things are important even if there is no blueprint for raising an
Olympic athlete or a Harvard scholar.
The study of human capital has profound implications for public policy. Most
important, it can tell us why we haven’t all starved to death. The earth’s
population has grown to six billion; how have we been able to feed so many
mouths? In the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus famously predicted a dim
future for humankind because he believed that as society grew richer, it would
continuously squander those gains through population growth—having more
children. These additional mouths would gobble up the surplus. In his view,
humankind was destined to live on the brink of subsistence, recklessly
procreating during the good times and then starving during the bad. As Paul
Krugman has pointed out, for fifty-five of the last fifty-seven centuries, Malthus
was right. The world population grew, but the human condition did not change
significantly.
Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution did people begin to grow
steadily richer. Even then, Malthus was not far off the mark. As Gary Becker

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points out, “Parents did spend more on children when their incomes rose—as
Malthus predicted—but they spent a lot more on each child and had fewer
children, as human capital theory predicts.”
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The economic transformations of
the Industrial Revolution, namely the large productivity gains, made parents’
time more expensive. As the advantages of having more children declined,
people began investing their rising incomes in the quality of their children, not
merely the quantity.
One of the fallacies of poverty is that developing countries are poor because
they have rapid population growth. In fact, the causal relationship is best
understood going the other direction: Poor people have many children because
the cost of bearing and raising children is low. Birth control, no matter how
dependable, works only to the extent that families prefer fewer children. As a
result, one of the most potent weapons for fighting population growth is creating
better economic opportunities for women, which starts by educating girls.
Taiwan doubled the number of girls graduating from high school between 1966
and 1975. Meanwhile, the fertility rate dropped by half. In the developed world,
where women have enjoyed an extraordinary range of new economic
opportunities for more than a half century, fertility rates have fallen near or
below replacement level, which is 2.1 births per woman.
We began this chapter with a discussion of Bill Gates’s home, which is, I am
fairly certain, bigger than yours. At the dawn of the third millennium, America is
a profoundly unequal place. Is the nation growing more unequal? That answer,
by almost any measure, is yes. According to analysis by the Congressional
Budget Office, American households in the bottom fifth of the income
distribution were earning only 2 percent more in 2004 (adjusted for inflation)
than they were in 1979. That’s a quarter century with no real income growth at
all. Americans in the middle of the income distribution did better over the same
stretch; their average household income grew 15 percent in real terms. Those in
the top quintile—the top 20 percent—saw household income growth of 63
percent (adjusted for inflation).
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As America’s longest economic boom in history unfolded, the rich got richer
while the poor ran in place, or even got poorer. Wages for male high school
dropouts have fallen by roughly a quarter compared to what their dads earned if
they were also high school dropouts. The recession that began in 2007 has
narrowed the gap between America’s rich and poor slightly (by destroying
wealth at the top, not by making the typical worker better off). Most economists

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would agree that the long-term trend is a growing gap between America’s rich
and poor. The most stunning action has been at the top of the top. In 1979, the
wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of the nation’s total income;
now they get 16 percent of America’s annual collective paycheck.
Why? Human capital offers the most insight into this social phenomenon. The
last several decades have been a real-life version of Revenge of the Nerds.
Skilled workers in America have always earned higher wages than unskilled
workers; that difference has started to grow at a remarkable rate. In short, human
capital has become more important, and therefore better rewarded, than ever
before. One simple measure of the importance of human capital is the gap
between the wages paid to high school graduates and the wages paid to college
graduates. College graduates earned an average of 40 percent more than high
school graduates at the beginning of the 1980s; now they earn 80 percent more.
Individuals with graduate degrees do even better than that. The twenty-first
century is an especially good time to be a rocket scientist.
Our economy is evolving in ways that favor skilled workers. For example, the
shift toward computers in nearly every industry favors workers who either have
computer skills or are smart enough to learn them on the job. Technology makes
smart workers more productive while making low-skilled workers redundant.
ATMs replaced bank tellers; self-serve pumps replaced gas station attendants;
automated assembly lines replaced workers doing mindless, repetitive tasks.
Indeed, the assembly line at General Motors encapsulates the major trend in the
American economy. Computers and sophisticated robots now assemble the
major components of a car—which creates high-paying jobs for people who
write software and design robots while reducing the demand for workers with no
specialized skills other than a willingness to do an honest day’s work.
Meanwhile, international trade puts low-skilled workers in greater
competition with other low-skilled workers around the globe. In the long run,
international trade is a powerful force for good; in the short run, it has victims.
Trade, like technology, makes high-skilled workers better off because it provides
new markets for our high-tech exports. Boeing sells aircraft to India, Microsoft
sells software to Europe, McKinsey & Company sells consulting services to
Latin America. Again, this is more good news for people who know how to
design a fuel-efficient jet engine or explain total quality management in Spanish.
On the other hand, it puts our low-tech workers in competition with low-priced
laborers in Vietnam. Nike can pay workers $1 a day to make shoes in a
Vietnamese sweatshop. You can’t make Boeing airplanes that way.
Globalization creates more opportunities for skilled workers (Naked Economics
is published in eleven languages!) and more competition for unskilled workers.

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There is still disagreement about the degree to which different causes are
responsible for this shifting gap in wages. Unions have grown less powerful,
giving blue-collar workers less clout at the bargaining table. Meanwhile, high-
wage workers are logging more hours on the job than their low-wage
counterparts, which exacerbates the total earnings gap.
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More and more
industries are linking pay to performance, which increases wage gaps between
those who are more and less productive. In any case, the rise in income
inequality is real. Should we care? Economists have traditionally argued that we
should not, for two basic reasons. First, income inequality sends important
signals in the economy. The growing wage gap between high school and college
graduates, for example, will motivate many students to get college degrees.
Similarly, the spectacular wealth earned by entrepreneurs provides an incentive
to take the risks necessary for leaps in innovation, many of which have huge
payoffs for society. Economics is about incentives, and the prospect of getting
rich is a big incentive.
Second, many economists argue that we should not care about the gap
between rich and poor as long as everybody is living better. In other words, we
should care about how much pie the poor are getting, not how much pie they are
getting relative to Bill Gates. In his 1999 presidential address to the American
Economics Association, Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize–winning economic
historian, pointed out that our poorest citizens have amenities unknown even to
royalty a hundred years ago. (More than 90 percent of public housing residents
have a color television, for example.) Envy may be one of the seven deadly sins,
but it is not something to which economists have traditionally paid much
attention. My utility should depend on how much I like my car, not on whether
or not my neighbor is driving a Jaguar.
Of course, common sense suggests otherwise. H. L. Mencken once noted that
a wealthy man is a man who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s
husband. Some economists have belatedly begun to believe that he was on to
something.
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David Neumark and Andrew Postlewaite looked at a large sample
of American sisters in an effort to understand why some women choose to work
outside of the home and others do not. When the researchers controlled for all
the usual explanations—unemployment in the local labor market, a woman’s
education and work experience, etc.—they found powerful evidence to support
H. L. Mencken’s wry observation: A woman in their sample was significantly
more likely to seek paid employment if her sister’s husband earned more than
her own.
Cornell economist Robert Frank, author of Luxury Fever, has made a

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persuasive case that relative wealth—the size of my pie compared to my
neighbor’s—is an important determinant of our utility. He offered survey
respondents a choice between two worlds: (A) You earn $110,000 and everyone
else earns $200,000; or (B) you earn $100,000 and everyone else earns $85,000.
As he explains, “The income figures represent real purchasing power. Your
income in World A would command a house 10 percent larger than the one you
could afford in World B, 10 percent more restaurant dinners and so on. By
choosing World B, you’d give up a small amount of absolute income in return
for a large increase in relative income.” You would be richer in World A; you
would be less wealthy in World B but richer than everyone else. Which scenario
would make you happier? Mr. Frank found that a majority of Americans would
choose B. In other words, relative income does matter. Envy may be part of the
explanation. It is also true, Mr. Frank points out, that in complex social
environments we seek ways to evaluate our performance. Relative wealth is one
of them.
There is a second, more pragmatic concern about rising income inequality.
Might the gap between rich and poor—ethics aside—become large enough that
it begins to inhibit economic growth? Is there a point at which income inequality
stops motivating us to work harder and becomes counterproductive? This might
happen for all kinds of reasons. The poor might become disenfranchised to the
point that they reject important political and economic institutions, such as
property rights or the rule of law. A lopsided distribution of income may cause
the rich to squander resources on increasingly frivolous luxuries (e.g., doggy
birthday cakes) when other kinds of investments, such as human capital for the
poor, would yield a higher return. Or class warfare may lead to measures that
punish the rich without making the poor any better off.
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Some studies have
indeed found a negative relationship between income inequality and economic
growth; others have found just the opposite. Over time, data will inform this
relationship. But the larger philosophical debate will rage on: If the pie is
growing, how much should we care about the size of the pieces?
The subject of human capital begs some final questions. Will the poor always be
with us, as Jesus once admonished? Does our free market system make poverty
inevitable? Must there be losers if there are huge economic winners? No, no, and
no. Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need
poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in
order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side
of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor

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