economics

Physics, philosophy and why people don’t want “Centrism”

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Physics & Philosophy

For a while, it seemed that “centrism” was back on the agenda. In the US, Howard Schultz, the “burnt coffee magnate”, was considering a run for Presidency and was only one of a long queue that included Beto O’Rourke and Michael Bloomberg (who has decided not to run). In Britain, renegade Labour and Tory MPs founded The Independent Group, designed to coral a fragmented anti-Brexit sentiment in into a movement, replete with the usual platitudes about a “new type of politics”. Every centrist potential presidential candidate is feted by the media as an answer to Trump and AOC; the TIG has actually had success in forcing policy changes from the Labour Party. It seems that, three years after the events that led to 2016, and two decades after the Third Way of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, sensible politics was hoisting itself back into the public consciousness and relevance.

But here’s the problem: people don’t actually want “centrism”. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have taken onboard the very real desire for non-partisanship and somehow mangled this interpretation into support for centrism which is about as far from reality as they could be. It is unclear whether this misunderstanding is at least rooted in good faith about what ordinary people want, or whether it is part of a more sinister move to hijack the non-partisan agenda into something more appealing to those who only ever considered Trump and Brexit as aberrations. Indeed, from some parts of the spectrum supporters of these centrist trends are even preparing themselves for failure, by raising the red herring of “polarisation”. According to this, it is the public’s problem – they are too polarised these days to accept the logic of centrism. Shame on them.

There are two principal reasons why centrism is destined for failure, and none are the problem of the electorate. They are rooted in the two things which centrism stands for. First is compromise. There is some truth to the idea that the electorate is too polarised for compromise today; but this has always been the case. In politics, compromise has rarely been highly regarded since it inevitably results in the worst of all worlds, and usually are a by-word for kicking the can down the road. The Missouri Compromise or “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” come to mind for US history. The Barnett Formula, the EVEL answer to the West Lothian Question, and even the British opt-outs at Maastricht in 1992, are cases in point for Britain. The fact is that compromise is rarely satisfactory and tells of an inherently unstable equilibrium which as yet still needs to be resolved. Voters are quite tired of this given the questions thrown up by two decades of globalisation, automation and the 2008 financial crisis, and compromise is not going to answer them.

The second reason is that “centrism” above all (be it consciously or surreptitiously) is about defending the status quo – the exact opposite of popular opinion today. Whether Schultz or the TIG, advocates of the new politics are effectively trying to preserve a now discredited consensus around major issues of the day including free trade of the sort we have come to know, liberal immigration, a focus on GDP, the pursuit of “growth” and exports, keeping interest rates and inflation low and above all the protection of large corporates rather than SMEs. But that is from a pre-2016 world. Today the electorate, having been woke by the events of that year want something quite different – in a weird way, what they want is not centrism but extremism at both ends. Yes, they want to break the deadlock of existing parties, but they don’t want to return the consensus of old. Yes, they do not want the old “Left” vs “Right”, but neither do they want the compromise and consensus of the old “Centre”.

I have previously referred to what I call the Physics and Philosophy paradigm, and it is perhaps worth explaining more here. The problem with studying physics and philosophy is that each seems so different at the beginning and none of it makes sense until the loop completes at the end. Nothing makes sense until everything makes sense – whether in academia, business or anything else.

PhyPhi

Politics, too, is like this. At the beginning, one only sees things labelled for us as “Left” and “Right”, and the expanse of the political firmament is limited by lines of sight from traditional perspectives. Hence, at the beginning of 2016, this is what the American political world imagined it was seeing:

PhyPhi - pre 2016 politics

What we do not see at first glance is how these two ostensibly opposed directions may link up again at the other end of the circle. Yet if we tilt the planet up to peak behind, it is revealed what the political firmament had become by the end of the that year:

PhyPhi - post 2016 politics

Trump and Sanders were not, at the end, all too far away from each other in many of the crucial questions being posed on a number of areas such as trade, international companies and overseas cash-piles, and even infrastructure and healthcare. Both had moved right around the planetary orbit until they almost met again at the other side – the dark side of the planet invisible to the conventional commentariat sitting comfortably on the light side. And in that dark side are all the commonalities which are so hard to digest, principally amongst them the sense that the starting point for policy had to be the domestic and national, not the trade or people beyond the borders. In a sense, Trump and Sanders were in the “centre”, but a “centre” a world away from the “centre” prescribed by Bloomberg. The old centrists are wrong: their centrism was not being rejected due to cultural, regional and partisan polarization – it was not because the two sides were too different, but rather because they were too similar.

And this, ultimately, is where we are today. The TIG’s polling numbers have dramatically collapsed in the face of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, declining from the mid-teens to low single digits since the party’s inception earlier this year. Bloomberg never ran. Howard Schultz has been non-committal about a presidential campaign and Democrats have been begging him not to run; the likes of known centrist Amy Klobuchar are failing to gain traction whilst complete outsiders like Andrew Yang are doing so. Yang, if anyone, is the 2020 heir to the 2016 dark-side-of-planet movement.

“Centrism” is an idea of a bygone age, one where the recent past was a story of success, where defending the status quo seemed like common sense and where just a small amount of compromise would be enough to navigate through foreseeable difficulties. But politics has changed in the last few years. Whether you are for or against Brexit, or whether you are for or against Trump or Sanders or Andrew Yang, the stasis engendered by the old “centre” is as irrelevant as defeating Communism or the Nazis. Although much of the mainstream media remain seduced by the familiarity of what was, voters on both sides have moved on; and most of them have now marched so far around the unseen side of the planet that only candidates who themselves see the future, will be positioned to reap its rewards. Centrism is dead; long live the Dark Side!

 

 

Out really means out – why Britain should reject the “WTO option” even under Hard Brexit

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brexit-trade-barriers-810x521

The sheer amount of ignorance in British public discourse about how trade works is one of the most disappointing lessons from the whole sorry Brexit drama. As a Remainer I have no qualms in picking out the likes of Dan Hannan as an example of this, whose comprehension of the subject (and of economics in general) seems to have been plucked from half-remembered A-level text books, or, at a stretch, incidental discussion from reading History at Oxford. Amongst his favourite refrains is that which tells us that “at least we will still have WTO to fall back on”. Yet of all the options, this is probably the very worst. In the event of Hard Brexit, Britain should actually reject the WTO too.

This is not the place to get into the minutiae of what the WTO actually is or how it works. There are plenty of people who have written in easier detail that I can about this. Instead there are two common misconceptions about the WTO which need to be digested before we even get onto whether it is good for Britain or not. The first is that the WTO is not actually about regulating tariffs; its core notion is that of making sure that everyone abides by the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle, meaning that however you structure your trade (higher tariffs, lower tariffs, no tariffs) you must at least treat everyone the same. Clearly, this is a starting point on lowering tariffs but it does not actually reduce tariffs in and of themselves. Secondly, the WTO is not a single set of regulations, but rather applies to each country differently depending on their schedules of entry. In other words, upon joining the WTO, each country basically agrees to its own unique set of tariffs and commitments.

The blog referred to above gives the helpful example of shoes – a sector in which the UK happens to be an exporter:

8% is charged by the EU on shoes imported from all other WTO members (except under a free trade agreement, such as EU-Japan, or preferences on shoes from developing countries). The import duty rate in other countries will be different. The US’s import duties on shoes vary from duty-free to around 10% or higher. Japan charges 20%–30% duty on many shoe imports.

In other words, the WTO does not set monolithic rules, even at a lowest common denominator, as many casual observers seem to believe. The reason I highlight this is to emphasise that the WTO is not some magic bullet for providing a minimum level of trade freedom. It is merely a mechanism for getting countries to discuss ways to lower tariffs. How much each country has to commit to upon entry to the WTO is, much like any other trade deal or indeed any other non-deal trading relationship (which is how most trade is done), dependent on their economic strengths. A larger economy, offering both greater consumption power and usually some irreplicable exports, will always get a better “deal” out of the WTO as a whole (or any other trade negotiation such as an FTA) than a smaller economy. With or without the WTO, with or without an FTA. That is just the way life works.

Moreover, the WTO largely does not cover services, which matters for Britain. After all according to the ONS, British services exports constituted 44% of total exports in the 2017-2018 fiscal year, representing a trade surplus of +£107bn (+€124bn) compared to the trade deficit of -£139bn (-€161bn) in goods. Contrast this with Germany, France and Italy for instance who have a trade surplus in goods and deficit in services. Yet if you delve into the WTO’s website to look at something like architectural services, something Britain has had some success at, you will find the following wording:

Currently, architectural and engineering services, like all services are included in the new services negotiations, which began January 2000. Principles of trade in architectural and engineering services are contained, like for all services, in the GATS.

In other words, nothing has been agreed. The same wording applies to everything else including finance, law, advertising and so on. GATS itself, the precursor to the services agreement, is essentially toothless. As a result, you might have noticed that prior to the Brexit referendum in 2016 nobody anywhere had been talking about the WTO for almost a decade. Instead, partly in order to cover services, most countries have gone on to think about regionally integrated trade deals like ASEAN, the TPP, APEC, the East African Union, Mercosur and, er, the EU.

The problem for Britain is that the WTO is an unfinished project. People seem to forget that the intention for global “free trade” was supposed to be a multi-step process, starting with the trade in goods before moving onto the trade in services, tackling non-tariff barriers and eventually encompassing freedom of labour and capital. The trade in goods came first, naturally, because in the era in which the GATT discussions commenced, most economies including the OECD were still ones that made stuff. There was no real asymmetry in economic structure at that time and if anything, GATT and WTO were forecast to open up emerging markets to developed nation goods such as industrial equipment whilst the latter continued to develop their basic industries such as agriculture and natural resources.

However over the course of time this changed. The OECD became notably more services-based, including in their export mix. On the other hand the emerging markets, led by China, came to dominate the manufacturing industry not just at the low end but increasingly at the higher ends too – Korean autos for instance, Chinese industrial equipment and so on. It was therefore imperative that the next phase of global “free trade”, that of services, was completed – but it never was. The Doha Round, in the back of everyone’s memories, collapsed ignominiously. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 on these ossified terms has probably contributed significantly to its rise and America’s comparative decline. It certainly led to Trump. If you are a modern economy, the WTO is probably bad for you.

We have not even touched on the specifics of how and whether Britain could easily join the WTO and on what conditions. The likelihood is that Britain could join pretty quickly – if it did so exactly on the current EU schedules (ie the 8% tariff for shoes above). But as noted, each set of schedules was designed to suit a specific economy and the existent schedules suit the EU as a whole. With a focus on protecting agricultural exports for instance, they are probably not ideal for Britain. If it wanted to join on a different, bespoke set of schedules, this would require agreement from all WTO members which would almost certainly throw up objections both legitimate (British government subsidy for financial services for instance) and illegitimate (Russia or Argentina purposefully creating trouble). Furthermore this would require time, unlike the replication of the EU schedules – the shortest period of time for a WTO accession has been several years.

This brings us to the central conclusion that if Britain goes through with Hard Brexit, it would be better to reject the WTO altogether and act unilaterally. The WTO as it exists today suits some countries like Germany and China and Japan, but specifically ill-suits the UK given the commitments Britain would have to make on accepting manufactured goods but getting no such commitments on services in return. Neither is Britain a big enough an economy to enter into renegotiations to remake the rules in its own favour, as the Quadrilateral could. Moreover, rushing into the WTO would actually undermine Britain’s ability to strike independent trade deals as most of what it has to offer – a market for consumer goods – would be given up already. Leverage in bilateral negotiations by trading goods access for services access, would be eliminated including with the EU.

Indeed in recognition of Britain’s place as a middle-sized economy, it makes more sense to try and protect certain industries, even at the cost of near-term price increases.  Whilst signing up to the WTO does not restrict Britain’s ability to lower tariffs, it would prevent the country from strategically increasing tariffs where necessary, for instance incubating industries struggling to find their feet after seventy years in the wilderness. The fact is that a vibrant SME sector really only exists in economies that have reached a critical mass in exports such as the US, Germany and Japan. For all other economies, creating national champions is a better guarantee of long-term economic survival (more of this in future posts).

Brexit is a political, not an economic, debate. That political choice should be made on its own merits, but decisions about trading relationships need to be clear-headed afterwards. Relying on the WTO sounds like a short-cut for preserving some stability for British trade, but it is a false friend. The reason why nobody else pays attention to the WTO anymore is the same reason why Britain must abandon it too – if indeed it actually ends up with Hard Brexit come 29 March.

The Chinese New Economy: Alibaba as Sauron and why the old economy will be the winners

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Sauron eye

Anyone familiar with the Chinese new economy will be aware of the rise of the internet giants of Alibaba and Tencent, along with their satellite businesses. Most will also be aware of the largely exclusive ecosystems within which Chinese online life is led – platforms that encompass everything from messaging to shopping to transport to payments and beyond.

It seems astonishing to remember that barely five years ago many commentators fretted over whether China could ever achieve real innovation. The Harvard Business Review for instance posed the question “Why Can’t China Innovate?”, baldly stating:

“Can China lead? Will the Chinese state have the wisdom to lighten up and the patience to allow the full emergence of what Schumpeter called the true spirit of entrepreneurship? On this we have our doubts.”

This of course is all rather a fading memory now. Innovation can broadly be divided into three areas: upstream (essentially, “how it works”), midstream (“how it’s made”) and downstream (“how it’s used”). For years, China as a manufacturing hub had made quite noteworthy progress on midstream innovation but most uneducated observers – including many in government – have an unhealthy obsession with upstream blue-sky invention. Yet as we can see with the likes of Berners-Lee, inventors are rarely rewarded and rightly so, since the real creativity and invention from the likes of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos is in the downstream. Jobs was an arch innovator in how technology is actually used and therefore spread through an economy, with a vision of how lives are actually impacted and changed. Chinese companies, particularly through the big online giants, are clearly doing the same: modern life in China is now lived in quite an advanced but different manner to modern life in OECD countries. Alibaba and Tencent have contributed towards the creation of a real and organic Chinese modernity and technological innovation within China arguably outpaces even the US even leaving aside issues of theft.

So it is worth spending a moment to look at these two major ecosystems and how they really behave – who they are, as it were. First, there is a question of why ecosystems exist in China in the first place in a way which outside of China they do not. Amazon comes the closest of the American tech players to demand a closed ecosystem but even they seem to find limits. Western shareholders have always rewarded single-capacity specialization, and often find the idea of any conglomerate absurd, let alone a tech company offering bicycles and banking.

In China though, this has been natural, for two reasons. First, there is the historical socio-anthropological tendency within Chinese society to build a “closed loop universe” within one’s own family or clan, which has extended to the national level through the Communist Party and SOEs. My own preference for explaining this remains Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic empire theory, which tells us that most ancient civilisations relied on centralized power to deliver water to its people, enshrining the principles of autocracy and top-down governance at the government and family level. This in turn typically leads to closed-loop systemic thinking since everything has to work together or else nothing works – diversity of thought is only bad news. Secondly though, and somewhat ironically, these ecosystems have become so broad precisely because they are making up for assurances which the Chinese government cannot offer. When you make a purchase on TMall, you have more faith in the Alibaba-backed guarantee that your products will be delivered and that your payment is safe, than one does with the disparate parts of the national banking, postal or legal system offered by the government. The tech giants had to offer a total universe, or else consumers would have been reluctant to actually engage with the new business model in the first place.

Chinese ecosystems (2)

Source: SCMP

So much for why they exist – the bigger issue is how to understand who they are, what their personalities and identities are and how they should be understood from the outside. One possibly analogy, given their conflict, is that of the Cold War. In this world, Alibaba are the Soviet Union – a sprawling empire with a strong centralized view on how things are supposed to be done. Tencent on the other hand are the United States, a beacon of freedom and inspiration but which has its own agenda focused on generating and owning consumption. JD.com are Britain: commercially-minded, focused on trade and fully acquiescent into the American (Tencent) world. Lastly you have Meituan – which owes its existence to Tencent, but like France to the US is entirely ungrateful and maintains the pretence of wanting an ecosystem of its own.

Upon reflection however, a new analogy came to me which may be a touch more accurate, which is Middle Earth. In this version of events, Alibaba are indisputably Sauron, the lurking, evil presence which looks across the lands of men with an unrelenting will to dominion. They provide you the tools to “help” only so that they can own them and you. They invest in you because they need to control your system from the inside. Resistance is futile; eventual subjugation can be the only outcome. The interesting one is Tencent, who I liken to the High Elves of Rivendell. The things about the Elves is this: they are generally on the side of good, and can facilitate it; but they are not themselves a force for good since they sit far away from the battle, detached from it all. They too provide tools, but they may not tell you how to use them; their attention is ultimately elsewhere. The forces of Men ranged against Sauron – let us assume these are essentially a proxy for traditional retail and consumer business in the region – ultimately have to find the solution for themselves, aided at times by the Elves but not reliant on them. If I were to stretch this analogy ad absurdum, perhaps this makes the Dwarves JD.com with their grubby focus on gold and commerce; whilst Meituan the slightly nobler Rohirrim, since they, er, move around a lot on delivery scooters like the horses of the Riddermark. Which start-up will be the valiant hobbit which destroys Alibaba, God only knows.

The serious point to all this is that for old economy companies, it feels like making a choice is inevitable. But the more one looks at the giants of the new economy, the more apparent it is that in the conflict of “internet+” vs “+internet”, it will likely be the latter – especially established asset owners – that win out. In particular, it is difficult to imagine that in this inflated global asset price environment, that the business which need, as Alibaba and JD.com especially are doing, to build out a network of physical infrastructure can be the eventual winner. Well, maybe one early mover can, but the world is not about to be flooded with online victors – by and large, the winners will be whoever of the old economy players adapts best to the new, rather than a new economy player.

And this then comes down to the vision thing. I have another analogy: I call it the “Physics & Philosphy” dilemma™. P&P is a little known but highly intellectual degree at Oxford (arguably the most esoteric of all) which combines two subjects that are not immediately connected. Yes, it is true that in the first term, courses such as Logic may play a part in both areas but then it would appear the two diverge. Yet we should see this like the rings of Saturn: you start off at one point travelling in two opposite directions on the ring, and whilst they move far apart to begin with in the end they meet again. In P&P, the questions at the other end of the circle see the two disparate subjects poetically rejoin on questions such as: what lies beyond the Universe? What happens if time stops? What if light bends? What is not obvious when you start the degree, become enormously obvious by the time you end it.

And seeing what is on the other end of this ring – what exists on the “dark side of the planet” as it were – is the very thing that marks out business geniuses from mere mortals. It took Amazon 14 years to become profitable, but there seems little doubt that Bezos had an idea of what lurked out of his sight in the distance. Likewise Jobs as he labored through various versions of Apple. But the point is, old economy companies can equally achieve this. We know the famous examples of IBM and Intel reinventing themselves based on their competencies; Apple itself did so. Further back in history are companies like Berkshire Hathaway and General Electric, and even Nokia who started life in rubber products. Reinvention is hard, but the world has not ended just because a series of new giants seem to own everything in sight. If the old economy is to learn anything, it is that with courage and vision, and a will to innovate internally if imperfectly, the future is still going to be theirs. For every Amazon which succeeds, there will still be a dozen Walmarts and Targets which make it, stronger than before.

The technology giants will go down in history mostly as the midwives of change, delivering the new baby to their old economy counterparts. We are already seeing them do this, below the surface as Alibaba and JD.com start to crystalise value in real businesses where they can (finance, technology etc rather than the core e-commerce platforms which have rarely made money for anyone). In many ways they are merely pioneering the examples of what the future looks like, so that old economy companies can learn from it but probably implement it better – the Chinese O2O supermarket businesses are a case in point. Indeed the cheerleading nature of the new economy player’s roles in businesses like retail, ahead of its time, loss-leading and ultimately doomed as a standalone business, begs another more controversial comparison. The tech giants are St John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness; the old economy players are Jesus.

Why commentators like Martin Wolf are still firmly thinking inside the box on China

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aging-population

China’s rise is not about following the conventional economic norms, and the reality is that an ageing population is probably better than a young one

China has always been a black box. For the whole of my professional life, companies (investment banks being amongst the worst) happily hire someone – anyone at all – who claims to know the Chinese market if they can make even a sliver of money. Consequently, these people are given free rein to build their own silos. For boards in London or New York, China remains “a faraway nation of whom we know nothing”. It is from this mysterious, exotic ignorance that reliably insightful commentators, from publications which should know better, produce some tired answers to tired questions. Sad to say, amongst them was a recent piece from Martin Wolf at the Financial Times titled The Future May Not Belong to China.

Now, the future may very well not belong to China. Much of what Wolf outlines from his Capital Economics report (rather too much from one source for my liking) is unarguably true: the over-investment, the under-consumption, the increasing corporate debt and reliance on exports. But they only change from fact to “problem” when seen through the same old prism of economic development. China though has been disrupting the whole framework through which one sees these issues, confounding a whole mini-industry of untiring China bears. Who can forget the inflation crisis of 2010 – 2011? The Chibor crisis in the summer of 2013? The stock market crisis in 2015? The capital outflow crisis over 2016 – 2017? In each of these and many others besides, China was to be “found out”; it never was, not because the facts were inaccurate but because the basis for observation by outsiders was so incomplete (although to be fair some of the facts were also inaccurate). The fact that the naysayers and doom-mongers have been consistently wrong may be a cheap point to make, but it is worth making nonetheless. The only laws of economics, it seems, are the ones amateur journalists derive from their undergraduate readings of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Keynes.

china bears

A non-exhaustive list of China bear headlines since 1990

However I would submit two additional unrelated and possibly more controversial theses. The first is that the way China encounters these perceived crises is actually a mark of its success in terms of being on a pathway to global power, rather than a failure. There is a reason why China encounters “difficulties” where Japan, during its own precipitous rise in the 1970s, did not: China is actively trying to change the world it is living in. These crises are the tremors generated by moving tectonic plates, as Chinese objectives grate against the rules and outcomes it is being measured against. Currency and capital flows, interest rates, debt and the banking system – these are all examples of Chinese policy that do not make macro-economic sense until you factor in that it wants to change the system and if it plays its cards right, it probably can. We are faced with the first occasion since the United States back in the 1840s, where the world may have to accommodate a new power, and accordingly the rules will change. For China, this friction is good.

japan china gdp

Source: The Economist (2010)

To run through just one example of this, let us look at capital outflows. The reason capital outflows seem like a “crisis” is that the Chinese government wants to control the currency rather than let it be determined by the market. To pay for this, it must use foreign exchange reserves to keep the exchange rate stable. This becomes a huge cost when the environment is weak – except that the reason China does this is to try and make the RMB a regionally accepted trade and reserve currency. This could be done through just trade alone, but in China’s case it will also be done through the crypto-imperialism of the Belt & Road and other initiatives. If it succeeds, it will both eat into America’s ability to project power through the dollar, as well as ultimately encourage greater consumption of Chinese-made goods which in turn once again brings capital flows back into balance. It is a risky and expensive, all-or-nothing gamble; but unlike merely acquiescing into the current world system, if it succeeds it will have changed the regional financial and trade landscape. A price, some would say, worth paying.

The second thesis focuses on the cliché that China may be facing the middle income trap – that it may “get old before it gets rich”. This is typically paired with the curiously British trait of enthusiasm for India as an alternative story. Yet I would argue that with the coming of automation, China is actually on the right side of history on this and that far from fearing age, the adage should be turned on its head: for many comparable countries it is youth, not age, which will be a great peril; and these countries may be too young to ever get rich.

We have for some decades been fed the neoliberal trope that a younger population is good for the economy, and that pursuit of youth, through birthrates or immigration, is a Good Thing. Yet we are fast approaching the point where this notion is being exposed, because automation is actually a process which will eat into youth employment rather than any other. China’s workforce is actually declining and has been for some years, just in time for robots to start taking over.

The process of classic industralisation is just one of various models for a country to develop. But in this particular model, families can contribute labour rather than capital in order to obtain greater earnings, and thereby over time accumulate household assets. For many countries though, this industrialisation may never now be possible. The Economist noted as much when opining that the pathway of development exhibited by the China + ASEAN axis is probably irreplicable by anyone else including markets in Africa and South America. Goods may be manufactured in some of these economies, but it will be robots that do most of it and young median households will never cross either the asset-owning or educational thresholds required to survive automation before it hits.

Now, it may be that these countries find other models to become rich, but I doubt it. Agriculture or resource extraction will be possible for only a precious few. The mercantile model is not stable or sustainable. Services, as we have seen, actually produce a lower return on labour than industrialization does since jobs are often of a lower quality. In any case one of the stark lessons of 2016 was the fact that in 29 out of 50 states in the US, trucking was the single most common form of employment – and this, more so than manufacturing, is where automation will first hit.

us job types

Source: NPR (2015)

The fact is that to weather automation, median family assets need to reach a critical mass enough to be “invested” into the economy such that they can be gainers from robot productivity rather than victims. The most obvious if questionable form of asset-ownership would be home-ownership, but in an ideal world it would take other forms. China’s urban population has just about caught this train (financial income growth has far outstripped wage growth in recent years), but younger populations in India or Vietnam may not make it. Young people inevitable have fewer assets having had less time to earn; if their family does not reach this critical automation-neutralising financial position, they face eternal unemployment. OECD economies mitigate this conundrum somewhat through welfare transfers, but welfare is another privilege of long term asset accumulation by Society – a privilege emerging markets do not have. It is a race against time and any country that fails to achieve this will be left without a chair when the music stops.

In this context, I have little time for those who argue, as Wolf does, that India is “the most interesting other economy” (Americans I have noticed, tend to use Vietnam as their preferred example). As one of my friends commented, “the human race will probably be extinct before India has an airport like Pudong”. Taken individually, each of these points (China’s extra-economic rise and youth being a greater concern than age) have huge implications about the rules and framework for emerging market development theory. Taken together however, they may represent a perfect storm which leading to an inflection point in global economic development. In this case, being wedded to the old ideas, commentators like Wolf are probably missing it.

Why Britain could demand asymmetric labour access to the EU – and why it might be best for both sides

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Freedom of movement

The disputes over Brexit negotiations have mostly been premised on the idea of reciprocity – or rather, retaliation. If we do not give them rights, they will not give them to us. This has been particularly true when discussion freedom of movement, possibly the single most important driver of Brexit voting in 2016. On the face of it, there seems to be logic in the EU demanding that EU nationals be allowed to freedom of movement into the UK if the UK wants the same thing in return. However this may belie the reality, which is that asymmetric access is perfectly viable and indeed valid.

To give one example of where this makes sense, let us examine Chinese policy with regards Hong Kong. Here, Hong Kong residents have an almost unhindered access to the Mainland and its economy, not only in terms of movement and residency, but also asset ownership including real estate and businesses. Chinese Mainlanders on the other hand face extremely stringent rules on coming to Hong Kong and particularly for settling here. Work visas are required almost exactly as they are of any foreigners. Yet this is essentially just one country with ultimately one government. And yet it suits both sides.

Why? Well there are two main reasons for allow one-way borders. The first is when one area needs skills the other has. This was historically true of Hong Kong and the services it provided to mainland China in terms of capital and skills, although today this is no longer so relevant. In the case of Britain and the EU, there are arguably skills which those across the channel, all things being equal, would prefer to have. Banking and finance might be part of this, but it seems unlikely. Much more relevant is that Britain is far more innovative than the rest of Europe and particularly so compared to the larger countries. In the European Commission’s innovation rankings for instance, Britain comes fifth but well ahead of Germany, as well as France, Italy and Spain. This is something the EU would surely rather not lose: startups and business ideas which could change the world but which need a large market to be tested and improved. For this reason, one-sided migration would be net positive.

European countries ranked by innovation

European innovation

Source: European Innovation Scoreboard 2018 (European Commission)

The second reason is the defensive one and relies on a resource Britain has an abundance of: parochialism. One of the reasons China has no particular fear of opening the border to Hong Kong is that there is very little chance that people will want to cross the border and stay there. Oddly enough, Britain is in the same boat, since Britons have historically been far less likely to move to another European country than many others, especially those of a working age. If we look at northern European migrants to other northern European destinations (in other words, intra-EU migration which strips out the retirement population) Britain figures as one of the least mobile populations behind even France. Only Germany is marginally behind and this is due to its outstanding export economy.

Total intra-Northern European emigrants as a percentage of total population

Intra-European migration

Source: People on the Move (Bruegel Jan 2018)

This reflects only “rich” Europe; if eastern and southern Europe were included the numbers would be even more stark. This peculiarly British parochialism can be seen in everything from the lack of language learning in British schools through to the reluctance of British footballers to move to European leagues which are better for their career. In other words, the British are much more disinclined to move and settle in the EU than the other way around, so that offering asymmetric access will only help business without causing any employment displacement.

This is a classic and enjoyable case of hidden asymmetry, the defining theme of this blog. The simple fact is that just because access is unequal does not mean that it is imbalanced or not beneficial to both sides. Reciprocity may seem “fair” on the face of it but may not actually be relevant – when there are cultural asymmetries as in this case, there is a good case to argue that reciprocity is not needed. Unless indeed retaliation is the core objective.

The hidden costs of parenting – why PPP could become PPPP

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stress-cost-of-kids

Purchasing power parity or “PPP” has for many years been as good a proxy as any for allowing comparability between figures such as different countries’ GDP. China’s economy, for example, has a nominal GDP of just US$12 trillion, compared to America’s US$19.4 trillion. Yet when re-based on PPP, China’s GDP is actually US$23.2, making it the largest in the world. I for one accept that this is a useful indicator of economic strength, in the sense that China as a country is able to mobilise more economic resources than its nominal GDP would strictly suggest, since labour and capital there are cheaper. Likewise, a preferred measure of living standards is that of GDP per capita at PPP, or sometimes (better) average wages at PPP. In this way, some comparability may be afforded which accounts for street food in China appearing so much cheaper than in the West for instance.

Yet a friend of mine recently noted that in a sense, PPP-based comparisons of wages and living standards were very much geared towards the individual. A great leveler, he reckoned (as a relatively new parent complaining about the costs of the endeavor) was the arrival of children into his life. Because whilst in theory a basket of goods for PPP calculation includes items needed for raising children, in reality behavioral differences distort its reality. PPP, he felt, did not reflect the full costs of parenting and its effects seemed most intuitive to a single person. When considering where to live, PPP in his life could and perhaps should be re-adjusted to Parental PPP or “PPPP”.

There are three main buckets to consider in making any such adjustments:

1. Direct additional costs of education
2. Consumption choices
3. Real estate costs

The theory here is as follows: wherever you live in the world, the likelihood is that you will as a parent attempt to make up for the deficiencies of the world around you as best you can, in the interest of your children. This comes out of your own resources, and actually in many countries where life is “cheap”, when it comes to raising children those expenses shoot right up again. For instance, as a single person one may choose to drink tap water; as a parent one begins to invest in water cleansing machinery or bottled water (especially in Asia). Education is an important element too, since although many countries provide free universal education, parents recognize their limitations and will correspondingly pay for tuition and other aid. A surprisingly large selection of countries such China actually see parents effectively paying for education despite it being notionally free – and this is before getting to the issue of boarding schools paid for by expats. Lastly, real estate requirements are different and in some parts of the world rents / price counter-intuitively increase with the size of a property, commanding a premium due to restricted space.

So a comprehensive, scientific adjustment to PPP would require a sophisticated model which includes all these factors. To test it though, I instead looked at a simplistic account using only one factor that I could readily find, HSBC’s analysis of how much parents pay for their children’s education in several countries:

Cost of parenting
Source: HSBC – The Value of Education report 2017

Using this data as a rough proxy for all-in childcare costs (imperfect, but it is all I have to hand) I then readjusted the standard PPP index as provided by the OECD. The assumption I have made is that one-third of a parent’s income is used on children, a figure broadly in-line with statistics also published by the OECD. Thus I left two-thirds of income adjusted on the official OECD PPP basis, whilst the remaining one-third I have adjusted using a new index created by comparing total childcare spend. The results look like this:

Value of 30000

Basic and clumsy though this analysis is, it shows some interesting trends. First, as my friend suspected, the “real” living costs for a parent in places like China and India may be in fact higher than initially assumed, due to a surprisingly high need for private spend. But even more notable is how much value is added by the welfare societies of France and the UK, where the median family does not spend anything like as much for education particularly at the tertiary level. Median wages go a lot further in Europe and Canada than in the US under this system – and indeed US$30,000 almost matches the value of US$30,000 in China. The same kind of logic no doubt applies to issues such as universal healthcare. Assuming my calculations are even remotely accurate, life is fundamentally as cheap in Europe as it is in China, whilst life in the US remains the most expensive.

This methodology is very preliminary, full of assumptions and no doubt lacking. I would be happy to hear opinions on how best to improve it. However the basic theory is strong, namely that PPP may have a simple underlying flaw due to not accounting for changes in life cycle; in some cases PPP probably needs to become PPPP to be meaningful for public policy and for investment purposes alike. Essentially, single life remains localised whilst parenthood is becoming globalised. Since parenting costs are only going to increase as we go forward, the issue becomes particularly prominent. PPPP could be the future.

**************

For those keen to see the underlying data, below is the table of calculations:

PPPP table

How all politics really works – in one simple chart

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Introducing the General Theory of Government 

The events of 2016 were curious because of their dichotomy: on the one hand, they were such a shock to the political classes, on the other hand they were also entirely predictable. Yet the commentariat both then and since appeared to miss (or simply forget) the most basic and obvious premise of how all politics works: namely that the ruler has to offer the ruled a mixture of both material and psychological well-being. The desire for identity is as legitimate a concern as any amount of wealth, and any government that fails to provide one or the other over a long period of time will suffer the occasional revolt. Understanding this explains Brexit, Trump and any other examples one might care to mention.

I do not claim this to be revolutionary, but given its lack of profile and given the impending elections in the US which will doubtless cause another round of soul-searching, I think it is useful to visualize this concept in a simple, easy to comprehend model. With no further ado therefore, all politics can be represented in this single chart:

General Theory - basic model

The Wealth-Identity Trade-off Model

It should be easy to see where I am going with this. Into the x-axis goes all those things which politicians want to focus on: taxes, welfare spending, the cost of living. Into the y-axis are all those things politicians seem not to think exist anymore such as ethnicity, religion and language. And, in a democracy at least, any government which consistently offers too little of one or other of these parameters, will find themselves cast out. We have for perhaps too long been living in a world where the governing classes have not only mistaken how to deliver W (Sanders, &c), but completely ignored i (Trump, Farage &c). Political parties across the spectrum have spent the last few decades obsessing over the x-axis whilst assuming that the y-axis will tend to itself. Rectifying this will be, as I have alluded to before, the dominant theme of the next two decades at least in the West.

I would hope this is all intuitive enough not to need vast amounts of explanation, but in a series of posts I intend to outline the basic premise of the General Theory and specifically its core idea, the Wealth-Identity Trade-off Model (WITM™). I will go on to examine how and when a society ceases to function properly; what a society really comprises within the model (“Median Man”, or “MM“); and lastly look at some applied examples in the world today and perhaps yesterday.

What I am proposing is not in itself, I think novel; however like all good things I believe this theory synthesizes simple, intuitive ideas which have at best not been expressed before in such a manner, or perhaps may not have been coherently identified. To anyone who disagrees with this, or who have contrary opinions, I look forward to hearing them. Additionally, since these are blog posts which may one day find their way into a book, I will not footnote everything in detail. However I trust that enough is articulated to allow the reader to comprehend what I intend.

The End of Entrepôts – why the future is big, not small

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Lugard

Photo: Lord Lugard with the Legco in 1909

It is one of the most oft-repeated fallacies in modern politics that the future is destined to be ever smaller and fragmented. One only has observe the fetishization of breakaway movements such as Scotland or Catalonia and hear the accompanying, knowing murmurs telling us that in political terms at least, atomization is the way of the future – small is beautiful. Some still reach further back, summoning up the collapse of the Soviet Union as proof that all large entities must collapse.

This is completely at odds with reality, on a number of levels. First, recent history has, far from being driven by a narrative of devolution, instead been dominated by the rise of “big countries” which in turn are resurrecting their own brand of Great Power relations. The corresponding decline in relevance of smaller entities is pronounced – most noticeably in the shape of individual European nations which have seen their weight fall off considerably. The 2010 Copenhagen agreement, where Obama sidelined the Europeans to reach straight for emerging giants, was an early sign of this; the gradual extinction of the Quadrilateral in determining trade policy was another.

Indeed in my 2013 paper on China and multilateralism, I noted that the world is if anything heading towards a new “community of empires”, with both the foreign and domestic policies of China, Brazil and India joining the US and Russia in pursuing an unrelentingly imperial logic. In response, those outside of their orbit are banding together to form what are prima facie trade blocs, but which are in reality the beginnings of something much more. Whether the European Union, ASEAN or Mercosur, nation-states are ceding sovereignty slowly but surely for the express purpose of aggregating their power in the world beyond. Even in unexpected corners of functioning humanity such as East Africa, union is the name of the game. Status and size do not have a linear correlation; as one reaches critical mass, the relationship becomes exponential. A power ten times as large as its neighbours is far more than ten times as important.

At the heart of this is a simple thesis: in the long run, the power of any country will be determined by the size of its population (with a shared identity – more of that another time), somewhat adjusted for a country’s natural resource base. In the long run, all else is mere noise. Yes, certain countries or civilisations may exercise disproportionate power for a period of time, even centuries. This can have any number of causes but often it is because of temporary technological disparities – temporary because in the long run, all technology will permeate meaning that we arrive back at where we started: population. Any vision of a world where the largest population blocks are not the most important countries must be premised on a smaller, more nimble country actively and exploitatively keeping larger population blocks subject. This was a kernel of much of European colonialism of the 19th century (which should not be conflated with a general model of imperialism exercised in human history).

Now in the long run, as Keynes says, we are all dead. So does it matter? I would say yes it does, particularly for those living in and around the rising powers of Asia such as China, Indonesia and to a lesser extent, India. Because some of these changes are no longer concerns for the long term, but coming to maturity now.

One lesson is this: the age of entrepôts such as Hong Kong and Singapore is fast coming to an end. In the future, there will be no space for such outposts any longer, at least in their current form. This is because the very existence of such centres is a lingering post-colonial legacy, based on an economic system that is now no longer extant. City-states like Singapore thrive because they are a form of offshoring, and the offshoring they offer is reaching the end of its useful life.

We should be crystal clear that offshoring has two forms: there is offshoring for work a country does not want to do, and offshoring for work it cannot do. On the one hand, there is what we classically understand as “offshoring” where one jurisdiction offers a cheaper way of producing goods and services for a richer one – offshoring from below. Textiles in Bangladesh fall into this, as does the core of China’s economic rise during the 1990s and 2000s. The second form is what hubs such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and even London offer to an extent – offshoring  from above. They provide capabilities that other poorer, less developed countries cannot do themselves.

The problem is that much of the world is catching up. There is precious little that can be done in Hong Kong today that cannot be done in China; yet Hong Kong really only exists to serve the Chinese economy, much as some lament its progress to becoming “just another” Chinese port. Singapore is safer for the moment, but it is still implausible to imagine that Malaysia, much less Indonesia, will allow the island to remain an offshoring hub for high value-added industries such as finance. As with China, they will end up doing everything themselves. The post-colonial legacy of substantially inadequate skills and infrastructure will be bridged, if not today, then tomorrow. At that point, the city-states will have precious little left. This is a problem not faced by Bangladesh – but then no-one wants to be Bangladesh. There is a reason why entrepôts barely exist in the OECD and if they do, they service a tiny, marginal sliver of their neighbours’ economic life as Jersey or the British Virgin Islands do. It is because there is no room at the top.

Britain suffers from many of the same issues. Plenty have lauded the supposed rebirth of the British automotive industry, and in a few instances, this is well justified. But for every Aston Martin or Morgan, where real value-add and R&D is achieved in the UK, there is a far bigger presence of Nissan or Toyota. The latter however, are essentially a little Bangladesh model – investment into the UK occurs not because of any inherent capabilities, but because we are marginally cheaper and have fewer regulatory restrictions (unionization etc) than regional neighbours. This is not much of a national dream.

The other side of the UK is that of the entrepôt. Here I am referring to her services exports – but not the headline-grabbing financial services sector, which will be pretty easily replicable elsewhere, but rather industries such as advertising, publishing, design and architecture which are more genuinely unique. And one can tell that they are unique, since whereas the UK can barely export any financial services to the big empire economies of the US or China, it sells large quantities of stylish design. The problem is, this is nowhere near enough to support an independent UK – the idea of the UK becoming a “Singapore of Europe” is beyond fanciful, as I have noted before.

Singapore has been conspicuous in how strongly it clings to and pushes for ASEAN. And the reason is clear: if ASEAN does not succeed in binding the region together, Singapore will soon have nothing to offer its larger neighbours. Only a union of sorts will allow it to continue holding a position of import. Hong Kong’s commercial residents have long acquiesced to the fact that it will have to be another Chinese city, albeit one offering some special rules and playing a specific role. Hong Kong’s flagship airline’s troubles reflect the decline of hub-and-spoke trade in favour of point-to-point, and are a microcosm of how the whole economy is developing. Dubai will play off the inability of regional giants to pull their weight (Iran, Egypt and Turkey) but if and when they do, it too will face the same problems of reinvention.

But the old model of “Singapore” is a complacent and condescending anachronism – and those pushing the model for countries like Britain are living a sheer fantasy.

Explaining the Umbrella and Sunflower protests

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As a brief follow-on from my previous piece on Taiwan, I have done a quick and dirty analysis on what is driving youth discontent in Greater China, and specifically what has arisen in Hong Kong and Taiwan in recent years.

In this single chart, I believe I capture what I would call the “aspiration deficit” in being a young person in these two jurisdictions today. Here I have calculated the house pricing and rental in key cities as a multiple of graduate starting salaries.

Graduate salaries

Sources:

  1. Graduate salaries for PRC cities from Baidu News, as per 2017
  2. Graduate salary for Hong Kong from SCMP, as per 2016
  3. Graduate salary for Taiwan from Taipei Times, as per 2016
  4. House price and rental data from Knight Frank Greater China Property Market Report Q3 2017, based on Luxury Residential

The caveats: this is not designed to give any sort of rule of thumb about how long it takes to save for a flat, or how much is used up of income to pay for rent. I may even come up with a better methodology going forward – if the data allows. Instead, this exercise is simply a measure of what pressure there is on the dreams of those who newly come onto the job market, having been promised that their four years at university would lead them to a better life. This is why the luxury Residential market is I think an adequate metric on which to judge.

What is shows is quite how desperate prospects are for many of those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Their earnings are stagnant, yet house pricing is going up. Welfare is better than in China, but the infrastructure is beginning to creak. The idea of looking after themselves – let alone looking after their parents – seems distant; and of course having children in this environment is ever less appetising. This is perhaps the single largest contributor to the upheavals experienced from students and other youth in the Umbrella and Sunflower movements – and it explains why so many young people see their future in China or elsewhere abroad.

To bring this back to politics, I wrote some time ago on the problems Beijing has had in relying on local tycoons to press their case in Hong Kong:

“… less obvious has been how housing prices are preventing young local Hong Kong residents from starting lives properly, and in this as with much else the fault lies in a government that has existed to serve the tycoons – let us call them the Oligarchs – instead of the people. Beijing has been complicit in this since it decided to use the Oligarchs as a shortcut towards legitimacy after the handover. In colonial times, many tycoons were respected by locals as examples of being able to escape the unspoken racial glass ceiling, but since 1997 these Oligarchs have gone on to really take local people for a ride. Beijing is now paying the price for siding with the rich against the poor for so long. There is a limited amount of time that this can continue before Beijing must begin to change sides.“

The same, in a sense, is true of Taiwan, where the big business lobby has been allowed to get rich off mainland China, repatriate their earnings and create asset bubbles in Taiwan that put home ownership increasingly beyond the reach of locally based graduates. It is a death spiral for aspiration – and it is this, much more than any real impact on living standards – which diminishes the legitimacy of any regime.

American poverty is neither urban nor rural – it’s small, mostly white towns

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A vacant, boarded up house is seen in the once thriving Brush Park neighborhood with the downtown Detroit skyline behind it in Detroit,

It has been a year since Trump entered the White House, and eighteen months since the Brexit vote. Yet the media still display an astonishing lack of understanding about several aspects both of US wage stagnation, as well as how it interacted with voting.

The Brookings Institute came out with an important piece recently which has not received the attention it deserved. They produced five maps, showing the winners and losers in median wage change across the US between 1999 and 2016. Some of the results are obvious: the first map, of “winners”, shows that wages in the tech hubs and in government subsidised DC have done rather well; the last map, showing where wages have done the worst – step forward Detroit amongst others – is also a well-worn narrative.

But it is the penultimate map which should be most concerning. I have long argued that American liberals take far too narrow a view of poverty, and see the role of government as essentially providing urban answers to urban problems, which are the most visually obvious to those inside the Beltway. This ends up focusing on helping ethnic and other minorities, albeit usually in a less-than-constructive method. Altogether ignored is where much of the real poverty lies – as this map shows:

metro_20171012_alan-berube_fig4-struggling-v3

It repays some close study. The problem areas are not Detroit or Flint or Cleveland. The problems are that 10 urban areas of over 1 million inhabitants – and another 59 towns of between 100,000 and 1 million – have experienced median wage declines of 10% – 15% over the period. On the basis of this study, that’s 50 million people constituting the single largest group, and are not all names you would expect:

While the group contains a handful of large Sunbelt metro areas still laboring to rebound from the late 2000s housing crash (e.g., Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, Tucson) and a few major industrial centers in the Midwest (e.g., Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee), small- to mid-sized urban areas predominate in this category. Most are manufacturing centers that lost significant numbers of middle-income jobs in the 2000s that have not been replaced, including 10 urban areas in Wisconsin, six each in Michigan and Ohio, and five each in Georgia and Indiana. A few have shown some green shoots in the 2010s after a rough decade, including Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo in Michigan, and Oshkosh in Wisconsin. Others, however, have slipped considerably since 2009, such as Charleston, W.Va., Davenport, Iowa, and Springfield, Ill.

This reinforces two lessons. The first is that the often quoted cliché about urban vs rural voters is a false one; neither America (nor Britain) are about large urban centres. By my last count, well fewer than half (43%) of Americans lived in conurbations of over a million people. Fewer again (33%) lived in cities of over two million. The genuinely rural population is also small (15%). Instead, real American life is about small market and post-industrial towns.

Politics focused on what happens in New York or LA, and contrasted perniciously against what happens “out on the ranch”, is not helpful to anyone. Reporters and politicians know all about the urban indigent, even if they do not do much about it; but they seem to know nothing of the small-town working poor. That is what Trump and Sanders were all about. It is also the case with Britain, as was identified in an excellent piece in 2007 by Blair Freebairn.

The obsession with reporting on urban areas is one I have discussed before in relation to media misinformation about street protests in the developing world.

Neatly compact urban street protests are highly photogenic and easily captured on camera. Crowds sell news … It is difficult for outside observers to empathize with anyone other than those who are so passionately occupying the capital. It also involves much greater effort and investment in time – time which is not afforded by the twenty-four hour news cycle.

The great tragedy is that the same misguided focus is applicable at home, where we discovered last year that journalists who should know better, did not.

The second lesson is the danger of economists and economic commentators continue to fall victim to the intellectual Tyranny of the Mean, whereby average numbers still form the focus at the expense of median data. What I should hope is by now a very commonly seen chart shows the disparity which still leads to the incredulous question: “who are all these poor white people?”

US_GDP_per_capita_vs_median_household_income

There is little sense in technocrats informing voters that their economy has been growing, or that living standards have been rising, when no-one recognizes it as such. The disparity shown here is not only obvious as a chart, but more importantly in how voters feel about the economy. Median calculations are not perfect, but a good starting point would be for all economists to rethink along median lines each and every time they put out a statistic or indicator.

All said and done, it seems to me most liberals have still not grasped the underlying lessons of the last few years. Obama, of course, had precisely zero to say on the issues that would come to dominate 2016 – he barely seemed curious about such trends, for someone so supposedly intellectual. Fighting the urban-rural battle is to continue the last war. Small white towns are where it’s at right now, and telling them they’ve been doing okay is not going to win any votes.