Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com

support these people or help us get rid of them. When business leaders in
Sacramento, California, decided to crack down on the homeless, one strategy
was to offer them one-way bus tickets out of town.
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(Atlanta reportedly did the
same before the 1996 Olympics.)
Now imagine the same corner and let’s drop off 100,000 graduates from
America’s top universities. The buses arrive at the corner of State and Madison
and begin unloading lawyers, doctors, artists, geneticists, software engineers,
and a lot of smart, motivated people with general skills. Many of these
individuals would find jobs immediately. (Remember, human capital embodies
not only classroom training but also perseverance, honesty, creativity—virtues
that lend themselves to finding work.) Some of these highly skilled graduates
would start their own businesses; entrepreneurial flair is certainly an important
component of human capital. Some of them would leave for other places; highly
skilled workers are more mobile than their low-skilled peers. In some cases,
firms would relocate to Chicago or open up offices and plants in Chicago to take
advantage of this temporary glut of talent. Economic pundits would later
describe this freak unloading of buses as a boon for Chicago’s economic
development, much as waves of immigration helped America to develop.
If this example sounds contrived, consider the case of the Naval Air Warfare
Center (NAWC) in Indianapolis, a facility that produced advanced electronics
for the navy until the late 1990s. NAWC, which employed roughly 2,600
workers, was slated to be closed as part of the military’s downsizing. We’re all
familiar with these plant-closing stories. Hundreds or thousands of workers lose
their jobs; businesses in the surrounding community begin to wither because so
much purchasing power has been lost. Someone comes on camera and says,

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“When the plant closed back in [some year], this town just began to die.” But
NAWC was a very different story.
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One of its most valuable assets was its
workforce, some 40 percent of whom were scientists or engineers. Astute local
leaders, led by Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, believed that the plant could be sold
to a private buyer. Seven companies filed bids; Hughes Electronics was the
winner.
On a Friday in January 1997, the NAWC employees went home as
government employees; the following Monday, 98 percent of them came to work
as Hughes employees. (And NAWC became HAWC.) The Hughes executives I
interviewed said that the value of the acquisition lay in the people, not just the
bricks and mortar. Hughes was buying a massive amount of human capital that it
could not easily find anywhere else. This story contrasts sharply with the plant
closings that Bruce Springsteen sings about, where workers with limited
education find that their narrow sets of skills have no value once the
mill/mine/factory/plant is gone. The difference is human capital. Indeed,
economists can even provide empirical support for those Springsteen songs.
Labor economist Robert Topel has estimated that experienced workers lose 25
percent of their earnings capacity in the long run when they are forced to change
jobs by a plant closing.
Now is an appropriate time to dispatch one of the most pernicious notions in
public policy: the lump of labor fallacy. This is the mistaken belief that there is a
fixed amount of work to be done in the economy, and therefore every new job
must come at the expense of a job lost somewhere else. If I am unemployed, the
mistaken argument goes, then I will find work only if someone else works less,
or not at all. This is how the French government used to believe the world
worked, and it is wrong. Jobs are created anytime an individual provides a new
good or service, or finds a better (or cheaper) way of providing an old one.
The numbers prove the point. The U.S. economy produced tens of millions of
new jobs over the past three decades, including virtually the entire Internet
sector. (Yes, the recession that began in 2007 destroyed lots of jobs, too.)
Millions of women entered the labor force in the second half of the twentieth
century, yet our unemployment rate was still extremely low by historical
standards until the beginning of the recent downturn. Similarly, huge waves of
immigrants have come to work in America throughout our history without any
long-run increase in unemployment. Are there short-term displacements?
Absolutely; some workers lose jobs or see their wages depressed when they are
forced to compete with new entrants to the labor force. But more jobs are created
than lost. Remember, new workers must spend their earnings elsewhere in the
economy, creating new demand for other products. The economic pie gets

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bigger, not merely resliced.
Here is the intuition: Imagine a farming community in which numerous
families own and farm their own land. Each family produces just enough to feed
itself; there is no surplus harvest or unfarmed land. Everyone in this town has
enough to eat; on the other hand, no one lives particularly well. Every family
spends large amounts of time doing domestic chores. They make their own
clothes, teach their own children, make and repair their own farm implements,
etc. Suppose a guy wanders into town looking for work. In scenario one, this guy
has no skills. There is no extra land to farm, so the community tells him to get
back on the train. Maybe they even buy him a one-way ticket out of town. This
town has “no jobs.”
Now consider scenario two: The guy who ambles into town has a Ph.D. in
agronomy. He has designed a new kind of plow that improves corn yields. He
trades his plow to farmers in exchange for a small share of their harvests.
Everybody is better off. The agronomist can support himself; the farmers have
more to eat, even after paying for their new plows (or else they wouldn’t buy the
plows). And this community has just created one new job: plow salesman. Soon
thereafter, a carpenter arrives at the train station. He offers to do all the odd jobs
that limit the amount of time farmers can spend tending to their crops. Yields go
up again because farmers are able to spend more time doing what they do best:
farming. And another new job is created.
At this point, farmers are growing more than they can possibly eat themselves,
so they “spend” their surplus to recruit a teacher to town. That’s another new
job. She teaches the children in the town, making the next generation of farmers
better educated and more productive than their parents. Over time, our contrived
farming town, which had “no jobs” at the beginning of this exercise, has
romance novelists, firefighters, professional baseball players, and even engineers
who design iPhones and Margarita Space Paks. This is the one-page economic
history of the United States. Rising levels of human capital enabled an agrarian
nation to evolve into places as rich and complex as Manhattan and Silicon
Valley.
Not all is rosy along the way, of course. Suppose one of our newly educated
farmers designs a plow that produces even better yields, putting the first plow
salesman out of business—creative destruction. True, this technological
breakthrough eliminates one job in the short run. In the long run, though, the
town is still better off. Remember, all the farmers are now richer (as measured
by higher corn yields), enabling them to hire the unemployed agronomist to do
something else, such as develop new hybrid seeds (which will make the town
richer yet). Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to

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mass unemployment in the long run. Rather, we become richer, which creates
demand for new jobs elsewhere in the economy. Of course, educated workers
fare much better than uneducated workers in this process. They are more
versatile in a fast-changing economy, making them more likely to be left
standing after a bout of creative destruction.
Human capital is about much more than earning more money. It makes us
better parents, more informed voters, more appreciative of art and culture, more
able to enjoy the fruits of life. It can make us healthier because we eat better and
exercise more. (Meanwhile, good health is an important component of human
capital.) Educated parents are more likely to put their children in car seats and
teach them about colors and letters before they begin school. In the developing
world, the impact of human capital can be even more profound. Economists have
found that a year of additional schooling for a woman in a low-income country is
associated with a 5 to 10 percent reduction in her child’s likelihood of dying in
the first five years of life.
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Similarly, our total stock of human capital—everything we know as a people
—defines how well off we are as a society. We benefit from the fact that we
know how to prevent polio or make stainless steel—even if virtually no one
reading this book would be able to do either of those things if left stranded on a
deserted island. Economist Gary Becker, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
his work in the field of human capital, reckons that the stock of education,
training, skills, and even the health of people constitutes about 75 percent of the
wealth of a modern economy. Not diamonds, buildings, oil, or fancy purses—but
things that we carry around in our heads. “We should really call our economy a
‘human capitalist economy,’ for that is what it mainly is,” Mr. Becker said in a
speech. “While all forms of capital—physical capital, such as machinery and
plants, financial capital, and human capital—are important, human capital is the
most important. Indeed, in a modern economy, human capital is by far the most
important form of capital in creating wealth and growth.”
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There is a striking correlation between a country’s level of human capital and
its economic well-being. At the same time, there is a striking lack of correlation
between natural resources and standard of living. Countries like Japan and
Switzerland are among the richest in the world despite having relatively poor
endowments of natural resources. Countries like Nigeria are just the opposite;
enormous oil wealth has done relatively little for the nation’s standard of living.
In some cases, the mineral wealth of Africa has financed bloody civil wars that
would have otherwise died out. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has most of the
oil while Israel, with no natural resources to speak of, has a higher per capita

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income.
High levels of human capital create a virtuous cycle; well-educated parents
invest heavily in the human capital of their children. Low levels of human
capital have just the opposite effect. Disadvantaged parents beget disadvantaged
children, as any public school teacher will tell you. Mr. Becker points out, “Even
small differences among children in the preparation provided by their families
are frequently multiplied over time into large differences when they are
teenagers. This is why the labor market cannot do much for school dropouts who
can hardly read and never developed good work habits, and why it is so difficult
to devise policies to help these groups.”
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Why does human capital matter so much? To begin with, human capital is
inextricably linked to one of the most important ideas in economics:
productivity. Productivity is the efficiency with which we convert inputs into
outputs. In other words, how good are we at making things? Does it take 2,000
hours for a Detroit autoworker to make a car or 210 hours? Can an Iowa corn
farmer grow thirty bushels of corn on an acre of land or 210 bushels? The more
productive we are, the richer we are. The reason is simple: The day will always
be twenty-four hours long; the more we produce in those twenty-four hours the
more we consume, either directly or by trading it away for other stuff.
Productivity is determined in part by natural resources—it is easier to grow
wheat in Kansas than it is in Vermont—but in a modern economy, productivity
is more affected by technology, specialization, and skills, all of which are a
function of human capital.
America is rich because Americans are productive. We are better off today
than at any other point in the history of civilization because we are better at
producing goods and services than we have ever been, including things like
health care and entertainment. The bottom line is that we work less and produce
more. In 1870, the typical household required 1,800 hours of labor just to
acquire its annual food supply; today, it takes about 260 hours of work. Over the
course of the twentieth century, the average work year has fallen from 3,100
hours to about 1,730 hours. All the while, real gross domestic product (GDP) per
capita—an inflation-adjusted measure of how much each of us produces, on
average—has increased from $4,800 to more than $40,000. Even the poor are
living extremely well by historical standards. The poverty line is now at a level