Category: Economic Theory

By: Ethan Lamb

Oren Cass advocates for changing the underlying conditions so that the market can achieve more auspicious outcomes for working families.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about the growing populist force, evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s monologue, that attributes many societal troubles to market forces. My conclusion followed like this: Instead of seeking to curb the free-market, government officials should focus on cultivating conditions that are likely to generate more auspicious outcomes through the free-market. Consistent with this notion, former Domestic Policy Director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and current Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Oren Cass, writes a fascinating policy-intensive book called the Once and Future Worker. Senator Marco Rubio contends that The Once and Future Worker “offers much-needed clarity for how to make the American dream possible for many.” The author of the NYT bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, who is often used as a reference for describing the struggles (manufacturing jobs leaving, opioid crisis, etc) in the Rust Belt ,  calls it “among the most important [he’s] ever read.”  The central premise of this book is a push towards the goal of “productive pluralism,” in which policy goals should be constructed around a healthy labor market and an emphasis on work, rather than merely GDP growth. In other words, Cass contends that there are benefits existent in dignified work and community that cannot be captured by the metric of GDP growth. Dissimilar to Tucker Carlson, Cass acknowledges how GDP growth and productivity gains are necessary for a flourishing society—- he just posits that they are not sufficient.  Many of the failures, Cass contends, are the results of misguided regulatory policies and approaches to contemporary issues. This article will primarily deal with explicating his proposals on environmental regulation and higher education. That being said, with a variety of other policy areas discussed, this book is well worth the read in its entirety.

Cass makes the case for manufacturing without subscribing to the protectionist philosophy. He illustrates how it is not entirely the fault of the free-market in constricting employment in this industry. Rather, it’s a pervasive regulatory apparatus that is artificially shifting the demand for labor to industries free of regulation.

With regard to how environmental regulation impacts the labor market, Cass points to the EPA tightening air quality requirements from 75 parts per billion (pbb) to 65-70 ppb in 2014. While seemingly trivial, such a radical change creates “nonattainment zones,” which are areas that do not meet the updated standards. These cities include Atlanta, Baltimore, and St. Louis. Cass advocates for an increase in justifying regulations, in which the benefits of the regulation would have to equal or exceed the cost. This calculation, he points out, would have to account for the cost of unemployment for individuals in this region, among other things. Moreover, current permits allow existing plants to circumvent updated regulations, while mandating new plants to abide by the new standards. Cass notes how “large businesses benefit from barriers to entry that keep newer and smaller firms out, giving them an incentive to advocate regulation that hurts them but hurts their competitors more.” Given these distorted incentives, Case advocates for holding all plants to the same standards. He goes on, “This reform would be the economic equivalent of removing a dam. The current discrimination against new investments holds back a reservoir of capital that would surge forward were it not for the costs and restrictions now imposed.

Furthermore, Cass urges reform on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA, instituted in 1970, requires the federal government to conduct reviews, including an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which can result in thousands of pages and five years before completion. According to Cass, “a completed EIS then provides an invitation for environmental groups to launch lawsuits over the quality of the EIS, occupying years more, even if no legal basis exists for objecting to the project itself.” Such prolonged spectacles predictably stifle infrastructure projects and deter future investments from taking place. Cass proposes adopting a “streamlined review process,” similar to Canada and Germany, that “guarantee short, fixed timelines for review and preclude further litigation once a decision has been made.” Cass points to the conspicuous incongruity in the oil and gas production that has taken place in private land, as opposed to public land.

Cass also addresses how certain misconceptions about higher education have not redounded to the country’s benefit in recent generations. He laments both a watering-down of the high school education system and the “college for all” initiative advanced by politicians. He points to the fact that, despite the doubling of per-person spending in the k-12 education system since 1970, the average National Assessment of Education Scores for both reading and math have not increased. In fact, national SAT scores have actually declined. Moreover, he continues, “in states where almost all high school seniors take the SAT, only about one-third achieve scores that would indicate a likelihood of B minus average at a four year college.

There has been external pressure on school districts to inflate their graduation rates. This, however, has come at the expense of actually educating kids. Cass writes:

In the nation’s capital, the Washington Post headlined with a straight face that the “Entire Senior Class at D.C.’s Ballou High School Applies to College,” even though the school’s graduation rate the prior year had been only 57 percent and few than 5 percent of its students had passed citywide standardized exams. A National Public Radio investigation discovered that half the graduated missed at least three months of senior-year classes and that teachers had faced overwhelming pressure to pass failing students. More than one-quarter of the teaching staff quit during the year.

While specious studies indicate a premium on college attendance, Cass contends that important omitted variables in these studies are intelligence and work ethic. In other words, the causal impact in expected income level is not college itself. Rather, on average, students with these formidable characteristics are inclined to go to college. This means that, perhaps, a restructuring of the education can leverage these students’ expected income, in ways that a bloated college system cannot. College, in large part, is responsible for the distortion of the labor-force and skills-gap that to blame for lagging productivity. When referring to college graduates, Cass states:

Roughly speaking, one-fifth of all students were already off-track and did not join their classmates crossing the stage. Another fifth will move from their senior year to something besides further schooling. The third fifth will enroll in college but fail to complete it. Yet another fifth will complete some form of college but land in jobs that don’t require the degrees they just earned. Despite decades of teacher training, student testing, and standards, as well as school choice and hundreds of billions of dollars in new annual education spending, only a final fifth will successfully navigate the path—high school to college to career—that is our education system’s ideal.

By no way is it compassionate to exhort younger generations to accrue an insurmountable amount of debt for a major that bears no relation to future vocational field. The underwhelming results of the bloated higher education system is underscored by a report Brookings Institution study in which it was found that, “although college attendance rates have risen steadily in the United States for the past two decades, bachelor’s degree attainment has not improved at all.” In fact, Cass points out, the percentage of twenty-five-year-old Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree was lower in 2015 than it was in 1995.

As a solution, Cass advocates for a “tracked system” that, in varying degrees, is practiced throughout most modern counties. Such a system does not preclude from ever achieving an upper-class status. The New York Times notes that “it is not uncommon to find executives in Europe who got their starts in apprenticeships.” Cass suggests that the tracking process would start in ninth or tenth grade and would emphasize “practical skills, offered opportunities to explore different industries, and instilled in students the flexibility to adapt and learn as their careers progress.” By the eleventh grade, the amount of time between classroom learning and vocational training would shift in the direction of vocational training. The Swiss system, which Cass uses an example of success, has roughly two-thirds of students pursue a vocational training route. Germany, which has also constructed a robust apprenticeship system, has a success rate of 80 rate in terms of young adult employment rate after graduation, compared to the United States’ meager 48 percent rate.

Specifically, Cass outlines a model where community colleges would bid to become “program sites,” offering a two year Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) associates degree. Employers would sponsor the students and be able structure the program to best fit their needs. Students would spend two eight-hour days in the classroom and three eight-hour days working and accruing experience. Cass stipulates that with no net increase in education spending, “America could offer every tenth grader additional classroom learning, a subsidized three-year apprenticeship for which he might also be paid, and a savings account with $20,000 to $40,000 awaiting upon completion. It is reiterating Cass’ attention to the labor force and market when discussing such proposals.

The “college for all” initiative advanced by the federal government through subsidies and federal loans programs has generated a large artificial increase in demand for college, thereby eminently increasing the price. In public policy, many of the concerns surrounding the skills gap and lagging productivity growth are simply being ignored and obscured. Many political figures now promulgate a vision where the distinctions between college and high school education are increasingly blurred. By prolonging general education, the marginal cost of forgoing an expeditious path to a stable career far exceeds the marginal benefit of a college education for many people. Cass does a good job avoiding the temptation to pander to the populist outrage and lament the changing demands in the labor market. Rather, his reforms are designed to equip young adults with the requisite skills to join the labor force. Adopting Cass’ vision for education policy would go a long in aligning future generations’ capabilities with available work.

In sum, Oren Cass manages to unite Tucker Carlson’s instinctive apprehension with substantive policy reforms. Populist movements often devolve into resentment politics and counterproductive policies. Tucker, like many other populists, is guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He sees contemporary problems in society and attributes the cause to market forces. Capitalism has always engendered responses from reactionary movements, and creative destruction has always dispelled such fears. We have reached a uniquely prosperous time in human history and it is always worth protecting the precise mechanism that powered the engine of prosperity. Oren Cass knows this. He advocates for changing the underlying conditions so that the market can achieve more auspicious outcomes for working families. Economic policies alone cannot explain the entirety of the discourage trends in the middle-class. However, reactionary calls to stifle market forces can certainly make them worse.

Works Cited:

Image Source: Cass, O. (n.d.). The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America – Kindle edition by Oren Cass. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-Worker-Renewal-America-ebook/dp/B079617VFZ

Cass, O. (2018). The once and future worker a vision for the renewal of work in America. New York: Encounter Books.

By: Ethan Lamb

Tucker fails to reconcile his diatribe against the free market with the incontrovertible truth that capitalism has been the most formidable poverty-reducing mechanism the world has ever known.

On January 2^nd, popular news anchor Tucker Carlson opened his showTucker Carlson Tonightwith a captivating monologue, capturing the attention of millions. This segment precipitated an intriguing debate among conservative intellectuals about the relationship our government ought to have with the economy and the extent to which this relationship bears responsibility for the contemporary issues plaguing the middle-class, such as the declining marriage rate, life expectancy, and the opioid crisis. Now, Tucker Carlson is not an economist. He is not an expert on public policy, nor does he claim to be. However, he does resonate with the vast swaths of the country who feel that their lives are expendable as a consequence of the initiatives advanced by the elites.

Tucker Carlson accuses the ruling class, which he claims, is largely untroubled with the plight of the middle-class, as the predominant culprit. He stipulates, “they have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.” Tucker contends that, governed by their self-interests, elites have embraced certain initiatives such as unilateral free trade, unfettered low-skill immigration, and automation. Such policies, according to Tucker, have made prosperity increasingly untenable for the middle-class. These sentiments, distrustful of free markets, are not dissimilar to something you’d hear at a Bernie Sanders rally (Sanders, until recently, lambasted the support of high levels of immigration as a Koch brothers conspiracy). To encapsulate his point, Tucker questions, “The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.” However, this contention presupposes that the degradation of societal pillars is a consequence of a market economy— preserved and protected by the ruling class. As evidence for the growing discontent with the political class, Tucker points to the populist movements arising in Brazil, the Philippines, and all around Europe. He continues, “voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you’re watching is entire populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.”

Tucker’s rebuke is not restricted to just one political movement. When referring to libertarians’ deference to market outcomes, he responds that “it’s also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.” When addressing social conservatives, he asserts, “you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it.” He then proceeds to question the feminist movement’s celebration of female performance in the workplace. He states, “study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow — more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.”

His ire for the free market is exceedingly clear when he claims that “families are being crushed by market forces” and “any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having.” When listening to this viewpoint, one invariably wonders what policy solutions he might propose. While he does not actually propose any concrete solutions in this monologue, he is known to support government interventionism. He routinely expresses concerns about the impact of automation on the job market. He has pilloried Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for underpaying his employees. In fact, he even told conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in an interview that he would support a wholesale ban on driverless trucks in order to protect existing jobs. Such sentiments hardly resemble someone who has confidence in the market process.

Granted, there is an element of truth to Tucker’s skepticism. Applying free market principles to destructive substances such as opioids may not be of benefit to society. However, the free market did not create these addictive avenues to exploit. There had to have been an existing demand for such substances. Therefore, the problem may lie deeper than economics.

But first, let’s unpack the merits of Tucker’s claims. On the substance, he is correct in diagnosing troubling indications of a struggling middle-class. For the third year in succession, life expectancy in the United States has actually decreased. According to the CDC, the national suicide rate has uninterruptedly risen 33% since 1999. Furthermore, deaths from drug overdoses have risen steadily each year since 2000, with a conspicuous increase in deaths specifically from opioids. Moreover, in 1979 the average male with a high school degree and a family of four had earnings high enough to double the poverty line threshold. By 2007, his earnings were only high enough to clear the poverty threshold by less than 50%. Such statistics cannot be attributed to reduced government aid. Means-tested government spending has increased from $73 billion, at the time that Lyndon Johnson instituted “The Great Society,” to over $1.1 trillion as of 2015, when adjusted to 2015 dollars. This statistic means that the government is spending an average of $20,000 for every individual that is below the poverty line. In fact, federal outlays currently account for over 20% of GDP, with the overwhelming majority allocated to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The aforementioned statistics should be disconcerting irrespective of whether Tucker’s ire is correctly placed.

What’s more confounding is the divergence in family structure between the upper-class and the working-class, paving the way for an increasingly stratified society. Political scientist Charles Murray points out in his book Coming Apartthat, in 1960, the proportion of married couples between the ages of 30-49 was 84% for those considered working-class and 94% for those considered upper-class. However, by 2010, while the marriage rate remained high at 83% for the upper-class, the rate markedly declined to 48% for the working-class. Furthermore, while the percentage of children living with a single, divorced, or separated parent was under 5% for both upper and middle-class households in 1960, the percentage of middle-class households satisfying these criteria has eminently risen to 22% in comparison to just 3% for upper-class households. These are not merely unrelated factoids. These disturbing trends are replicated in a multiplicity of other studies including divorce rate, recorded happiness in marriage, non-marital birth ratio, and participation in the labor force. Such evidence, at the very least, lends credence to the notion that the certain foundations, including family structure and economic performance, that have historically undergirded the welfare of working-class families have started to erode in recent decades.

This breakdown in family composition has deleterious effects on both present and future generations. In a study conducted by Richard Reeves at the Brookings Institution, children born in the 1980s and 1990s were tracked until 2014. Reeves found that, when juxtaposing children born in the bottom income quintile raised by both parents in the same household with children born in that same quintile raised by a never-married mother, those in the former group stood a much bigger chance (19%) at progressing to the top quintile than those in the latter (5%). Stanford Professor Raj Chetty affirmed this study when he found that the single-parent household variable had the highest causal impact in determining upward economic mobility within a region. In fact, the very institution of marriage itself has been found to have a positive causal impact on earnings. According to a study conducted by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robert I. Lerman of the American Enterprise Institute, a substantial “marriage premium” exists, in which the act of getting married has a causal impact in boosting individual income. Such social science studies affirm the unassailable truth that individual decisions and family structure do impact economic outcomes on the micro level. However, this data does not support Tucker’s most fervent assertions.

Herein lies the main issue with Tucker’s monologue: He does not actually bother to explain the degradation of family structure in working-class communities. He, rather, forms a non sequitur that posits that because plight is existent in the middle-class, it mustbe the manifestation of free market policies at fault, despite no evidence to substantiate this claim. He pillories the free market and unjustly conflates the free market with the status-quo. This same argument is prominent among left-leaning circles when discussing healthcare, where health outcomes in the United States are compared with single payer-systems abroad in order to demonstrate shortcomings of the free market system– when in reality, the healthcare industry is considered to be the most regulated industry in the country. By identifying free market excesses as the underlying issue, without articulating precisely how, Tucker is able to artfully construct a specious case for government intervention.

Perhaps by design, Tucker fails to reconcile his diatribe against the free market with the incontrovertible truth that the capitalism has been the most formidable poverty-reducing mechanism the world has ever known. The shrinking middle-class paradigm often propagated by both leftwing and rightwing populists ignores the fact that a large part of the middle-class has actually moved upin the economic latter over the past five decades. Economist Mark Perry states:

The 19.6 percentage point increase in the share of high-income US household between 1969 and 2016 (from 8.1% to 27.7%) was a result of: a) an 11.1 percentage point shrinkage in the share of middle-class households (from 53.2% to 42.1%), and b) an 8.5 percentage point shrinkage in the share of low-income households.

When examining the economic trends through a deeper account of human history, the case against free markets simply falls apart. Managing editor of Humanprogress.org Chelsea Follett points out, “In 1820, more than 90 percent of the world population lived on less than $2 a day and more than 80 percent lived on less than $1 a day (adjusted for inflation and differences in purchasing power). By 2015, less than 10 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank’s current official definition of extreme poverty.” During this time, the number of people living in abject poverty dropped from 1 billion to 700 million despite the massive population growth. In fact, since just 1970, the amount of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced by more than half. This eminent spike in the standard of living is certainly a narrative-buster and demonstrates how free markets redound to society’s benefit, especially for the poorest among us.

The inconvenient truth that the emergence of some disturbing trends in the middle-class have coincided with unambiguous growth in economic prosperity is very difficult to address because there is no easy remedy. Economic hardship absolutely does precipitate some of the unfortunate trends like drug abuse and family formation, but I don’t think anyone would characterize the last fifty years as a period of economic turmoil, especially when comparing it to other periods in history. This lends credence to the theory that this increasingly bifurcated society has a lot more to do with culture rather than purely economic reasons. This notion is encapsulated nicely by Political commentator Kevin Williamson:

What evidence is there, if any, that it is our economy that produces the horrors that Vance describes so eloquently? The United States and El Salvador have about the same suicide rate; so do the United States and Finland. So do Belgium and India. So do Japan and Burkina Faso. Desperately poor Yemen has a suicide rate about one-third that of Russia, which is governed by economic nationalists much-admired by some in the American nationalist-populist camp. What should this tell us about the relationship between economic policy at the broad level and social dysfunction?

This may be inconvenient to those seeking political capital, but it is the reality. While there is no easy fix, certain narratives about the top 1% rigging the system through the vehicle of “hyper-capitalism” can actually be counter-productive. This is because such broad-brushed sentiments, without any sufficient evidence, actually rob those living in these imperfect conditions of any agency. By insisting that the elite are subjugating an entire class, rather than promulgating the message that we are living in the most prosperous and just time in human history and that good decisions will generally yield prosperity, we are unjustly disarming people of realizing their potential. Conservative pundit David French acutely makes this point:

Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes — civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc. — and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what theyare doing to you.

In fact, in Creating an Opportunity Societyby Ron Haskins and Isabell Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, it was found that only 2% of adults that finished high school, who  got a full-time job, and waited until marriage to have kids found themselves in poverty. In other words, responsible decisions can still lift people out of poverty.

This argument, however, is not to suggest that government policy is perfect — far from it. However, it is irresponsible and ahistorical to ascribe many of society’s issues to free markets — the most efficacious mechanism for poverty reduction in human history. Rather, the influence of the elites that Tucker Carlson pillories is entirely antithetical to the workings of the free market. Such a relationship between the well-connected in society and the government is often referred to as “cronyism” which seeks to undermine, rather than foster, creative destruction.

Instead of seeking to curb the free market, government officials should focus on cultivating conditions that are likely to generate more auspicious outcomes through the free market. History has shown that embracing the creative destruction that comes with free markets ultimately leads to higher productivity and wages. This displacement does not come without consequences. But it is evident that the plight of the working-class cannot be explained by the economic conditions, nor can it be reversed through economic solutions. The problem, unfortunately, runs much deeper. Tucker Carlson is a talented speaker and has a huge following. With that in mind, his myopic calls to stifle market forces are not only misplaced but can actually exasperate human suffering.

Works Cited:

Image Source:https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/45577919995/in/photostream/\

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