Back in 2016, when he was CEA chair, @jasonfurman argued that if the unemployment rate was unexpectedly high, that should automatically trigger *more* generous unemployment benefits. I thought, and still think, he was right about that. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/…
Last year, he was arguing that UI should be very generous when labor markets are weak, employment is growing slowly or falling, and the unemployment rate is high. It should be scaled back when labor markets are strong and the unemployment rate is low. piie.com/system/files/d…
It seems to me that if we follow this line of reasoning, the most recent weak jobs numbers must be an argument for keeping generous UI benefits in place for longer.
@jasonfurman explains his current views on UI and labor market conditions in this helpful thread.
I personally don't agree cutting UI is a good idea. I agree with him that more generous benefits were called for 6 months ago than today, and more generous benefits are called for today than (hopefully) in 6 months. But my baseline is that they were much too stingy to begin with.
Is the fact that the April job numbers were weaker than expected evidence that UI benefits are a bigger problem than people thought, and need to be scaled back more quickly? @jasonfurman says clearly the answer is No. It is (weak) evidence that UI should stay generous longer.
He doesn't think April numbers should move our views much one way of another. That's fine. But my tweets might have implied that, contrary to his earlier views, he was now suggesting that slow employment growth is an argument for scaling back UI. He is not saying that.
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Currently reading Michael Heinrich's Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, the first of a multi-volume intellectual biography of Marx. I'm really liking it.
One thing I like about it is that it is not just about Marx, it is - in the early sections - a social history of early 19th century Germany. Post-Napoleonic Trier was a very distinctive place.
Trier had been occupied by France, and effectively incorporated into it, for most of the 30 years before Marx was born. This had fundamentally reshaped society there in all sorts of ways, which were not necessarily reversed once the Congress of Vienna gave it to Prussia.
The key takeaway for me is that National Investment Authority-type proposals combine two logically distinct elements. They are supposed to be *lenders* that will direct public finance to private projects. And they are *borrowers* that will create new assets for financial markets.
In my mind the first function makes sense and worth pursuing. The second is fundamentally misguided. The financing problem for the public sector has already been solved, we don't need to create a new form of public liabilities to finance decarbonization.
What's most striking to me is how she draws a straight line from spending focused on recovery from the pandemic to spending on longer term problems. The goal is not just to get back to January 2020.
When you go back to the first year of the Obama administration, the mantra was "timely, targeted and temporary." It was an explicit goal and selling point that increased federal spending would last no longer than the recession. What Yellen is saying now is the opposite of that.
Those lumber prices, huh? $1,600 per 1000 board-feet, up from $400 a year ago. Why? This story mentions a mills closing prior to the pandemic, reducing supply; not a lot of inventory on hand; a skilled labor shortage; and of course construction picking up. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
What do we do about it? Some people might note that we live in a market economy, where prices carry information. High lumber prices tell mills to boost capacity and train up more skilled labor, and builders to look for methods that use less wood. Isn't that what prices are for?
Others might say that market adjustment isn't so quick or smooth, so it might be wise to speed the process along. We could, I don't know, offer cheap credit to lumber companies looking to expand capacity? or look for regulations that would favor less wood-intensive construction?
The last few years have seen renewed interest in hysteresis - the idea that shifts in demand can have persistent effects on GDP, well beyond the period of the "shock" itself. But it seems to me we haven't distinguished clearly enough between two forms of this.
Demand could have persistent effects on output because demand influences supply - this seems to be what people usually have in mind. But it also could be because demand itself is persistent, i.e. aggregate spending behaves like a random walk with drift.
Anyone who follows me on twitter has seen lots of versions of this picture. But assuming we think the deviation is in some large part due to the financial crisis, are we imagining that output has persistently fallen short of potential, or that potential has fallen below trend?
If @ojblanchard1 really believes that the financial crisis and recession reduced potential GDP by 10 points for all time, shouldn't his overriding concern be preventing a repeat? If you really thought this, why would you give even a second's thought to overheating?
To claim both that the Great Recession was a far greater macroeconomic disaster than anyone could have imagined, and that we should just go on doing macroeconomic policy as if it never happened, is just fundamentally unserious.