Krugman versus Yglesias

Paul Krugman has two explanations for why profits are rising at the expense of workers:

As best as I can tell, there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.
 

Matt Yglesias advances what I think is a better explanation:

 To put it nonpolemically, you can see in the chart that not only is there a structural trend in the labor share of output, there's also a strong cyclical trend. The labor share declines during recessions and rises during booms. And the problem of the Federal Reserve is that over the past 30 years, it has a perfect track record of never allowing inflation (which is to say a sustained period in which wages rise faster than productivity), but it doesn't have a perfect track record of never allowing recessions. The inevitable consequence of this asymmetrical success is for the labor share to steadily decline.
 

I like this argument for the simplicity: it is based on a clear policy choice that was made and which continues to this day.  There is no need for an appeal to "the world has changed" over and above the decision to be willing to hold price stability in place at the cost of employment.  This is directly relevant to today as the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate.  On one side of the mandate, they have the requirement to ensure price stability.  On the other side of the mandate they need to encourage full employment.  It's pretty clear that they are doing much better with one piece of this mandate than the other. 

To spell out or not to spell out

I just posted some thoughts on the pros and cons of teaching algorithms for solving math problems. It's  fairly long but here's a quick look:

It takes a great deal of thought to come up with an algorithm and to understand why it works, but actually performing one should be an almost entirely mechanical process. The whole point is to get the answer reliably and quickly with an absolute minimum of thinking. 

This isn't a bug; it's a feature. There are situations where you want people operating on autopilot. Thought is slow, unpredictable and distracting. You probably don't want your tax preparer stopping to reflect on the subtleties of economic distortions while filling out your 1040 and if you're an administrator, you certainly don't want students thinking about the nature of numbers while doing long division on a standardized test that determines your next bonus. You could even argue that most of the progress of mathematics over the past three centuries is due to notation that makes much of the work thought-free thus allowing mathematicians and scientists to focus on more important matters.

If you're a teacher or just someone with an interest in math education, check it out and let me know what you think.

First they come for the pigeons...

Well this is ominous:

The study, conducted largely by scientists from the University of Toulouse, is titled "Freshwater Killer Whales" and describes the beaching behavior of European catfish on the River Tarn in France. The study's abstract section states: "Among a total of 45 beaching behaviors observed and filmed, 28 percent were successful in bird capture."

Dogwalking

I was struck by this comment in Dean Dad's column:

The Times article quotes someone saying he knows people with six figure incomes from dog-walking businesses.  I don’t.  And I bet you don’t, either.
 

What is interesting about this quote is that I see a six figure income as a dog walker as plausible if you are talking revenues.  Dog walker is actually a tough gig if you are going to make it a profession and give high end experience.  You need a vehicle to transport the animals to a dog park.  You need insurance (liability and personal health).  You need to be bonded as you likely have access to people's houses when they are at work.  You are dealing with beloved animals who may well decide not to listen at a key time. 

So it takes trust and there is a lot of effort involved in building that reputation.  The effect of reputation (do you trust the professional or the new person) is an effective barrier to entry to new dog-walkers who simply can't just compete on price.  So this creates a space for some dog-walkers to end up able to generate a lot of revenue. 

But this sort of heavily networked profession is more than just picking up dog poop.  It's also about controlling lots of animals, knowing how to run a high liability business and developing an impeccable reputation -- being able to sell yourself as trustworthy.  Ending up in that sort of profession where you are the real product being sold (musicians, car salesman, model) has always been a alternate path to a decent income.  But there is a huge element of risk in all of these approaches and not everyone can end up with a highly successful network. 

Value Investing

I often cringe at Megan McArdle's social commentary, but she seems to be pretty sharp at the level of the small, individual investor.  I especially liked her comments on value investing:

Graham's big investment coups came in the early 1930s, when the market was so depressed it was literally possible to buy some stocks for less than you'd get if you just shut the place down and sold off the assets.  Buffett similarly made a lot of money in the prolonged bear market if the 1970s.  And except for a brief period in late 2008 and early 2009, the market has simply never dipped low enough for investors to make those kinds of profits.  To be sure, 2009 was a great year for value investors, but you cannot build an entire financial career off of a single nine-month period.
 

I think that this is precisely correct.  To gain huge returns (on the order of Buffet) one really needs a stock market so depressed that extraordinary value is just sitting there.  I remain skeptical that such opportunities exist (in general) where everyone is looking.  In modern, carefully analyzed and highly liquid stocks this seems to be a hard thing to pull off. 

It's also the case that it can't be done consistently.  A single mis-priced stock could end up never appreciating in value or, even worse, could suffer an adverse change (say of CEO and thus strategy).  You need to be able to play the numbers (trying for many opportunities and relying on the law of large numbers) and that probably requires systematic under-pricing. 

Incentives

There has been a recent discussion of Ross Douthat's column on women in the West not having enough children and how this is a sign of decadence.  I want to outsource one major objection to this column to James Joyner, who is far from a liberal.  Consider:

Or, as some of our fellow conservatives call it, “taking responsibility for their lives and not having more children than they can afford.” Indeed, Douthat seems to acknowledge that on the part of the individual while lamenting the collective outcome.

and

But this is an argument that we conservatives apply nowhere else that I can think of. Indeed, most American conservatives, myself included, rail against collectivism in much less significant arenas. Let government try to force us to change to a more energy efficient lightbulb or regulate the water capacity of our toilets and the calls for revolution ring out across the land. Encourage us to buy more energy efficient automobiles through tax incentives and corporate subsidies and you’re a tyrant. Suggest that we turn off electronic devices that aren’t in use and you’re at very least a dirty hippy and probably an out-and-out commie. But suggest that women give up the advances they’ve made over the last half century because somebody has to have more kids, why, what could be more reasonable?

I think that this point is completely correct.  Even worse, there are a lot of policy choices that we could implement if we decided (as a society) that we wanted more children.  Just consider programs like "Aid to Families with Dependent Children" that could be reinvented.  Or we could subsidize childcare.  Or add in mandatory long maternity leaves.  Why not use incentives to try and improve collective outcomes?

Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling and Moral Hazard

One argument for high executive compensation is that there is a high degree of risk that comes with the job. In theory, great success is met with great reward, mediocre results produce much lower compensation and anything short of that will cost you your job. This is supposed to align the interests of executives with those of shareholders -- my portfolio loses value and you lose your job -- but where we have risk, it probably makes sense to talk about moral hazard.

Think about the familiar argument against a one-time government program to bail out underwater homeowners. Even if we included a provision saying that the homeowners sign away the right to take advantage of similar programs in the future, you could still argue that the program presented a moral hazard because it set a precedent. To put it in plainer terms, it's a bad example. Other prospective homeowners will look at this and be more likely to buy more house than they can afford or, worse yet, pick up a copy of Rich Dad and start flipping houses.

We can argue about the validity of the argument in this particular case (I have problems with it myself), but we should all be able to agree on at least two points:

1. there are potential problems to shielding people from negative consequences;

2. these problems extend, not just to those shielded but to those who think they may be shielded in the future.

All of this suggests that the numerous and highly publicized examples we've seen of executives getting better compensation than their performance merits might be doing damage even in companies that really are aligning   pay and performance.

And it makes stories like this truly scary:

The latest news from the bankruptcy front at iconic Twinkies maker Hostess Brands: AP is reporting that the Irving, Texas company is planning to ask a bankruptcy judge to grant approval of bonuses totaling up to $1.8 million for its executives. Hostess says the incentive pay is necessary to assure that the 19 managers in charge of the liquidation process remain on board until the wind-down is complete. Hostess wants to make two of those executives eligible for additional financial rewards, depending on how efficiently they carry out the liquidation.

What's so disturbing here is the fact that the horrible condition of Hostess is actually an argument for increasing the potential compensation of the executives who drove it into the ground. They managed the company so badly it supposedly can't survive a change in management.

That's what I call a bad example.

Marketplace on data mining and targeted marketing

Two stat relevant segments on today's show, one on Obama email marketing and another on mining online data. Good stuff.

Tsunamis and Scientologists

Since this last post seems to have gotten some interest, here are some more thoughts (or at least some previous thoughts spelled out in greater detail).

If you remember this started with a humor piece about the horrors of living in LA. It's an old and pretty much mined out genre. It was already tired when Harlan Ellison wrote the definitive rebuttal ("Face Down in Gloria Swanson's Swimming Pool") thirty-four years ago and time has not made it any fresher. Ellison could make a meal out of this latest piece, picking through  the literary flaws or the dubious cultural observations but I have to admit, it wasn't those that really caught my attention; it was the sampling methodology. 

Of course, we don't expect writers to base their work on random samples but we can hope for representative ones and one way to accomplish that is by sampling broadly. Here we have any incredibly narrow sample, both geographically and culturally. When the author tries to generalize from the sample, he (not entirely sure of the gender)  ends up applying traits to the entire area that are only found in a tiny portion of either Hollywood or Venice Beach, specifically the most touristy parts (Not that there's anything wrong with being touristy, but it should make you nervous when an expert on a region doesn't seem to be familiar with anything you can't see from a tour bus).

Take the Tsunami signs. When you walk down to the beach in LA you almost always really do walk down. This is a rocky coast and most of the beach towns are fairly elevated (more than New York, for instance). The notable exception is Venice (which actually has canals, by the way). Venice is the only neighborhood I know of that's close to sea level. Thus it's the only place I've seen Tsunami warning signs.

Then there's the fear of Scientology the author claims all Angelenos have. In the tiny area of Hollywood the author is focusing on, signs of the church and its founder are everywhere. Literally within a two mile radius, you have multiple buildings, displays, festivals, people offering free personality tests, even an L. Ron Hubbard drive. Outside of that radius, virtually nothing and the subject of Scientology seldom comes up.

For reason that aren't entirely coincidental, the Groundlings, Second City LA and the Upright Citizen's Brigade are also in that same two mile radius, hence the author's belief that all Angelenos are fans of improv. 

It's like this through the entire piece. The author latches onto some characteristic found only in four or so square miles of LA and assumes it holds for the remaining four thousand. The result is that old story, if you take your data from an unrepresentative subpopulation and try to generalize, you're likely to come out looking like an idiot.

Now if I could just figure out how a link to this got into Felix Salmon's blog.

Horribly pretentious person seeks out horribly pretentious people so she can be horrified at their pretentions

There's a certain type of humorous writing (and you have no idea how badly I wanted to use quotation marks there) where an out-of-towner moves to a city/state/region, seeks out the most stereotypical aspects and complains about them ("The trouble with Houston is, if you don't like cowboy hats and line dancing..."). These pieces are also sometimes accompanied with impressive-sounding sociological terms, in which case they qualify as serious journalism.

The LA subgenre invariably focuses on a tiny sliver of the more than four thousand square miles of LA County (when people talk about LA, they generally mean the county). It's a tiny strip that runs through (but doesn't encompass) Silver Lake, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica. When you read one of these pieces bitching about cliche LA, you can be reasonably sure the writer didn't make it to Watts or East LA (if you want to read someone who actually did explore the area, check out Dana Goldstein).

Perhaps the worst example inexplicably come recommended by Counterparties. In it the writer, with a couple of notable exceptions, picks things that are so close they are actually in walking distance of each other, largely in a neighborhood that most Angelenos tend to avoid, leaving it to the tourists. As a result, she spends most of her time complaining about things that are only of concern to people who live in a tiny neighborhood dominated by Scientology buildings, improv theatres and tourist attractions. The writer is the only resident of LA I have ever encountered who actually talks about the stars on the sidewalk.

The only non-Hollywood area she refers to is Venice, specifically the boardwalk (once again, more of a tourist spot than a place for locals) and the Tsunami warning signs. She goes on about these at length in a way that makes me wonder if she has actually seen any of the coast other than Venice and Santa Monica (Venice is exceptionally low lying. Most of LA's coast is not).

Finally, as for the writer's depiction of LA being a town full of waiters calling themselves actors and directors, my experience here has actually been the opposite. Most people I meet are sensitive to the cliche and tend to overcompensate. I've never had a conversation with an aspiring entertainment type who overstated his or her resume. I have, however, had acquaintances I've known for a while before I happened to look them up on IMDB or Wikipedia and discovered they had done something pretty impressive. If the writer of this piece keeps running into people trying to impress her with exaggerated accomplishments, perhaps it's because they think she's shallow enough to be impressed by them.

Walmart and Unions

Matt Yglesias points out that Megan McArdle is actually making a pretty solid pro-Union arguement for Walmart (while trying to argue the opposite).  Consider:

This is a great case study in rhetorical strategies. But the analysis is admirably clear. Wal-Mart's profit margins, though by no means enormous, are larger than those of its main competitors. Given the weak national labor market, Wal-Mart has no reason to cough up extra money to its workforce. But a strong labor union could coerce them into coughing up higher pay and bringing their margins in line with Costco and Macy's. As a result, each Wal-Mart employee might get a bit less than $3,000 more a year. Whether that's "life-changing" or not is an interesting question, but since we're talking about low-wage workers here, I think the intuitions of highly paid professionals may be a bit off. It seems very plausible that the marginal hedonic value of a thousand bucks or three to Wal-Mart's workforce would be very large.

How large?  The average wage for a Walmart employee is tricky as many are not full time and the mean hourly wage is a subject of debate.  However, this is a high end estimate (both in hourly wages and in the assumption of full time employment):

The average Walmart "associate," Wake Up Walmart reports, makes $11.75 an hour. That's $20,744 per year. Those wages are slightly below the national average for retail employees, which is $12.04 an hour. They also produce annual earnings that, in a one-earner household, are below the $22,000 poverty line.
 

So a $3,000/year hike in wages would, conservatively, be a 15% increase in pay.  That would leave prices unchanged and reset the margins at Walmart to that of Macy's (hardly a disaster in the making to have margins at this level).  If the average employee makes more like $14,000 (another plausible estimate) then the pay rise is even steeper.  At these pay levels, a few thousand a year can be a life changing event, given the number of fixed expenses in life.   

The other argument Megan advances, that Amazon is coming, is admittedly more subtle.  But here is the thing, Matt is absolutely correct that Amazon is unstoppable so long as its current business model is permitted to exist.  It has no margin . . . at all, and is thus a bet on the future of e-commerce.  Now the United States has been aggressively subsidizing e-commerce in a number of ways, ranging from failing to collect sales taxes for online items, providing a reliable postal service everywhere to make the shipping model work, and Wall Street being willing to pour cash into the company despite no profits. 

But that issue doesn't affect Walmart more than any other retailer.  Nobody is immune to this problem and it remains to be seen how this will all shake out. 

Profile of a businessman I admire

I was working on a longer post about what a well run business looks like and I remembered the following Malcolm Gladwell piece for the New Yorker. When you read the first paragraph, you'll think the title of this post is a joke; when you get to the end, you'll know it's not.

Hostess and salaries

Mark pointed out that, in my Hostess and wages post, I only put in the previous wage cuts and not the new one that management was proposing.  The relevant passage:

Again, the 14-year Hostess bakery veteran: “Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”

One thing that is easy to overlook in the discussion of did Unions show inflexibility is that a 50% wage cut over less than 10 years is an amazing drop in nominal wage (and the initial drop from 30,000 to 19,000 employees).  Mark's piece has pointed out that management was not doing any of the obvious moves to try save the business.  While the actual pattern of executive compensation is slightly more complicated than early reports indicated, it is pretty clear that huge (long term) wage cuts were not envisioned in the executive suite.

In some ways this links to a broader trend of firms being reluctant to actually pay workers.  This is linked to a reluctance to train workers, as well, but that only makes sense.  But here is where the whole story gets surreal to me.  Employees are assets as well as expenses.  We all seem to get that when we pay CEOs a lot of money -- we argue that it is not just an expense but also an investment in talent.  It is true that the modern world of corporate America has been very good at breaking down trust (few employees an informal promise at all anymore).

That is part of the issue with Hostess.  Not only were they trying to drop wages but the pattern of action on the part of the management team was to focus entirely on the easy target of salaries and ignore the hard targets of actually using information to reform the company into a more competitive shape.  Now maybe that was impossible (it seems unlikely but who knows).  But then we'd expect all of the bakers to be going under.

Nor is it impossible for firms to make highly creative moves to try and survive.  Notice how McDonald's and Starbucks (two companies that I consider well run) have quietly tried to sneak into each other's space.  Suddenly there is an egg sandwich at Starbucks (why go to two drive-thrus in the morning?).  And there are Latte's at McDonalds (why pay $5 for a Latte if you can't tell the difference).  Both firms are tougher, as a result, and -- as a pleasant side effect -- customers are better off.

But I want to go back to Mark's piece -- if you want to give management credit for a well run business strategy then you should be suspicious when failure is entirely blamed on the employees (who, t the union level, typically do not craft strategy).  

For those of you who are still working their way through the leftovers

Thanksgiving, 1905 from the incomparable Windsor McCay

from Mippyville.

update: the hash was very good, thanks for asking

The real reason for almost all big business failures

The commonly voiced view of business, red in tooth and claw, a Darwinian landscape where only the fit survive may hold for small to mid-sized operations, but with big business, survival is surprisingly easy. As a rule it is only the remarkably unfit that die. When you see a big company go under you can generally find a history of incompetent management and stupid or shortsighted decisions.

Though as narrative-obsessed as their political brethren, business journalists tend to be notably averse to stories built around the question "what happens when you give the keys to an idiot?" That's a shame because some of the most entertaining accounts start with that premise. It's understandable though. Business journalists, once again like their political brethren, tend to have overly cozy relationships with their subjects and, (compared to reporters thirty or forty) tend to sympathize more with management than labor.

The decline of professional standards also plays a part. A surprising number of "news" stories are actually press releases in only slightly rewritten form and PR department go to great lengths to avoid statements that make their bosses look like morons.

Given these factors and the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that journalists often feel when forced to report that a major corporation's management is incompetent, they will almost always pass over the obvious narrative and opt instead for one of these three standards:

1. the company was made obsolete by new technology;

2. it was doomed by changing markets;

3. it just couldn't get good help.

Of course, in theory, these things can doom a company, in practice though, when you hear one of these explanations given for a collapse, you will almost always find that managerial malpractice played at least as large a role. For example, ebooks had much less to do with Borders demise than did an ill-conceived expansion into the ridiculously over-served British market.*

Here the LA Times invaluable Michael Hiltzik takes apart the standard narratives (numbers 2 and 3) of the troubles at Hostess (via Thoma, as usual)

Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die.

It failed because the people that ran it had no idea what they were doing. Every other excuse is just an attempt by the guilty to blame someone else.

...

Hostess management's efforts to blame union intransigence for the company's collapse persisted right through to the Thanksgiving eve press release announcing Hostess' liquidation, when it cited a nationwide strike by bakery workers that "crippled its operations."

That overlooks the years of union givebacks and management bad faith. Example: Just before declaring bankruptcy for the second time in eight years Jan. 11, Hostess trebled the compensation of then-Chief Executive Brian Driscoll and raised other executives' pay up to twofold. At the same time, the company was demanding lower wages from workers and stiffing employee pension funds of $8 million a month in payment obligations.

Hostess management hasn't been able entirely to erase the paper trail pointing to its own derelictions. Consider a 163-page affidavit filed as part of the second bankruptcy petition.

There Driscoll outlined a "Turnaround Plan" to get the firm back on its feet. The steps included closing outmoded plants and improving the efficiency of those that remain; upgrading the company's "aging vehicle fleet" and merging its distribution warehouses for efficiency; installing software at the warehouses to allow it to track inventory; and closing unprofitable retail stores. It also proposed to restore its advertising budget and establish an R&D program to develop new products to "maintain existing customers and attract new ones."

None of these steps, Driscoll attested, required consultation with the unions. That raises the following question: You mean to tell me that as of January 2012, Hostess still hadn't gotten around to any of this?

The company had known for a decade or more that its market was changing, but had done nothing to modernize its product line or distribution system. Its trucks were breaking down. It was keeping unprofitable stores open and having trouble figuring out how to move inventory to customers and when. It had cut back advertising and marketing to the point where it was barely communicating with customers. It had gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions from its unions, and spent none of it on these essential improvements.

The true recent history of Hostess can be excavated from piles of public filings from its two bankruptcy cases. To start with, the company has had six CEOs in the last 10 years, which is not exactly a precondition for consistent and effective corporate strategizing.

... 

Hostess first entered bankruptcy in 2004, when it was known as Interstate Bakeries. During its five years in Chapter 11, the firm obtained concessions from its unions worth $110 million a year. The unions accepted layoffs that brought the workforce down to about 19,000 from more than 30,000. There were cuts in wages, pension and health benefits. The Teamsters committed to negotiations over changes in antiquated work rules. The givebacks helped reduce Hostess' labor costs to the point where they were roughly equal to or even lower than some of its major competitors'.

But the firm emerged from bankruptcy with more debt than when it went in — in with $575 million, out with $774 million, all secured by company assets. That's pretty much the opposite of what's supposed to happen in bankruptcy. By the end, there was barely a spare distributor cap in the motor pool that wasn't mortgaged to the private equity firms and hedge funds holding the notes (and also appointing management).

... 

The post-bankruptcy leadership never executed a growth strategy. It failed to introduce a significant new product or acquire a single new brand. It lagged on bakery automation and product R&D, while rivals such as Bimbo Bakeries USA built research facilities and hired food scientists to keep their product lines fresh. At the time of the 2004 bankruptcy, Hostess was three times the size of Bimbo. Today it's less than half Bimbo's size. (Bimbo, which has been acquiring bakeries such as Sara Lee and Entenmann's right and left, might well end up with Hostess' brands.)

UPDATE * I meant to include a link to this growth fetish post that gives my take on what the people at Borders might have been thinking.