Economist Channel

My last post on taxes continued the question, who bears the burden of the corporate tax? Will a reduction in corporate taxes benefit stockholders or workers? It was a fun technical discussion.

But the whole time I want to scream: That is the wrong question! And the public economists job should be to scream from the rafters, that is the wrong question!  By just accepting the question, we are doomed to bad answers.

The public, and politicians, analyze taxes entirely through the lens of who gains and who loses. Income redistribution, yes, but also redistribution from renters to homeowners, married to unmarried, young to old, city dwellers to farmers, Texans to Californians, and so on. The political and popular discussion is about taxES, and who pays what.

Economists serve best when they offer thoughts outside the standard left-right partisan divide. Our first function should be always to remind people that marginal tax rates matter to the economy not taxes. 

Our second insight is always to analyze things comprehensively. The Federal income tax is not what counts, the entire wedge between work and consumption matters. Whether the corporate tax is progressive or not does not matter, whether the overall tax code is progressive (plus the overall spending code, and forced cross-subsidy code!) matters.   Don't tax wine over beer to redistribute; tax goods evenly and achieve progressivity through a progressive income (or better, consumption) tax, or spend money on programs to help people whose distress is correlated (imperfectly) with beer drinking.

Economists may feel their moral sentiments about redistribution are really important. But we have little professional reason to argue our feelings are better than anyone else's. What we can argue is, if you'r going to do more or less redistribution, do it efficiently and comprehensively.

In this context, the current tax reform proposal, and its instant dismissal from self-identified Democratic economists, echoing political rhetoric, is a deep disappointment.

The economists' tax reform starts with a detailed breakdown by income. (I'm caving to political reality that our nation is obsessed with income, not more meaningful measures of economic advantage and disadvantage.) Then, we create a tax reform in which each group pays the same amount (ideally, bears the same burden), but trades lower marginal rates for fewer deductions, exemptions, and for the reduction or elimination of taxes that either highly distort economic activity or lead to lots of inefficient avoidance  (corporate, rates of return, estate).

In short, we aim for a revenue-neutral, redistribution-neutral, reform. We recognize that eventually tax rates must be high enough to cover spending. There isn't a big need to argue over Laffer effects. Even if scored as statically revenue neutral, when the economy booms, revenue flows in, and we have paid off the debt we can start lowering rates. We recognize that if the structure if the tax reform is fixed, we can later continue to argue over the right amount of redistribution.

1986 came close. It wasn't perfect. But at least the rhetoric was this, and politicians explained this goal to the public. You will pay the same taxes, but at lower rates for fewer deductions, and the economy will grow. And lo, it did.

For thirty-one years, we have waited to finish the job. As the tax code grew more complex, with higher statutory rates and more deductions, we waited to redo the job. Reform proposal came and went, with at least a nod to this amount of economic sense.

But no more. Now tax policy is all redistribution all the time. Democratic politicians have decided that their mantra is "tax cuts for the rich." Well, a slogan is a slogan. More sadly, self-identified democratic economists echo this mantra, and little other. Anytime you're arguing one side's talking point or another, you're doing little to illuminate a discussion.

Each provision is examined in isolation for its redistributive impact. It's profoundly hypocritical of course.  Tax deductions are indeed a "tax cut for the rich" since people in the 40% marginal bracket who itemize get a lot more than Joe and Jane down in the lower brackets. But you hear either silence, or pretzel logic defense, such as the New York Times defense of the profoundly regressive deduction for state and local taxes.

I was disappointed at both the rhetoric and the small progress of the administration's proposal's to date. Yes, cutting the corporate rate is a good idea. But they don't even try to argue for marginal rate reductions or incentives. The buzzword is to give "tax cuts to help the middle class," which the left can then argue is a "lie" or not. Once you fall for redistributionist rhetoric, once you say that tax policy is all about giving the right people more and the wrong people less money, I think the hope for a tax reform that actually gets the economy going is dim.

The holy trinity was off the table from the start -- home mortgage interest deduction, charitable deduction, and employer-provided health deduction. The fourth horseman of the apocalypse, the deduction for state  and local taxes, is in danger. (Sorry for mixing metaphors!) This is like a wayward husband saying, "sure, I'll clean up my act. However, the drinking, gambling, and smoking are off the table." The corporate tax reduction does not seem to be coming with a serious cleanup of the thousands of deductions and extenders, each catnip to the lobbyists who keep them in place.

The political challenge for a reform is to say to each group, "you're going to give up your deduction, yes even interest on future home mortgages. But, your rates will go down so much that you will end up paying no more overall, and as the economy grows you will pay less. I want your help holding the fort against those who will demand their deductions and subsidies." That's a deal that pretty much held together in 1986. But if we go into the negotiation saying "oh, and by the way the big three are getting theirs unscathed," and "therefore really big rate reductions are off the table," then the hope of putting that coalition together is gone. It's  a free for all, call your congressperson and make sure you keep yours.

I am often asked to opine about whether automation will destroy all the jobs. Yes, we talk about tractors, which brought farm employment from something like 70% of the country at the beginning of the 20th century to about 3% today. And cars, which put the horse drivers out of business. And trains, which put the canal boats out of business.

A more recent case occurred to me. This is what offices looked like in the 1950s and 1960s:

This is a "typing pool." There used to be basketball-court sized rooms that looked like this, all over the place, staffed almost exclusively by  women.

Then along came the copier -- many of these women are copying documents by typing them over again with a few sheets of carbon paper -- the fax machine, the word processor, the PC. And that's just typing. Accounting involved similar roomfuls of women with adding machines. Filing disappeared. Roomfuls of women used to operate telephone switchboards, now all automated.

This memory lives on in the architecture of universities. All the old buildings have empty hutches for secretaries.

If you are prognosticating in about 1970, and someone asks, "what will happen now that women want to join the workforce, but office automation is going to destroy all their jobs?" It would be a pretty gloomy forecast.

What actually happened: Female labor force increased from 20 million to 75 million. The female participation rate increased from below 35% to 60%. Women's wages relative to men rose -- they moved in to higher productivity activities than typing the same memo over a hundred times. Businesses expanded. And no, 55 million men are not out on the streets begging for spare change.

Civilian Labor Force Level: Women

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: Women

I'm simplifying of course. And surely some people with specific skills -- shorthand, typing without making mistakes, and so on -- who could not retrain didn't do as well as others. But the magnitude of the phenomenon is pretty impressive.

Update. So did women just take all the men's jobs? As MC points out, the male labor force participation rate did decline, from 87.5 to 70.0. That's a big, worrisome decline. But it's 15 percentage points, while the women's increase was 25 percentage points.

But even if women are moving in and men are moving out of employment, that does make the case that you don't just look at who has what jobs now threatened by automation! The typing pool got better jobs.

Please (please!) keep in mind the point here. No, this is not a post about all the ills of the labor market, and "middle class" America, and all the rest. Yes, there are plenty. The narrow point is, will automation mean that all the jobs vanish. In this case, even combined with a large expansion of the people wanting to work, it did not.


Also the male labor force expanded from 45 million to 82 million. So the idea that there is a fixed number of jobs and if women take them men lose them is not true.

Ed Glaeser has a thoughtful essay at City Journal, "The War on Work -- and How to End It.''

It is interesting that our political class says it wants more Americans to work. Yet there are few activities as hit by disincentives and regulatory barriers than the simple act of paying another person to do something for you.

With wide range and long historical perspective, Ed points out the slow decline in the fraction of the population working, especially prime-age men.

From 1945 to 1968, only 5 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54—prime-age males—were out of work. ...As of December 2016, 15.2 percent of prime-age men were jobless  

These are "out of the labor force," not looking for work. We are arguably at a business cycle peak, with a low unemployment rate -- defined as those looking for work.

Joblessness is disproportionately a condition of the poorly educated. While 72 percent of college graduates over age 25 have jobs, only 41 percent of high school dropouts are working. 

Why? I'm not going to restate the whole thoughtful essay but the disincentives caused by safety net programs are a big part of the story:

...Social Security and unemployment insurance,  National disability insurance,  Medicaid and food stamps, housing vouchers... 

These various programs make joblessness more bearable, at least materially; they also reduce the incentives to find work. ... After 1984, though, millions went on the disability rolls. And since disability payments vanish if the disabled person starts earning more than $1,170 per month, the disabled tend to stay disabled. The economists David Autor and Mark Duggan found that the share of adults aged 25–64 receiving disability insurance increased from 2.2 percent in 1985 to 4.1 percent 20 years later.... 

Other social-welfare programs operate in a similar way. Unemployment insurance stops completely when someone gets a job, which may explain why economist Bruce Meyer found that the unemployed tend to find jobs just as their insurance payments run out. Food-stamp and housing-voucher payments drop 30 percent when a recipient’s income rises past a set threshold by just $1. Elementary economics tells us that paying people to be or stay jobless will increase joblessness.

The excellent "Panhandling in Downtown Manhattan: A Preliminary Analysis"  by Gwendolyn Dordick and Brendan O’Flaherty (HT Marginal Revolution) gives a particularly vivid example, Eli the panhandler:

Eli is severely disabled and confined to a wheelchair. He is a slight African-American man in his mid to late forties. He is unable to speak clearly. His uncontrollable twisting movements undermine his ability to maintain eye, but they do little to stop him from trying to let people see his somewhat toothless smile.

Eli is not homeless; he rents a small place uptown. Eli collects Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid. Rent, food, utilities and transportation leave him little money for anything else, such as helping out his daughters every now and then, and making monthly payments for his cell phone(1) . [1 Eli bragged that since he switched carriers that he chopped close to $90.00 off his monthly bill.] 

Eli held regular employment in the past; he worked in a mailroom for two hours a day, but his hours are constrained by government regulated income limits. The more income Eli has, the less his SSI benefit will be. Furthermore, if his "countable’ income exceeds the allowable limit, he will lose his SSI benefits.(2)   [2 Countable income includes earned income from wages, from self–employment; unearned income, such as Social Security benefits, pensions, State disability payments, unemployment benefits, interest income, and cash from friends and relatives; in-kind income, for food or shelter; and deemed income from a relative (http://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-report-ussi.htm).]

Some of the highest marginal tax rates in the US apply to people  like Eli. Wouldn't we rather see Eli working in the mailroom?
Back to Glaeser, an important point

Scholars Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers have explained Europe’s persistent unemployment, which they called “hysteresis,” by the interaction of adverse economic shocks and extremely generous welfare states.

The fact that food stamps and disability have huge implied marginal tax rates does not affect people how have a job. Their disincentives kick in when people lose jobs, use the programs, and find it very hard to kick the habit.

Glaeser also mentions occupational licensing and other barriers to employment.

Glaeser mentions housing subsidies, but not their disincentive effects. I hope, as a top real estate economist, he comes back to this topic. Much of our safety net is tied to location. One reason people don't move to follow better jobs is that safety net programs don't follow them or family members well.

Housing subsidies are among the worst offenders. If you win an "affordable housing" lottery in one part of town, you can't afford to move across town or to another town to follow a better job. Or any job. Our government's subsidy of highly leveraged owner occupied houses has impoverished a generation of people who need to leave the factory town when the factory closes.

This is a tough nut. We want our government to target money to people who really need it. But we don't have infinite money. The answer has been to means-test programs, phasing out benefits as people get more income. The answer also has been to make programs somewhat of a pain in the butt, and not so portable. That discourages people who "don't really need it." Many Federal programs have take up rates in the single digit percentages. State and local administration of programs also discourages portability. Once you've gotten on Medicaid and found a doctor who will actually see you, moving once again gets harder.

The answer, I think is perhaps to spend more in order to spend less, and to limit benefits by time not by income; to focus on the incentives of programs not the amounts they spend. If there is less income phase out, the marginal tax rate is lower. The static cost seems larger, but if more people can move out of needing benefits, it may not be larger in the long run. If disability for back pain, say, was for 3 years only, integrated with health care for back pain, has no income limit, is transferable to a new place, we might see a lot more work -- people figuring out new occupations that don't hurt their backs too, more mobility, and in the end less expense.  Benefits need to be much  more portable, we need to let builders build apartments where people want to go.

More deeply, our government is quickly creating a legal class system based on income. You are a "low income person," for life, apparently, much as you once were a serf, tied to place, occupation and status. No. In America "income" should be, as it is, a temporary part of your life, low at times of misfortune, high at times of good fortune, and always beckoning. We are not a class society, but we are fast creating one by legislation.

The disincentive to work comes from the sum of all programs, not each one in isolation. The fragmentation of our programs makes the disincentives harder to see. Glaeser:

Consolidating social policies would be a crucial step. Struggling families now receive food stamps, housing vouchers, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and other assistance—all of which punish work. If the various programs were combined into a single cash benefit, that benefit could be designed so that the tax on earnings never went above 30 percent. We could follow the lead of Norway on unemployment and disability insurance, allowing the disabled to keep, say, 50 percent of their benefit above the $1,170 threshold, while tightening the requirements for being designated as disabled. [Or, as I suggest, limiting the time] Unemployment insurance could be structured so that payments were no longer contingent upon staying completely out of work.

Reforming the incentives of social programs could be a bipartisan effort (if anything can be a bipartisan effort these days). We spend less, we help people more.

Reform is not impossible.

Twenty years ago, the more economically successful European nations, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, reorganized their welfare states to emphasize work and witnessed positive results. Others, including France, Italy, and Spain, did not, and they have struggled. In a sense, the eurozone financial crisis of the past half-decade is the legacy of southern European countries that wouldn’t fix their failing welfare systems. The U.S. needs to decide if it wants to follow the path of Germany or of Spain.

"Socialist" Sweden turned out to be remarkably hard nosed about incentives. If they can do it, so can we.

Russ Roberts has an excellent essay, What do economists know? on economic humility. (HT Marginal Revolution)

A journalist once asked me how many jobs NAFTA had created or destroyed. I told him I had no reliable idea. ... 

The journalist got annoyed. “You’re a professional economist. You’re ducking my question.” I disgreed. I am answering your question, I told him. You just don’t like the answer. 

A lot of professional economists have a different attitude. They will tell you how many jobs will be lost because of an increase in the minimum wage or that an increase in the minimum wage will create jobs. They will tell you how many jobs have been lost because of increased trade with China and the amount that wages fell for workers with a particular level of education because of that trade. They will tell you that inequality lowers health or that trade with China reduces the marriage rate or encourages suicide among manufacturing workers. They will tell you whether smaller classrooms improve test scores and by how much. And they will tell you things that are much more complex — what caused the financial crisis and why its aftermath led to a lower level of employment and by how much.

And Russ continues, with great clarity, to explain just how uncertain all those estimates are.

So what do economists know? As Russ points out, much of these kind of estimates are not really produced by economics

...most of the people I am talking about are not economists. They are really applied statisticians. Economics is primarily a way of organizing one’s thinking in considering incentives and costs and the interactions between individuals that we call a market but is really emergent behavior with feedback loops.

Economists generally believe that incentives are very powerful

I'd rather he had said "Economists generally understand.." as "believe" is not a good word for any scientific enterprise. Much of the world makes sense if you recognize the power of incentives.

Yes. In just about every policy question an economist sees an incentive. Where most of our political analysis sees an income transfer. Raise gas taxes? An economist sees an incentive to drive less, move closer to work, carpool, ride a bike, buy a more efficient car. Most of our political system sees only a transfer of income, with current habits unchanged.

But I want to go further. Budget constraints and accounting identities. I think good economists quickly follow the money one more step than most analysts. If you subsidize x, then you must take money away from y. If foreigners are not able to sell things to us, then they cannot get dollars to buy things from us, or to buy assets, or to invest in the US. There is no such thing as "real" vs. "paper" investment -- each person making a "paper" investment is buying someone else's liability, which funds a "real" investment. You can't make American's wages go up, say by banning nurses from the Philippines, and also health care costs go down. We can't all buy or sell stocks -- for every buyer there must be a seller.

Unintended consequences. Our field is, perhaps, best described as a collection of funny stories about unintended consequences. (I became an economist one day very young, reading a newspaper story about a program to get rid of poisonous snakes. The government had offered a bounty on each dead snake. Guess what happened. Hint: It's easy to raise snakes.)  Unintended consequences usually come from forgetting about incentives and budget constraints. My daughter, age about 8, looked up from reading the paper one day and asked, "Dad, if the government makes everyone buy fuel efficient cars, won't they just move further from work and use the same amount of gas as before?"

Supply response, (or demand), and competition. In thinking about banking regulation, a good economist focuses on incentives for new banks to come in, rather than just how to manage the existing ones. In thinking about health care, we are all talking about how to pay for it, not about how to get new competitors to come in and offer better services. In thinking about labor regulation, we forget that the worker's ability to quit and easily get a new job, from a new hungry business trying to unseat the old one, is his or her best defense against a shoddy employer. If a drug company grabs the only FDA approval for a generic and hikes the price up insanely, the answer is competition, let others sell the drug, not price controls.

As you see, I think we're pretty good at identifying causal channels that most analysts ignore, even if we are not always great at quantifying their relative significance. But "not zero" is usually an eye opener in public policy.

The fallacy of composition ought to be right up there with correlation is not causation. Roosevelt tried to raise inflation by raising prices. Alas, you can only raise relative prices that way.  Individually, it seems we can get ahead by getting a better bargain, but my gain must be your loss and the economy does not gain overall. What's good for a business, or a bank, is not necessarily good for an economy or a banking system. A local stimulus can work by transferring resources from somewhere else. That does not mean the overall economy benefits from stimulus. Negotiating better can help one, but only at the expense of another. We can't all negotiate better.

In sum, I think economics provides an excellent set of bullshit detectors. This is my stock answer about my own professional expertise. I may not know what makes the economy grow, or how monetary policy works. But I now with great detail exactly why the ten stories in front of us are all wrong, and typically logically incoherent. That is useful knowledge.

Russ has a lovely closing paragraph, which you might miss:

But an economist when considering a policy of banning autonomous vehicles can think of a lot of other impacts besides the jobs saved and the continuing deaths from human driven cars if such a ban is put in place. One of the things we would think about is how such a ban will effect the incentives to discover future innovation that might also people out of work. We would think about how putting more power in Washington would encourage lobbying for protection. We would think about the children and grandchildren of today’s workers and how restricting technology and changing incentives would affect things. These ideas are not rocket science. But they come easily to economists and not so easily to non-economists. Thinking like an economist is very useful.

So let's call it Hayekian humility. This is the hardest one for so many economists to admit, as we all like to play central planner.

Economics and economic history also teach us humility: No economist in 1900 could have figured out what farmers, horse-shoers, ice deliverers, street-sweepers, and so forth would do when those jobs disappeared. The people involved did. Knowledge of our own ignorance is useful. Contemplating the railroad in 1830, no economist could have anticipated the whole new industries and patterns of economic activity that it would bring -- that cows would be shipped from Kansas to Chicago, and give rise to its fabled meat-packing industry. So, in a dynamic economy, all the horse-drivers, stagecoach manufacturers, canal boat drivers, canal diggers, and so forth put out of work by the railroad, and their children, were not, in the end, immiserized.

So, economics should be much better at being the ark for simple lessons of economic history and experience. Alas our current professional training makes us pretty terrible at this.

PhD training in economics focuses on theory and statistical technique, and prepares you well to do academic research. There are occasionally requirements for economic history, but these are usually economic analyses of particular episodes, i.e. training to do research as an economic historian. The sort of simple facts that Russ mentions just aren't much covered.

This isn't necessarily such a terrible thing. Physics training also doesn't cover its intellectual history that much, except for the lovely practice of repeating classic experiments. But current physics theory encodes everything you need to know about the messy experience that distills that theory. So too, perhaps, one may feel that current economic theory encodes everything you need to know about the experiences that produce such theory.

Obviously, this is a doubtful proposition, but to some extent it's true. A supply-demand curve with a price control, showing how price controls, rent controls, and minimum wages produce shortages, really does encode centuries of hard-won experience. However, social science knowledge is obviously less durable than Physics, and we see how quickly economists, armed with the theory but not the experience, can come to doubt their own knowledge. Economic models are not literal descriptions of the truth, but rather quantiative parables.

Also, many of the "facts" aren't quite facts, and really are always up for review. If we start teaching lessons of history, for example, the old chestnut that stimulus is proved by the rise in output from WWII spending -- never mind the failure of output to collapse after WWII ended, the end of Roosevelt's war on capital, the failure of hundreds of other stimulus programs or the minor fact of a war -- or how the New Deal saved us in the Great Depression, will get passed on along with valuable nuggets such as dreary repetition of experience on the effects of rent controls. Many historical issues are no less settled than the current issues that Russ talks about!

Finally, PhD training really is vocational training to do research, not to advise public policy. The market test is pretty clear -- to do research, you don't need a broad based understanding of economic history. When a research project needs a particular history, it's easy enough to learn that.

So, don't sign me up quite yet as one of those ready-for-retirement economists who bemoan too much math and not enough experience in graduate school. Actually we need more math, as the kinds of stories people talk about especially in finance are well beyond our capacity to model.

But the lack of an ark of experience, especially on microeconomic issues where they are clearer, is noticeable.

Nicholas Eberstadt in Commentary, (HT Marginal Revolution) offers a revealing look at what's wrong with "middle" America's stagnation. Read the whole thing, but the following snapshot jumped out at me.

He starts with a review, probably familiar to readers of this blog, of the sharp decline in work rates, even among prime-age men and women.

As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

Why are so many not working, not studying for work, and not even looking for work? What is going on in their lives? One answer:

The opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new plague for our new century...

According to [Alan Krueger's] work, nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.

I think Krueger had a different idea in mind: that they are in pain, indicated by medication, so can't be expected to work. How the explosion in disability jibes with a much safer workplace is an interesting puzzle to that view. Eberstadt has a different interpretation, and the lovely thing about facts is they are facts, not interpretations.

We already knew from other sources (such as BLS “time use” surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-age men in this un-working army generally don’t “do civil society” (charitable work, religious activities, volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and indeed watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. But Krueger’s study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.

(Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, and Kewin Charles and Erik Hurst have a new paper coming soon, which I just saw presented, "Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men", with some more facts about time-allocation of non-working young men. They emphasize cheaper and better video games and leave out drugs.)

But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap. As Dreamland carefully explains, one main mechanism today has been the welfare state: more specifically, Medicaid, Uncle Sam’s means-tested health-benefits program. Here is how it works (we are with Quinones in Portsmouth, Ohio):

"[The Medicaid card] pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI. . . . If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of them—Medicaid health-insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street."

You may now wish to ask: What share of prime-working-age men these days are enrolled in Medicaid? According to the Census Bureau’s SIPP survey (Survey of Income and Program Participation), as of 2013, over one-fifth (21 percent) of all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force, the share was over half (53 percent). And for un-working Anglos (non-Hispanic white men not in the labor force) of prime working age, the share enrolled in Medicaid was 48 percent.

By the way: Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more government disability program in 2013. Disability checks and means-tested benefits cannot support a lavish lifestyle. But they can offer a permanent alternative to paid employment, and for growing numbers of American men, they do. The rise of these programs has coincided with the death of work for larger and larger numbers of American men not yet of retirement age. We cannot say that these programs caused the death of work for millions upon millions of younger men: What is incontrovertible, however, is that they have financed it—just as Medicaid inadvertently helped finance America’s immense and increasing appetite for opioids in our new century.

The VA has also been a part of getting veterans addicted to pain killers.

If you dozed off, the main point: Half of non-working prime age men take daily pain medication. Half of non-working prime-age people are in Medicaid, which pays for re-sellable opiates. Three-fifths of non-working prime age Anglos receive disability payments. The latter benefits disappear if you take a job, or if you move, a steep disincentive that Nick does not mention.

I knew the story, but was not really clear on the magnitude. Half.

An advantage of government-subsidized drugs Nick points out: crime is down. However, our criminal justice system offers another barrier to employment and advancement:

...rough arithmetic suggests that about 17 million men in our general population have a felony conviction somewhere in their CV. That works out to one of every eight adult males in America today.

In the understatement of the year,

we might guess that their odds in the real America are not all that favorable.

The bottom line

And when we consider some of the other trends we have already mentioned—employment, health, addiction, welfare dependence—we can see the emergence of a malign new nationwide undertow, pulling downward against social mobility.

Actually looking at people's lives in this way is devastating to the nostrum that "inequality" is mysteriously increasing and just needs more transfers, or its just a lack of "jobs" which can be brought back by left-wing "demand" or right-wing trade restrictions.

people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language.

This is I think an inartful choice of language. I hear "insecurity" a lot from the left, for example just how it is that obese people have trouble paying for food. And, Orwellian language or not, they do have a point. "Insecurity" is not the core of the problem. "Barriers to Advancement" sounds too old fashioned. "Caught in the web of awful disincentives" is more accurate but does not sing.

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. ...The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

With the election of 2016, Americans within the bubble finally learned that the 21st century has gotten off to a very bad start in America.

Reading the Weekend New York Times, especially the Review, I think this is actually false. Americans within the bubble are still foaming at the mouth with Trump Derangement Syndrome. But when they get a grip,

Welcome to the reality. We have a lot of work to do together to turn this around.