The NYT had a piece on changes to French labor market regulation that will make it easier for employers to cut wages. The piece implies that France has a seriously dysfunctional labor market:

"There is wide agreement that the country has to bring down its relatively high labor costs if it is to compete with lower-wage destinations overseas and even with Germany, which underwent its own painful labor-market restructuring over the last decade and currently has a jobless rate of just 5.4 percent.

"It is the kind of structural overhaul that European Union leaders are urging to increase employment and growth in France, which is being given two more years to get its budget deficit down to the European Union-mandated 3 percent of the gross domestic product. But even the government acknowledges that more must be done, including further changes to pensions.

"France is in the midst of an unemployment crisis, with nearly 11 percent of the work force unemployed in a period of near recession. Among people under 24, the problem is even worse, with more than 26 percent jobless."

France's economy is clearly depressed, but the more obvious culprit would seem to be the fallout from the collapse of housing bubbles across Europe and the austerity policies being imposed by the European Central Bank and the European Union. While France's unemployment picture does look bad, its employment to population ratio tells a different story. According to the OECD, the employment to population ratio (EPOP) in France, for people ages 16-64, was 63.9 percent in 2012, down only slightly from its 64.2 percent rate in 2007.

By comparison, the EPOP in the United States has fallen 4.8 percentage points over this period, from 71.9 percent in 2007 to 67.1 percentage points in 2012. The reason that the United States has not seen a comparable rise in its unemployment rate is that a large portion of those without jobs have given up looking for work. Most economists would probably not consider this evidence of a well-functioning labor market.

Undoubtedly everyone has seen stories in the media about how we need to expand high-skilled immigration because we have a shortage of workers with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Claims of a shortage of STEM workers have been disconcerting to those of us who believe in economics since shortages are supposed to result in rising prices, or in this case, higher wages. We don't seem to be seeing rapidly rising wages in most areas, which makes the claims of shortages dubious.

It turns out that at least one major tech firm has figured out how markets work. Netflix apparently doesn't have any problem hiring STEM workers. It offers higher wages. According to Businessweek:

"Netflix can now hire just about any engineer it wants. That’s a function of the computer science the company does and its reputation as the highest payer in Silicon Valley. Managers routinely survey salary trends in Silicon Valley and pay their employees 10 percent to 20 percent more than the going rate for a given skill."

If Netflix can figure this out perhaps it would be possible for companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and other tech giants to get this down as well. It is always good for a company to get lower cost labor, just like they want to pay less for all of their inputs. But if these companies really need workers, the trick is to offer higher pay. Maybe remedial courses for top management would do the trick.

The Washington Post long ago abandoned the separation between news and editorials, routinely running pieces advocating cuts in Social Security and Medicare in its news section. It now appears as though the New York Times is following the Post's lead.

A news story on the budget made repeated assertions that Social Security and Medicare must be cut. At one point it referred to the:

"the inevitable pain that comes from curbing those huge and popular programs [Social Security and Medicare]."

Of course there is nothing inevitable about curbing spending on Social Security and Medicare and there is certainly not inevitable pain. The most obvious route for curbing costs in these programs from an economic standpoint would be cutting Medicare payments to drug companies, medical equipment companies, doctors and other providers. This would not be especially painful for anyone who does not derive income from the program.

Clearly the paper was expressing its desire to see these programs cut.

It later added:

"The longer the delay, the sharper and more immediate the changes Washington must eventually make to ease the long-term fiscal squeeze."

Again, this is an invention of the NYT. There is no evidence that the country is up against any "long-term fiscal squeeze" or that anything would be gained by making cuts now.

The NYT, unlike the Post, generally keeps these sorts of political views on the opinion page. It is unfortunate that it appears to have departed from its standard practice with this article.

Addendum

This piece is now (8:30 AM, 5-15) clearly labeled as "political memo," indicating that it is not a straight news story. That was not the case when it was posted last night. Here's the original for those of you who thought I made an Excel spreadsheet error.

In prior posts I have often referred to the run-up in the dollar engineered by the Clinton-Rubin-Summers team in the 1990s as being the root of all evils. The point is that their over-valued dollar policy led to a large trade deficit. The only way the demand lost as a result of the trade deficit (people spending their money overseas rather than here) could be offset was with asset bubbles.

To fill this demand gap, the Clinton crew gave us the stock bubble in the 1990s and the Bush team gave us the housing bubble in the last decade. In both cases the bubbles crashed with disastrous consequences, the latter more than the former. (It took us almost 4 years to replace the jobs lost in the 2001 recession, so that downturn was not trivial either.)

Anyhow, my take away from this story is that, using the advanced economics from Econ 101, we need to get the dollar down. I have made this point in the past and readers have often commented that trade does not appear to be responding as would be predicted from a falling dollar. I would argue otherwise. The graph below shows the non-oil trade deficit measured as a share of GDP against the real value of the dollar.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve Board 

One of the key issues in the financial crisis was the fact that mortgage backed securities (MBS), filled with subprime mortgages of questionable quality, managed to get Aaa ratings from the bond-rating agencies. While ignorance and stupidity may explain much of what happens on Wall Street, there were people at the rating agencies who did raise questions about the quality of these securities. In one e-mail at S&P an analyst complained that it would rate an MBS as investment grade if it were "structured by cows." The analyst's complaint was ignored for a simple reason, S&P was making lots of money rating MBS.

Senator Al Franken proposed a simple way to eliminate this obvious conflict of interest. He proposed having the issuer use the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as an intermediary in the hiring process. Essentially, this means that the issuer would have to call the SEC when they wanted to have an issue rated and the SEC would then pick the rating agency. This would eliminate the incentive for the rating agency to issue an investment grade rating to get more business. The Franken Amendment passed the senate by a huge 65-34 majority, winning bi-partisan support. (Disclosure: I had written about this sort of reform and discussed it with Franken's staff.)

While this might have seemed like a victory for simple common sense, the amendment was largely eviscerated in a conference committee, apparently at the urging of then House Finance Committee Chair Barney Frank. Instead of implementing the amendment, the conference bill called for the SEC to study the issue and make a decision by the end of July, 2012.

The SEC is now almost a year late in this process, but apparently is prepared to ignore the rule, with an assist from the Washington Post. In an article discussing the SEC's plans, the Post dutifully repeated statements from the industry groups that were almost complete nonsense, without consulting any of the many experts who could have spoken in support of the Franken proposal.

The median pay for a member of the board of a Fortune 500 company is almost $240,000 a year. This typically involves 4-8 meetings a year. One of the top priorities of the board is supposed to be ensuring that top management doesn't rip off the company. They have not been doing a very good job as Gretchen Morgenson points out in her column today.

That raises the question of what exactly they get all this money for? Director Watch will be coming soon to a website near you.

As a general rule economists are not very good at economics. This is why almost none of them were able to recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble that sank the economy. (No, this isn't bragging, it only took simple arithmetic and basic logic.) Most economists are unable to conceptualize anything that someone with more standing in the profession did not already write about.

This is the only reason that the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt-to-GDP threshold was ever taken seriously to begin with. The point that I have tried to make in the past, apparently with little success, is that debt is an arbitrary number. It is not something that is relatively fixed, like the age composition of the population or the supply of land.

The country's debt is something that can and often is easily altered through simple steps. In this way the debt-to-GDP ratio can be thought of as something like the color of a house. Suppose Reinhart and Rogoff told us that people who lived in blue houses had 40 percent less income than people who lived in houses painted other colors. Presumably people would be skeptical of the results, but if their finding was really true, then we would probably want to encourage people in blue colored houses to paint them a different color.

In effect, Reinhart and Rogoff were making the same sort of claim about debt and GDP. Let me try to explain this in a way that even an economist can understand it.  

I have often pointed out that the value of long-term debt fluctuates with the interest rate. I didn't think this is a secret, but apparently few economists have followed what happens to bond prices when interest rates change. The point is that the value of our debt will plummet if interest rates rise, as the Congressional Budget Office and other forecasters expect. This means that we could buy back long-term debt issued today at interest rates of less than 2.0 percent for discounts of 30-40 percent. This would sharply reduce our debt-to-GDP ratio at zero cost.

Yes, this is really stupid, but if you believed the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt cliff, then you believe that we can sharply raise growth rates by buying back long-term bonds at a discount. It's logic folks, it's not a debatable point -- think it through until you understand it. 

Floyd Norris has a good piece today comparing trends in unemployment rates across countries in the downturn. He notes that Germany alone has seen a drop in its unemployment rate since the downturn began. While he notes that Germany has pursued work sharing policies that have encouraged employers to keep workers on the job working shorter hours, readers may not appreciate the full importance of this policy.

Growth in Germany and the United States have been virtually identical since the beginning of the downturn. While Germany has a large balance of trade surplus, in contrast to the deficit in the United States, its consumption growth has been weaker.

Source: International Monetary Fund.

Germany is helped in this story by the fact that it has a slower rate of labor force growth, but clearly the difference in growth rates does not explain the fact Germany's unemployment rate has fallen by 2.5 percentage points while unemployment in the United States has risen by 3.0 percentage points.

Note: correction made --thanks ltr.

Businessweek tells us that homebuilders would be building more homes, if only they could find qualified construction workers. Hmmm, that must mean that wages for construction workers are soaring as the shortage causes employers to bid up wages in an effort to grab workers away from competitors or hold on to their current workforce.

That's not what the data say. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after adjusting for inflation the average hourly wage in construction has risen by just 0.9 percent in the five years from 2007 to 2012. Note that this a total increase of 0.9 percent over these five years, not an annual increase. If there is a labor shortage, it's not showing up in wages for some reason. (Of course the unemployment rate for construction workers was reported at 13.2 percent in April, which also does not seem to indicate a labor shortage.)

The more obvious explanation for the fact that construction remains depressed is the near record vacancy rates. Presumably many of these empty homes will have to be filled before builders get more aggressive about building new ones.

The Washington Post continued to use its news section to advance its agenda for cutting Social Security and Medicare. It headlined an AP article on how these programs have not been cut by the sequester, "entitlement programs thrive amid gridlock, shifting money from younger generations to older."

The headline and the article wrongly imply that cuts to programs will benefit the young and increase economic growth. This is not true. The proximate cause for these cuts is a decision by political leaders to have lower budget deficits. The headline would have more accurately read "pursuit of deficit reduction is taking away money from young."

The notion of a shift to older generations is especially bizarre because none of the programs benefiting the elderly have been expanded notably in recent years. (The Medicare drug benefit is being made more generous, but the cost is covered by reduced payments to drug companies.) The assertion of a redistribution to the elderly would be like claiming there has been a redistribution to people living in North after reporting on a crop failure in the South. Certainly the fact that the South is worse off means that the North is relatively better off, but to describe this as a redistribution to the North is highly misleading, as is the claim of a redistribution to the elderly.

Also, even within whatever deficit targets are set one could just as credibly say that there has been a redistribution from children to Wall Street banks since the Wall Street banks are using their political power to block any effort to tax their financial speculation. Such a tax could easily cover the cost of the programs that are now being cut. The Post has decided not to frame the issue this way.