Economics and Ethics

A Cozy Monopsony in Silicon Valley?

Jonathan B. Wight

But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. – Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, Liberty Press, 1981 [1776]), p. 84.)

Markets work by getting the prices right. When a worker's productivity exceeds her pay that provides an incentive for other firms to poach that underpaid worker. Over time, workers are rewarded for effort and contribution.

But that apparently didn't always happen in Silicon Valley. Released emails reveal an alleged tight cartel among Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Pixar and other execs to prohibit poaching each other's programmers. Top CEO's allegedly had a "gentleman's agreement" to hold down wages by preventing competition.

Not everyone played the game:

Ex-Palm Inc. CEO Ed Colligan wrote to [Steve] Jobs in 2007: "Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal"…

Lawsuits can—in theory—break up hiring cartels and improve market efficiency, as happened in the Ivy League admissions cartel in the early 1990s. But relying on the law may be unreliable:

Antitrust cases that revolve around hiring practices are difficult to win, said David Balto, a Washington, D.C.-based antitrust lawyer who investigated Microsoft as a staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in the 1990s. Among the legal challenges they face is defining who exactly makes up the class of workers harmed by the alleged violations, since people with different jobs have different employment options, he said.

"I don't think anybody at these companies is losing a nanosecond of sleep because of this lawsuit," Balto said.

So, let's summarize: Markets rely on competitive pressures to reward workers fairly. Sometimes a cozy cartel of CEO's conspires to prevent that. Workers can sue, but that is expensive, laborious, and the results are usually unreliable (in other words, the transactions costs for getting justice are very high).

Where does this leave workers? Possibly seeking direct political action, bad-mouthing markets, and joining the occupiers in parks? In this case, workers really do have a beef: the 1% at the top quite explicitly held them back.

World Congress Summer School in Social Economics – Applications for Fellowships Now Open

Jonathan B. Wight

Glasgow, Scotland

June 19-20, 2012

 

Applications for Fellowships Now Open

The Association for Social Economics announces an exciting Summer School workshop for graduate students and recent Ph.D.s. to be held in conjunction with the World Congress of Social Economics in Glasgow, Scotland.  Between 12-18 fellows will be selected to attend the Summer School as guests of ASE. The Summer School begins the evening of June 19 and continues on June 20, 2012.  The World Congress opens the evening of June 20 and concludes on June 22, 2012.

Aims:  The Summer School brings together a small group of fellows to discuss the central concerns of social economics as a springboard for cutting-edge research and teaching.  Social economics is centrally concerned with questions of social, cultural and ethical values in economic life and the study of these questions at philosophical, theoretical, empirical and policy-related levels.

School topics include aspects of: (1) Social economics, the history of economic thought, and frameworks for thinking about ethics and economics; (2) core topics in social-economics research (theory of the individual, the role of social and cultural values in economic life, inequality, poverty, needs, capabilities, social justice, human flourishing); (3) contemporary topics and empirical research in social economics (the social economy/third sector, social networks, fair trade, socially responsible consumption and production, experimental work on fairness, etc.); and (4) publishing outlets and strategies for graduate students and recent Ph.D.s. 

Eligibility:  Fellows must be graduate students or recent Ph.D.s in economics or related fields. 

Awards:  Fellows accepted to the Summer School will receive complementary room and meals for the Summer School and the World Congress, complementary registration to the World Congress, plus all Summer School materials, a package worth up to $1,400.  Some travel stipends are also available on a competitive basis. 

Fellow Obligations:  Accepted fellows must become members of ASE and submit a Summer School refundable deposit of $100 (that will be returned upon completion of the World Congress).  All fellows must commit to participating in all sessions of the Summer School and to staying for the entire World Congress. 

Program: Click here for the Provisional Program

Applications: Click here for the Application Instructions and Form

Or, go to the ASE website (socialeconomics.org/), click on "Conferences" à "World Congress Summer School" à to see the Overview, Preliminary Program, and Application.

The application deadline is March 1, 2012.

For questions contact Aurelie Charles, Chair, Summer School Selection Committee, at A.Charles@bath.ac.uk

Deirdre McCloskey featured in the Wall Street Journal's Cultural Conversation

Mark D. White

Our dear friend Deirdre McCloskey is featured in today's Cultural Conversation in the Wall Street Journal, which briskly covers some of her background, laments the separation of ethics and economics after the latter became intensely mathematical, and covers key points from her recent books, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce and Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World.

Adventures in jurisprudence: The new Kaiser poll on Obamacare

Mark D. White

Classes start for me on Monday (though our spring semester starts today--that's right, on a Friday), and my first class will be one of my favorites to teach. legal philosophy. And luckily for me (and for my students), I was given the perfect news item to start the class and motivate our discussion.

The International Business Times reported yesterday on a new Kaiser Health Tracking Poll on the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Of course, there is much confusion regarding the contents and legality of the ACA, but there seems to be just as much confusion regarding the nature of judicial decision-making.

Kaiser reported that 59% of those polled believed that the Supreme Court justices will let their “own ideological views influence their decision” on the ACA, and 28% said the justices will “base their decision on legal analysis without regard to ideology or politics.” The rest were undecided or refused to answer—perhaps because they realized neither choice was adequate. The justices not only will but must use ideology to make their individual decisions, but it will be ideology in the sense of a reflective legal and political philosophy developed over years of study and experience, not their own personal political preferences.

The hearings over the ACA, particularly regarding the individual mandate, will surely prove to be the most important legal case of the decade, if not longer. It is what scholars of judicial decision-making call a “hard case,” one which cannot be settled decisively by what is written in the Constitution and statutes or embodied in over two hundred years of judicial precedents. In such cases, the cynic would say that judges make new law out of thin air by indulging their personal political preferences. But we need not resort to this, when there is a better answer that both explains differences of opinion while retaining a strong sense of civic duty and impartiality among judges.

As legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin wrote, judges decide hard cases by interpreting the existing legal materials (the Constitution, statutes, and previous decisions) and arriving at the answer that best maintains the integrity of the legal system. The question then becomes not whether they interpret the law but how. This is where ideology enters the process, but not in terms of personal politics. In making hard decisions, each judge interprets the law against a legal and political philosophy that he or she feels best fits the historical materials.

It is not a matter of whether each justice supports or opposes the ACA, but whether he or she believes the ACA is consistent with their view of the  legal and political history of the United States of America. Understood this way, ideology does play an integral role in judicial decision-making, but it is a principled ideology based on a careful reading of law and history, not on a judge’s own predilections regarding the case at hand.

This is a subtle distinction, to be sure, and one that leads to tremendous confusion. Legal scholars and ordinary citizens alike are much too eager to say that judges vote their politics, whether liberal or conservative—especially when the judge is on the “other side on the aisle” from the critic. But this shows  a regrettable degree of bad faith. It is just as easy to say that each judge votes according to the principles for which he or she thinks—after years of study, reflection, and experience—that the United States stands. Will the resulting positions correspond to their personal political beliefs? Of course they will, but that doesn’t imply they are voting based on their personal politics, but rather that their personal politics are based on the same careful analysis that informs their judicial decision-making.

Will “liberal” judges likely vote in support of the ACA? Yes, but not because they support the president and his party; they will vote for it because their vision of this country is one in which the government plays an active role in ensuring the well-being of its citizens (whether the ACA will actually achieve that or not). Will “conservative” judges likely vote in opposition to the ACA? Yes, but not because they oppose the president and his party; they will vote against it because their vision of this country is one in which the government interferes in its citizens’ lives only to prevent harm (whatever their conception of harm may be).

Judging from the many arguments I’ve heard and opinion pieces I’ve read over the last several years, I believe this is how most people outside Washington think about the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate: in terms of principle rather than politics. Why, then, is it so hard for them to believe that the justices of the Supreme Court think in the same way?

Frum on Election Follies

Jonathan B. Wight

Today's Morning Edition radio show had an insightful interview with David Frum, the former Republican strategist.

Frum notes that a politician has to be emotionally connected to his or her constituents and at the same time be intellectually capable of sifting facts and constructing policies that address problems rather than just feed the emotion about problems.

Can I say this is a "Smithian" approach—in reference to Adam Smith's moral sentiments along with his economic policies? Moral sentiments play a foundational role in the motive for laws, but individual moral sentiments have to be brought down to a lower emotional pitch—through the use of self-control. Work at lowering the emotional pitch, Smith would say, not inflaming it. Smith was very worried about mob rule, particularly brought on by religious ferver.

Newt Gingrich, according to Frum, has achieved that strong emotional connection to the base that explains his rise in popularity. But Gingrich is feeding and inflaming those emotions often by distorting facts and without providing workable solutions. Mitt Romney, according to Frum, has little ability to connect emotionally, yet he has the demeanor and temperament to come up with reasonable policy solutions.

Not coincidentally, tonight's Republican debate will encourage the audience to participate through clapping and other reactions. Gingrich reported threatened to boycott any debate that did not allow audience cheering. The TV networks have hired a stage director to "loosen up the crowd" and generate loud enthusiasm so as to generate more TV audience interest. In other words, we are creating a survival game, a Roman arena where the crowd has come to see blood. It's all about emotion, and damn the facts and policies! Forget self-control: this is an age of Twitter, IM, and Facebook, and people want to spout what's on their minds. [Well, I sure do, that's why I contribute to this blog!]

One can't help recall the downfall of Athenian democracy (led by the mobs) and the death of Socrates by a boisterous crowd. This is a reason our founding leaders did not create a democracy, they created a Republic. We do not have direct elections but the Presidency is decided by the Electoral College. In the past I have favored eliminating the Electoral College and going to a direct public election. After seeing this carnival, I may need to reconsider.

Even worse, the crowd at tonight's debate is pre-selected to be those most politically active; it will not represent anything like a cross-section of America. Do we really want mobs determining our elections? Can anyone remember 1933? In the descent into dictatorship, Hitler riled up his audience in the Reichstag with these emotionally-laded words:

By its decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life, the Government is creating and securing the conditions for a really deep and inner religious life. The advantages for the individual which may be derived from compromises with atheistic organizations do not compare in any way with the consequences which are visible in the destruction of our common religious and ethical values. The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society.

Nothing like a little religious rant to inflame the passions?

Frum asks us instead to support candidates who can use society's passion to direct the nation in positive directions, in ways that lower the flame of negative emotions, and he cites Roosevelt during the depression and WWII and Reagan during the cold war. You may choose to hold up other presidents who showed remarkable self-control, and did not inflame the emotional wounds of the time: my candidates would be Washington and Lincoln. How about yours?

[More in a day or so on Obama's State of the Union; which some would say inflamed.]

UPDATE (1/27/12): Timothy Egan has an article "Deconstructing a Demagogue" in today's NTTimes that further develops these ideas.

“Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”

Jonathan B. Wight

That's not me saying it – it's Jack Welch(!),voted the "Manager of the Century" by Fortune magazine in 1999.

Executives spend way too much time managing expectations and not enough time building long term value. To use a simile of Roger Martin's, it is like football coaches spending their week on the phone to Vegas, massaging the point spread—and then running the game on Sunday to exactly meet that spread! The game is "fixed." Would fans stand for that?

If football fans don't like it, why should stockholders? Management guru Peter Drucker provides this interesting review in Forbes of Roger L. Martin's, Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL (Harvard Business Review Press 2011).

Drucker and Martin both attack the demon that is the reality today on Wall Street: chasing earnings expectations rather than building a customer base through service and product innovation. The demon raises management costs, fudges accounting, and distracts everyone from long term goals:

"Although Jack Welch was seen during his tenure as CEO of GE as the heroic exemplar of maximizing shareholder value, he came to be one of its strongest critics. On March 12, 2009, he gave an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times and said, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. … Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company."

Drucker's focus on the product and the customer as the goals, while treating shareholder return as a constraint, seems paradoxically better suited to creating long term value for shareholders. To use the phrase coined by John Kay, obliquity means getting to an end through indirect means. That is how Jack Welch accomplished his success.

Martin's book has various policy conclusions about how to spur a re-thinking, through changing tax and accounting laws. But it also will take a careful discussion about the philosophy of capitalism. The idea that maximizing shareholder value is and ought to be the only goal of a manager is, of course, an idea championed by Milton Friedman. As developed here, Marty Calkins and I argue that Friedman's exposition contains some serious internal contradictions.

I don't think Friedman would reject the idea that it is possible to maximize shareholder value in the long run by not focusing on shareholder value in the short run. There is always a danger that this thinking can lead a company down the path to oblivion; but managers hawking quarterly earnings may accomplish that even sooner.

Regulating Goods versus Speech

Jonathan B. Wight

Reading Ronald Coase – Pt III

One more post on Ronald Coase's, Essays on Economics and Economists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

In one essay, "The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas," Coase tries to explain why liberals strongly support the First Amendment right to free speech -- namely, laissez-faire in selling ideas -- yet often strongly oppose laissez-faire in some goods markets.

His answer may be derived from his reading of Adam Smith, and relates to self-interest and self-esteem:

Self-esteem leads the intellectuals to magnify the importance of their own market. That others should be regulated seems natural, particularly as many of the intellectuals see themselves as doing the regulating. But self-interest combines with self-esteem to ensure that, while others are regulated, regulation should not apply to them. And so it is possible to live with these contradictory views about the role of government in these two markets. (Page 67-68.)

Coase goes on to analyze an interesting feature of the modern press: namely, that print media are almost completely unregulated whereas broadcast media are subject to extensive FCC oversight. What is interesting to Coase is that print journalists have complained so little about the abridgment of First Amendment rights of their fellow broadcasters. This is particularly obvious in Britain where the BBC historically had a monopoly on broadcasting.

Coase explains this once again in terms of self-interest: print journalists don't mind the First Amendment rights of broadcasters being restricted because that inhibits their competitors! Nice slam dunk!

As much as I tout virtue ethics, we should always remember, "No one ever went broke over-estimating the self-interest of an economic actor."

The Great Chutzpah

Jonathan B. Wight

"It doesn't matter what I do... People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live." – Newt Gingrich

Really? So I guess the issue is not Newt's serial adultery, it is the vast media conspiracy against him!

Nice line of attack, and everyone should remember it if your hand (or something else!) is caught in the cookie jar. Blame the accuser. Kill the messenger. Chutzpah! Chutzpah! Chutzpah! Arrogance mingled with insolence and brashness, and not an ounce of humility.

Newt blames the "machinations of the secular-socialist machine" for undermining the nation's Judeo-Christian values. Hmmm…

Had I been the interviewer at yesterday's debate, a more precise opening question might have been: "Do you believe in marriage as a sacred bond? If so, define what you mean by the word 'sacred.' Give some examples from your own life. Hint: Do not use the word 'convenience' or 'cost-benefit' in your answer."

Transaction Costs and Trust

Jonathan B. Wight

Reading Ronald Coase – Pt. II

I'm still getting through Ronald Coase's, Essays on Economics and Economists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

In the first chapter, Coase sums up the major insight from his article "The Theory of the Firm" (1937), a breakthrough he had worked out five years earlier at the tender age of 21!

I found the answer by the summer of 1932. It was to realize that there were costs of using the pricing mechanism. What the prices are have to be discovered. There are negotiations to be undertaken, contracts to be drawn up, inspections to be made, arrangements to be made to settle disputes, and so on. These costs have common to be known as transaction costs. Their existence implies that methods of coordination alternative to the market, which are themselves costly and in various ways imperfect, may nonetheless be preferable to relying on the pricing mechanism, the only method of coordination normally analyzed by economists. It was the avoidance of the costs of carrying out transactions through the market that could explain the existence of the firm, in which the allocation of factors came about as a result of administrative decisions...(pps. 7-8).

The implication is that "to have an efficient economic system it is necessary not only to have markets but also areas of planning within organizations of the appropriate size." (Page 8).

If this were the only insight of Ronald Coase, he would deserve to be remembered forever in the discipline. But it is incorrect to say that he was the first to grapple with transaction costs. Transaction costs play a critical role in Adam Smith's acceptance of the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations (for a longer analysis, see here).

When discussing the political economy of trade, Smith argues that business people lack familiarity with their overseas trading partners and may also face questionable legal systems abroad. High transaction costs thus make it riskier to take capital abroad and the home country thus unintentionally gains investment that promotes higher domestic output and employment:

Thus, upon equal or nearly equal profits, every wholesale merchant naturally prefers the home trade to the foreign trade of consumption, and the foreign trade of consumption to the carrying trade.... He can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts, and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress. (WN, Glasgow Edition, p. 454)

Hence, Smith argues against imposing capital controls because they are unnecessary. But what makes this the result in this case? It is because there is more trust and better legal remedies in the home market. In short, Smith's endorsement of laissez-faire capital is contingent on the existence of lower transactions costs in the domestic market!

Social economics -- the consideration of the ways in which people interact in markets -- is essentially a story about transaction costs, even though Adam Smith would ground the social instincts in moral sentiments not calculations.

Reading Ronald Coase – Pt. I

Jonathan B. Wight

I've been reading Ronald Coase's, Essays on Economics and Economists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and finding it a delightful collection. In these articles, Coase displays the virtuous attributes that Frank Knight insists are needed in a serious scholar: integrity, competence, and humility, and one should also add--courage. Getting inside Coase's mind is easy because of his clear and uncluttered writing style. He is quick to point out the weaknesses in his own knowledge and argument, which is refreshing.

In one of the first essays, "How Should Economists Choose?" Coase takes on Milton Friedman's essay on "The Methodology of Positive Economics," and argues that Friedman's account of evaluating models based on their predictions is essentially a normative judgment about how economists ought to proceed:

When Friedman says that the "ultimate goal of a positive science is the development of a "theory" or "hypothesis" that yields valid and meaningful... predictions about phenomenon not yet observed," I cannot help mentioning that a science has no goals, only individuals have goals. (P. 18, emphasis added).

While Friedman's normative goal for science is prediction, Coase argues that in actuality, economists choose the models they endorse in an entirely different way based on whether a model makes more sense intuitively:

Economists, or at any rate enough of them, do not wait to discover whether a theory's predictions are accurate before making up their minds. Given that this is so, what part does testing a theory's predictions play in economics? First of all, it very often plays either no part or a very minor part." (p. 24)

Furthermore, empirical testing is rarely conclusive. Coase observes that "... if you torture the data enough, nature will always confess." (p. 27). On a related point, economists are in a competitive situation. Their research is done to bolster the theory that they already believe in. Hence, "what we are dealing with is a competitive process in which purveyors of the various theories attempt to sell their wares." (p. 28). (This chapter was first published in 1982, and thus presages Deirdre McCloskey's work on rhetoric.)

If scientists are self-interested, and work in a competitive market, will the invisible hand work according to the maxim "Greed is good?" Coase doesn't address this directly, but there are enough hints here to strongly infer an answer. Coase quotes Frank Knight, who argues that the "basic principle of science -- truth or objectivity -- is essentially a moral principle, in opposition to any form of self-interest."

And yet, economists have their own self-interests at stake, which include not only money, but perhaps even more important, status. Coase quotes Samuelson as writing: "In the long run, the economic scholar works for the only coin worth having -- our own applause." (p. 31)

This market for ideas would not work as well unless individual researchers adopted moral principles that constrain self-interest. Coase again cites Knight: "[T]he presuppositions of objectivity are integrity, competence and humility." (p. 15) In other words, science needs virtue.