Waiting for the Tooth Fairy
Four prominent economists at the Hoover Institution have published a new paper claiming that President Trump’s policies could make the U.S. economy grow 3 percent a year. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but three of the four authors have been mentioned as people Trump might nominate to head the Federal Reserve Board after Janet Yellen’s term expires next February.
Let’s be clear: 3 percent annual economic growth would be quite an accomplishment. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown that quickly over a full year since 2005. There’s no doubt that Americans would feel much better off if the economy were to soar as the Hoover Institution economists suggest. Personally, though, I think we’re about as likely to get a visit from the tooth fairy.
The authors attribute slow U.S. economic growth to slow productivity growth and a drop in the percentage of adults who are in the workforce. I agree entirely. But they then go on to lay the blame on President Obama, without mentioning him. “Focused primarily on ‘stimulus’ in the short-term, the conduct of economic policy in the post-crisis years did little to reset expectations higher for long-term growth. That policy failure restrained those expectations, adversely affecting consumption and, especially, investment spending,” they say. The authors assert that lower taxes on businesses and on capital investment, less regulation, and slower growth of federal spending “would help turn the recent upswing in animal spirits into a significant improvement in economic activity.”
You may have caught this movie before. Back in the 1980s, President Reagan’s economic experts promised much the same. Tax rates were lowered, regulations scaled back, federal spending curtailed. Yet on average, output per hour worked in non-farm businesses — the most basic measure of productivity — grew more slowly during the Reagan years than it had during the miserable 1970s, when tax rates had been far higher. These policies were supposed to bring miraculous productivity growth, but as Reagan’s former budget director, David Stockman, said in 1986 “The fundamentals that I look at are not a miracle.”
What’s the issue here? Our four authors claim that “economic policies are the primary cause of both the productivity slowdown and the poorly performing labor market.” But as I show in An Extraordinary Time, the connection between government policy and productivity growth is tenuous. Productivity gains stem mainly from innovations in the private sector, which work their way into the economy in unforeseen ways. Government can help by supporting education, scientific research, and infrastructure, but the productivity payoff from such investments is unpredictable. The evidence that tax rates or government deficits affect productivity growth is quite weak. This is true not only in the United States, but in other advanced economies as well.
Some productivity experts, notably Robert Gordon, think slow productivity growth is with us permanently, which would mean Americans’ incomes will grow only modestly in the coming years. I’m not so pessimistic. Historically, we’ve seen unanticipated spurts of productivity growth as firms suddenly figure out how to take advantage of new technologies and new ways of doing business. That has happened before, as with the Internet boomlet of the late 1990s, and I think it’s entirely possible that it could occur again. But I’m afraid the claim that the government can give us faster productivity growth just by passing a couple of laws falls into the realm of wishful thinking.
Tags: economics, Federal Reserve, productivity, regulation, Robert Gordon