April 2023

The answer is straightforward. We need to redefine productivity so that it equates to using the lowest material input possible in a process. And we need to incentivise this by, firstly, accounting for the costs of planetary destruction and, secondly, imposing environmental taxes to actually reflect that cost on those companies that cannot or will not adapt to the world we live in.

So, total factor productivity with Pigou Taxes on externalities. If only someone could have thought this up before the ‘Tater brought it to our attention!

A government in this position can have a policy of full employment, knowing that until that point is reached, there will be under-used resources within that economy for which they are responsible, meaning that inflation will not be stimulated as a result so long as the resources put to use are those currently unemployed, whether they be people, physical assets, or intellectual property.

But Smurf tells us that vast numbers of people are unemployed. And even he’s noted that we’ve got inflation. So, errr?

If the government has a growing economy and modest but controlled inflation within that economy, then the expansion of its money supply is essential, and that expansion of the money supply is best delivered by the running of government deficits. Such deficits represent a shortfall of tax receipts compared to government expenditure. This policy should be preferred to increasing the scale of private sector borrowing within the economy, which is the alternative source of new money creation.

Why should Wes Streeting decide where the new money goes rather than you or me?

The secondary role of tax in the government’s funding cycle is to provide the government-created currency of a jurisdiction with value in exchange. That happens because if the tax owing to a government can only be settled using the currency that government creates those transacting in that economy who are likely to have tax liabilities arising as a result will not be able to afford the exchange risk arising from trading in any other currency.

Both BP and Shell trade extensively in $. And pay UK corporation tax in £.

So, err?

Way back when Smurf tried to tell us (on Jololoyn’s blog) that people attempted to maximise their income. I turned up in the comments to point out that no, the assumption is that people attempt to maximise their utility. He accused me of an ad hominem for correcting him.

Today:

A thought, inevitably, occurred to me as I was wandering around. In economic terms, model making (and many other hobbies) must be amongst the most unproductive things we can do. Vast amounts of effort is usually put into very small quantities of material input with a result that, if it were to be sold, rarely reflects the value of that time. And yet, what is produced is of great value to those making it.

This is virtually the exact opposite of what the economist values. They want to minimise labour input into any product, always seeking to maximise the material input instead. The result is a profoundly homogenised product that they actually say has only marginal value.

No. The economist says that people attempt to maximise their utility. Utility being that whatever combination of whatever makes the person happiest given the constraints faced. The economist absolutely is not attempting to say that maximal material output is desired. Further, labour minimisation isn’t an assumption nor an insistence either. If people like spending their time that way then bully for them. Granny knitting the booties for the new babbie might well be an inefficient use of time in clothing the baby. But that’s not in fact the point at all, it’s a demonstration from Granny as to how much she values the new babbie.

Economics, standard, neoclassical, straight out of the textbooks economics, already deals with all of this. But the ‘Tater hasn’t read any of the standard textbooks which is why he’s so ignorant on the point.

Where economists do go on – and what leads to my standard insistence that jobs are a cost, not a benefit – is that *if* you wish to maximise output *and* you face a universe of scarce inputs *then* labour minimisation is a good idea. Something that’s obviously true. Also something that leaves room for knitted booties, hobbies and even, sigh, model railway enthusiasts.

Further thoughts followed, of course. One was that until we cure the world of the economists’s obsession with productivity that maximises material input in proportion to labour cost we will not solve three problems.

Innit great? By not knowing the basics he then starts to design the new world.

One is sustainability. Productivity as defined by economists demands we consume ever more material resources in proportion to human effort. We know that is not possible now. It is, literally, killing us.

Entire fucking cretinism. You can – and we do – have the productivity of anything at all. The productivity of, say, gold. We used to plate connectors in computers to 200 nm. Now we do so to 2 nm. We’ve raised the productivity of the use of gold in computers. We now use *less* gold to make any given number of computers. We have *increased* sustainability by doing so.

Or, another example and one that surprised me. Iron and steel use in the US. This is now down to 1906, 1908 sort of levels. Tens of percentage points below peak usage in the 1950s. No, that’s not per capita, that’s not per unit of GDP. That’s a near doubling (??) of the population some three or four times richer (??) using less iron and steel in aggregate (yes, including exports and imports and before the effects of recycling, so iron ore use has fallen much, much, more). That’s an increase in iron and steel productivity.

Because Spud’s just ignorant he thinks “productivity” means “labour productivity”. Which is wrong. Which is why economists talk about “total factor productivity” of course.

Cretin.

Second, we need find ways to create meaningful work, which seems to me to be one of the great problems of our age. David Graeber described the world of work as being full of bullshit jobs. I would simply call them shit jobs, because that is what they are.

Yep, just think of all of those labour hours that go into country by country reporting. Soul destroying work for no added value whatsoever. Or gender pay gap reporting, or the $4 billion the SEC says blood mineral reporting cost in just its first year. We should certainly do away with all of that.

Third, public services and most things of value are destroyed. I refer, of course to what is called Baumol’s Law.

What this economic law says is that as the private sector improves productivity, as it has been able to do by destroying the planet and creating shit jobs, those engaged in the public sector, the arts and other creative sectors like education have not been able to match those productivity gains.

Oooooh, well done. Misunderstanding Baumol as well! Because of course shit jobs don’t improve productivity. Therefore they’re not an exemplar of Baumol – unless we’re to say that the public sector has more of them.

It’s also not between public and private sectors. It’s between manufacturing and services. Given that 80% of the UK economy is services this is not, therefore, a public/private split.

However, wages in the private sector have risen over time because productivity has increased. As a result those in the public, creative, education and other such sectors must do so as well or people engaged in them will have to move to the private sector. Politicians miss the point when they demand increased productivity in exchange for those public sector pay rises: that supposed increase in productivity actually destroys the service the public and other such sectors supplies.

And now really misunderstanding Baumol. Who did not say that services cannot become more productive in their use of labour. He said it’s more difficult. Technological change still makes it possible. Think before printing. Exaplaining algebra relied upon one to one attention. Now we can print books. So, at least some children can learn from the book not requiring one to one attention. We’ve increased the productivity of labour in explaining algebra. We invest aspirin and we no longer require the comely maiden wiping fevered brow with damp cloth as our only solution to a headache.

More difficult, slower, is not the same as impossible.

The reality is that the public sector cannot and never will match productivity gains that can be achieved in the private sector as a result of destroying the planet.

Services, not public sector.

But that does not mean we should abandon public sector services as unaffordable, which is the supposedly logical consequence that economists now says follows from this because those services have, apparently, become unaffordable.

But no economist does say that. Instead there’s rumination on how we might improve services labour productivity as best we can. Baumol is indeed one of those constraints we have to work within. Great, that’s what economics is, allocation in a universe of scarce resources. So, how best do we do that?

Can we expect politicians to get their heads around this very obvious idea? Or should we accept that what was once entirely affordable is now not so entirely because the costs of trashing the planet are not taken into account in economists’ (and accountants’) estimates of productivity?

What is it to be? A sane economics that says we must stop trashing the planet so that we not only have a chance of survival but also can have the things (like the NHS) that we value, or are we to just live in a literal throwaway society where everything of worth is going to end up abandoned and destroyed?

We could start by employing economists who actually understand economics…..

For example, if we increase the productivity of labour in services provision – even if it’s all in the public sector – then we can enjoy more services (more public sector output) without trashing the planet. So, we’d really rather like to increase labour productivity in the provision of public sector and services output, wouldn’t we – it’ll make us richer.