资源描述
此文档收集于网络，如有侵权请联系网站删除
october 29, 2008
20081029 American Income Inequality
American Inequality
The Top Tenth:
Within the Top Tenth:
The Top Ten Thousand:
A Closer Look:
Differences in Log Earnings:
Wage Ratios:
Decomposing:
Start with the 1940 distribution:
Change the Xs (characteristics):
Change the betas (prices):
Change the residuals:
Before 1940:
After WWII:
Posted at 01:39 PM in Lecture Notes | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 27, 2008
20081027 American Economic History: The Furnace Where the Future Is Being Forged
Investment, Resources, Invention, and Technological Change
· America is:
o Resource rich
o Skilled labor abundant
o Energetic, entrepreneurial labor abundant (to have crossed an ocean...)
· America is also capital rich, and new capital rich--hence technologically advanced ** The furnace where the future is being forged...
Labor and Capital
America's Commitment to Education:
· Iowa: Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz look at Iowa high schools
· America has a very strong and very early commitment to general education
· Europe: why not provide people with the education they'll need early (answer: people change jobs, the economy changes, the background knowledge base is very important)
· Europe: educate the working classes and they'll ask for more (response: yes, that's the point)
· America's commitment to human capital as a very powerful multiplier of productivity
America and Unions: The Early Stages:
· America has a long history of labor unions
· America has a long, bloody labor history
o Pinkertons
o Federals--Grover Cleveland vs. John Peter Altgeld in the breaking of the Pullman strike
o Early unions: Knights of Labor
o Early unions: IWW
o Union threat: the IWW and Henry Ford's $5 day.
§ Just because unions don't have lots of members and win lots of strikes doesn't mean that they are unimportant
America and Unions: Craft Unions:
· Craft unions: the AFL
· Craft unions: the AMA
· After WWI: the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare
· The 1920s: Welfare Capitalism
· Legal doctrines: Lochner and its friends
America and Unions: The Great Depression and After:
· Sit-down strikes
· Industrial unionism--the CIO
· The AFL-CIO
· The UMW and the Teamsters
· The NLRA and the NLRB
· The War Labor Board
· The Taft-Hartley Act
· Rolling Back Unionized America
o Lawyers
o Right-to-work
o Interstate competition
o International competition *Monopoly and voice faces of unionism
· The situation today: public-sector unions have a powerful edge. private sector unions... not so...
· What role has globalization played in the erosion of union power? Uncertain...
Investment Banking: Routing Around Capital Market Failures:
· The coming of the corporation: limited liability and professional management
· Who guards the guardians? Example: Leland Stanford (and Huntington, and Hopkins, and Crocker), the Central Pacific, and British investors...
· Separation of ownership from management creates all kinds of principal-agent and management-monitoring problems
· How to solve them? Finance capitalism. J.P. Morgan and the "Money Trust"
· Complaints about the Money Trust: Louis Brandeis: "personal power is unAmerican"
· Complaints about the Money Trust: the Northern Securities Panic
· Progressive attack on the Money Trust fails--until 1933 comes
* Finance After the Great Depression:*
· With the coming of FDR, the Progressive Era program for taming the Money Trust is dusted off and put into action:
· The exaltation of management at the expense of ownership and monitoring
· The end of utility empires--the PUHC Act
· The separation of investment from commercial banking
· The large-scale provision of information
· The level playing field
· The Berle-Means problem: managers select themselves, so how are stockholders' interests guarded?
· The Galbraithian "technostructure"
Recent Finance:
· The coming of the 1980s
o Junk bonds
o Takeovers
· Rapidly-climbing CEO pay
· The reintegration of high finance
· How well do our financial markets really work? It's still an open question
Upward Mobility
Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin
Europe is supposed to be about who your family is America is supposed to be about who you are--although it was one of Napoleon's generals who said that "I am my ancestors" Abraham Lincoln's belief: anyone who wants to can move up--a combination of: Plenty of room at the top Lots of immigrants to (temporarily) fill in at the bottom A fairly equal distribution of wealth meaning that starts were not too far apart All This Changes in the Middle of the Gilded Age:
The Closing of the Frontier and the Great Immigration Wave
No more free land--direct effects (can't homestead) and indirect effects (immigrants now put downward pressure on real wages) Immigrants: are the "new immigrants" not from northwest Europe American? In the case of Asians, the answer is "obviously no" "Races" in Pennsyvlania in 1910: whites, blacks, slavs, Latins... The peak of American inequality Ending the Gilded Age
Progressives The New Deal picks up the Progressive Era program, and enacts it Immigration restrictions play an uncertain but probably large role Social democracy and social insurance... Minimum wages Unions again Middle-Class America
The Great Compression in wages Unions? Wartime (WWII, that is)? Social changes Supply and demand? Free land again--this time free land to buy a house within commuting distance of anywhere... The Returns to Skill
The overeducated American The enormous expansion of wage inequality since 1970 All of a sudden, position matters a lot The Anemia of Social Democracy in America
America was never as upwardly mobile a place as it thought it was... Europe was never as rigid a place as it thought it was... Increasing risk (but the "risk" of being bankrupt instead of dead is a good thing--as Martha Stewart would say--no? Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
Racism? The myth of Horatio Alger? Another possible answer: it's just taking us a long time to build it up...
Posted at 01:55 PM in Lecture Notes | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 22, 2008
20081022 The Global Economy
World War II:
Origins of World War II
· In Germany: the Great Depression brings Hitler to power
· No Great Depression in Germany, no Hitler
· Hitler takes his Malthus too seriously
o Believes that only a populous Germany can be a strong Germany
o Believes that only a Germany with lots of farmland can be a populous Germany
o Hence wants to do to the Poles and the Russians what the Americans did to the Indians
· Roosevelt eager to fight Hitler to the last Briton (and give them plenty of materiel in the meantime)
o America not so eager
o How eager was Roosevelt to commit America to World War II in Europe? Not clear.
o And after Pearl Harbor it was Germany that declared war on the United States
· In Japan, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
o Takeover of Manchuria in 1931
o War with China beginning in 1937
o Occupation of Indo-China in 1940
o Roosevelt's ultimatum: Withdraw from Indochina (and China?) or we'll cut off your oil
§ Dean Acheson at the State Department did indeed cut off their oil
· Pearl Harbor as the response
Rough Numbers with Respect to Military Production (as percent of Nazi Germany):
· 450%: U.S.
· 150%: Britain
· 100%: Germany
· 80%: Russia
· 25%: Japan
· 15%: Italy
The wonder is not that the allies won given that they decided to fight
· The wonder is that they decided to fight to the end
· The wonder is that the axis powers held on for so long.
o Out-produced five-to-one
o Professional excellence of the Nazi Army...
o Professional excellence of the start-of-war Japanese fleet...
50 million dead in World War II
· 6 million Jews
· 5 million Chinese civilians
· 8 million Russian civilians
· 4 million Russian POWs
· 2 million Polish civilians
· Et cetera...
· Plus all the battle and military deaths...
World War II Cured the Depression in the U.S.:
· Extraordinary levels of aggregate demand
· spending--military spending--rises to 40% of GDP
· The ten-million man army
· Unemployment down to 2% or lower
· Rosie the Riveter
· Price controls and rationing
· After WWII, few doubted Keynes's claim that government could control the economy
Trying to stop the return of the Great Depression: The Employment Act
Trying to stop the return of the Great Depression: The Marshall Plan
· Eichengreen and DeLong's interpretation of the Marshall Plan: key benefit that it allowed the good "mixed economy" guys to win the political struggle in Western Europe
o Alternatives? Populist statists a la Peron--and stagnation
o Alternatives? Communists--and eventual stagnation
o Alternatives? Right-wing "hold what we have" semi-fascists
· Are Eichengreen and DeLong right?
o Perhaps the threat from Stalin had as much to do with post-WWII "consensus" politics in Western Europe as the Marshall Plan did... * Perhaps good leadership: Schumann, Monnet, de Gasperi, Attlee, Adenauer, Erhard...
Postwar:
After the Postwar: Productivity Slowdown and End of the Population Explosion:
Posted at 01:01 PM in Lecture Notes | Permalink | Comments (0)
20081013: The Great Depression
Audio: The Great Depression
The Collapse of Real GDP, and Recovery:
Components of Real GDP:
The Consumption Function:
The Semi-Stabilizing Role of Government:
Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win-the-War:
The Collapse of Private Investment:
· Can account, with multiplier, for essentially everything...
The Propagation Mechanism: Three Theories for the Collapse of Investment (and Consumption):
· Friedman: Inept Federal Reserve policy and banking crises...
· DeLong and Summers: Expected deflation and self-fulfilling expectations...
· Bernanke: Bank failures and the credit channel...
The Impulse:
????
1928
· The construction boom is over.
· Farmers' share of the national income has dropped from 15 to 9 percent since 1920.
· Between May 1928 and September 1929, the average prices of stocks will rise 40 percent. Trading will mushroom from 2-3 million shares per day to over 5 million.
1929
· Herbert Hoover becomes President.
· Business inventories grows three times larger than the year before.
· Freight carloads and manufacturing fall.
· Automobile sales decline by a third in the nine months before the crash.
· Recession begins in August, two months before the stock market crash.
· Stock market crash begins October 24. Investors call October 29 "Black Tuesday."
· Congress passes Agricultural Marketing Act to support farmers until they can get back on their feet.
1930
· By February, the Federal Reserve has cut the prime interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. Expands the money supply with a major purchase of U.S. securities.
· However, for the next year and a half, the Fed will add very little money to the shrinking economy.
· Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announces that the Fed will stand by as the market works itself out: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate… values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wreck from less-competent people."
· The Smoot-Hawley Tariff passes on June 17. With imports forming only 6 percent of the GNP, the 40 percent tariffs work out to an effective tax of only 2.4 percent per citizen.
· The first bank panic occurs late this year.
· Democrats gain in Congressional elections, but still do not have a majority.
· GDP falls 9.4 percent from the year before.
· The unemployment rate climbs from 3.2 to 8.7 percent.
1931
· No major legislation is passed addressing the Depression.
· A second banking panic occurs in the spring.
· GDP falls another 8.5 percent.
· Unemployment rises to 15.9 percent.
1932
· GDP falls a record 13.4 percent.
· Unemployment rises to 23.6 percent.
· Industrial stocks have lost 80 percent of their value since 1930.
· 10,000 banks have failed since 1929, or 40 percent of the 1929 total.
· The Fed makes its first major expansion of the money supply since February 1930.
· Congress creates the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
· Congress passes the Federal Home Loan Bank Act.
· Bonus March: July 28, 1932
· Top tax rate is raised from 25 to 63 percent.
· Roosevelt: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."
1933
· A third banking panic occurs in March. Roosevelt declares a Bank Holiday
· "100 Days" of intensive legislative activity.
· Millionaire businessmen discuss overthrowing Roosevelt with a military coup. Talk to General Smedley Butler.
· Congress authorizes creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
· Congress passes the Emergency Banking Bill, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Farm Credit Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth-in-Securities Act.
· U.S. goes off the gold standard.
· Roosevelt rejects Keynes' advice to begin heavy deficit spending.
1934
· Congress authorizes creation of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Mediation Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
· Congress passes the Securities and Exchange Act and the Trade Agreement Act.
· The economy turns around: GDP rises 7.7 percent.
· Unemployment falls to 21.7 percent. A long road to recovery begins.
· Sweden becomes the first nation to recover fully from the Great Depression.
1935
· The Supreme Court declares the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional.
· Congress authorizes creation of the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and the Rural Electrification Administration.
· Congress passes the Banking Act of 1935, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act.
· GDP grows another 8.1 percent.
· Unemployment falls to 20.1 percent.
1936
· The Supreme Court declares part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act to be unconstitutional.
· Top tax rate raised to 79 percent.
· GDP grows a record 14.1 percent.
· Unemployment falls to 16.9 percent.
· Germany becomes the second nation to recover fully from the Great Depression
1937
· The Supreme Court declares the National Labor Relations Board to be unconstitutional.
· Roosevelt seeks to enlarge and therefore liberalize the Supreme Court.
· GDP rises 5.0 percent.
· Unemployment falls to 14.3 percent.
· World War II in Asia begins with the Japanese invasion of China.
1938
· Congress passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
· GDP falls 4.5 percent.
· Unemployment rises to 19.0 percent.
· B
展开阅读全文
浙ICP备2021020529号-1 | 浙B2-20240490 
