Noted
I like it when people make clear, definite, time-limited predictions. And that's what Niall Ferguson has done. In six months' time, Egypt will be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and will adopt a hostile policy toward Israel. Thanks Prof F. We'll come back and see how you get on.
Via Melanie Phillips, in whom I detect an increasing note of despair. Now, apparently, Orthodox Jews are (by her standards) tolerant of anti-Semitism and Israelis are insufficiently pro-Israel. Who is left? Sarah Palin, I guess.
Britain is apparently in the grip of a geopolitical Tourette's syndrome, and a pathologically uncontrollable spasm of hatred and lies. But this is also a symptom of the death throes of Western civilisation. I guess MP is relying on the British all dying before they can get their act together to do anything about their uncontrollable hatred; that's the only explanation I can think of for why she continues to live in London and to work for a British magazine and for Radio 4. I must say I admire her courage, although surely anyone who agreed with her would consider it a bit foolhardy to stick around.
Didn't Mel already think Egypt was hostile to Israel?
ReplyDeleteIsrael: proof that if you give a country everything it asks for, sooner or later it will hang itself. I mean at the very least they could have held back on demanding subsidised gas from the Egyptians. Show a little restraint people... First you humiliate your only friend, the one country you absolutely need, and then you publicly steal from them. I mean seriously?
Well, it's nice to see that Fergie is back in the neo-imperialism punditry business, having taken time out to pontificate on his supposed speciality of global finance.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Mel already think Egypt was hostile to Israel?
ReplyDeleteI believe the phrase used was "hysterically Judeophobic"
Israel: proof that if you give a country everything it asks for, sooner or later it will hang itself.
ReplyDeleteI believe America is likely to bring up the other example, and of course the perpetual country of the future, Brazil.
Japan, on the other hand, is an economic example of what happens when you work your butt off to get exactly, precisely everything you think you want and need, but in fact don't.
What unites them all is sheer, overpowering parochialism of the small mind.
Six months - so, a Friedman unit then?
ReplyDeleteJapan, on the other hand, is an economic example of what happens when you work your butt off to get exactly, precisely everything you think you want and need, but in fact don't.
ReplyDeleteYou become blazingly successful and prosperous?
Demanding subsidised gas from the Egyptians? I missed that one.
ReplyDeleteWell I exaggerate, but that's certainly how its seen in Egypt.
ReplyDeleteEgypt has been providing Israel with subsidised gas for a while. Nobody really knows why. The only possibilities are I guess kick backs to Egypt's ex-leadership at some level.
But lets assume that your leader of Israel. The one country in the region that you must not lose, no matter what, is Egypt. A country whose leadership is struggling to contain its population, who loathe your country.
Do you:
a) Decide to do everything you can to minimise those problems.
b) Or do you inflame them by accepting the supply of gas at considerably less than the market rate.
Actually he said "by the end of the year", so he's got about ten months grace. 1.6 Friedmans.
ReplyDeleteI liked this line of Fergie's a lot.
"Well I think Mr. Obama’s influence has been almost completely absent, whereas I think there’s no question that his predecessor had a great deal of influence in the region."
I have to agree. Not even Bush's worst enemy could deny that he had a lot of influence in the Middle East.
Influence suggests that you achieve your desired outcomes. Even Bush's friends are struggling to argue that :)
ReplyDeleteYou become blazingly successful and prosperous?
ReplyDeleteNot for the past two decades.
Trivially, I enjoyed this capitalisation in the transcript:
ReplyDelete"Right now, we have, as far as I can see, virtually no organization on the part of secular Democrats."
Well, no argument there, but not sure of the direct relevance of this to Egypt.
Well, he's virtually guaranteed the partial win of "more hostile to Israel", whatever conceivable government gets in; no conceivable democratically elected government would, for example, co-operate with the blockade of Gaza (and I don't even think that another military dictatorship could do it, under the circumstances).
ReplyDeleteNot for the past two decades.
ReplyDeleteJapan is still incredibly prosperous and successful, Anonymous. Its GDP per capita is about the same as Britain's, it's the third-largest economy in the world, it's got the best life expectancy in the world, excellent standard of living, etc.
While it's true that it hasn't seen much economic growth, almost all of that can be explained by demographic factors: thanks to low childbirth rates and low mortality, the working-age population share has been falling. If you look at GDP growth per worker, Japan spent the last decade growing faster than pretty much any other developed nation.
Wasn't some of the life expectancy recently brought into question when someone went looking for centenarians and discovered that they were dead but people were still claiming their pensions?
ReplyDeleteAjay, quite, which is why pro-American commentators are quite fond of absolute stats whenever they can get away with them, and per capita (rather than per worker) stats whenever they can't.
ReplyDeleteThere's also the Purchasing Power Index thing. Which does indeed show that the US does rather well in terms of standard of living (second to Luxembourg), so long as you're earning the mean income or above. The reason for this being that much of the cost of living is defined by the cost of services, and in an unequal society these are a lot cheaper than somewhere like Norway (taxi drivers make a lot more in Norway).
ReplyDeleteIf you use the median, the US does rather worse...
To avoid data visualisations like this one, which clearly shows the US as being the worst serious country in the world.
ReplyDeleteIts GDP per capita is about the same as Britain's, it's the third-largest economy in the world, it's got the best life expectancy in the world, excellent standard of living, etc.
ReplyDeleteI have always wondered about Japanese productivity, because I keep hearing about things like karoshi. It's entirely possible that Japan has about GDP growth per worker, but it also doesn't say much for the country if they were just pushing it by blunt force.
To avoid data visualisations like this one, which clearly shows the US as being the worst serious country in the world.
The point is that country-for-country comparisons don't tell you much about the U.S., because there's seldom an uniform national standard. The standard of living in Massachusetts is extremely high, while it is relatively lower in Michigan.
There's also the Purchasing Power Index thing. Which does indeed show that the US does rather well in terms of standard of living (second to Luxembourg),
Not really. In the more low-cost areas of the U.S., the quality of the services you purchase, although cheaper, is generally not the same. There's a trap in thinking that you can "live more cheaply" in the cheap parts of America; yes, but only at the cost of degraded standards compared to most else of the first world.
Degraded standards might be part of it, but most of the cost of services is people's salaries. Its why productivity growth is far lower in services.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you pay people less, services cost less. And given that most of the services people consume in the US are produced by the bottom half, who are paid a lot less than people in the wealthier parts of Europe (possibly excluding the SE of England), then the cost of living tends to be lower. This is as true in the wealthier parts incidentally. That's what a high Gini index will get you.
To give an example. Dry cleaning is much much cheaper in the US than it is any other first world country.
The inverse of this is that services produced by people in the top 20% or so tend to be a lot more expensive in the US. Which is why college is so ridiculously expensive, or doctors, lawyers, etc.
However, if you pay people less, services cost less. And given that most of the services people consume in the US are produced by the bottom half, who are paid a lot less than people in the wealthier parts of Europe (possibly excluding the SE of England), then the cost of living tends to be lower. This is as true in the wealthier parts incidentally. That's what a high Gini index will get you.
ReplyDeleteMy anecdotal impressions are a) incomes are very low by first-world standards in "hick" parts of the U.S. and b) services might be cheap, but not necessarily in a pleasant way. There are various intangibles that factor into cheap services, and one which is missing is professionalism.
By the way, you have to explain the "possibly excluding the SE of England" comment. It's lost on me.
Services are cheap in the wealthy parts of the USA also. There is nowhere in the US that is as expensive as Switzerland, or Norway. A cleaner will make significantly more in those countries, than one will anywhere in the US. Just as a taxi driver will, or somebody who works in a shop, or a restaurant. This significantly raises the price of services. I'm not talking about lawyers, or ad execs here. Professionalism doesn't enter into it, prejudice against the south not withstanding.
ReplyDeleteThe SE of England is a bit of an outlier, in that it is very wealthy, but also is quite unequal and people at the bottom tend to be paid very poorly.
I have always wondered about Japanese productivity, because I keep hearing about things like karoshi. It's entirely possible that Japan has about GDP growth per worker, but it also doesn't say much for the country if they were just pushing it by blunt force.
ReplyDeleteIf they were all working themselves to death they wouldn't have such a high life expectancy, would they?
The point is that country-for-country comparisons don't tell you much about the U.S., because there's seldom an uniform national standard. The standard of living in Massachusetts is extremely high, while it is relatively lower in Michigan.
I don't see that this follows at all unless you're rejecting the whole idea of averages.
The SE of England is a bit of an outlier, in that it is very wealthy, but also is quite unequal and people at the bottom tend to be paid very poorly.
ReplyDeleteAre we talking about Polish plumbers, or something else entirely?
If they were all working themselves to death they wouldn't have such a high life expectancy, would they?
That's a rather nice point, but my point relates to the Japanese working more hours than others, and not to its lethality. If they got the same standard of living by working more, that's hardly saying much.
I don't see that this follows at all unless you're rejecting the whole idea of averages.
The point I am trying to make is that statistical comparisons between say, U.S. and France are not very informative, because an U.S. national average is basically a composite rather than a snapshot, perhaps more so than for other jurisdictions.
A much more useful comparison, I think, is between say, France and California, or England and the Northeast, or Portugal and Arizona, or Colorado and Switzerland, Connecticut and Luxembourg, so on. Directly compare OECD countries with American states.
Are we talking about Polish plumbers, or something else entirely?
ReplyDeleteSomething else entirely. Cleaners, cab drivers, retail workers. Dirty Pretty Things territory.
The point I am trying to make is that statistical comparisons between say, U.S. and France are not very informative, because an U.S. national average is basically a composite rather than a snapshot, perhaps more so than for other jurisdictions.
ReplyDeleteFor Gini coefficients the differences are not hugely significant for the purposes of this discussion. All US states have a much higher Gini coefficient than any of the wealthy European states. No European state, save perhaps Portugal, has a comparable Gini coefficient. And the wealthy US states tend to have significantly higher Gini coefficients than the average in the US.
So for example California has a Gini coefficient of .47, while France has one of around .28 - that's a huge difference.
And incidentally, there's a huge difference between the SE of England, and the rest, so I'm not sure where you're going to stop with your composites. North Italy and S. Italy have completely different economies, and so forth.
The standard of living in Massachusetts is extremely high, while it is relatively lower in Michigan.
This isn't actually true. The standard of living in Massachusetts is high if you're well off. Its pretty crappy if you're poor. Gotta watch those composites :)
The difference in hours worked between the US and Japan are very slight. Well within error margins.
ReplyDeleteCian: yes. Productivity per hour in Japan is slightly below EU average and hours worked is slightly above, but below such paragons of ceaseless effort as Portugal, Italy and Greece.
ReplyDeleteFor Korea, on the other hand, this point is more cogent; their hours worked are massive and their productivity's really pretty low.
ReplyDeleteThe difference in hours worked between the US and Japan are very slight. Well within error margins.
ReplyDeleteData and methodology? Because if it is based on official records then the data is more or less useless, as the common practice is to work socially expected overtime with at most tacit recognition, without extra pay or bureaucratic recognition. The cases where employees are working while the rest of the lights have been turned off, for example, would be unrecorded.
If it is based on private returns within the census, it should theoretically be reliable, but it ls also unverifiable.
So for example California has a Gini coefficient of .47, while France has one of around .28 - that's a huge difference.
I was never particularly sure how much to trust French data (nothing wrong with their government; there is just much more prevalent tax evasion giong on). Presumably the .28 figure is more or less accurate, though.
For Korea, on the other hand, this point is more cogent; their hours worked are massive and their productivity's really pretty low.
ReplyDeletePresumably the Koreans are actually reporting all, or at least most, of their overtime.
Someone please inform me on the statistical methodology, because I really have no clue as to how they got the numbers they did.
From the explanatory document:
ReplyDelete"Japan: Data for total employment are Secretariat estimates based on data on monthly hours worked by regular workers in the non-farm private sector taken from the Monthly Labour Survey of Establishments, then extended to agricultural and government sectors, non-regular workers and the self-employed by means of actual hours worked from the Labour Force Survey. Annual hours worked are on a per job basis.
Data for dependent employment supplied by Statistics Bureau, Management and Coordination Agency, from the Monthly Labour Survey, referring to all industries excluding agriculture, forest, fisheries and government services. Annual hours per dependent employee are also on a per job basis."
The OECD annual working hours are expressed as total hours worked divided by number of employed persons; if the above blurb means what I think it means, then the Japanese numbers are more or less bullshit, because it would entail massive underreporting. The OECD discourages using their numbers for cross-country comparisons because reporting bases are variant.
Ajay: Korea's not a rich country, though. Middle income, and doing rather less well since they followed western advice.
ReplyDeleteData and methodology? Because if it is based on official records then the data is more or less useless, as the common practice is to work socially expected overtime with at most tacit recognition, without extra pay or bureaucratic recognition. The cases where employees are working while the rest of the lights have been turned off, for example, would be unrecorded.
Great. Argument via anecdotal rumour. I have absolutely no idea, but I do know that the US figures do understate US working hours. So, you know, there's that.
And you do realise that not all Japanese workers are salary men, right? You're talking about a smallish chunk of the working population. I doubt it would make that significant a difference to the figures, any more than the hours worked by pre-partner status lawyers, or investment bankers, or management consultants (which are also going to be underreported in the statistics).
Anyway, no I'm not going to do lots of digging into methodology for an anonymous commentator on an obscure blog. Crazy I know.
Ajay: Korea's not a rich country, though. Middle income, and doing rather less well since they followed western advice.
ReplyDeleteData and methodology? Because if it is based on official records then the data is more or less useless, as the common practice is to work socially expected overtime with at most tacit recognition, without extra pay or bureaucratic recognition. The cases where employees are working while the rest of the lights have been turned off, for example, would be unrecorded.
Great. Argument via anecdotal rumour. I have absolutely no idea, but I do know that the US figures do understate US working hours. So, you know, there's that.
And you do realise that not all Japanese workers are salary men, right? You're talking about a smallish chunk of the working population. I doubt it would make that significant a difference to the figures, any more than the hours worked by pre-partner status lawyers, or investment bankers, or management consultants (which are also going to be underreported in the statistics).
Anyway, no I'm not going to do lots of digging into methodology for an anonymous commentator on an obscure blog. Crazy I know.
This is the explanatory blurb for Korean numbers (again, OECD):
ReplyDelete"Korea: Data for total employment taken from the OECD National Accounts questionnaire. Weekly actual hours worked are multiplied by a factor of 52 weeks to obtain annual hours worked estimates.
Data for dependent employment supplied by the Ministry of Labour from the Survey on Wages and Working Hours at establishments with five or more regular employees, but covering all employees: regular and non-regular."
Anonymous: I repeat. You do realise that the US working hours are also underreported, right?
ReplyDeletePresumably the Koreans are actually reporting all, or at least most, of their overtime.
Or maybe they just work longer hours. Crazy I know.
The OECD annual working hours are expressed as total hours worked divided by number of employed persons; if the above blurb means what I think it means, then the Japanese numbers are more or less bullshit,
ReplyDeleteYou're not really doing your credibility any favours by making such a ludicrously strong statement. They might be inaccurate (though please state your reasons for believing they are less accurate than the US numbers), but there is likely to be some relationship to reality.
Anonymous: I repeat. You do realise that the US working hours are also underreported, right?
ReplyDeleteWell yes, but I don't think we are talking about the same ballpark here. Not that many Americans are bankers or consultants. Anyways, the blurb for American data:
"United States: Data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Office of Productivity and Technology (OPT). Revised estimates of the annual hour per worker series. The annual working hours series are unpublished data expressed on a per job basis. The annual hours series are derived from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) for production and non-supervisory workers in private sector jobs and from the Current Population Survey (CPS) for other workers. The OECD Secretariat converts hours per job series to hours per worker series by multiplying the job-based annual hours of work by (1 + CPS based share of multiple jobholders in total employment)."
You're not really doing your credibility any favours by making such a ludicrously strong statement. They might be inaccurate (though please state your reasons for believing they are less accurate than the US numbers), but there is likely to be some relationship to reality.
ReplyDeleteWell, pretty much every white-collar career worker engages in tacit overtime, and pretty hefty ones too (Wikipedia verifies that Toyota puts out PA announcement every hour after 7 p.m. urging workers to go home, which presumably normalizes overtime before it), so there's that. It's a real chunk of the labour force, and changes social norms regarding working hours.
The whole statistics/methodology debate is both dull and irrelevant anyway to your original point, which was your assertion that Japan has not been successful and prosperous for the last two decades. This is wrong.
ReplyDeletewhich was your assertion that Japan has not been successful and prosperous for the last two decades. This is wrong.
ReplyDeleteMy point was that if they are just jacking up the working hours instead of matching US and Euro productivity, then that's not economic success by conventional definitions. Our advice to developing countries is not "just work harder." Which is why the stats debate is germane.
(If the real numbers did indicate a noticeable difference in productivity between Japan and the U.S. and U.K., then we'd probably stop regarding Japan as an ongoing economic success.)
ReplyDeleteBrazil is the really interesting question: what the hell is happening there? I hear their economy's doing well.
Anyway, you obviously don't care about the statistics, because your own quote makes quite clear that the Japanese hours data is based on surveys rather than on payroll reporting.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you obviously don't care about the statistics, because your own quote makes quite clear that the Japanese hours data is based on surveys rather than on payroll reporting.
ReplyDeleteI think you might want to investigate what the word "survey" can mean in the context of economic statistics.
(I am presuming that business surveys are generally filled out by accounting departments based on the business's official numbers.)
ReplyDeleteAll hours-worked data is based on surveys, basically because it would be absurdly disproportionately costly to do them any other way. Rush hour on the Tokyo subway is 5 to 7, same as in New York.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, no I'm not going to do lots of digging into methodology for an anonymous commentator on an obscure blog.
Oh Cian, you know how to hurt a guy. This was once a really big blog, did I ever mention that?
You have mentioned it, usually in posts designed to drive your remaining readership away...
ReplyDeleted^2:
ReplyDeleteFrom a FT article, on Japanese work culture:
"According to Rengo, a national association of trade unions, 84 per cent of full-time workers do overtime and one in five puts in an extra 20 hours or more a week. Though long hours are hardly unheard of in other countries, overwork is closer to the rule than the exception in Japan."
An extra 20 hours a week is 60 hours total. That's running close to NYC corporate lawyer hours (12 hours a day for 8 hours of billable time, or about 2000 hours of billables a year).
"Yet, along with the outrage, the scandal has generated some sympathy for the candle-burning bureaucrats. Their overtime is copious, and roughly one in 10 habitually works past 11pm, according to a survey by the public workers’ union."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7feb2804-5e8f-11dd-b354-000077b07658.html#axzz1EygXhqoq
Well, pretty much every white-collar career worker engages in tacit overtime, and pretty hefty ones too
ReplyDeletePretty much every white-collar career worker in the US and UK who works in the private sector engages in tacit overtime also. As DSquared points out, the existence of Tokyo rush hour strongly suggests that it isn't generally hefty in Japan.
Not that many Americans are bankers or consultants.
And are many Japanese people working extremely long hours? Nobody's arguing that some do, just like some UK/US workers do. The question is it large enough to make a significant difference to the official statistics.
ReplyDelete"According to Rengo, a national association of trade unions, 84 per cent of full-time workers do overtime and one in five puts in an extra 20 hours or more a week. Though long hours are hardly unheard of in other countries, overwork is closer to the rule than the exception in Japan."
And how much of this is reported, which is the only relevant thing for your original point.
If we go back to ajay's original point:
ReplyDeleteIf you look at GDP growth per worker, Japan spent the last decade growing faster than pretty much any other developed nation.
then you can see that Anonymous needs not only to establish the existence of a large amount of "dark matter" in the Japanese hours-worked series, but to established that this has been growing over the last decade - otherwise, the growth in GDP per worker has to reflect productivity.
And how much of this is reported, which is the only relevant thing for your original point.
ReplyDeleteNot very much of it, I would think. The Rengo number is presumably based on surveys of their membership, while the Government numbers are based on surveys of businesses that are actually filled out by payroll administrators based on official payroll figures.
If you crunch the numbers, it's pretty difficult to square the numbers being reported by Rengo and the comparative numbers reported to the OECD. I don't think that 20% of FT US/UK workers are working 20+ hours a week.
then you can see that Anonymous needs not only to establish the existence of a large amount of "dark matter" in the Japanese hours-worked series, but to established that this has been growing over the last decade - otherwise, the growth in GDP per worker has to reflect productivity.
ReplyDeleteIf you are talking about the derivative of the derivative, as in the relative acceleration of Japanese productivity growth compared to in the West, then I suppose it could be persuasive. The problem with that is I think Japan underperformed in the 90's, so this might entirely be due to catch-up.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/17847-stephen-roach-on-german-and-japanese-productivity-growth
ReplyDeleteFrom Stephen Roach's numbers:
Japan's productivity growth from 1995 to 2002 was 1.2% yearly. American productivity growth from 1996 to 2005 was 2.8% yearly.
For 1996 to 2002, the difference in productivity growth amounted to about 11.6% (I compounded the numbers, correct me if I'm wrong). That's pretty big.
I suspect that what Japan needs is more Protestantism (snigger).
ReplyDeleteI am afraid that US productivity numbers for 1996-2005 need to be taken very carefully, because there was a very large contribution from the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector.
ReplyDelete"Thanks to these reforms, Swedish productivity growth, which had averaged 1.2% a year from 1980 to 1990, accelerated to a remarkable 2.2% a year from 1991 to 1998 and 2.5% from 1999 to 2005, according to the McKinsey Global Institute."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.economist.com/node/17173903
Both Japan and Sweden have economies with large high-tech and complex-machinery sectors, with heavy presence of large industrial conglomerates.
Man with a blunderbuss at a shooting range. You'd figure that given enough time he'd hit something, yet somehow he never does.
ReplyDeleteIts nice to see that the economist is still confusing correlation with causation.
No one is endorsing the Economist here. I am just using the article for Sweden's productivity growth numbers.
ReplyDelete(Yes, it's wrong about reforms "causing" Swedish uptick in productivity growth. My point was that there was a comparative uptick at all; the reason is not the important thing here.)
Professor Brad Delong:
ReplyDelete"After the crash of the Japanese stock and real estate markets at the end of the 1980s, I was still very optimistic about the medium-run growth prospects of the Japanese economy. I looked at the enormous gap between world best-practice and Japanese productivity outside of export industry. I looked at Japan's extraordinarily high level of domestic investment, and thought about how true it was that new capital goods embodied new and more productive technologies. I looked at the extent to which Japan was developing a comparative advantage in the most innovative and high technology components of manufacturing. And I thought that the end of Japan's "bubble economy" would produce a short and perhaps sharp recession, but would then be followed by a rapid recovery and a renewal of rapid Japanese productivity growth.
I was wrong.
The 1990s saw *no* motion toward eroding the extraordinary *internal* productivity gaps between export industry and the rest of the economy that characterize Japan's dual economy. Domestic investment remained high, but did not seem to generate visible improvements in technology and productivity. And those parst of high-tech in which Japan had a strong comparative advantage--memory chips, LCD screens, and so forth--turned out not to be the key capital goods of the information age but more like the rubber insulation you wrapped around your wires--a necessary but hardly high-value component."
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/mark_to_market.html
With respect to Japan's economy being a success or not, there's also the (anecdotal?) evidence of one's own eyes if you ever visit the place.
ReplyDeleteThe country's unique (or nearly unique, and only for now) problem is the working age population has been falling for a while so it's moving from being a huge economy to one that's European sized.
Obviously there are other problems, but it still has the lowest unemployment rate, crime rate, inflation rate, so while perhaps not the tippety-top, it's pretty high up there.
By the way, I want to go back to this:
ReplyDeleteThe SE of England is a bit of an outlier, in that it is very wealthy, but also is quite unequal and people at the bottom tend to be paid very poorly
...
Something else entirely. Cleaners, cab drivers, retail workers. Dirty Pretty Things territory.
This is very strange, because I am pretty sure the efficiency wage for legal low-skilled workers in rich parts of the U.S. (especially California) can be something like $12 or $13 an hour. I have heard stories of supermarkets in the Bay Area paying like $17 an hour (again, legal workers, and presumably no or minimal health insurance), which I mean, isn't a great living in the Bay Area, but not completely sucky either. It's really...odd that low-skilled pay in London would be lower than in Cali, but I don't know London so I'll just have to accept that as one of the mysteries of life.
No one is endorsing the Economist here.
ReplyDeleteWell you're having a conversation with yourself, clearly. I'm reminding myself of why I stopped reading the Economist all those years ago. And now Brad de Long also. Plumbing, jeez.
Surely GDP per worker will increase as unemployment increases (assuming roughly constant GDP)?
ReplyDeleteWhy would you assume constant GDP if you're assuming increased unemployment? (Ie, the newly jobless would previously have been doing something that went into the GDP).
ReplyDelete