YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Furman

lines on the record: 77
first: 2020-08-26
most recent: 2020-08-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm not that worried about the savings rate. I don't think it's the constraint on business investment right now because the cost of capital is very low. I think in terms of retirement security, the first place I would go for retirement security would be to expand social security rather than to raise savings. And so I think the main issue with low savings is just an intertemporal consumption one that we're borrowing from foreigners today. We'll need to repay those foreigners in the future. And with a current account deficit of around 3% of GDP, I think we're on the edge of where we need to be worried, but not really that far past the edge of where we need to worry. If we wanted to increase savings, though, Certainly, you could do it on the private side, but you could also decide you're going to reduce the budget deficit.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think Brian Kaplan's book, which I loved, Didn't take completely seriously some of the transition issues and some of the transition costs, the speed with which these changes happen politically, culturally, economically. I think that is relevant.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I think within any conceivable range that I can imagine for public policy, I'd rather have more immigration than less immigration. When you've decided on the amount you have, I then do believe in enforcement. I think it is perfectly reasonable for the United States to decide who can be here. Certainly reasonable for the United States to decide who can vote in the United States. I'd like those rules to be much more permissive and then to enforce the much more permissive place that we set those rules. I guess I just, you know, can I imagine 700 million a billion? I certainly think economically we could support that number of people in the land that we have in this country. If that happen, you'd end up with an awful lot of people moving to Idaho without having to tell them to move to Idaho because prices in New York and San Francisco would go up even more than they have.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you don't mind if Yes, I was about to say, if the only way for me to get more immigrants is they have to be in one part of the country, I would probably settle for that and compromise with you on this plan. Beyond that, I don't. Again, maybe that's not where they can make the biggest contribution to the American economy, to the American Fisc, to their own families. So I guess I'd rather let people choose that than make the choices about where they want to live, including immigrants, make those choices.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tyler, you are just so much more creative and imaginative than I am. So my rather prosaic mind hears an ideal like that and thinks the idea that we're going to have internal checkpoints within the country, even if it's for one type of people and doesn't apply to others, I don't even quite know how we do that. It seems to me.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's any area of policy where Congress is less interested in expert input than the area of which locations in the country should get resources.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was about to say, I'm not sure I can think of any place based policies that I'm particularly enthusiastic about. I don't mind algorithmic place-based policies. This place has a bigger deeper recession so it gets a larger federal allocation of Medicaid or it gets longer unemployment insurance benefits. So there's that type of place base that's based on a formula about state unemployment rates or state incomes. That, I think, can make sense. The regional development, we're going to go into this area, create this new cluster, create this new industry. I think that's littered with a history of failures. I don't even know that we know what we're doing when it comes to place-based policy. Even if academics knew what they were doing, when it came to place-based policy, I think when the political system implemented it.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yes, I think if you have a less fluid labor market, then a shock will have all of these bad consequences. That begs the question of why we have a less fluid labor market. I think some of it is land use and the expense of moving to places. Some of it is occupational licensing. Some of it is the cost of health care and lock-in. It'd be interesting to see whether that's gotten better after the Affordable Care Act. But I think that question, how do we have a more fluid labor market means the matching models will work better the next shock hits?”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you certainly saw both the 2001 recession and the 2007 through 9 recessions. You saw disproportionately long periods of long-term unemployment, of people working part-time for economic reasons, so involuntarily part-time, and people leaving the workforce and the participation rate falling. So something about both of those shocks led to very prolonged all three of these negative consequences. You take a crappy job, you don't get a job at all, or you give up entirely. And labor market dynamism was lower than it had been. People were moving from job to job less. Businesses were creating and destroying fewer jobs.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just the United States, it's not just the present. For the last 50 years, a couple dozen countries, unemployment rates can go up very quickly, unemployment rates cannot come down very quickly. In fact, the pace that the unemployment rate declined in this recovery was about the same or slightly faster than the pace it did in the 1980s. And the only area where the economy probably consistently outperformed forecasts after the recession was the unemployment rate. It was consistently lower than what was forecast. Now the employment rate was not higher than was forecast GDP growth was weaker, but the unemployment rate itself, I don't think it was abnormally slow in its recovery.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh I remember in two thousand nine Alan Crew. and he looked at every single OECD country in the last not going to get any of these numbers exactly right but let's just say in the last 50 years who had seen an unemployment rate rise rapidly in a short period of time by a couple percentage points. And he asked the question, how quickly does it come down? What he found was the fastest that any OECD country achieved was seven tenths of a percentage point per year.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the China shock literature is a fantastic contribution to labor economics and is less important in thinking about trade. I think we've learned about weaknesses and deficiencies in the structure of our labor markets, the ability to connect people with jobs, the ability people to move after a shock happens to get themselves retrained, to have some form of insurance that could help them in the event that their next job has a lower pay. So yes, that literature together with other observations about what's been going on with, for example, prime age men in the workforce has affected the way I think about the dynamism and efficient allocation of labor in the American workforce much more than it's affected the way I think about trade.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first economics class I took as a freshman in college, we were told that trade had winners and losers. We were told that the winners were diffuse intended to have smaller gains and the losers were concentrated intended to have large losses. That seems to be exactly what the China shock literature has found. But if the losers turn out,”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't consider myself an expert in any of those national security questions, so I would be open to thinking about the national security concerns associated with the supply chain. I have an awful lot in specific cases, both when I was in government and just in the world more generally, heard people make national security arguments that I found tendentious and pretty unpersuasive. So I think there may be some that are persuasive and that are true. There's an awful lot that aren't. Our administration towards the end worried a bit about semiconductors when I've looked at that. There's enough of a diversified world supply, enough of an ability to scale up if necessary in the United States that I don't think on semiconductors I think there it was protectionism under the guise of national security. So I think we should accept the possibility of national security, take it seriously, but be really, really wary that a lot of protection.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that manufacturing itself should be an important objective of US policy. It's one type of job. It's been a good type of job, but there's other good types of jobs as well. So I wouldn't focus on where physical things are being made as opposed to where services are being made. And in fact, if anything, I think the error in policy is probably to do a little bit too much emphasis on manufacturing and a little bit less on services”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be on my list too. If we keep going, probably we'll discover that a large fraction of the thoughts I have about economic policy would fall under the heading of enhancing productivity. Absolutely. I think there's a real mismatch of people globally, people that would be more productive if they were in the United States than they were in the country that they were in. And then there's a mismatch not nearly as large, but a still sizable one within the United States itself, the places where people can most productively add to the economy, places like the Bay Area, the Boston area, the Washington area are ridiculously and unnecessarily expensive to live in because of artificial constraints on building that drive people out and keep people from coming in.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it the number one factor in the slowdown? Probably not. But we have a lot of micro evidence that papers that take a look at what happens when immigrants come. And not only do they patent, but Jennifer Hunts found that the Americans end up patenting more when they're in the presence of those immigrants. So this is something where I think we have a good enough set of microdata. We don't need to use sort of macro decades to try to make inferences.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, number one, two, and three would be more immigration, more immigration to talented people that will add to innovation here in the United States that would bring their ideas with them that would start businesses. Now, if I had to go to four, five, and six, a much increased federal R&D, it's fallen as a share of GDP consistently since the 1960s. A business tax reform that included more incentives for investment like expensing and an expanded R&D credit to encourage businesses to internalize more of the benefits that their research has for others and then finally investing in American higher education.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intermediate, but most of them were in the base. Five, ten, fifteen years ago Google online travel online shopping Wikipedia It's not like adding these or going to add to your They might add to the level of productivity, but they were in the level, they were in the base a while ago now, and they've just continued up. So I certainly think there's some things we're not measuring. A bunch of it, though, is about the use of our time. And YouTube may be better than TV, but it's only a bit better than TV, so you can't just take the gross benefits of YouTube. You have to do the net benefits relative to the other activity. And then if you're being a paternalist, you could ask, is any of this a good use of our time? But without even going there, I think you get sort of decent size impact on the level of well-being, a small impact on the growth of well-being over the last decade.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 95 to 2005, well, it's a relatively short period of time. Stuff fluctuates. You have a period of faster growth, but broadly speaking, we're in a world of one and a half percent productivity growth if we're lucky. Unfortunately, it's been more like one lately. And that's just what it is.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. You know, I think there's some things less infrastructure investment, less R&D. There were some major projects in terms of highways in the 1950s, the lunar landing in the 1960s, et cetera. I'd like to think that was the answer to your question. I think the truth is when you go and quantify that type of public investment, it's sort of a couple tenths of a percent of the answer. In the recent period, I do think the increased concentration we're talking about might be a tenth or two percentage point of the slowdown that we've seen. Some of it may be that you need to invert your question and ask not why did productivity slow down, but why was productivity so fast? Well, there's a lot of very special things about the 1950s and the 1960s just coming off of World War II. And in terms of”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm an economic realist. You look at Robert Gordon and he's been turned into this big pessimist, this pole of prediction that's, you know, this negative. We've run out of ideas. There's nothing ever is going to happen. Turns out if you just look at average productivity growth over the last 50 years and assume that's what you're going to get over the next 50 years, we're going to have a GDP growth rate that is around 2%, maybe a little bit below it. And that's just from continuing the last 50 years. the average of the last 50 years is better than the average of the last 15 years. So in some ways, I'm an optimist. I think we'll get back to our historical productivity growth. But the idea that we're going to get way beyond that certainly could happen, but I don't think is a reasonable forecast of what's going to happen.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that these macro measures of market power are limited and problematic, and that's something we always knew. We knew that the first time we published them at the Council of Economic Advisors, a lot of the researchers that have published them have known that. The question is, like anything else in economics, does it have predictive power? Does it explain something? Does it work? And it does seem associated with things like profitability, with things like markups at an aggregate level in some of the aggregate models, it matches features of the data like the rise in the return to capital relative to the safe rate of return on treasuries. Is this going to work for every sector? No. Retail, for example, more concentration. In part, that's more competition at the local level. In part, that's more innovation. So in retail, the national...”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, I don't quite know the exact thing to do there. When it comes to hospitals, there's very few efficiencies that come out of these mergers. The only efficiency that might come out of them is that you can pay nurses less than you used to. And I'm not sure how thrilled we should be about that.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market power is a problem in some sectors. I think that, I actually think the health sector is an example of where it is. The problem that has been very well measured and very well documented is higher prices as a result of market power. So I'm quite confident in the health sector market power leads to higher prices. If higher prices are investment like drugs, then I think it's tough. I think you do have a trade-off between are you getting more innovation on the one hand and higher prices.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is. You see this in research by Tomas Philippon. You see it in research that Jan Eberley has done. Both of them have shown that the predictions you'd get by looking at increasing concentration are pretty similar to the predictions you'd get in terms of where you see the investment shortfalls. I know Jan Erberly did look at the hospital industry and I thought that was one of the shortfalls, but I'm not completely positive about that. Of course, health has 18 different issues and distortions going on in it all at once.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with the easy ones. There's no warm up here, Tyler. Think there's a lot of reasons. Some of it isn't a problem. It's that you don't need as much investment from businesses in the type of intangible economy that we have today relative to the type of heavy industry we used to have. But I think part of the investment shortfall does reflect problems and failures in economic policy, and in particular the increase in concentration in certain industries has led to greater monopoly power and has reduced some of the incentives and need to make investments in those industries. And I think that's part of the investment shortfall we can and should do something about.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source