Author: Warren Coats

I specialize in advising central banks on monetary policy and the development of the capacity to formulate and implement monetary policy.  I joined the International Monetary Fund in 1975 from which I retired in 2003 as Assistant Director of the Monetary and Financial Systems Department. While at the IMF I led or participated in missions to the central banks of over twenty countries (including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgystan, Moldova, Serbia, Turkey, West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Zimbabwe) and was seconded as a visiting economist to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1979-80), and to the World Bank's World Development Report team in 1989.  After retirement from the IMF I was a member of the Board of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority from 2003-10 and of the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review from 2010-2017.  Prior to joining the IMF I was Assistant Prof of Economics at UVa from 1970-75.  I am currently a fellow of Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.  In March 2019 Central Banking Journal awarded me for my “Outstanding Contribution for Capacity Building.”  My recent books are One Currency for Bosnia: Creating the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina; My Travels in the Former Soviet Union; My Travels to Afghanistan; My Travels to Jerusalem; and My Travels to Baghdad. I have a BA in Economics from the UC Berkeley and a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. My dissertation committee was chaired by Milton Friedman and included Robert J. Gordon. I live in National Landing Va 22202

My coldest winter since Chicago

Climate change is a politically charged subject. This makes it more difficult for us layman to evaluate the arguments over what is happening and expected to happen to temperatures (i.e. to know who to trust). “Climate change” is a more neutral term than “Global Warming” reflecting, I assume, the fact that scientists who specialize in climate and weather disagree not only over the impact of increases in CO2 on temperatures, but how to measure and compare temperatures over time. Should we measure land temperatures or sea temperatures or land and sea temperatures combined. Are these temperatures the result of averaging dozens or hundreds or tens of thousands of measurements and how is each reading weighed in the average? Which methods of measuring temperature are more reliable—satellite measures, ground stations, tree rings, etc. and how is one to be adjusted and matched to others in order to compare temperatures over long periods of time.

I suspect that one reason that global warming has been changed to climate change is that the global temperature has declined over the last 17 years. Temperatures have been rising and falling for thousands of years. By some measures (I have no idea which ones) it was hotter at the time of Christ than now and again in the 1300s AD and a lot hotter seven thousand years ago. But I don’t know how we can trust estimates of temperatures seven thousand years ago with now.

One of my favorite graphs is the “reconstructed global temperature over the past 420,000 years based on the Vostok ice core from the Antarctica (Petit et al. 2001).” The little red box on the far right is the most recent 5,000 years.

VostokTemp0-420000 BP

Thus I find the temperature information provided every morning in the Washington Post quite interesting. For example, yesterday at BWI the high was 23° and the low as 2°. The record high for BWI on the same date was 74° in 1930 (85 years ago) and yesterday’s low was the record low for that date. Fifty or so miles south at Reagan National (don’t quote me on the distance) the high yesterday was 27° and the low was 14° (well it is further south) while the record high and low for that date were 75° in 1953 and 7° in 1885. If those constitute a trend we must be moving into another ice age. Though it feels like it, I doubt it. Climate change seems the right words to describe what we have observed.

Greece, Debt, and Parenting

If you are a parent, you may have experienced something like the following:

Son number 1 and his children live in a much nicer home than you did at his age. It is the biggest house he could qualify to buy and you put up the down payment to assist him in his purchase. He worked hard as an auto mechanic earning a decent income. His wage was increased modestly each year as his productivity gradually increased with experience, though barely keeping up with inflation. He and his wife were loving parents with three wonderful children and enjoyed their family time together spending what they earned on their children. However, they spent his income as he received it and borrowed the maximum possible to buy a nice second hand family van. When the car needed more than the normal repairs, he had no savings and borrowed the money from you. The occasional family illnesses were paid for by additional loans from you as well and rather than paying off their mortgage and other debts over time these debts grew larger. When his children reached college age they took jobs that did not require college educations as no money had been saved for college.

Son number 2 was also an auto mechanic but ran his own repair shop. His wife and two children lived in a more modest home with lower mortgage payments and they consumed his earnings carefully and modestly in order to save for emergencies, the children’s college fund, and his retirement, and to invest in equipment that would make his repair shop more productive. For a number of years they enjoyed a lower standard of living than did son number 1, but gradually paid down their mortgage without incurring additional debt. More importantly, his income rose more rapidly than did his brother’s because of his investments in tools and equipment. Within 24 years his income was twice his brothers as a result of its growing 3% per year faster.

With the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 and having his hours of work reduced because of the slowing economy, son number 1 was forced to sell his house in a short sale arranged with the mortgage holder and you wrote off what he owned you. His family was forced to cut many of their expenditures because no one would lend them the money needed to continue living beyond their means. They were forced to cut their consumption even further in order to have some savings when the inevitable health and mechanical emergencies occurred because you decided that your earlier financial help had only perpetuated their shortsighted behavior and refused to lend him more. They complained about the fall in their standard of living as they were now forced to consume within their means. Your son number 1’s family was now poorer. Or more accurately, their standard of living matched reality and became sustainable. Their earlier, higher standard of living was an unsustainable illusion.

Needless to say, son number 2’s future was brighter. His family took advantage of the fall in housing prices by 2008 to buy a larger home, keeping their original one for its rental income. His two daughters went to and graduated from college. His higher standard of living was real and sustainable (i.e. he paid for his higher consumption fully out of his higher earnings).

If you rename son number 1 “Greece”, and son number 2 “Germany” you can begin to understand the difference between the situation of each economy and the difference between competitiveness (exports that match and pay for imports) and productivity (the level of wages and income). For a while Greece enjoyed an artificial and unsustainable standard of living. It needed to “adjust” to reality, i.e. to bring its expenditure in line with its income both internally (the government and each household better matching their incomes and expenditures) and externally (imports matched by –i.e., paid for by—exports) and thus to recognize that it is really poorer than it had pretended. This is what is meant by being competitive. To raise its standard of living it must become more productive by creating a more business friendly environment, reducing its blotted government bureaucracy, and liberalizing labor and product markets. For more details see my earlier articles on Greece: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/greeces-debt-crisis-simplified/ and https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/saving-greece-austerity-andor-growth/

Comments on the All-Volunteer Military

My friend and former University of Chicago classmate sent the following comments on my All-Volunteer Force note. From 1989-93 Chris Jehn was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Management and Personnel.

Warren–
I read with interest your recent essay on unintended consequences of ending conscription in the U.S. Having spent a large part of my career on issues surrounding implementation of the All-Volunteer Force. I was curious to learn what consequences you had in mind. I was disappointed to read, “the top 20-30 percent of income earners in the United States provide almost none of their sons and now daughters” to the military. Where did you hear this? It is a commonly held view of liberal critics of the military, but, like many persuasions of the left, it is not based on fact. (You could have looked it up. See Table 41 of the DoD population report at http://prhome.defense.gov/portals/52/Documents/POPREP/poprep2011/appendixb/b_41.html.) Using the only available data on the issue, census tract home of record for new enlisted recruits, DoD/CNA analysis shows that 18.5% of recruits in FY 2011 came from the top quintile of the income distribution. Adding new officers to the analysis (not possible since officers’ original home is not carried in their military records) would probably raise that percentage somewhat since virtually all new officers are college graduates. It is surprising to many to learn that the recruits each year are drawn more or less evenly from across income quintiles, but this has been true for 30 years now.

However, the overall percent of the population recruited each year is quite low, regardless of income class. (About 4,000,000 kids turn 18 each year and the military recruits somewhat over 200,000.) This leaves most families without any first-hand connection to the military and that is another lament of the left (and some on the right). I think this is usually mindless World War II envy. At the end of WW II, about 12 million men and women were in uniform, about 10% of the TOTAL population of the U.S. So that meant everyone knew many in the military. That’s not true today. To match that percent today would require a military of over 30 million (compared to today’s 2.5 million, including reserves). And this demographic phenomenon was ultimately the source of draft opposition in the 1960s (and has been in many European countries recently). When most draft-age men serve (as they did in the ’50s) conscription’s inequities are more tolerable. The increasingly large birth cohorts of the baby boom changed that.

But fundamentally, all the debate about the military’s “representativeness” is silly (whether it’s representativeness in terms of socioeconomic class, race, geography or anything else). The requirement for representativeness is based on a view that military service is a burden to be equitably distributed rather than a profession freely chosen and well compensated. In other words, it is antithetical to the notion of a force of professional volunteers.

Another liberal criticism of the AVF is that it has enabled military adventurism. There is no evidence for this assertion either, despite its face appeal. Interestingly, the only Gates Commission member I’ve discussed this with, Allen Wallis, thought this was a positive aspect–freeing the President to use the military without immediate political pushback. So, at least for Wallis, this consequence was not unintended. Of course, pushback from the draft objectors didn’t slow Johnson and Nixon down much, despite an eventual 50,000 deaths in Viet Nam, ten times the toll of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I must apologize for not inviting you to a CNA event in September when we discussed many of these questions at a symposium to honor Walter Oi. I think you would have found it interesting. We did a reprise at last month’s AEA meetings in Boston. Most agree Walter was the most important economist in the battle to end conscription. Among my remarks, I said the following about Walter:

“There are many heroes in this story [of the end of conscription]: the Gates Commission members, Mel Laird, Marine Corps Generals Wilson and Barrow, Army General Max Thurman, and many economists and other analysts. But among the analysts and economists, none was more important than Walter Oi.

It’s tempting to cite instead the economists on the Gates Commission, Milton Friedman, Allen Wallis, and Alan Greenspan. They were essential. But they were advocates, cheerleaders. Walter made the first empirical, data-based argument for voluntarism. And that case helped convince President Nixon and, later, other Gates Commission members. It’s possible that without Walter’s early work—which, as the Hogan-Warner paper notes, stood the test of time and subsequent analyses—conscription would have ended much later, if at all. There were, after all, other politically plausible proposals to ‘fix’ the draft and end the controversy surrounding it, not just a force of all volunteers.”

Some support for my argument is contained in a short note Stephen Herbits prepared for the CNA event (also attached). As part of the planning for the two events, I interviewed the two surviving members of the Gates Commission, Herbits and Alan Greenspan. That was fun and educational.

I should also note that an AVF’s budget costs are not clearly higher than those of a conscripted force of equal capability, due to the high turnover and training costs for draftees. The most careful analysis of this question was GAO’s in 1988. I cite it (as well as my article on conscription in Europe) in my piece on conscription in David Henderson’s encyclopedia (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Conscription.html).

Finally, I think your memory of the 1960s may have failed you here. You and your colleagues may have had some skin in the game. The first lottery in 1968 included those under 26 who had held student deferments. You were probably too old, but I and other classmates were subject to conscription depending on our lottery number (based on our birth date, not our Selective Service number). I luckily drew a number in the 300s.

As for your concluding proposal, while your draft-related arguments don’t support it, it has merit on other purely budgetary grounds, as you note. I too think it’s unconscionable that “overseas contingencies” (to use the Pentagon’s euphemism) are funded through supplemental appropriations funded from borrowing and the general revenues. (And DoD has not “suffered” as a result. You can safely ignore the whining on the subject by Pentagon leaders and their allies in Congress and the press.) But your proposal will never go anywhere. If the Congress had wanted do things differently, they wouldn’t have been doing it like this for as long as I can remember.)

I hope you find much of this interesting, perhaps even educational. If you do nothing else, please look at the Warner-Hogan paper: “Walter Oi and His Contributions to the All-Volunteer Force: Theory, Evidence, Persuasion”, by John T. Warner and Paul F. Hogan, presented at the Contributions to Public Policy: A Session in Honor of Walter Oi, American Economic Association Annual Meetings, Boston, MA, January 3, 2015

–Chris

Should the U.S. help finance Ukrainian weapons?

Ukraine is much more important to Russia than to the U.S. It borders Russia, was part of the Soviet Union, and much of what is now Ukraine, including Kiev, has been part of Russia from time to time for as long as the United States has existed. Ukraine’s importance to the U. S. is, however, more academic. It is reasonable to assume that as long as it is economically able Russia will counter any increase in Ukraine’s military capacity and activity in eastern Ukraine (the part bordering Russia) with equal or greater military force. If we increase our support and Ukraine elevates its military activities in the east, so will Russia. The Russian economy is suffering from years of exploitation by Putin and his friends as well as inadequate investment and is now suffering from the sharp fall in the prices of its primary exports– oil and gas. Russia will presumably only stop matching escalations from the West when it is no longer economically able to do so. Do we have a national security interest in escalating that far?

Our interest in Ukraine is humanitarian– not military out of a concern for our own security. We would like to see the people of every country enjoy the freedom and prosperity that we have. Moreover, most of us have long believed that healthy, prosperous, well-governed countries make better neighbors and a more peaceful and prosperous world. So it serves that interest and our humanitarian natures to encourage and financially support the new Ukrainian government’s efforts to reduce the corruption their country has long suffered from. Military aid is an entirely different matter.

Both we and Ukraine’s government in Kiev must accept and come to reasonable terms with Russia’s dominance in the area and its determination to remain in Eastern Ukraine as it has in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The alternative, which would likely follow the injection of western arms into the conflict, would be a continued escalation of fighting with unknown consequences and an unknown end point. We don’t like to give in, and wouldn’t and shouldn’t whenever our national security is truly at stake, but this is not our war. What, after all, did our “victory” in Iraq (one of the most insane and ill-advised wars we have ever launched) gain us? ISIS!!

Let’s help Ukraine financially, which it desperately needs, as long as its government continues to seriously fight the corruption that has characterized it for so long (easier said than done). Ukrainian offensives in “rebel”/Russian dominated areas of the East are futile and we should not encourage them by providing the weapons that make them possible. Freeze the status quo until Russia comes to its senses (which we should encourage in every possible way) or collapses economically (which we should not hope for).

The All Volunteer Military: Unintended consequences and a modest proposal

America’s war in Vietnam, its longest before Afghanistan, relied on the obligatory military service of its young men if drafted. When we turned 18, we were required to enroll with the Selective Service System and those of us who did not volunteer lived in terror for about ten years of eligibility that we would be “called up.” To protect the education of our more talented youth, deferments from the draft were given to those of us in college. Not surprisingly this did not go down well with those who could not or chose not to go to college and the fairness of the system was challenged. Thus, college deferments for anyone older than I was (lucky me) were ended and replaced with a lottery at the beginning of each year based on the selective service numbers we received when we first enrolled. Those whose numbers where at the top of the list were sure to be drafted and those closer to the bottom were sure not to be.

Because of the draft the majority of American families with sons were emotionally involved and connected to the war and as it became more and more unpopular this broad connection helped finally bring it to an end.

In 1967, a group of libertarian University of Chicago students and I founded the Council for a Volunteer Military to publicize the inequities of the draft and the benefits of an all volunteer military. We were not subject to the draft ourselves as our college deferments were grandfathered, and thus we were purely motivated by our sense of fairness and believe in the superior effectiveness of a volunteer Army. The Council’ directors were Jim Powell, Henry Regnery, myself as Executive Secretary, Danny Boggs, and David Levy (the one who is now a Professor of Economics at George Mason U). Our Sponsors included my teacher, Milton Friedman, as well as Yale Brozen, Richard Cornuelle, David Franke, James Farmer, Karl Hess and socialist Norman Thomas.

President Richard Nixon appointed Professor Friedman to a commission to study the viability of an all volunteer military headed by Thomas S. Gates, Jr. This led to Nixon’s replacement of the draft with higher pay and other employment conditions that made it possible to man our military with hired professionals. The result was a more expensive (the draft was effectively a tax on those drafted, who tended to be poorer to begin with) but significantly more effective military. After some years adjusting to the new approach, even the Generals praised the great success of our all-volunteer force.

As our military adventurism of recent decades has resulted in more and more American troops fighting and dying abroad, some observers have noted that the volunteer force left most American families unaffected directly by these wars thus undercutting the opposition they might otherwise express. This was obviously an unintended and negative aspect of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). If there were no way to compensate for this negative consequence, the AVF would still be the best and fairest approach to manning our military. However, there is a simple way to help mitigate this negative feature, which has much merit in its own right.

Since 2001 our wars have cost us $1.6 trillion dollars ($10.5 million dollars per hour). This is just the direct budgetary cost and does not take account of the lives lost and other indirect costs and distortions to the economy, worsened relations abroad, etc. While the top 20-30 percent of income earners in the United States provide almost none of their sons and now daughters to fight these wars and thus might be more inclined to support them, they do provide almost one hundred percent of the taxes raised to finance our government. (In 2012, the latest income tax data available, about half of American families reported taxable income of which the top 50% paid 97.2% of all income tax revenue in that year. The top 5% of tax payers earned 36.8% of total adjusted gross income reported that year and paid 58.9% of total income taxes received.) None of the costs of these wars have been paid for by raising taxes or cutting other spending (except within the Defense Department, where equipment and weapons development expenditures suffered). The funds were borrowed from those buying U.S. treasury securities, adding to our debt that will have to be paid by our children.

My modest proposal, echoing one made a few years ago by U.S. Congressman David Obey, D-Wis., who on Nov. 19, 2010 introduced H.R. 4130, the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010,” is that any budget supplemental appropriations to cover the costs of fighting abroad must be paid for fully by an income tax surcharge. See Bruce Bartlett’s discussion of this issue: http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/25/shared-sacrifice-war-taxes-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html. By explicitly putting the cost on income taxes, any war and its financing will get the attention it deserves from the wealthier members of society who pay that tax. Taxing to pay for wars has the double benefit of adhering to principles of sound finance (properly paying for whatever the government spends), and of bringing the costs (at least the budgetary costs) of war to the pocket books of American voters.

My Key stories of the world in 2014

Twenty fourteen was a busy year for the planet and in general a rather unhappy time. But believing as I do that when the pendulum swings too far in one direction (big brother) it swings back (personal freedom), I am such an optimist that I see some hopeful signs for 2015. These are the developments that I think are important (and/or felt like writing about).

Torture: A big plus this year was the eye-opening report of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on CIA Torture. It found that the CIA used torture (violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Declaration Against Torture, and the I, II, and IV Geneva Conventions of 1949 all of which were signed by the United States and are thus binding laws of the land) and that it was not effective in gathering actionable information that couldn’t have been obtained with traditional interrogation techniques. Admittedly Senator Diane Feinstein was angry about CIA illegal hacking of computers of the Committee staff who have the legal responsibility of CIA oversight and may have been settling some scores. But if you do not find these abuses of power frightening, you live in the wrong country. While the report might not have been fully balanced, its findings on the ineffectiveness of torture are consistent with the earlier findings. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/torture-is-immoral-and-doesn’t-work/

Our common sense assumption that a prisoner being tortured will tell his captures whatever they want to hear in order to stop the pain was dramatically confirmed by the recent news that Nian Bin was released by the Chinese government after eight years in prison for murders he did not commit. He was originally tortured into admitting the alleged crimes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-china-a-rare-criminal-case-in-which-evidence-made-a-difference/2014/12/29/23f86b80-796b-11e4-9721-80b3d95a28a9_story.html

Hopefully these disclosures will reign in these embarrassing and appalling abuses by the United States government.

Greece: Since joining the EU and adopting the Euro (still very popular in Greece as protection against the bad old inflation days), Greece has enjoyed and unfortunately recklessly indulged in a higher living standard (consumption) than it earned (produced) by borrowing from the rest of Europe at the low interest rates paid by Germany. This mispricing of the risk of lending to Greece by financial markets resulted in part from the failure of the European Central Bank (ECB) to rate Greece sovereign debt realistically (treating all sovereign debt of its members alike). It also reflected the moral hazard of the wide spread belief that the EU, ECB, and international financial institutions such as the IMF would bail out holders of such debt. But no one and no country can live beyond its means forever. What can’t go on forever, won’t. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/greeces-debt-crisis-simplified/, https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/saving-greece-austerity-andor-growth/

The balance between what Greece (short hand for individuals, firms, and government domiciled in Greece) imports and (pays for with) exports can be restored by lowering the cost of Greek goods and services. This will increase its exports and decrease its imports. This can be achieved by lowering wages and other costs of production or increasing productivity. Lowering wages without an increase in productivity simply acknowledges the reality that Greeks are poorer than most other Europeans. Increasing productivity improves Greek competitiveness and thus exports while also increasing its real standard of living.

The loans provided to the Greek government by the troika (EU, ECB, and IMF) tied to (i.e. conditional on) reductions in the government’s borrowing needs (reducing government employees, increasing tax revenue, etc) and structural reforms to make the economy more productive, provided an alternative to its default and forced sudden cut in government spending that markets would have forced on it otherwise. There is debate about which approach would be best for Greece in the long term. Hopefully Greek voters will face and debate this choice honestly in the presidential elections in January: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/greek-impasse-forces-early-elections-and-fears-of-euro-crisis-return/2014/12/29/3be75924-8f4e-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html The implications for the EU and the Euro are huge. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-greek-referendum/

Cuba: President Obama has decided to diplomatically recognize Cuba after a half century long failed policy of sanctions. Not only have our economic sanctions failed to displace the Castro brothers and their pernicious regime (most other countries do not observe our sanctions and trade and invest with Cuba anyway), we have no business (or national self interest) in adopting and promoting a regime change as national policy, however much we might wish for it. Moreover it is very much in our national interest to have good information on and channels of communication with every country with a government no matter how chosen. The linked article by Marc Thiessen illustrates the arrogant and dangerous thinking of our neocons. If Thiessen supports something, I start out against it until convinced otherwise: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-cuban-dissidents-blast-obamas-betrayal/2014/12/29/cc68ffcc-8f5b-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html

Crony capitalism: President Eisenhower famously worried about the dangers of the military industrial complex as he sought to conduct a cold war with the USSR: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/eisenhowers-farewell-address-50-years-later/. It is difficult for the government to objectively serve the public interest while dealing with or regulating industry. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/free-markets-uber-alles/ The relationship that develops in such a situation often serves the interests of the regulated industry more than the general public. The result is what we call crony capitalism and it is the enemy of true capitalism as much as its variants– socialism and fascism. One of the particularly alarming examples of truly disgusting and damaging crony capitalist deals is described in the following article. It involves JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Eric Holder’s Justice Department agreeing on what seems like a large fine, but is more accurately described as a bribe, to suppress evidence of criminal behavior on the part of Chase. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106.

Twenty fifteen will be a better year than was 2014 if public outrage at the use of torture, the abuse of the privacy of American’s, the bailing out of and favoritism toward Wall Street and the costly and counter productive deployment of American military around the world, result in rolling back these dangerous excesses. My fear is that nothing will be done and that there will be more the same. I hope that I am wrong.

FREE MARKETS UBER ALLES

World per capita income didn’t change much from the time of Christ to the founding of the United States ($444 to $650 in 1990 dollars), a period of 1,790 years. But in the following 320 years it jumped to $8,080. And about half of that jump came over the last 50 years. What explains this fairly recent explosion of well being? Many things, of course, but central to this explosion of wealth was trade. Only when people could specialize, which requires relying on others to produce part of what they need or want, i.e. to trade, was it possible to dramatically increase the productivity of individuals. The prospect of selling to others also carried the incentive to innovate and develop new technologies, etc.

Trading requires some level of trust in the person you are trading with and mutual acceptance of the rules of the game (contracts). This is relatively easy when you trade with your neighbors and fellow villagers face to face. But as trade extended over longer distances—as it expanded from personal to impersonal dealings— the development of trust became more challenging but no less essential. Product standardization, for example, allowed even greater efficiency and productivity but also facilitated the development of trust in the quality of what we are buying. Companies invested in building and preserving their reputations, which became associated with brand names. As trade expanded, the need for trust was satisfied in more innovative ways.

In today’s rapidly expanding Internet world, where virtually anything under the sun (virtual or real) can be traded via the impersonal Internet, the old brand name reputation approach to establishing trust continues to be useful. Thus we trust the level of quality of products marketed by Sears, or Nieman Marcus on their website to match what we find in their physical locations. However, “the customer review” is rapidly becoming an important source of trust, whether looking for a plumber, a restaurant, a hotel room, or buying a new car.

Government’s have long facilitated trade via providing security (Feudal Lords providing Sheriffs to hunt down highway robbers) and enforcement of contracts. At some point governments began to think that they could establish (or replace) trust more effectively than did competitive markets by imposing regulations to inform or protect consumers. Standard product information, for example, the contents and their nutritional values on the labels of food products, help consumers decide which product best meets their needs. Licensing practitioners of various professions—from cab drivers to physicians—became a widespread form of vetting minimum professional competence or standards. In many if not most professions the regulators tended to be captured by the industry they regulated resulting in protection of the practitioners from competition rather than protection of the customers from poorly trained service providers. Medical doctors fought, often successfully for a long time, competition from providers of alternative medical services (chiropractors, acupuncturists, Internet medical service providers, etc.). Licensed taxi companies obtained exclusive rights to serve specific areas and limit their number in order to boost fares in the name of consumer protection.

The medallions required to operate a taxi in New York City are a famous example of a government created monopoly. The following is from the website of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission announcing the auction of 89 medallions on May 2, 2008:

New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) Commissioner/Chairman Matthew W. Daus has determined that the Minimum Upset (Bid) Price for each of the 43 available lots of two Minifleet (Corporate) Accessible Medallions that will be auctioned on May 2, 2008 will be $700,000. One Individual Accessible Medallion will likewise be available for bid on that date at a Minimum Upset Price, also set by the Chairman, of $189.000, as will two Individual Alternative-Fuel Medallions at a Minimum Upset Price of $300,000.

The Minimum Upset Price is the minimum amount that will be considered valid. The highest valid bids will be named apparent winners.

Such systems of licensing are meant to insure minimum quality of service (both of the car and of the driver). They are meant to establish trust on the part of customers that when a yellow car pulls up, he will not over charge or rape or rob you. These issues are explored in an interesting paper by Christopher Koopman, Matthew Mitchell, and Adam Thierer: “The Sharing Economy and Consumer Protection Regulation: The Case for Policy Change” Mercatus Center, George Mason University

Click to access Koopman-Sharing-Economy.pdf

“Under the traditional ‘public interest theory’ of regulation, regulation is sought to protect consumers from externalities, inadequate competition, price gouging, asymmetric information, unequal bargaining power, and a host of other perceived ‘market failures’.”

Unfortunately, as economists Mark Steckbeck and Peter J. Boettke observe, regulators often ignore ‘the dynamism of markets and the incentive mechanism driving entrepreneurs to discover ways to ameliorate problems associated with market exchange.’” page 6

“Writing in 1920, Arthur C. Pigou cautioned against contrasting ‘the imperfect adjustments of unfettered private enterprise with the best adjustment that economists in their studies can imagine.’ Instead, he noted that in the real world, policymakers may not implement policy as scholars think they ought to: For we cannot expect that any public authority will attain, or will even whole-heartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure and to personal corrup¬tion by private interest. A loud-voiced part of their constituents, if organised for votes, may easily outweigh the whole.” Page 7

“Because rent-seeking is used to contrive exclusive privileges rather than to create value for customers, these efforts cost society forgone productive opportunities. To compound the problem, rent-seeking changes the way people allocate their talents. Rather than keeping a focus on devising new and innovative ways to create value, entrepreneurs turn their efforts toward devising new ways to acquire these regulatory privileges.” Page 10

So how has NYC’s medallion system worked? Ask a New Yorker. In 2006 there were only 12,799 licensed taxicabs in New York City, compared with 21,000 in 1931, when the city had about 1 million fewer inhabitants.

Koopman, et al, explore the implication of the choice (or mix) between market and government regulation for the area of what they call the “sharing economy.” The trading facilitated by Craigslist, Uber, and Airbnb has existed for centuries, but the use of the Internet by some clever entrepreneurs has transformed the business model.

Most of us in years past have taken advantage of a limousine driver between official jobs passing by slowly and offering a relatively cheap fare. Unauthorized drivers hang around airports and Theaters to pick up extra fares illegally. My favorite experiences were in the former Soviet Union in the first few years after its collapse. Most everyone wanted free markets but didn’t have a very clear idea how they were organized. We came to realize that virtually any car on the road was potentially an informal taxi. We could flag down almost any car and if we could communicate where we wanted to go and agree on a price, we had a ride. Uber has provided a high tech means of connecting such drivers with customers. “The company says it is not a transport or taxi service; it is a technology company whose product is not car rides but the phone application used to arrange them. Its UberX service relies on partnerships with thousands of independent contractors who use their own vehicles. Drivers find passengers using Uber’s phone app and then remit a percentage of the fare to the company.” uber-pressures-regulators-by-mobilizing-riders-and-hiring-vast-lobbying-network/2014/12/13/Washington Post

But what about trust? Those of you who have used Uber have probably experienced, as I have, an easier, faster, more polite, and cheaper ride. But how can we trust that the car will be safe and the driver competent and honest? The success of Uber and other web based services rests on their being able to satisfy these concerns. Will the dictates of market success do a better job than government regulation in satisfying these customer concerns?

“Reputation systems are arguably the unsung heroes of the social web. In some form or another, they are an integral part of most of today’s social web applications.” Chrysanthos Dellarocas, “Designing Reputation Systems for the Social Web,” in The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World, ed. Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 3. To gain and keep the public’s trust, Uber has established internal standards for the private drivers and their cars that it signs up to connect with customers through Uber. The failure of any driver or car to live up to those standards (and they have several car types) hurts Uber’s reputation and thus its bottom line. It has a strong incentive to get it right. Uber also uses easy to provide customer reviews of each ride experience as do a growing number of web based trading serves.

But what about dishonest reviewers, perhaps working for a competitor (the world is a harsh and cynical place)? The presence of dishonest people lowers the standard of living in any society whatever its system of government or economy. Societies heavily dominated by honest people, are more prosperous. But some people will be dishonest and we need ways to deal with them and minimize their damage. Waze, the very popular GPS based car destination app, provides up to the minute information on traffic conditions on your route provided by users on the spot. It harnesses the desire of most people to be helpful. The information provided by users (their reviews, if you will) is rated for accuracy by other users (in the form of an easily delivered “thank you”). I have no doubt that services traded via the Internet will continue to explore better ways of establishing trust in the products and services traded there.

The recent alleged rape of a young woman in New Delhi, India by an Uber driver raises this issue in a dramatic way that the rape of a young woman in Fort Lauderdale two months earlier by a Yellow cab driver didn’t seem to. A foolish, careless comment by an Uber official about how he might use travel information on Uber’s customers, also raises questions about the safety and uses of such information. Are these problems better handled by regulation or by market competition?

The answer in my view is that the government should provide the foundation for trade provided by contract law and its enforcement, and minimal requirements that are generally applicable (a driver’s license and appropriate insurance). But the Uber’s of the world should be required by free competition to prove themselves and their service to the satisfaction of their potential customers rather than to regulators. If you want to know the standards of safety Uber has set for its self as it seeks customers, check its website, for example: http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening.

A Citizen confronts the Bureaucracy

I recently concluded a contract with the National Bank of Kazakhstan to provide technical assistance in their effort to develop inflation-targeting capacity. I am working together with an American and a Czech econometrician, and thus decided it would be best to incorporate as a Limited Liability Company.

I live in Maryland and thus went to the Maryland government’s website and within half an hour had not only filled in the required application and paid the required fee, but had actually received (via email) the official, signed registration and Articles of Organization document for my company “Economic Consulting, LLC.” Sorry about the unimaginative name, I will give it more thought the next time.

Kazakhstan is a signatory of a tax treaty with the United States that requires it to deduct 20% from any payments to me under our contract unless I have provided a number of specific documents. In addition to the above Articles of Organization, I must also provide a certificate of residency for the company issued by the U.S. Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service and certified by an Apostille issued by our State Department. Rather than have 20% deducted, we agreed that the National Bank would not pay me anything until these documents were received. I was on a learning curve that I really didn’t care to be on.

Hence began what I hoped would be an equally efficient e-government interaction with the Federal government that proved to be anything but. For starters, the form 8802 to request the certificate was three complicated pages long and could not be submitted on-line. Thus the printed form and my check for $85 were sent August 27, 2014 to the IRS by U.S. mail. On September 3 my check cleared so I knew the request had been received. One worry eliminated.

A month later on October 6th I received a letter from the IRS that I assumed was the long-awaited certificate. Instead it was an acknowledgement that my request had been received on September 3rd and that the requested certificate would be sent within 30 days. And indeed in another 30 days another letter arrived, but rather than the certificate it was another letter like the last one saying that the certificate would be sent within another 30 days. Shit.

The letter provided a phone number, which I now called expecting a long wait at the end of an automated list of choices. In fact, the wait was only about 20 minutes at which point Karen answered my call. “Oh my goodness. You should not have received those letters (i.e., we should not have sent those letters). Those were the wrong letters because there was a problem with your request.” She proceeded to carefully and politely walked me through the application form to correct the one or two things I had gotten wrong. The confusion resulted from the fact that I will as always file my business expenses and income on Form C of the 1040 rather than filing separately for the LLC. Blaw, blaw, blaw.

Karen gave me her personal business fax number (yes the U.S. government still uses faxes) and said that she would process it right away. As I no longer have a fax machine, I walked down the street to a neighbor’s with a fax and sent it off receiving the normal confirmation that it had been received. Ten days passed. Calling that number had been so successful the last time that I tried it again. After a one-hour wait on hold Ms. Douglas answered my call and assured me that my fax had never been received. A short, pointless discussion followed about the earlier fax and I finally agreed to send it again, this time to her fax number. I needed the exercise anyway. She promised to call me to confirm its receipt, which in fact she did saying that it was now fine and she would process it immediately and I should receive the certificate within ten days. I was excited by the progress, but reflect nostalgically on the 30-minute start to finish, all on-line, incorporation of my company in Maryland.

Ten days passed and it hadn’t arrived so a called again, this time with only a 15 minute wait (note to self: Monday at noon is a good time to call the IRS). Jane informed me that the document had been processed by Ms. Douglas and printed and would now be ship to the Utah center for mailing to me and should arrive within ten days!!! They don’t do this every day, she explained politely. You can’t make this stuff up. I took a deep breath and struggled to keep my voice under control. I reminisced nostalgically about the 30-minute start-to-finish (including delivery to my desk) incorporation of my little company in Maryland.

Jane quickly agreed with me that it would be nice for the Federal Government to catch up with the twentieth century (I meant the 21st century—but would settle for the 20th). Unfortunately, unlike the private sector, which is continually looking for ways to do things better for less, Jane and her boss have no incentive to do anything about the ridiculous process she described to me. The state of Maryland, which seems better organized and better managed, does at least feel a bit of competitive pressure from Virginia and other states, lacking at the Federal level. I am not about to move to Mexico or some other country over this.

The certificate—a one liner confirming my address – finally arrived on December 3, 98 days after my request. Now I can learn about how to get an Apostille and hopefully get paid. I assure you that I have not made any of this up. Please pray for me.

P.S. The State Department office of Authentication informed me by phone with no wait at all that I could not get an appointment (at which time the Apostille could be given while I waited) for 15 days, but that I could drop it off and it would be ready within three days. Sounds encouraging but I am not holding my breath.

P.P.S. As instructed, this morning (December 4) I drove into town to “drop off” my document to be authenticated and was informed that the drop off is only from 8:00-9:00 am — I was too late. Back tomorrow!!!

Afghan President Ghani’s attack on corruption?

The Comptroller General of Da Afghanistan Bank, Afghanistan’s central bank, has been sitting in jail since October 8 along with 3 DAB colleagues as part of President Ghani’s attack on corruption. What has he done, asked the two young children of this young 32-year-old rising Afghan star? Muhammad Qaseem Rahimi was one of 21 Afghans convicted on March 6, 2013 by a Special Tribunal appointed by President Karzai for crimes associated with the Kabul Bank fraud, by which Afghanistan’s largest bank channeled virtually all of its almost one billion U.S dollars worth of depositor money to a handful of its owners and their friends.

Kabul Bank’s founder Sher Khan Farnod and his former bodyguard and later Kabul Bank CEO Khalil Ferozi received light sentences of five years in prison and were asked to repay 279 million, 531 million respectively. Mahmood Karzai, one of the President’s brothers and the third largest shareholder got off scot free having repaid part of what he had “borrowed” and claiming that he did not need to repay the loan he received to buy his shares (illegal in itself) because the shares were now worthless!!! These two primary perpetrators of this crime, as well as the other 19 appealed their convictions. Farnod and Ferozi have repaid nothing and have been seen dinning around Kabul ever since. In one of his first acts as President, Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank employee, ordered: the Supreme Court to get on with the case, the confiscation of stolen assets, the prosecution of accomplices, and the immediate incarceration of those convicted pending the resolution of their appeals. Justice finally on the move? Perhaps.

At the time of Kabul bank’s collapse four years ago, young Qaseem had just recently been appointed Deputy Director General of the central bank’s Supervision Department. As one of a group of young Afghan university graduates recruited to the central bank for special mentoring under a highly successful USAID capacity building program, Qaseem, a natural leader, rose rapidly within DAB. I frequently saw him standing in the middle of an admiring circle of his peers. As a Tajik of about 5’10’’ he towered over his much shorter Pashtun colleagues making him seem taller than he really is. After his two year mentoring appointment he left DAB and Kabul for graduate studies in Kuala Lumpur. Upon his return he pondered his options for a clearly bright future and with some hesitation (and some urging from me) returned to the central bank. He had hoped for a directorship but instead was offered the position of Deputy Director General of the Supervision Department. So what crime had he committed for which he now sits in jail?

The Special Tribunal found Qaseem as well as the Governor of the central bank, Abdul Fitrat, and its First Deputy Governor, Mohibullah Safi, both of whom have now fled the country, and five other DAB employees guilty of dereliction of duty. They had failed to detect and report the cleaver fraud perpetrated by Farnod and Ferozi. Though hard working and intelligent, at 28 years old Qaseem naturally lacked the experience of seasoned banking supervisors, who would have had great difficulty detecting this fraud as well. The central bank law like those in most every other country protects its employees from prosecution for acts committed in the good faith exercise of their duties.

At least two questions leap out immediately. How could the central bank staff have been charged and convicted in the first place and why haven’t their appeals been heard until now?

It is widely believed in the international community that the charges and convictions against the central bank governor and his staff were President Karzai’s retaliation for the embarrassment caused when Governor Fitrat disclosed the names of Kabulbank shareholders and borrowers in public testimony in Parliament on April 21, 2011. The names included one of Karzai’s brothers and one of Vice President Fahim’s brothers. Governor Fitrat resigned and fled the country for the United States soon thereafter for his safety. In a normal country these vengeful convictions would have been thrown out promptly but sadly Afghanistan and especially its judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world.

But why Qaseem and his colleagues are still sitting in jail is harder to answer. If President Ghani wishes to move away from rule by Presidential fiat, as seems the case, he is right to adhere to established procedures as painful as they are. But jailing those convicted pending the consideration of their appeal is almost unheard of in other countries, though it is satisfying to see Farnod and Ferozi finally behind bars. An honest judiciary would have thrown out the convictions of the central bank employees long ago. Let’s hope they finally do so quickly now.

My Prayers for Afghanistan

As of today (Monday September 29, 2014) Afghanistan has a new government headed by two very capable men, Ashraf Ghani, President, and Abdullah Abdullah, Chief Executive, of a new unity government. It is the first democratic change of government in Afghanistan’s history. It was not easy for Afghanistan to get to this place, and it is not clear whether the compromise, unity government, will hold together and work constructively together. The election, though bravely participated in by a large majority of Afghan people, was messy. And Afghanistan has a long way to go to achieve the norms of a peaceful, just, and prosperous 21st century country.

The best organization of the governance of Afghanistan’s ethnic and tribal groups (Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimak, Turkmen, Baloch, Pashai, Nuristani, Sadat, Gujjar, Arab, Brahui, Pamiri, etc.), if there is a “best,” is still evolving. The traditional ways of tribal life need to adjust to the standards of liberal democracies, which provide more space for individual expression and diversity and govern interactions under the rule of law. It is not easy today for the single breadwinner of an extended family to explain why he is not able to provide a job for his nephew, for which the nephew is not qualified. Merit based employment and promotion are among the concepts upon which the well-being of modern economies depend.

But Afghanistan faces more difficult challenges. The deadly insurgency of a relatively small band of terrorists (Taliban), who wrap their vicious immorality in the name of Islam (to the shame of real Muslims), continues and must be contained to the more manageable level of criminality that every society sadly must deal with. Afghanistan also suffers from the serious cancer of corruption, which has been feed and nurtured by the billions of dollars of foreign financial aid given with the aim of fighting the Taliban and establishing modern, liberal institutions. This is a paradox, not unlike over medicating a human cancer patient. The flow of foreign money is a magnet that attracts and feeds corruption, but without it the patient is likely to die. The over medication must be reduced, but finding the right balance will not be easy.

Afghanistan’s new President promises to give the fight against corruption, which will be long and hard at best, his highest priority. Referring to Sherkhan Farnood and Khalilullah Ferozi, the founders of Kabulbank, which had quickly grown to be Afghanistan’s largest bank when it collapsed in 2010 when the public and the authorities discovered that they had lent virtually all of its almost one billion U.S. dollars worth of deposits to themselves, Ghani stated that: “I will prosecute the two culprits. This will be the first sign that I am not going to tolerate impunity,” he said. “The Afghan public is sick and tired of corruption, we are not going to revive the economy without tackling corruption root, stock and branch.” I pray that he succeeds. Few things are as important for Afghanistan’s future than dramatically reducing corruption.

The hope for a better future for Afghanistan, however, rests, as always, with its young. I have worked in many struggling countries and have always met a few dedicated and intelligent people there. However, Afghanistan is blessed with a large number of unusually talented young men and women determined to make their country a better place. The extensive corruption over their heads will make that difficult. For some, the pressures and temptations of such ill-gotten wealth will overcome their nobler ideals. But I am praying that enough of these fine young people will be strong enough to persevere in their commitment to the rule of law and a better society. Their battle has not been and will not be easy. But I have been impressed by their determination and commitment to what is right. It has been a great pleasure to work with them. While Afghanistan’s new leaders will be able to send Afghanistan in a better direction if they choose to, my hope for this beautiful country rests with the new generation now moving up through its institutions.