Left behind movements do not just reflect deindustrialisation, but also geography, inequality and lack of representation.

There was extensive analysis after the UK EU referendum of the characteristics of those who voted for Brexit and those who didn’t. A robust finding was that those who voted for Brexit tended to be older and had less years of education. But some noted a link between a tendency to vote Leave and areas of deindustrialisation. The idea of the ‘left behind’ was born. It gained force when rest-belt states in the US swung to Trump in the same year.

This characterisation of the left behind was attractive to many on the left, who have been critical of the globalisation they saw as the cause. Yet as Martin Sandbu points out, the period of what is often called hyper-globalisation is the 1990s, and much deindustrialisation occurred before then. Some of that was a result of automation rather than globalisation, and in the UK 1980s deindustrialisation was hastened by a large appreciation of sterling caused by a combination of discovering North Sea Oil and monetarism. Why the 30 year delay for the left behind to finally find its political voice?

If we look at the geography of the Brexit vote, areas of deindustrialisation is not the only thing that strikes you. Much more obvious is that people in large cities voted against Brexit, and those in smaller cities or towns or the countryside voted for Brexit. The same was true for Trump, and Trumps core support comes from rural areas. Is this simply a consequence of differences in age and education already discussed?

It could well be. As the Centre for Towns showed, UK villages and towns have been getting older and cities have been getting younger. Jobs that attract the university educated tend to be in cities rather than in towns and villages.The old tend to be more socially conservative, and so are attracted to the anti-immigration message that was a key part of the Leave and Trump campaigns.

There is no doubt these factors are important, but do they explain all the the geographical nature of the support for Brexit and Trump, or is there more to it? I think the gilet jaunes from France can shed some light on this question. As John Lichfield outlines, the gilet jaunes come from peripheral France: the outer suburbs and countryside. That may include some areas of deindustrialisation but it goes well beyond that. Their protests are self-organised and remarkably persistent. They do not fit any clear left/right categorisation. Immigration, or race, are not high up among their concerns, which is why they do not feel represented by the far right party of Marine Le Pen.

What do the gilet jaunes want? Specific demands are varied and often contradictory. But a dominant theme is that they want to be valued and represented. They feel that the centres of power in France, the government but also other organisations, do not speak for or even respect them. They think the major cities are getting all the benefits of growth while they are falling behind.

The gilet jaunes tend to be working or lower middle class, sometimes self-employed, sometimes retired. Initially their protests were sympathetically viewed by most French voters, which was one reason why Macron responded with tax breaks for pensioners and low income workers. As time goes on and the violence has continued their popularity among French voters has waned. Whether they have a future as a coherent force may depend on whether they can transform themselves into a conventional political group that wins seats in the forthcoming European elections, a process which has already led to some fragmentation along traditional left/right lines.

Macron’s election as President of France had led many to think that the wave of populism influencing democracies around the world could be held back or even beaten. What the gilet jaunes show is that this cannot be done just by electing a charismatic President. Indeed the character of Macron, clearly part of an affluent city elite, may even have been a provocation.

Can the gilet jaunes tell us anything about those who voted for Brexit or Trump? All three movements come from outside of the main cities, so perhaps geography is more than just an incidental factor. What is unique about the gilet jaunes has been self-organisation, made possible through social media, and the variety of their political demands. In contrast Trump is a Republican, and Brexit is a very specific cause. But perhaps this difference just reflects the ability of some politicians and parts of the media to capture the discontent of the geographical areas that feel left behind?

The EU was not considered an important issue among most voters until the referendum. Immigration was, but a good part of that was because the government and press had managed to deflect anger at declining public services and wages on to immigrants rather than their own policies. Whereas the gilet jaunes had to organise themselves using social media, Brexit and to some extent Trump had sections of the conventional media to do that job. While many gilet jaunes want to overturn the government, Brexit supporters succeeded because they had the help of politicians and the media.

Underlying causes in all three cases include geographical and financial inequality, and a feeling of being ignored by conventional politics. In the UK, looking mainly at the first decade of the century, a NEF report found that nearly all of the 20 fastest growing constituencies were in cities. Often the prosperity of towns depends on the success or otherwise of a nearby city. Those in the periphery see money going to projects like crossrail or HS2 while local bus services are cut.

People look at others to measure their own prosperity but they also look at their own past. In the UK real wages are still below levels before the financial crisis, and in the last year the disparity between the incomes of most people and those at the top of the income distribution has started to increase again. (It is one reason why the Chancellor is getting more tax receipts than he expected.) In the US most of the proceeds of growth have for some time been going to the top of the income distribution.

We can see the same thing, although to a lesser degree, in France. Here is a revealing graph from a study by Thomas Piketty and colleagues. It shows how average annual growth rates of pre-tax income has varied by where people are in the income distribution over three time periods. To the right we have the richer income deciles, including at the end the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% respectively. In the two periods before the 1980s incomes at the top grew less rapidly than all other groups. From 1983 to 2014 the opposite has been true: growth rates of top incomes have been up to three times those of everyone else. In addition the growth rate of incomes of the non-rich have been historically low.

Low average growth in most incomes together with much faster growth in incomes at the top is provocative, particularly if you are in parts of the country that are stagnating with few prospects. I do not think it is any coincidence that a week ago we saw the gilet jaunes targeting the exclusive shops and restaurants of the Champs-Élysées.

Inequality based on incomes or geography is not enough to get the gilet jaunes on to the streets, to get UK voters to want to take back control, or Trump voters to vote for the worst President in a century. This also requires a feeling that your voice is not heard in the political process. In the UK a feeling of powerlessness was hijacked by politicians and the press who pretended it was a result of the EU, or in the US by Trump who pretended to speak for ‘real America’.

Speaking up for those left behind should naturally be something parties on the left do. Yet in the UK, as the NEF report shows, Labour have been increasing their vote share in dynamic cities and the Conservatives from areas in decline. This may be part of a longer term trend in both the UK, US and France, where the left party that once represented the less educated now is the party of the educated. The chart below taken from another study by Piketty shows this trend, which he calls it the emergence of the “Brahmin Left”.

Yet I think this alone is an incomplete explanation. To explain recent developments we should add the adoption by traditional left parties of a neoliberal framework which discouraged regional, industrial and redisributive policies that might have transferred more of the benefits of city dynamism to the periphery. That created a left behind that went beyond areas of deindustrialisation, that felt unrepresented and deprived, and which in the UK and US was open to capture by a populist right.

Is increasing workers' bargaining power a way of raising real wages?

There is no doubt that the last decade has been a terrible period for average real wages in the UK, with levels still below where they were before the Global Financial Crisis. It is very tempting to related this to the weak baragining power of workers. After all, we were being told before Brexit that the economy was strong, so if the benefits were not going to wages they must have been going somewhere else. Some people go further and say that one of the reasons that the bargaining power of UK workers is weak is because of high levels of immigration, and that therefore immigration must be responsible for lower real wages.

What people often forget is that real wages depend as much on prices as nominal wages. If nominal wages in the economy as a whole rise, firms can just pass additional costs on by raising their prices, leaving real wages unchanged. Equally if nominal wages are depressed because of weak bargaining power or immigration, firms are able to cut prices to become more competitive, rather than keep prices unchanged and raise their profits.

To see what firms have done on average we can look at the chart below, which shows the percentage shares of profits and wages in national income over the last thirty years. (They do not sum to 100 because of factors like self employment income and sales taxes.) The share of wages and profits in national income have been remarkably stable over the last two decades. It is simply not the case that bosses have been expropriating the gains from growth over the last decade.

So what does explain why real wages are still lower than before the Global Financial Crisis (GC), when the size of the economy a whole surpassed its pre-GFC level in 2013?

The first explanation is that GDP is not the right measure to use if you want to know about standards of living, because it can increase just because there are more people producing things in the economy. A much better measure is GDP per capita (GDP divided by the total population), and that only surpassed pre-GFC peaks at the end of 2015. It is one of the great ironies of UK politics (and a big media failure) that the growth the Conservatives like to boast about is in good part due to immigration they want to stop.

Yet GDP per capita is still higher than it was pre-GFC and real wages are not. The main reason for that is the exchange rate. We have had two very large depreciations since the GFC: one that happened as the crisis was unfolding and one as a result of the Brexit vote. This raises the price of imported consumer goods, which reduces real wages relative to GDP per capita. Another way of making the same point is that although each worker is producing a bit more stuff than pre-GFC, that stuff buys less overseas goods than it used to, which means workers are worse off.

The first depreciation probably reflected in part our dependence on a financial sector that was hit by the GFC, but the Brexit depreciation was a completely self-inflicted wound. But that aside, the overall message is that the main reasons for lower UK real wages are stagnant productivity and a decline in sterling.

Does this mean that weak bargaining power has nothing to do with weak UK wages? There are two potential reasons why there could still be some connection. First, there is some evidence that individual firms that have some monopoly power now share less of their surplus profits with workers than they used to, and that might well reflect weaker bargaining power. Perhaps the UK aggregate profit share might have fallen over the last decade if it hadn’t been for these firms passing on less of their surplus to workers.

Second, it might be the case that one reason why productivity is so poor is that nominal wages have remained low. If nominal wages rose because workers had more bargaining power, that might induce some firms to investment in labour saving machinery. This is an argument I examine in a new article in a special edition of Political Quarterly on post-Brext policy.

We have one clear recent piece of evidence on what happens if you raise nominal wages, and that is when minimum wages are increased. If George Osborne’s hike in minimum wages raised labour saving investment and productivity then no one has noticed. More seriously, the near consensus of the empirical literature on minimum wages is that increases generally do not reduce employment, and that appears inconsistent with those increases promoting labour saving investment. Now an increase in the minimum wages is not exactly the same as an increase in the bargaining power of workers, so this piece of evidence is not definitive, but as yet we have no strong evidence that greater bargaining power would spur innovation.

All this suggests that the declining bargaining power of workers is at best only a minor factor behind the decline in average real wages. To increase UK real wages we need to improve productivity, and that means not hitting investment on the head with first austerity and then Brexit. Evidence suggests that the best way to increase productivity is by raising demand so firms need to invest to meet that demand. Raining public investment would be the best way to stimulate aggregate demand.

But that does not mean that we should not increase the bargaining power of workers. There seems little doubt that working conditions in some occupations are pretty bad, and a strong union presence would be an effective way of improving the working conditions of workers. But I also think a strong union presence in a worksplace can have a positive influence on the distribution of real wages.

The average wage measure in the national statistics include some some very high wages at the top of the income distribution. Over the last thirty years the typical or median real wage has fallen by much more than the average, and that is because of rising inequality, a good part of which is due to high pay rises for the top few percent of earners. While some of that is just down to the rise of the financial sector, some is also within a firm. Andy Haldane at the Bank of England has also noted (page 8) that since the 1990s the wage share of older workers has risen, but the wage share of younger workers (below 35) has fallen. Furthermore, as Martin Sandbu points out, it is often inequality in the wage distribution that allows firms to continue to employ workers on low wages to do things a machine could do. Some of this growing inequality may have been a consequence of weaker trade unions.

There are therefore plenty of good reasons to want to increase the bargaining power of UK workers. Just don't expect that to have much impact on the living standards of workers. To raise real wages we need higher UK productivity, and that will only come from stronger private and public sector investment.

Was Neoliberal Overreach Inevitable?

In June 2017 a member of the hard left of the Labour party, reviled by the right and centre for his association with left wing leaders and movements around the world and for his anti-nuclear views, in a few short weeks went from one of the most unpopular party leaders ever to achieving the highest vote share for his party since Tony Blair was leader. While this unexpected turn of events was in part the result of mistakes by, and inadequacies of, the Conservative Prime Minister, there is no doubt that many Labour voters were attracted by a programme that unashamedly increased the size of the state.

Contrast this with the United States. A Republican congress seems intent on passing into law a bill that combines taking away health insurance from a large number of citizens with tax cuts for the very rich. Let me quote a series of tweets from Paul Krugman:

“The thing I keep returning to on the Senate bill is the contrast between the intense hardship it imposes and the triviality of the gains. Losing health insurance -- especially if you're older, low-income, and unhealthy, which are precisely the people hit -- is a nightmare. And more than 20 million would face that nightmare. Meanwhile, the top 1% gets a tax cut. That cut is a lot of money, but because the 1% are already rich, it raises their after-tax income only 2 percent -- hardly life-changing. So vast suffering imposed to hand the rich a favor they'll barely even notice. How do we make sense of this, politically or morally?”

Or to put it another way, 200,000 more deaths over the next ten years for a marginal increase in the after tax income of the 1%. This is no anachronism created by a Trump presidency, but an inevitable consequence of Republican control of Congress and the White House.

Although these two events appear to be in complete contrast, I think they are part of (in the US) and a consequence of (in the UK) a common process, which I will call neoliberal overreach. [1] Why neoliberal? Why overreach? Neoliberal is the easy part. Although some people get hung up on the word, I use it simply to refer to the set of ideas associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. That includes the goal of reducing the role of the state in many areas of society, including its role in either replacing or regulating markets and taxing individuals (see Kansas), particularly reducing taxes for the well off.

Overreach is more contentious. I use the term because I think, in the UK at least, the period from the 1990s until the global financial crisis could be described as a stable neoliberal hegemony. By this I mean that governments largely accepted the transformations that took place in the 1980s, even when Labour or Democrats were in power. Of course changes did occur. In the UK Labour were prepared to involve the state in alleviating poverty in ways that Thatcher never contemplated, but Labour’s concern did not extend to the other end of the income distribution, and the income share of the 1% continued to rise. They were prepared to see an expansion in the size of the state to meet a natural increase in the demand for health, but they also experimented with bringing in market elements into state provision. However none of these changes compared in size to what went before or came afterwards. (As Tom Clark argues, Labour did not change the [essentially neoliberal] political discourse.)

This period was also characterised in the UK and US by macroeconomic stability: inflation had been contained, perhaps through the delegation of monetary policy to central banks, and growth remained strong such that the high levels of unemployment seen in the 1980s gradually disappeared. This was the ‘great moderation’.

It was undone by a major flaw in the neoliberal project: the self-destructive nature of an unregulated financial sector. The reaction to that, if the left had remained in power, might have been greater controls on finance and perhaps some attempt to reduce inequality (as the two are related). But the left lost power, and we got what I call neoliberal overreach.

Neoliberal deceit in the UK

By 2008 the conversion of the right in the UK to neoliberal ideas was largely complete. This meant that they were determined to continue where Thatcher had left off. But they faced what appeared to be an insurmountable problem: voters wanted the NHS (and other public services) and they wanted more of it partly because they were getting older and wealthier. The recession gave the right the opportunity to continue the neoliberal project by deceit, using two mechanisms.

The first was austerity, which I have talked about many times, but alas what I and other macroeconomists say has so far reached only a small minority (a minority which, importantly, includes the Labour party). What I call deficit deceit was the pretence that we needed above all else to cut spending (that would reduce the size of the state) because otherwise the markets would not buy the government’s debt. There was never any real evidence to back this story up, and plenty to suggest it was nonsense. The fevered imagination of some market participants who turned out to be wrong does not count as evidence. But the politics to make deficit deceit possible was all there: a recent financial crisis, consumers cutting back on debt themselves, a Treasury worried as Treasuries do, a central bank head who acted as central bank heads often do, and a Eurozone crisis that mediamacro made no attempt to understand.

The second deceit was immigration. Elements in society are apt to blame immigrants at a time of rising unemployment and falling real wages, and terrorism gave this an extra twist. The right and their supporters in the press had decided before the crisis that they could exploit fears over immigration to their advantage, and after the recession this became a more powerful weapon. They talked about how immigration was responsible for reduced access to public services and falling real wages, and they promised to bring levels of immigration down. It was deceit because those in charge knew full well that immigration benefited the economy in various ways and as a result they had no intention of really controlling it. But, as with austerity, the deceit worked: so much so that an already weak opposition appeared not to know how to respond.

Some may disapprove of the language I use here. Should a normally sober Oxford macroeconomist talk about political parties deliberately deceiving the electorate? It is not a view I have adopted lightly, but when a Chancellor repeatedly argues that public spending must be cut to meet deficit targets at the same time as reducing inheritance or corporation tax, or a Prime Minister continually repeats the lie that immigration reduces access to public services, what other conclusion can you come to? They could get away with this deceit because academic economists (the majority of whom know that austerity would reduce output, and that immigration improves the public finances) are largely ignored by the media.

Austerity and the deceit required to achieve it was neoliberal overreach in the UK. Austerity quickly became a disaster because it was done at just the wrong time, when monetary policy was unable to offset its effects. That hurt the economy a lot. Whether GDP was reduced by a few percentage points temporarily or permanently we may never know for sure. But for the political reasons I have already outlined, combined with feeble opposition, the Conservatives got away with it sufficiently to win a general election in 2015.

Populism and anti-neoliberalism

The deceit over immigration was also key to a second disaster: the vote to leave the EU. Although the case to Remain in the EU was led by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, neither could combat anti-immigration rhetoric with a positive case because of their earlier deception. For this reason alone you could also label Brexit as a consequence of neoliberal overreach. More importantly, factions on the right that actively campaigned for Brexit did so in part because they believed they could only achieve their regulation free neoliberal nirvana by doing so.

As Jan-Werner Müller writes

“The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.”

It would be wrong to say that Brexit or Trump represent an evolution of neoliberalism. Both promote strong restrictions to trade, and so it would be more accurate to view Brexit as a split within neoliberalism. [2] What is clearer to me is that populism is a consequence of neoliberalism as reflected in the policies of the political right. In the UK immigration was used as a scapegoat for the impact of austerity, which fuelled the Brexit vote. In the US one of the first acts of Reagan was to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which led eventually to the precursor and cheerleaders for Trump: talk radio and Fox news. In addition neoliberalism demonises any kind of regional or industrial strategy designed to alleviate the impact of globalisation.

Why was it Corbyn who led the revolt against austerity in 2017 rather than Miliband in 2015? One obvious explanation is that the more ‘moderate’ left in both the UK, much of Europe and the Democratic establishment in the US had become compromised by neoliberal hegemony. Instead it required those who had stayed faithful to socialist ideas together with the young who had not witnessed the defeats of the 1980s to mount an effective opposition to austerity and perhaps neoliberalism more generally. [***]

I am less familiar with the details of US politics, which are clearly different in some ways from the UK. The way the Republican party has co-opted both race and culture to their cause is different and clearly crucial. But there are plenty of similarities as well. Both countries have had austerity combined with tax cuts for the rich. Both countries have a right wing media which politicians can no longer control, leading to Brexit and Trump respectively. Bernie Sanders, like Corbyn, came from nowhere preaching socialism, but unlike the UK the established Democratic party halted his rise to power.

Was Overreach Inevitable

I’m not going to speculate whether and by how much this neoliberal overreach will prove fatal: whether Corbyn’s ‘glorious defeat’ marks the ‘death throes of neoliberalism’ or something more modest. Instead I want to ask whether overreach was inevitable, and if so why. Many in the centre ground of politics would argue that it would have been perfectly feasible, after the financial crisis, to change neoliberalism in some areas but maintain it in others. It is conceivable that this is where we will end up. But when you add up what ‘some areas’ would amount to, it becomes clear that it would be hard to label the subsequent regime neoliberal.

I think it is quite possible to imagine reforming finance in a way that allows neoliberalism to function elsewhere. Whether it is politically possible without additional reforms I will come to. If we think about populism, one key economic force behind its rise has been globalisation (see Dani Rodrik here for example). If we want to retain the benefits of globalisation, then counteracting its negative impact on some groups or communities becomes essential. Whether that involves the state directly, or indirectly through an industrial strategy, neither of those solutions is neoliberal.

Then consider inequality. I would argue that inequality, and more specifically the extreme wealth of a small number of individuals, has played an important role in both neoliberal overreach (in the US, the obsession within the Republican party with tax cuts for the wealthy) and populism (the financing of the Brexit campaign, Trump himself). More generally, extreme wealth disparities fuel political corruption. Yet ‘freeing’ ‘wealth creators’ of the ‘burden’ of taxation is central to neoliberalism: just look at how the loaded language in this sentence has become commonplace.

Indeed it could well be that gross inequality at the very top is an important dynamic created by neoliberalism. Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva have shown (paper) how reductions in top rates of tax - a hallmark of neoliberalism in the 1980s - may itself have encouraged rent seeking by CEOs which makes inequality even worse. Rent extractors naturally seek political defences to preserve their wealth, and the mechanisms that sets in place may not embody any sense of morality, leading to the grotesque spectacle of Republican lawmakers depriving huge numbers of health insurance to be able to cut taxes for those at the top. It may also explain why the controls on finance actually implemented have been so modest, and in the US so fragile.

The other key dynamic in neoliberal overreach has to be the ideology itself. In the UK surveys suggest that fewer than 10% of the population favour cutting taxes and government spending to achieve a smaller state (see my next post). There is equally no appetite to privatise key state functions: indeed renationalisation of some industries is quite popular. Yet the need to reduce the size and scope of the state has become embedded in the political right. Given that, it is not hard to understand the motivation behind the twin deceits of austerity and immigration control by Conservative led governments.

The dynamic consequences of extreme inequality and an unpopular ideology both suggest that neoliberal overreach may not be a bug but a feature.

[1] Reasons why this discussion might focus on the US and UK are discussed here.

[2] Among those who voted for Brexit, the two main groups were social conservatives who had a social rather than economic fear of immigration and the left behind who were deceived into thinking it was the EU and immigration that was behind their plight rather than neoliberalism itself. Liberal leavers may amount to little more than a few MPs and small businesses. Even among Conservative MPs, it is not clear that neoliberalism was the key factor in determining their position on Brexit.

***Postscript 06/07/17  It came out after I had written this post, but this article by William Davies expresses much better what I was trying to say in this paragraph.  

Inequality or poverty

Tony Blair famously said:

“[It’s] not that I don’t care about the gap [between high and low incomes], so much as I don’t care if there are people who earn a lot of money. They’re not my concern. I do care about people who are without opportunity, disadvantaged and poor.”

Most people, including the Labour government, interpreted that as focusing on poverty rather than inequality. For an excelllent discussion of historic trends in inequality and how they were influenced, among other things, by poverty reduction programmes pushed by Labour (as well as how that may unwind in the near future) see this excellent discussion by Rick. 

I recently saw a very clear defence of the position that poverty mattered more than inequality from Miles Kimball. His argument comes from surveys that quantify a basic principle of economics, which is diminishing marginal utility. He quotes results which suggest that a dollar of income means an awful lot more to someone earning half the average wage than someone who earns double the average wage. He suggests the results come close to validating the second principle of justice suggested by John Rawls. To put the idea at its most simple, we should not worry about the rich too much because their extra money buys them very little extra happiness, but instead focus on reducing poverty.

Now of course this point is irrelevant if we are talking about reducing poverty by taxing the rich. The rich are a very good source of money, because they will not miss it very much. The importance comes if we compare two societies. One has no poverty, but a significant number of very rich people. The other has no rich people, but still has poverty. Miles’s argument is that we should prefer the society with no poverty to the one with no super-rich. In a static sense I think that is right, but I have dynamic concerns that I will now come to.

Right at the start of Miles’s discussion is an interesting paragraph:

“Before going on, let me concede first of all that the amount of wealth held by the ultra-rich is truly astonishing, and that making sure that the ultra-rich do not convert their wealth into total control of our political system is important. Documenting and studying in detail all of the ways in which the ultra-rich influence politics is crucial. But short of the ultra-rich subverting our political system, the focus of our concern about inequality should be how well we take care of the poor; whether money needed to help the poor comes from middle-income families or the rich is an important issue, but still of secondary importance to how well we take care of the poor.”

I want to explore a point that Miles does not pursue. If money matters so little to the very rich, why would they want to become ultra-rich to an astonishing degree, and go on to try and control the political system to ensure they get even more? The answer comes from exactly the same logic as Miles uses. If £1000 means nothing to you because you are very rich, if opportunities arise you put effort into making that £1000 into £10,000 or £100,000. The fact that the ultra-rich have wealth that is truly astonishing may not be an accident, but may be a result of exactly the same principle that Miles explores: diminishing marginal utility. The rich are no different from everyone else in wanting more utility, except for them it requires huge amounts of money to get it. [1]

To see why this can matter, consider an argument put forward by Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva that I discussed here. Why has pre-tax income for the 1% risen so much in the two countries, the UK and US, that in the 1980s saw large reductions in top income tax rates? The argument these authors put forward is that with punitive tax rates, there was little incentive for CEOs or finance high-flyers to use their monopoly power to extract rent (take profits away) from their firms. It would only gain you a few thousands after tax, which as they were already well paid would not increase their utility very much. However once top tax rates were cut, it now became worthwhile for these individuals to put effort into rent extraction.

As I discussed here, the bonus culture may be the means of rent extraction that was incentivised by cutting top tax rates. If you want to see the kind of thing I have in mind in action, read this article by Ben Chu on what happened to Theresa May’s wish to see annually binding votes by shareholders on executive pay. That kind of lobbying takes effort. It worked, and as a result top executives at the builder Crest Nicholson can ignore a shareholder vote against changes to their compensation rules. No wonder executive pay seems to rise even when a company’s fortunes turn sour.

So it seems to me that I could take the same basic principle that Miles explores and write a very different conclusion. Once we allow those at the top the opportunity to earn very high incomes, and the only way these individuals can see to get additional utility is to embark on rent seeking, we can at the very least divert their effort from socially enhancing activities (i.e improving the company). When those efforts extend to influencing the political system, we are in serious trouble. These activities may culminate in taking over the political system, which after all is what has happened in the US, with potentially disastrous consequences. For that reason alone, inequality matters as well as poverty.

[1] Of course status linked to competitive consumption is also important.

Inequality under the Labour government

In the last few months I have sometimes been told that the last Labour government did nothing to reverse the rise of inequality seen under the previous Conservative administration. It is a serious charge, given the harm that inequality creates. But it is also incorrect, and here is a nice chart that shows why.

The Gini coefficient measures inequality. The black line looks at incomes, but the grey line looks at full time earnings. It shows that inequality in earnings was rising throughout the period, including when Labour was in power. Inequality of incomes was flatter while Labour was in power.

The chart is taken from a paper by Mike Brewer and Liam Wren-Lewis (short summary here). The authors use microdata to explain these divergent trends in the 1990s and 2000s. They find four factors at work.

“First, inequality between those with different employment statuses has fallen, primarily due to a fall in the number of unemployed. Second, employment taxes have played a larger role since 1991 in mitigating the increase in inequality of gross employment income than they did before 1991. Third, investment income has contributed less to total income inequality since 1991, largely due to the decline in its importance as an income source. Finally, a rise in the relative incomes of pensioners and households with children under five – both groups that benefited from reforms to welfare benefits and tax credits during the 1990s and (especially) 2000s – has pulled inequality down. Overall, since 1991 these four factors have almost entirely offset the impact on income inequality of the inequality-increasing changes in the distribution of earnings and self-employment income.”

Some of these factors may not have owed much to government policy, but others clearly did. The bottom line is that the last Labour government did quite a lot to reduce inequality. Only once you recognise that can you be realistic about what it would take to do more. Here are some ideas from Tony Atkinson, and I personally would be even more radical in one particular area. 

Inequality, business leaders and more delusions on the left

Those who think current levels of inequality are not a problem can skip this one

The Blair governments did a lot to fight poverty, but were famously relaxed about inequality, or more specifically the earnings of the 1%. For many in those governments this reflected their own views, but it also reflected a political calculation. The calculation went as follows. To win, Labour needed to be seen as competent to run the economy. The media all too often look to business leaders to answer that question. So Labour needed to be business friendly. Now being business friendly should mean creating an environment that business can thrive in. However to get the approval of business leaders you also need to create an environment where business leaders can thrive personally, and they are very much part of the 1%. QED.

Labour today is not following this strategy. First, Miliband has said quite clearly that he sees tackling inequality as a major issue: "Now I have heard some people say they don’t know what we stand for. So let me take the opportunity today to spell it out in the simplest of terms. It is what I stood for when I won the leadership of this party. And it is what I stand for today. This country is too unequal. And we need to change it." Second, it has two policies that directly impinge on the 1%: the mansion tax and restoring the 50p income tax band.

There are some on the left who dismiss these measures as marginal. One of the comments on my earlier post said that “When it comes to the broad trend of ever greater inequality there really is no meaningful difference between the main parties.” This seems to me a colossal tactical error. To see why, you only have to note what has happened over the last week in the UK. Various business leaders have proclaimed that a Labour government would be a disaster. Stefano Pessina, who among other things runs the Boots chain, declined to elaborate on why exactly Labour would be a disaster. In contrast, he was quite clear that the UK leaving the EU would be a big mistake, which of course is much more likely to happen under a Conservative government!

There is an obvious inference. Labour would not so much be bad for business, but bad for business leaders personally. [1] They, unlike some on the left, recognise that Miliband is not Blair, and that there has been a key shift in the direction of Labour policy. So they will do what they can to stop Labour winning. Labour in turn has responded by attacking the tax avoidance practiced by many of these companies. This is the beginnings of a major battle.

There are at least two important implications. First, the non-partisan media need to understand what is going on. Getting business leaders to comment on the relative merits of the two main parties programmes is no longer a neutral decision - it is giving additional airtime to one side. Second, everyone who cares about inequality needs to realise the importance of this election. Inequality is a key election issue, and there is a very meaningful difference between the two main sides. Certain business leaders clearly understand that.

[1] Another possibility is that they think Labour would be much tougher on business tax avoidance than the Conservatives, but saying this in public would be embarrassing.  

Redistribution under the UK coalition government

In his party conference speech, David Cameron did mention inequality. He did not say, as Ed Miliband said recently (see postscript to this post): “This country is too unequal. And we need to change it.” Instead he said “Under Labour, inequality widened. With us, it’s narrowed.” So do the two quotes above mean that both major parties now aim to reduce inequality?

Here is the evolution of two aggregate measures of UK income inequality over time, as calculated by the IFS from this recent study.

The main change is the large increase in inequality that occurred under Mrs Thatcher from 1979 to 1990. There was then a small tendency for inequality to increase until around 2007, since when inequality has fallen. The main reason for this recent fall is the decline in real wages over this period, while benefits have remained more constant in real terms. The share of the top 1% also rose during the Thatcher period, but unlike the measure above continued to rise sharply until around 1997/8. It then remained relatively stable until around 2004, rose sharply until the financial crisis, when it fell back in 2010/11 to end 90s/early 00s levels. (For details, access the PSE database here.)

If the decline in real wages since the financial crisis has reduced overall inequality, what impact has government fiscal changes had? In a landmark report issued this week, Paola De Agostini, John Hills and Holly Sutherland analyse who has gained and who has lost as a result of the direct tax and transfer changes made by the coalition government. (Indirect taxes are excluded.) One of the things I liked about the analysis is that it attempted (with some success) to reconcile its own results with similar analysis undertaken by the UK Treasury and the IFS.

The headline result is shown in this chart.

The black dots track who has gained and who has lost as a result of the coalition’s changes to direct taxation and benefits, including pensions. The poorest have lost out, while the main gains have been in the middle of the top half of the income distribution. So while a decline in real wages may have reduced inequality in the years following the recession, government policy has attempted to move things in the opposite direction. So perhaps what the Prime Minister should have said is “Under Labour, inequality widened. With us, it’s narrowed, but we are doing what we can to change that.”

There are many other interesting results from the study, but let me mention just three here. The first is contained in the most right hand black dot. Over the period in which the coalition has been in power, changes in direct taxes and benefits have had no significant overall impact on incomes, compared to what would have happened if indexation had run its normal course. That means that the impact of benefit cuts in reducing the deficit has been almost exactly offset by tax cuts.

The second told me something I should have realised about the Treasury’s analysis of the distributional impact of budget measures. The Treasury’s analysis is similar, but with one important difference - the biggest losers in their figures are the top income decile. As the report shows, the main reason for this is straightforward - the Treasury analysis starts from January 2010, not (as in this report) from May 2010. Why does this make so much difference? Because the new higher 50p tax rate introduced by Labour actually started in April 2010. George Osborne subsequently reduced this to 45p. So the Treasury’s figures show the top decile losing as a result of the top tax rate going from 40p to 45p, while this study starts at the 50p the coalition inherited.

The third bit of the analysis I wanted to mention was how these numbers might change by 2019/20 under current plans. The broad picture remains similar, but with one large question mark for the lowest decile, concerning the introduction of the new Universal Credit (UC). One of the hopes for UC is that it will increase the uptake of benefits. The report calculates that if everyone who currently claims any one of the benefits UC replaces takes up UC, then UC will lead to large (+3%) overall gains for the bottom decile. Whether this will happen depends in part on the efficiency and manner in which it is introduced.

Bonus Culture

The comments I received on my post about a maximum wage were interesting for many reasons. In this post I just want to focus on one common misperception. This is that a maximum wage, because it interferes with the market, must be distortionary and therefore something that should tend to be avoided. This in turn assumes that the actual economy approximates the competitive efficient allocation students learn about in Econ 101, which is what neoliberals would like people to believe.

To see why this might well not be true when it comes to high pay, I want to briefly discuss a paper (NBER version here) by Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole, which has the title of this post. I will try and make my discussion as non-technical as possible.

The basic idea is as follows. Jobs involve two types of activity or output, one of which is measurable and one is not. To reflect this, pay involves two components: a fixed component, which the worker always gets, and a performance element (the bonus) which depends on the worker’s measured output. The firm wants the worker to undertake both types of activity, so it sets the appropriate relationship between the two elements of pay to make sure the worker puts the right amount of effort into each type of activity. I will talk about what these two types of activity might be in practice below.

So far, so good. But now we add an information problem. There are two types of workers: the ordinary and the talented. The talented worker is much better at producing the measurable output. The firm cannot tell the two types apart, but it would naturally like to attract some of the more talented workers. One way it can do this is to offer two types of remuneration package: a ‘low bonus’ type and a ‘high bonus’ type. Talented workers will be attracted to the high bonus package, because their talent means that they can achieve high measured output (and therefore high pay) with relatively little effort.

This is useful for the firm, but it creates a problem. The bonus payment is now doing two jobs: allocating worker effort between activities, and attracting talented workers. In these circumstances, the bonus payment can depart from its efficient level. In particular the paper shows (p13) that in a competitive labour market, bonus payments designed for talented workers will be too high, in the sense that they lead to these workers putting too much effort into the measured activity, and too little into the other activity.

So what might these two activities (one measurable, one not) be in practice. The paper suggests, for measurable activities, things like sales, output, trading profits, and billable medical procedures, and for immeasurable activities things like intangible investments affecting long run value, financial or legal risk-taking, and cooperation among individuals or divisions. So the problem is that, in an effort to attract talented workers, the firm over incentivises effort on achieving tangible short term goals at the expense of work on intangible, longer term objectives.

The relationship to my discussion of a maximum wage should now be clear. To quote from the paper: “Turning to policy implications, we show that a cap on bonuses can restore balance in agents’ incentives, and even re-establish the first best, as long as it does not induce employers to switch to some alternative “currency” to screen employees.”

If you want to think about how this idea relates to alternative models of executive pay and competition for talent, I would encourage you to read section 1.1 of the paper, which is not too technical. The paper also contains a lot more that will be of interest to economists.

The general point I want to make is this. We can think about the minimum wage as an unfortunate interference in the market which can nevertheless be justified on equity grounds, or as a means of reducing poverty. However we can also see it as a way of increasing the efficiency of the economy, because many employers of low paid workers can exploit their monopoly power to pay wages that are below the efficient level (monopsony). Exactly the same may be true of the maximum wage. It could be that top pay is inefficiently high because executives have monopoly power, or it could be as this paper suggests because the firm wants to attract unobservable talent. I see no reason to presume that the dramatic increase in top pay reflects increases in the productivity of those workers.

  

If minimum wages, why not maximum wages?

I was in a gathering of academics the other day, and we were discussing minimum wages. The debate moved on to increasing inequality, and the difficulty of doing anything about it. I said why not have a maximum wage? To say that the idea was greeted with incredulity would be an understatement. So you want to bring back price controls was once response. How could you possibly decide on what a maximum wage should be was another.

So why the asymmetry? Why is the idea of setting a maximum wage considered outlandish among economists?

The problem is clear enough. All the evidence, in the US and UK, points to the income of the top 1% rising much faster than the average. Although the share of income going to the top 1% in the UK fell sharply in 2010, the more up to date evidence from the US suggests this may be a temporary blip caused by the recession. The latest report from the High Pay Centre in the UK says:

“Typical annual pay for a FTSE 100 CEO has risen from around £100-£200,000 in the early 1980s to just over £1 million at the turn of the 21st century to £4.3 million in 2012. This represented a leap from around 20 times the pay of the average UK worker in the 1980s to 60 times in 1998, to 160 times in 2012 (the most recent year for which full figures are available).”

I find the attempts of some economists and journalists to divert attention away from this problem very revealing. The most common tactic is to talk about some other measure of inequality, whereas what is really extraordinary and what worries many people is the rise in incomes at the very top. The suggestion that we should not worry about national inequality because global inequality has fallen is even more bizarre. 

What lies behind this huge increase in inequality at the top? The problem with the argument that it just represents higher productivity of CEOs and the like is that this increase in inequality is much more noticeable in the UK and US than in other countries, yet there is no evidence that CEOs in UK and US based firms have been substantially outperforming their overseas rivals. I discussed in this post a paper by Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva which set out a bargaining model, where the CEO can put more or less effort into exploiting their monopoly power within a company. According to this model, CEOs in the UK and US have since 1980 been putting more bargaining effort than their overseas counterparts. Why? According to Piketty et al, one answer may be that top tax rates fell in the 1980s in both countries, making the returns to effort much greater.

If you believe this particular story, then one solution is to put top tax rates back up again. Even if you do not buy this story, the suspicion must be that this increase in inequality represents some form of market failure. Even David Cameron agrees. The solution the UK government has tried is to give more power to the shareholders of the firm. The High Pay Centre notes that: “Thus far, shareholders have not used their new powers to vote down executive pay proposals at a single FTSE 100 company.”, although as the FT report shareholder ‘revolts’ are becoming more common. My colleague Brian Bell and John Van Reenen do note in a recent study “that firms with a large institutional investor base provide a symmetric pay-performance schedule while those with weak institutional ownership protect pay on the downside.” However they also note that “a specific group of workers that account for the majority of the gains at the top over the last decade [are] financial sector workers .. [and] .. the financial crisis and Great Recession have left bankers largely unaffected.”

So increasing shareholder power may only have a small effect on the problem. So why not consider a maximum wage? One possibility is to cap top pay as some multiple of the lowest paid, as a recent Swiss referendum proposed. That referendum was quite draconian, suggesting a multiple of 12, yet it received a large measure of popular support (35% in favour, 65% against). The Swiss did vote to ban ‘golden hellos and goodbyes’. One neat idea is to link the maximum wage to the minimum wage, which would give CEOs an incentive to argue for higher minimum wages! Note that these proposals would have no disincentive effect on the self-employed entrepreneur. 

If economists have examined these various possibilities, I have missed it. One possible reason why many economists seem to baulk at this idea is that it reminds them too much of the ‘bad old days’ of incomes policies and attempts by governments to fix ‘fair wages’. But this is an overreaction, as a maximum wage would just be the counterpart to the minimum wage. I would be interested in any other thoughts about why the idea of a maximum wage seems not to be part of economists’ Overton window.