A Piketty Moment

Update (10/27): Comments rightly pointed to different deflators for the two series. I added a figure to account for this (thanks!)

Via Mark Thoma I read an interesting Atalanta Fed Comment about their wage tracker, asking whether the recent pickup of wages in the US is robust or not.

The first thing that came to my mind is that we’d need a robust and sustained increase, in order to make up for lost ground, so I looked for longer time series in Fred, and here is what I got

This yet another (and hardly original) proof of the regime change that occurred in the 1970s, well documented by Piketty. Before then, US productivity (output per hour) and compensation per hour  roughly grew together. Since the 1970s, the picture is brutally different, and widely discussed by people who are orders of magnitude more competent than me.

[Part added 10/27: Following comments to the original post, I added real compensation defled with the GDP deflator.  While this does not account for purchasing power changes, it is more directly comparable with real output. Here is the result:

The commentators were right, the divergence starts somewhat later, in the early 1980s. This makes it less of a Piketty moment, while leaving the broad picture unchanged.]

Next, I tried to ask whether it is better for wage earners, in this generally gloomy picture, to be in a recession or in a boom. I computed the difference between productivity (output per hour) and wages (compensation per hour), and averaged it for NBER recession and expansion periods (subperiods are totally arbitrary. i wanted the last boom and bust to be in a single row). Here is the table:

Yearly Average Difference Between Changes in Productivity and in Wages
	In Recessions	In Expansions	Overall	% of Quarters in Recession
1947-2016	1.51%	0.40%	0.57%	15%
1947-1970	1.62%	-0.14%	0.19%	19%
1970-2016	1.42%	0.67%	0.76%	13%
1980-1992	0.64%	0.84%	0.81%	17%
1993-2000	N/A	0.68%	0.68%	0%
2001-2008Q1	4.07%	1.10%	1.41%	10%
2008Q2-2016Q2	2.17%	0.12%	0.49%	18%
Source: Fred (my calculations)
Compensation: Nonfarm Business Sector, Real Compensation Per Hour
Productivity: Nonfarm Business Sector, Real Output Per Hour

No surprise, once again, and nothing that was not said before. The economy grows, wage earners gain less than others; the economy slumps, wage earners lose more than others.  As I said a while ago, regardless of the weather stones keep raining. And it rained particularly hard in the 2000s. No surprise that inequality became an issue at the outset of the crisis…

There is nevertheless a difference between recessions and expansions, as the spread with productivity growth seems larger in the former. So in some sense, the tide lifts all boats. It is just that some are lifted more than others.

Ah, of course Real Compensation Per Hour embeds all wages, including bonuses and stuff. Here is a comparison between median wage,compensation per hour, and productivity, going as far back as data allow.

I don’t think this needs any comment.

Monetary Policy: Credibility 2.0

Life and work keep having the nasty habit of intruding into this blog, but it feels nice to resume writing, even if just with a short comment.

We learned  a few weeks ago that the Bank of Japan has walked one extra step in its attempt to escape lowflation, and that it has committed to overshoot its 2% inflation target.  A “credible promise to be irresponsible”,  as the FT says quoting Paul Krugman.

This may be a long overdue first step towards a revision of the inflation target, as invoked long ago by Olivier Blanchard, and more recently by Larry Ball. This is all too reasonable: if the equilibrium interest rates are negative, if monetary policy is bound by the zero-or-only-slightly-negative-lower-bound, higher inflation targets would make sense, and 4% is an arbitrary target as legitimate as the current also arbitrary 2% level. Things may be moving, as the subject was evoked, if not discussed, at the recent Central Bankers gathering in Jackson Hole. We’ll see if anything comes out of this.

But the FT also adds an interesting comment to the BoJ move, namely that the more serious risk is a blow to credibility. If it failed to lift the inflation to the 2% target, how can it be credibly believed to overshoot it?

This is a different sort of credibility issue, much more reasonable indeed, than the one we have been used to in the past three decades, linked to the concept of dynamic inconsistency. In plain English the idea that an actor has no incentive to keep prior commitments that go against its own interest, and hence deviates from the initial plan. Credibility was therefore associated to changing incentives over time (typically for policy makers), and invoked to recommend rules over discretion.

Today, eight years into the zero lower bound, we go back to a more intuitive definition of credibility: announcing an objective and not being able to attain it.

The difference between the two definitions of credibility is not anodyne. In the first case, the unwillingness of central banks to behave appropriately can be corrected through the adoption of constraining rules. In the latter, the central bank cannot attain the objective regardless of incentives and constraints, and other strategies need to be put in place.

The other strategy, the reader will not be surprised to learn, is fiscal policy. Monetary dominance is in fact a second tenet of the Consensus from the 1990s that the crisis has wiped out. We used to live in a world in which structural reforms would take care of increasing potential growth, monetary policy would be used to take care of (minor) demand-driven fluctuations, and fiscal policy was in a closet.

This is gone (luckily). Even the large policy making institutions now call for a comprehensive and multi-instrument policy making. The policy mix, a central element of macroeconomics in the pre-rational expectations era, is now back.  Even the granitic dichotomy between short (demand driven) and long (supply driven) term, is somewhat rediscussed.

The excessively simplified consensus that dominated macroeconomics for the past thirty years seems to be seriously in trouble; complexity, tradeoffs, coordination, are now the issues discussed in academia and in policy circles. This is good news.

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