Month: July 2018

Economics, Model

The Biggest Tech Innovation is Selling Club Goods

Posted on by Zach

Economists normally splits goods into four categories:

  • Public goods are non-excludable (so anyone can access them) and non-rival (I can use them as much as I want without limiting the amount you can use them). Broadcast television, national defense, and air are all public goods.
  • Common-pool resources are non-excludable but rival (if I use them, you will have to make do with less). Iron ore, fish stocks, and grazing land are all common pool resources.
  • Private goods are excludable (their access is controlled or limited by pricing or other methods) and rival. My clothes, computer, and the parking space I have in my lease but never use are all private goods.
  • Club goods are excludable but (up to a certain point) non-rival. Think of the swimming pool in an apartment building, a large amusement park, or cellular service.

Club goods are perhaps the most interesting class of goods, because they blend properties of the three better understood classes. They aren’t open to all, but they are shared among many. They can be overwhelmed by congestion, but up until that point, it doesn’t really matter how many people are using them. Think of a gym; as long as there’s at least one free machine of every type, it’s no less convenient than your home.

Club goods offer cost savings over private goods, because you don’t have to buy something that mostly sits unused (again, think of gym equipment). People other than you can use it when it would otherwise sit around and those people can help you pay the cost. It’s for this reason that club goods represent an excellent opportunity for the right entrepreneur to turn a profit.

I currently divide tech start-ups into three classes. There are the Googles of the world, who use network effects or big data to sell advertising more effectively. There are companies like the one I work for that take advantage of modern technology to do things that were never possible before. And then there are those that are slowly and inexorably turning private goods into club goods.

I think this last group of companies (which include Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb) may be the ones that ultimately have the biggest impact on how we order our lives and what we buy. To better understand how these companies are driving this transformation, let’s go through them one by one, then talk about what it could all mean.

Netflix

When I was a child, my parents bought a video cassette player, then a DVD player, then a Blu-ray player. We owned a hundred or so video cassettes, mostly whatever movies my brother and I were obsessed with enough to want to own. Later, we found a video rental store we liked and mostly started renting movies. We never owned more than 30 DVDs and 20 Blu-rays.

Then I moved out. I have bought five DVDs since – they came as a set from Kickstarter. Anything else I wanted to watch, I got via Netflix. A few years later, the local video rental store closed down and my parents got an AppleTV and a Netflix of their own.

Buying a physical movie means buying a private good. Video rental stores can be accurately modeled as a type of club good, because even if the movie you want is already rented out, there’s probably one that you want to watch almost as much that is available. This is enough to make them approximately non-rival, while the fact that it isn’t free to rent a movie means that rented videos are definitely excludable.

Netflix represents the next evolution in this business model. As long as the Netflix engineers have done their job right, there’s no amount of watching movies I can do that will prevent you from watching movies. The service is almost truly non-rival.

Movie studios might not feel the effects of Netflix turning a large chunk of the market for movies into one focused on club goods; they’ll still get paid by Netflix. But the switch to Netflix must have been incredibly damaging for the physical media and player manufacturers. When everyone went from cassettes to DVDs or DVDs to Blu-rays, there was still a market for their wares. Now, that market is slowly and inexorably disappearing.

This isn’t just a consequence of technology. The club good business model offers such amazing cost savings that it drove a change in which technology was dominant. When you bought a movie, it would spend almost all of its life sitting on a shelf. Now Netflix acts as your agent, buying movies (or rather, their rights) and distributing such that they’re always being played and almost never sitting on the shelf.

Spotify

Spotify is very similar to Netflix. Previously, people bought physical cassettes (I’m just old enough that I remember making mix tapes from the radio). Then they switched to CDs. Then it was MP3s bought online (or, almost more likely, pirated online). But even pirating music is falling out of favour these days. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Spotify are all competing to offer unlimited music streaming to customers.

Music differs from movies in that it has a long tradition of being a public good – via broadcast radio. While that hasn’t changed yet (radio is still going strong), I do wonder how much longer the public option for music will exist, especially given the trend away from private cars that I think companies like Uber and Lyft are going to (pardon the pun) drive.

Uber and Lyft

I recently thought about buying a car. I was looking at the all-electric Kia Soul, which has a huge government rebate (for a little while yet) and financing terms that equate to negative real interest. Despite all these advantages, it turns out that when you sit down and run the numbers, it would still be cheaper for me to use Uber and Lyft to get everywhere.

We are starting to see the first, preliminary (and possible illusionary) evidence that Uber and Lyft are causing the public to change their preference away from owning cars.

A car you’ve bought is a private good, while Uber and Lyft are clearly club goods. Surge pricing means that there are basically always enough drivers for everyone who wants to go anywhere using the system.

When you buy a car, you’re signing up for it to sit around useless for almost all of its life. This is similar to what happens when you buy exercise equipment, which means the logic behind cars as a club good is just as compelling as the logic behind gyms. Previously, we hadn’t been able to share cars very efficiently because of technological limitations. Dispatching a taxi, especially to an area outside of a city centre, was always spotty, time consuming and confusing. Car-pooling to work was inconvenient.

As anyone who has used a modern ride-sharing app can tell you, inconvenient is no longer an apt descriptor.

There is a floor on how few cars we can get by on. To avoid congestion in a club good, you typically have to provision for peak load. Luckily, peak load (for anything that can sensibly be turned into a club good) always requires fewer resources than would be needed if everyone went out and bought the shared good themselves.

Even “just” substantially decreasing the absolute number of cars out there will be incredibly disruptive to the automotive sector if they don’t correctly predict the changing demand for their products.

It’s also true that increasing the average utilisation of cars could change how our cities look. Parking lots are necessary when cars are a private good, but are much less useful when they become club goods. It is my hope that malls built in the middle of giant parking moats look mighty silly in twenty years.

Airbnb

Airbnb is the most ambiguous example I have here. As originally conceived, it would have driven the exact same club good transformation as the other services listed. People who were on vacation or otherwise out of town would rent out their houses to strangers, increasing the utilisation of housing and reducing the need for dedicated hotels to be built.

Airbnb is sometimes used in this fashion. It’s also used to rent out extra rooms in an otherwise occupied house, which accomplishes almost the same thing.

But some amount of Airbnb usage is clearly taking place in houses or condos that otherwise would have been rental stock. When used in this way, it’s taking advantage of a regulatory grey zone to undercut hotel pricing. Insofar as this might result in a longer-term change towards regulations that are generally cheaper to comply with, this will be good for consumers, but it won’t really be transformational.

The great promise of club goods is that they might lead us to use less physical stuff overall, because where previously each person would buy one of a thing, now only enough units must be purchased to satisfy peak demand. If Airbnb is just shifting around where people are temporary residents, then it won’t be an example of the broader benefits of club goods (even if provides other benefits to its customers).

When Club Goods Eat The Economy

In every case (except potentially Airbnb) above, I’ve outlined how the switch from private goods to club goods is resulting in less consumption. For music and movies, it is unclear if this switch is what is providing the primary benefit. My intuition is that the club good model actually did change consumption patterns for physical copies of movies (because my impression is that few people ever did online video rentals via e.g. iTunes), whereas the MP3 revolution was what really shrunk the footprint of music media.

This switch in consumption patterns and corresponding decrease in the amount of consumption that is necessary to satisfy preferences is being primarily driven by a revolution in logistics and bandwidth. The price of club goods has always compared favourably with that of private goods. The only thing holding people back was inconvenience. Now programmers are steadily figuring out how to make that inconvenience disappear.

On the other hand, increased bandwidth has made it easier to turn any sort of digitizable media into a club good. There’s an old expression among programmers: never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of cassettes (or CDs, or DVDs, or whatever physical storage media one grew up with) hurtling down the highway. For a long time, the only way to get a 1GB movie to a customer without an appallingly long buffering period was to physically ship it (on a 56kbit/s connection, this movie would take one day and fifteen hours to download, while the aforementioned station wagon with 500 movies would take 118 weeks to download).

Change may start out slow, but I expect to see it accelerate quickly. My generation is the first to have had the internet from a very young age. The generation after us will be the first unable to remember a time before it. We trust apps like Uber and Airbnb much more than our parents, and our younger siblings trust them even more than us.

While it was only kids who trusted the internet, these new club good businesses couldn’t really affect overall economic trends. But as we come of age and start to make major economic decisions, like buying houses and cars, our natural tendency to turn towards the big tech companies and the club goods they peddle will have ripple effects on an economy that may not be prepared for it.

When that happens, there’s only one thing that is certain: there will be yet another deluge of newspaper columns talking about how millennials are destroying everything.

Advice, Literature, Model

Sanderson’s Law Applies To Cultures Too

Posted on by Zach

[Warning: Contains spoilers for The Sunset Mantle, Vorkosigan Saga (Memory and subsequent), Dune, and Chronicles of the Kencyrath]

For the uninitiated, Sanderson’s Law (technically, Sanderson’s First Law of Magic) is:

An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

Brandon Sanderson wrote this law to help new writers come up with satisfying magical systems. But I think it’s applicable beyond magic. A recent experience has taught me that it’s especially applicable to fantasy cultures.

I recently read Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss, a book that falls into one of my favourite fantasy sub-genres: hopeless siege tales.

Sunset Mantle is what’s called secondary world fantasy; it takes place in a world that doesn’t share a common history or culture (or even necessarily biosphere) with our own. Game of Thrones is secondary world fantasy, while Harry Potter is primary world fantasy (because it takes place in a different version of our world, which we chauvinistically call the “primary” one).

Secondary world fantasy gives writers a lot more freedom to play around with cultures and create interesting set-pieces when cultures collide. If you want to write a book where the Roman Empire fights a total war against the Chinese Empire, you’re going to have to put in a master’s thesis worth of work to explain how that came about (if you don’t want to be eviscerated by pedants on the internet). In a secondary world, you can very easily have a thinly veiled stand-in for Rome right next to a thinly veiled analogue of China. Give readers some familiar sounding names and culture touchstones and they’ll figure out what’s going on right away, without you having to put in effort to make it plausible in our world.

When you don’t use subtle cues, like names or cultural touchstones (for example: imperial exams and eunuchs for China, gladiatorial fights and the cursus honorum for Rome), you risk leaving your readers adrift.

Many of the key plot points in Sunset Mantle hinge on obscure rules in an invented culture/religion that doesn’t bear much resemblance to any that I’m familiar with. It has strong guest rights, like many steppes cultures; it has strong charity obligations and monotheistic strictures, like several historical strands of Christianity; it has a strong caste system and rules of ritual purity, like Hinduism; and it has a strong warrior ethos, complete with battle rage and rules for dealing with it, similar to common depictions of Norse cultures.

These actually fit together surprising well! Reiss pulled off an entertaining book. But I think many of the plot points fell flat because they were almost impossible to anticipate. The lack of any sort of consistent real-world analogue to the invented culture meant that I never really had an intuition of what it would demand in a given situation. This meant that all of the problems in the story that were solved via obscure points of culture weren’t at all satisfying to me. There was build up, but then no excitement during the resolution. This was common enough that several chunks of the story didn’t really work for me.

Here’s one example:

“But what,” asked Lemist, “is a congregation? The Ayarith school teaches that it is ten men, and the ancient school of Baern says seven. But among the Irimin school there is a tradition that even three men, if they are drawn in together into the same act, by the same person, that is a congregation, and a man who has led three men into the same wicked act shall be put to death by the axe, and also his family shall bear the sin.”

All the crowd in the church was silent. Perhaps there were some who did not know against whom this study of law was aimed, but they knew better than to ask questions, when they saw the frozen faces of those who heard what was being said.

(Reiss, Alter S.. Sunset Mantle (pp. 92-93). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.)

This means protagonist Cete’s enemy erred greatly by sending three men to kill him and had better cut it out if he doesn’t want to be executed. It’s a cool resolution to a plot point – or would be if it hadn’t taken me utterly by surprise. As it is, it felt kind of like a cheap trick to get the author out of a hole he’d written himself into, like the dreaded deux ex machina – god from the machine – that ancient playwrights used to resolve conflicts they otherwise couldn’t.

(This is the point where I note that it is much harder to write than it is to criticize. This blog post is about something I noticed, not necessarily something I could do better.)

I’ve read other books that do a much better job of using sudden points of culture to resolve conflict in a satisfying manner. Lois McMaster Bujold (I will always be recommending her books) strikes me as particularly apt. When it comes time for a key character of hers to make a lateral career move into a job we’ve never heard of before, it feels satisfying because the job is directly in line with legal principles for the society that she laid out six books earlier.

The job is that of Imperial Auditor – a high powered investigator who reports directly to the emperor and has sweeping powers –  and it’s introduced when protagonist Miles loses his combat career in Memory. The principles I think it is based on are articulated in the novella Mountains of Mourning: “the spirit was to be preferred over the letter, truth over technicalities. Precedent was held subordinate to the judgment of the man on the spot”.

Imperial Auditors are given broad discretion to resolve problems as they see fit. The main rule is: make sure the emperor would approve. We later see Miles using the awesome authority of this office to make sure a widow gets the pension she deserves. The letter of the law wasn’t on her side, but the spirit was, and Miles, as the Auditor on the spot, was empowered to make the spirit speak louder than the letter.

Wandering around my bookshelves, I was able to grab a couple more examples of satisfying resolutions to conflicts that hinged on guessable cultural traits:

  • In Dune, Fremen settle challenges to leadership via combat. Paul Maud’dib spends several years as their de facto leader, while another man, Stilgar, holds the actual title. This situation is considered culturally untenable and Paul is expected to fight Stilgar so that he can lead properly. Paul is able to avoid this unwanted fight to the death (he likes Stilgar) by appealing to the only thing Fremen value more than their leadership traditions: their well-established pragmatism. He says that killing Stilgar before the final battle would be little better than cutting off his own arm right before it. If Frank Herbert hadn’t mentioned the extreme pragmatism of the Fremen (to the point that they render down their dead for water) several times, this might have felt like a cop-out.
  • In The Chronicles of the Kencyrath, it looks like convoluted politics will force protagonist Jame out of the military academy of Tentir. But it’s mentioned several times that the NCOs who run the place have their own streak of honour that allows them to subvert their traditionally required oaths to their lords. When Jame redeems a stain on the Tentir’s collective honour, this oath to the college gives them an opening to keep her there and keep their oaths to their lords. If PC Hodgell hadn’t spent so long building up the internal culture of Tentir, this might have felt forced.

It’s hard to figure out where good foreshadowing ends and good cultural creation begins, but I do think there is one simple thing an author can do to make culture a satisfying source of plot resolution: make a culture simple enough to stereotype, at least at first.

If the other inhabitants of a fantasy world are telling off-colour jokes about this culture, what do they say? A good example of this done explicitly comes from Mass Effect: “Q: How do you tell when a Turian is out of ammo? A: He switches to the stick up his ass as a backup weapon.” 

(Even if you’ve never played Mass Effect, you now know something about Turians.)

At the same time as I started writing this, I started re-reading PC Hodgell’s The Chronicles of the Kencyrath, which provided a handy example of someone doing everything right. The first three things we learn about the eponymous Kencyr are:

  1. They heal very quickly
  2. They dislike their God
  3. Their honour code is strict enough that lying is a deadly crime and calling some a liar a deathly insult

There are eight more books in which we learn all about the subtleties of their culture and religion. But within the first thirty pages, we have enough information that we can start making predictions about how they’ll react to things and what’s culturally important.

When Marc, a solidly dependable Kencyr who is working as a guard and bound by Kencyr cultural laws to loyally serve his employer lets the rather more eccentric Jame escape from a crime scene, we instantly know that him choosing her over his word is a big deal. And indeed, while he helps her escape, he also immediately tries to kill himself. Jame is only able to talk him out of it by explaining that she hadn’t broken any laws there. It was already established that in the city of Tai-Tastigon, only those who physically touch stolen property are in legal jeopardy. Jame never touched the stolen goods, she was just on the scene. Marc didn’t actually break his oath and so decides to keep living.

God Stalk is not a long book, so that fact that PC Hodgell was able to set all of this up and have it feel both exciting in the moment and satisfying in the resolution is quite remarkable. It’s a testament to what effective cultural distillation, plus a few choice tidbits of extra information can do for a plot.

If you don’t come up with a similar distillation and convey it to your readers quickly, there will be a period where you can’t use culture as a satisfying source of plot resolution. It’s probably no coincidence that I noticed this in Sunset Mantle, which is a long(-ish) novella. Unlike Hodgell, Reiss isn’t able to develop a culture in such a limited space, perhaps because his culture has fewer obvious touchstones.

Sanderson’s Second Law of Magic can be your friend here too. As he stated it, the law is:

The limitations of a magic system are more interesting than its capabilities. What the magic can’t do is more interesting than what it can.

Similarly, the taboos and strictures of a culture are much more interesting than what it permits. Had Reiss built up a quick sketch of complicated rules around commanding and preaching (with maybe a reference that there could be surprisingly little theological difference between military command and being behind a pulpit), the rule about leading a congregation astray would have fit neatly into place with what else we knew of the culture.

Having tight constraints imposed by culture doesn’t just allow for plot resolution. It also allows for plot generation. In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles gets caught up in a seemingly unwinnable conflict because he gave his word; several hundred pages earlier Bujold establishes that breaking a word is, to a Barrayaran, roughly equivalent to sundering your soul.

It is perhaps no accident that the only thing we learn initially about the Kencyr that isn’t a descriptive fact (like their healing and their fraught theological state) is that honour binds them and can break them. This constraint, that all Kencyr characters must be honourable, does a lot of work driving the plot.

This then would be my advice: when you wish to invent a fantasy culture, start simple, with a few stereotypes that everyone else in the world can be expected to know. Make sure at least one of them is an interesting constraint on behaviour. Then add in depth that people can get to know gradually. When you’re using the culture as a plot device, make sure to stick to the simple stereotypes or whatever other information you’ve directly given your reader. If you do this, you’ll develop rich cultures that drive interesting conflicts and you’ll be able to use cultural rules to consistently resolve conflict in a way that will feel satisfying to your readers.

Software

Against Programming Hobbies

Posted on by Zach

[Epistemic Status: Written more harshly than my actual views for persuasive effect. I should also point out that all views expressed here are my own, not my employer’s; when I’m hiring, my first commitment is complying with the relevant Federal, Provincial, and local legislation. My second commitment is to finding the best people. Ideology doesn’t come into it. Serendipitously, I think everything I’ve argued for here helps me discharge both duties.]

In my capacity as a senior employee at Alert Labs (it’s easy to be senior when the company is only three years old), I do a lot of hiring. Since I started, I’ve been involved in interviews for four full time hires and five interns. Throughout all of this, I’ve learned a lot about what to look for in a resume.

I’ve also gotten in the occasional disagreement about what we should look for in in people we’re (potentially) hiring.

When looking through resumes for software engineers, it’s accepted practice to look for independent programming projects. These are things that people do in their spare time, normally to learn new languages or make things that they find cool. I’ve done a few myself. If you look at my projects, you’ll see one where I create a tool for my favourite pen and paper roll playing game, one where I work through math problems, and one where I’m trying to better understand the concept of randomness.

There’s a curious double vision in the profession about programming projects. We all tell ourselves people do them only for fun. Yet we also look for them on resumes.

The second fact means that the first cannot always be true. My projects partially exist for my resume. I’ve enjoyed working on them. But if there wasn’t a strong financial motive to have worked on them, I probably wouldn’t have. Or I’d have done them differently.

As a someone who hires, I can’t claim that programming projects aren’t useful. They give, perhaps better than anything else (e.g. the much-derided whiteboard interview), an idea of what sort of code someone would write as an employee. I’ve called people – especially people without any formal education in CS – in for interviews largely on the strengths of their personal projects. Seeing that someone can use the languages that they say they can, that they can write unit tests and documentation, and that they can lay out a large project makes me have more faith that they can do the job.

When programming projects are used as a complement to employment and educational history, I think they help the field.

But I’ve also argued stringently against treating personal projects as a key part of any hiring process. While I like using them as a supplement, I think there are four good reasons not to rely on them as any sort of primary criteria.

First, not everyone has time for projects. Using them as a screen sifts out people with caregiving responsibilities, with families, or with strong commitments in their personal life. When you’re only hiring from people without other commitments, it becomes easier for a team to slip into a workaholic lifestyle. This is bad, because despite what many people think, studies consistently show no productivity benefits from working more than 40 hours per week for prolonged periods. All long hours do is deprive people of personal time.

(In a world where people with caregiving responsibilities are more likely to be female, overreliance on personal projects can also become a subtle form of hiring discrimination.)

I’m incredibly grateful that I work at a company founded by people with both management experience and children. Their management experience means they know better than to let their employees burn out from overwork, while their children mean that the company has always had a culture of taking time for other commitments. This doesn’t mean that I’m never in for sixty hours in a week, or that I never have to deal with a server failure at midnight. Work-life balance doesn’t mean that I don’t take my work seriously; it just means I don’t conflate being in the office for 12 hours at a time with that seriousness.

Second, requiring people to have programming hobbies sifts out a lot of interesting people. I understand that there exist people that only want to live code, only want to talk about code, and want to be surrounded by people who are also in that mode, but that isn’t me. I joined Alert Labs because I wanted to solve real-life problems, not make tools for people just like me. Having a well-rounded team means that people spontaneously generate ideas for new projects. It means they take ownership for features (like ensuring everything on our website follows accessibility guidelines) that would never percolate to the top of my mind. It makes our team stronger and more effective.

Outside of a few other oddball professions (lawyers, I’m looking at you), no one else is expected to treat their work as their hobby. People can make their hobbies into their work (look at webcomic artists or bloggers who make it big) and this was one of the initial purposes of personal programming projects. It’s not at all unusual to find something you like enough that you’d make a full-time job of it if you could. But then you normally get new hobbies.

People who fall in love with programming are lucky in that they often can turn it into a full-time job. Writers… are somewhat less lucky. I haven’t monetized my blog because I’d find the near-impossibility of making money off of discursive posts about political economy disheartening. Keeping my blog as a vanity project keeps it fun.

 

But we programmers shouldn’t let our economic fortune turn what has always been the path that a minority of people take into our field into a bona fide requirement.

Third, I dislike what an overemphasis on programming projects can do to resumes. I frequently see interesting hobbies shunted aside to make room for less-than-inspired programming projects. I’ve seen people who got the memo that they needed a profile full of projects, but not the memo that it had to be their projects. This leads to GitHub pages full of forks of well-known projects. I don’t know who this is supposed to fool, but it sure doesn’t work on me.

When students send in resumes, they all put the same four class projects on them, in the somewhat futile hope that we won’t notice and we’ll consider them adequately dedicated. I wish the fact that they were paying $8500 per term to learn about CS could be taken as proof enough of their dedication and I wouldn’t have to read about pong sixty times a semester, but that is apparently not the world I live in.

My final beef with an overemphasis on programming hobbies is that many important skills can’t be learned in front of a computer. Not all hobbies teach you how to work together with a disparate team, respectfully navigate disagreements with other people, and effectively address co-worker concerns, but those that do are worth their weight in gold. Software is becoming ever more complex and is having ever more capital thrown at it. We’ve exhausted what we can do with single brilliant loners, which means that we now need to turn to functional teams.

This isn’t meant to conjure up negative and insulting stereotypes about people who spend all their spare time programming. Many of these people are incredibly kind and very devoted to mentoring new members of our community.

I don’t want people who program in their spare time and love it with all their hearts to be tarred with negative stereotypes. But I also don’t want people with other interests to be considered uncommitted dilettantes. And I hope we can build a profession that believes neither myth.

Economics, Politics, Quick Fix

Why Linking The Minimum Wage To Inflation Can Backfire

Posted on by Zach

Last week I explained how poor decisions by central bankers (specifically failing to spur inflation) can make recessions much worse and lead to slower wage growth during recovery.

(Briefly: inflation during recessions reduces the real cost of payroll, cutting business expenses and making firing people unnecessary. During a recovery, it makes hiring new workers cheaper and so leads to more being hired. Because central bankers failed to create inflation during and after the great recession, many businesses are scared of raising salaries. They believe (correctly) that this will increase their payroll expenses to the point where they’ll have to lay many people off if another recession strikes. Until memories of the last recession fade or central bankers clean up their act, we shouldn’t expect wages to rise.)

Now I’d like to expand on an offhand comment I made about the minimum wage last week and explore how it can affect recovery, especially if it’s indexed to inflation.

The minimum wage represents a special case when it comes to pay cuts and layoffs in recessions. While it’s always theoretically possible to convince people to take a pay cut rather than a layoff (although in practice it’s mostly impossible), this option isn’t available for people who make the minimum wage. It’s illegal to pay them anything less. If bad times strike and business is imperiled, people making the minimum wage might have to be laid off.

I say “might”, because when central bankers aren’t proving useless, inflation can rescue people making the minimum wage from being let go. Inflation makes the minimum wage relatively less valuable, which reduces the cost of payroll relative to other inputs and helps to save jobs that pay minimum wage. This should sound familiar, because inflation helps people making the minimum wage in the exact same way it helps everyone else.

Because of increasingly expensive housing and persistently slow wage growth, some jurisdictions are experimenting with indexing the minimum wage to inflation. This means that the minimum wage rises at the same rate as the cost of living. Most notably (to me, at least), this group includes my home province of Ontario.

I think decreasing purchasing power is a serious problem (especially because of its complicated intergenerational dynamics), but I think this is one of the worst possible ways to deal with it.

When the minimum wage is tied to inflation, recessions can become especially dangerous and drawn out.

With the minimum wage rising in lockstep with inflation, any attempts to decrease payroll costs in real terms (that is to say: inflation adjusted terms) is futile to the extent that payroll expenses are for minimum wage workers. Worse, people who were previously making above the minimum wage and might have had their jobs saved by inflation can be swept up by an increasingly high minimum wage.

This puts central bankers in a bind. As soon as the minimum wage is indexed to inflation, inflation is no longer a boon to all workers. Suddenly, many workers can find themselves in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Without inflation, they may be too expensive to keep. With it, they may be saved… until the minimum wage comes for them too. If a recession goes on long enough, only high-income workers would be sparred.

In addition, minimum wage (or near-minimum wage) workers who are laid off during a period of higher inflation (an in this scenario, there will be many) will suffer comparatively more, as their savings get exhausted even more quickly.

Navigating these competing needs would be an especially tough challenge for certain central banks like the US Federal Reserve – those banks that have dual mandates to maintain stable prices and full employment. If a significant portion of the US ever indexes its minimum wage to inflation, the Fed will have no good options.

It is perhaps darkly humorous that central banks, which bear an unusually large parcel of the blame for our current slow wage growth, stand to face the greatest challenges from the policies we’re devising to make up for their past shortcomings. Unfortunately, I think a punishment of this sort is rather like cutting off our collective nose to spite our collective face.

There are simple policies we could enact to counter the risks here. Suspending any peg to inflation during years that contain recessions (in Ontario at least, the minimum wage increase due to inflation is calculated annually) would be a promising start. Wage growth after a recession could be ensured with a rebound clause, or better yet, the central bank actually doing its job properly.

I am worried about the political chances (and popularity once enacted) of any such pragmatic policy though. Many people respond to recessions with the belief that the government can make things better by passing the right legislation – forcing the economy back on track by sheer force of ink. This is rarely the case, especially because the legislation that people have historically clamoured for when unemployment is high is the sort that increases wages, not lowers them. This is a disaster when unemployment threatens because of too-high wages. FDR is remembered positively for his policy of increasing wages during the great depression, even though this disastrous decision strangled the recovery in its crib. I don’t expect any higher degree of economic literacy from people today.

To put my fears more plainly, I worry that politicians, faced with waning popularity and a nipping recession, would find allowing the minimum wage to be frozen too much of a political risk. I frankly don’t trust most politicians to follow through with a freeze, even if it’s direly needed.

Minimum wages are one example of a tradeoff we make between broad access and minimum standards. Do we try and make sure everyone who wants a job can have one, or do we make sure people who have jobs aren’t paid too little for their labour, even if that hurts the unemployed? As long as there’s scarcity, we’re going to have to struggle with how we ensure that as many people as possible have their material needs met and that involves tradeoffs like this one.

Minimum wages are just one way we can do this. Wage subsidies or a Universal Basic Income are both being discussed with increasing frequency these days.

But when we’re making these kind of compassionate decisions, we need to look at the risks of whatever systems we choose. Proponents of indexing the minimum wage to inflation haven’t done a good job of understanding the grave risk it poses to the health of our economy and perhaps most of all, to the very people they seek to help. In places like Ontario, where the minimum wage is already indexed to inflation, we’re going to pay for their lack of foresight next time an economic disaster strikes.

Advice, Model

Context Windows

Posted on by Zach

When you’re noticing that you’re talking past someone, what does it look like? Do you feel like they’re ignoring all the implications of the topic at hand (“yes, I know the invasion of Iraq is causing a lot of pain, but I think the important question is, ‘did they have WMDs?'”)? Or do you feel like they’re avoiding talking about the object-level point in favour of other considerations (“factory farmed animals might suffer, but before we can consider whether that’s justified or not, shouldn’t we decide whether we have any obligation to maximize the number of living creatures?”)?

I’m beginning to suspect that many tense disagreements and confused, fruitless conversations are caused by differences in how people conceive of and process the truth. More, I think I have a model that explains why some people can productively disagree with anyone and everyone, while others get frustrated very easily with even their closest friends.

The basics of this model come from a piece that Jacob Falkovich wrote for Quillette. He uses two categories, “contextualizers” and “decouplers”, to analyze an incredibly unproductive debate (about race and IQ) between Vox’s Ezra Klein and Dr. Sam Harris.

Klein is the contextualizer, a worldview that comes naturally to a political journalist. Contextualizers see ideas as embedded in a context. Questions of “who does this effect?”, “how is this rooted in society?”, and “what are the (group) identities of people pushing this idea?” are the bread and butter of contextualizers. One of the first things Klein says in his debate with Harris is:

Here is my view: I think you have a deep empathy for Charles Murray’s side of this conversation, because you see yourself in it [because you also feel attacked by “politically correct” criticism]. I don’t think you have as deep an empathy for the other side of this conversation. For the people being told once again that they are genetically and environmentally and at any rate immutably less intelligent and that our social policy should reflect that. I think part of the absence of that empathy is it doesn’t threaten you. I don’t think you see a threat to you in that, in the way you see a threat to you in what’s happened to Murray. In some cases, I’m not even quite sure you heard what Murray was saying on social policy either in The Bell Curve and a lot of his later work, or on the podcast. I think that led to a blind spot, and this is worth discussing.

Klein is highlighting what he thinks is the context that probably informs Harris’s views. He’s suggesting that Harris believes Charles Murray’s points about race and IQ because they have a common enemy. He’s aware of the human tendency to like ideas that come from people we feel close to (myside bias) – or that put a stick in the eye of people we don’t like.

There are other characteristics of contextualizers. They often think thought experiments are pointless, given that they try and strip away all the complex ways that society affects our morality and our circumstances. When they make mistakes, it is often because they fall victim to the “ought-is” fallacy; they assume that truths with bad outcomes are not truths at all.

Harris, on the other hand, is a decoupler. Decoupling involves separating ideas from context, from personal experience, from consequences, from anything but questions of truth or falsehood and using this skill to consider them in the abstract. Decoupling is necessary for science because it’s impossible to accurately check a theory when you hope it to be true. Harris’s response to Klein’s opening salvo is:

I think your argument is, even where it pretends to be factual, or wherever you think it is factual, it is highly biased by political considerations. These are political considerations that I share. The fact that you think I don’t have empathy for people who suffer just the starkest inequalities of wealth and politics and luck is just, it’s telling and it’s untrue. I think it’s even untrue of Murray. The fact that you’re conflating the social policies he endorses — like the fact that he’s against affirmative action and he’s for universal basic income, I know you don’t happen agree with those policies, you think that would be disastrous — there’s a good-faith argument to be had on both sides of that conversation. That conversation is quite distinct from the science and even that conversation about social policy can be had without any allegation that a person is racist, or that a person lacks empathy for people who are at the bottom of society. That’s one distinction I want to make.

Harris is pointing out that questions of whether his beliefs will have good or bad consequences or who they’ll hurt have nothing to do with the question of if they are true. He might care deeply about the answers of those questions, but he believes that it’s a dangerous mistake to let that guide how you evaluate an idea. Scientists who fail to do that tend to get caught up in the replication crisis.

When decouplers err, it is often because of the is-ought fallacy. They fail to consider how empirical truths can have real world consequences and fail to consider how labels that might be true in the aggregate can hurt individuals.

When you’re arguing with someone who doesn’t contextualize as much as you do, it can feel like arguing about useless hypotheticals. I once had someone start a point about police shootings and gun violence with “well, ignoring all of society…”. This prompted immediate groans.

When arguing with someone who doesn’t decouple as much as you do, it can feel useless and mushy. A co-worker once said to me “we shouldn’t even try and know the truth there – because it might lead people to act badly”. I bit my tongue, but internally I wondered how, absent the truth, we can ground disagreements in anything other than naked power.

Throughout the debate between Harris and Klein, both of them get frustrated at the other for failing to think like they do – which is why it provided such a clear example for Falkovich. If you read the transcripts, you’ll see a clear pattern: Klein ignores questions of truth or falsehood and Harris ignores questions of right and wrong. Neither one is willing to give an inch here, so there’s no real engagement between them.

This doesn’t have to be the case whenever people who prefer context or prefer to deal with the direct substance of an issue interact.

My theory is that everyone has a window that stretches from the minimum amount of context they like in conversations to the minimum amount of substance. Theoretically, this window could stretch from 100% context and no substance to 100% substance and no context.

But practically no one has tastes that broad. Most people accept a narrower range of arguments. Here’s what three well compatible friends might look like:

We should expect to see some correlation between the minimum and maximum amount of context people want to get. Windows may vary in size, but in general, feeling put-off by lots of decoupling should correlate with enjoying context.


 Here we see people with varyingly sized strike zones, but with their dislike of context correlated with their appreciation for substance.

Klein and Harris disagreed so unproductively not just because they give first billing to different things, but because their world views are different enough that there is absolutely no overlap between how they think and talk about things.

One plausible graph of how Klein and Harris like to think about problems (quotes come from the transcript of their podcast). From this, it makes sense that they couldn’t have a productive conversation. There’s no overlap in how they model the world.

I’ve found thinking about windows of context and substance, rather than just the dichotomous categories, very useful for analyzing how me and my friends tend to agree and disagree.

Some people I know can hold very controversial views without ever being disagreeable. They are good at picking up on which sorts of arguments will work with their interlocutors and sticking to those. These people are no doubt aided by rather wide context windows. They can productively think and argue with varying amounts of context and substance.

Other people feel incredibly difficult to argue with. These are the people who are very picky about what arguments they’ll entertain. If I sort someone into this internal category, it’s because I’ve found that one day they’ll dismiss what I say as too nitty-gritty, while the next day they criticize me for not being focused enough on the issue at hand.

What I’ve started to realize is that people I find particularly finicky to argue with may just have a fairly narrow strike zone. For them, it’s simultaneously easy for arguments to feel devoid of substance or devoid of context.

I think one way that you can make arguments with friends more productive is explicitly lay out the window in which you like to be convinced. Sentences like: “I understand what you just said might convince many people, but I find arguments about the effects of beliefs intensely unsatisfying” or “I understand that you’re focused on what studies say, but I think it’s important to talk about the process of knowledge creation and I’m very unlikely to believe something without first analyzing what power hierarchies created it” are the guideposts by which you can show people your context window.

Economics, Falsifiable

You Might Want To Blame Central Banks For Poor Wage Growth

Posted on by Zach

The Economist wonders why wage growth isn’t increasing, even as unemployment falls. A naïve reading of supply and demand suggests that it should, so this has become a relatively common talking point in the news, with people of all persuasions scratching their heads. The Economist does it better than most. They at least talk about slowing productivity growth and rising oil prices, instead of blaming everything on workers (for failing to negotiate) or employers (for not suddenly raising wages).

But after reading monetary policy blogs, the current lack of wage growth feels much less confusing to me. Based on this, I’d like to offer one explanation for why wages haven’t been growing. While I may not be an economist, I’ll be doing my best to pass along verbatim the views of serious economic thinkers.

Image courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. Units are 1982-1984 CPI-adjusted dollars. Isn’t it rad how the US government doesn’t copyright anything it produces?

 

 

When people talk about stagnant wage growth, this is what they mean. Average weekly wages have increased from $335 a week in 1979 to $350/week in 2018 (all values are 1982 CPI-adjusted US dollars). This is a 4.5% increase, representing $780/year more (1982 dollars) in wages over the whole period. This is not a big change.

More recent wage growth also isn’t impressive. At the depth of the recession, weekly wages were $331 [1]. Since then, they’ve increased by $19/week, or 5.7%. However, wages have only increased by $5/week (1.4%) since the previous high in 2009.

This doesn’t really match people’s long run expectations. Between 1948 and 1973, hourly compensation increased by 91.3%.

I don’t have an explanation for what happened to once-high wage growth between 1980 and 2008 (see The Captured Economy for what some economists think might explain it). But when it comes to the current stagnation, one factor I don’t hear enough people talking about is bad policy moves by central bankers.

To understand why the central bank affects wage growth, you have to understand something called “sticky wages“.

Wages are considered “sticky” because it is basically impossible to cut them. If companies face a choice between firing people and cutting wages, they’ll almost always choose to fire people. This is because long practice has taught them that the opposite is untenable.

If you cut everyone’s wages, you’ll face an office full of much less motivated people. Those whose skills are still in demand will quickly jump ship to companies that compensate them more in line with market rates. If you just cut the wages of some of your employees (to protect your best performers), you’ll quickly find an environment of toxic resentment sets in.

This is not even to mention that minimum wage laws make it illegal to cut the wages of many workers.

Normally the economy gets around sticky wages with inflation. This steadily erodes wages (including the minimum wage). During boom times, businesses increase wages above inflation to keep their employees happy (or lose them to other businesses that can pay more and need the labour). During busts, inflation can obviate the need to fire people by decreasing the cost of payroll relative to other inputs.

But what we saw during the last recession was persistently low inflation rates. Throughout the whole the thing, the Federal Reserve Bank kept saying, in effect, “wow, really hard to up inflation; we just can’t manage to do it”.

Look at how inflation hovers just above zero for the whole great recession and associated recovery. It would have been better had it been hovering around 2%.

It’s obviously false that the Fed couldn’t trigger inflation if it wanted to. As a thought experiment, imagine that they had printed enough money to give everyone in the country $1,000,000 and then mailed it out. That would obviously cause inflation. So it is (theoretically) just a manner of scaling that back to the point where we’d only see inflation, not hyper-inflation. Why then did the Fed fail to do something that should be so easy?

According to Scott Sumner, you can’t just look at the traditional instrument the central bank has for managing inflation (the interest rate) to determine if its policies are inflationary or not. If something happens to the monetary supply (e.g. say all banks get spooked and up their reserves dramatically [2]), this changes how effective those tools will be.

After the recession, the Fed held the interest rates low and printed money. But it actually didn’t print enough money given the tightened bank reserves to spur inflation. What looked like easy money (inflationary behaviour) was actually tight money (deflationary behaviour), because there was another event constricting the money supply. If the Fed wanted inflation, it would have had to do much more than is required in normal times. The Federal Reserve never realized this, so it was always confused by why inflation failed to materialize.

This set off the perfect storm that led to the long recovery after the recession. Inflation didn’t drive down wages, so it didn’t make economic sense to hire people (or even keep as many people on staff), so aggregate demand was low, so business was bad, so it didn’t make sense to hire people (or keep them on staff)…

If real wages had properly fallen, then fewer people would have been laid off, business wouldn’t have gotten as bad, and the economy could have started to recover much more quickly (with inflation then cooling down and wage growth occurring). Scott Sumner goes so far to say that the money shock caused by increased cash reserves may have been the cause of the great recession, not the banks failing or the housing bubble.

What does this history have to do with poor wage growth?

Well it turns out that companies have responded to the tight labour market with something other than higher wages: bonuses.

Bonuses are one-time payments that people only expect when times are good. There’s no problem cutting them in recessions.

Switching to bonuses was a calculated move for businesses, because they have lost all faith that the Federal Reserve will do what is necessary (or will know how to do what is necessary) to create the inflation needed to prevent deep recessions. When you know that wages are sticky and you know that inflation won’t save you from them, you have no choice but to pre-emptively limit wages, even when there isn’t a recession. Even when a recession feels fairly far away.

More inflation may feel like the exact opposite of what’s needed to increase wages. But we’re talking about targeted inflation here. If we could trust humans to do the rational thing and bargain for less pay now in exchange for more pay in the future whenever times are tight, then we wouldn’t have this problem and wages probably would have recovered better. But humans are humans, not automatons, so we need to make the best with what we have.

One of the purposes of institutions is to build a framework within which we can make good decisions. From this point of view, the Federal Reserve (and other central banks; the Bank of Japan is arguably far worse) have failed. Institutions failing when confronted with new circumstances isn’t as pithy as “it’s all the fault of those greedy capitalists” or “people need to grow backbones and negotiate for higher wages”, but I think it’s ultimately a more correct explanation for our current period of slow wage growth. This suggests that we’ll only see wage growth recover when the Fed commits to better monetary policy [3], or enough time passes that everyone forgets the great recession.

In either case, I’m not holding my breath.

Footnotes

[1] I’m ignoring the drop in Q2 2014, where wages fell to $330/week, because this was caused by the end of extended unemployment insurance in America. The end of that program made finding work somewhat more important for a variety of people, which led to an uptick in the supply of labour and a corresponding decrease in the market clearing wage. ^

[2] Under a fractional reserve banking system, banks can lend out most of their deposits, with only a fraction kept in reserve to cover any withdrawals customers may want to make. This effectively increases the money supply, because you can have dollars (or yen, or pesos) that are both left in a bank account and invested in the economy. When banks hold onto more of their reserves because of uncertainty, they are essentially shrinking the total money supply. ^

[3] Scott Sumner suggests that we should target nominal GDP instead of inflation. When economic growth slows, we’d automatically get higher inflation, as the central bank pumps out money to meet the growth target. When the market begins to give way to roaring growth and speculative bubbles, the high rate of real growth would cause the central bank to step back, tapping the brakes before the economy overheats. I wonder if limiting inflation on the upswing would also have the advantage of increasing real wages as the economy booms? ^

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