Servaas Storm, who’s always worth reading, has posted on the INET website a summary of a new working paper he coauthored.  This issue goes way back with me—I first started looking into and writing about the labor rights/wage/trade/development nexus back in the 1980s.  Working on my own, I had a lot of false starts, and I’m happy to see others digging much more deeply today.

I won’t comment on the substance of this paper, but I think an important piece is missing: how dual economies articulate, and in particular the role of clientelism.

Countries in which formal sector jobs are highly valuable but scarce, in a sea of abundant but unremunerative informal employment, have to have some mechanism for allocating them.  Some classic economic models to the contrary, it never happens through lotteries.  My hypothesis, based on what I’ve seen and read, is that the predominant mechanism is clientelism.

A brief digression: Most of the literature on clientelism appears in political science, where it refers to the exchange of votes for personally targeted services or transfers by politicians.  I use the term to refer to a much broader phenomenon, the exchange of personally targeted benefits in return for the performance of loyalty between patrons and clients.  Patrons have access to resources from which they can supply benefits to clients, while the extent of client loyalty is a determinant (but not necessarily the only one) of how many resources a patron can command.  Conceptually, the client-patron relationship is a dyad, although clientelist systems are constellations of such exchange relations across whole populations: many dyads, multiple levels (patrons are clients of higher-level patrons), competing networks.

A large gap between formal and informal employment increases the tendency for clientelism to expand as an allocative system.  Clientelism is not all bad—it can moderate frictions that market or formal administrative processes generate—but to the extent it replaces these “modern” alternatives it reduces social efficiency.  For instance, allocating scarce formal sector jobs through client-patron exchanges is relatively harmless if the people getting the jobs are no less qualified than those left out of the system, stuck in the informal sector.  If clientelist networks override formal qualification (administrative) or competitive performance (market) criteria, however, they degrade outcomes.  It’s a matter of degree.

This morning consumer price inflation for May was reported at +0.2%. YoY inflation was 2.8%. This is tied for the highest in six years (blue):

The cause of the increase was primarily twofold — and neither one reflective of wage inflation. First, gas prices have increased by over 20% in the past year (red, right scale above).

Another slow start to the data this week, so let’s take a look at relationship I haven’t updated in awhile.

Total sales in the economy are broken up into three categories: manufacturers’, wholesalers’, and retailers’. We’ll get retail sales, the biggest component of the three, later this week.

But wholesalers’ sales and inventories were released last week, and are a useful coincident barometer. They are a better measure than manufacturers’ sales, since those have been very much secularly affected by the adoption of just-in-time inventory controls.

The important thing to remember is that sales (blue, left scale) lead inventories (red, right scale).  Here’s both for the last 20 years:

Note than in addition to the two last recessions, sales also plateaued first in 2012 slightly before inventory growth did, and again during the “shallow industrial recession” of 2016. As of April, both sales and inventory were both rising, a very typical result during an expansion.

What is it with cows?  I mean their flatulence does add to global warming, but they seem so benign, chewing their cud while producing milk and meat.  Why is it that national leaders get into fits of backstabbing over them, or especially over all that milk they produce?

Well, of course, that is it; they produce a lot of it, and a variety of products come from the milk, which sometimes markets do  not want as much of as some of the other products. This is probably the main reason that in international trade agreements, where highly protected and subsidized agriculture is always a difficult topic, dairy products are often at the top of the list.  For years, the predecessor of the EU, the EEC had “butter mountains” from all the excess butter governments bought to stabilize the market and keep the Danes and the  French from stabbing each other in the back too viciously.  The US also  had a butter mountain problem for a long time, much of it stored in Madison, Wisconsin where it caught fire back in 1991 and burned for 8 days.  Yes, we must protect those Wisconsin Dairy State cows as Trum is struggling to dop!

Back in 1972, when I was a grad student at U of Wisconsin, then Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire thought briefly of running for president (he didn’t in the end) and showed up at the econ department one time to give a speech.  For those who do not know, he was very popular and although a Dem had a bipartisan appeal.  A major part of this was a reputation he had for being very clean and not taking money from special interests.  He had an image of saving taxpayers money as he handed out “golden fleece” awards to people or entities he determined were wasting public funds.  So, of course, in his speech “The Prox” went on and on about all his money saving efforts.  At the end one prof asked him, “Senator Proxmire, if you are so much for efficiency and saving money, why do you support dairy import quotas?”  To this The Prox just smiled and said, “Well, after all, I am the senior senator from the state of Wisconsin.”

Not really a surprise, after all, it is Monday, and RJS has been at this for quite a long time at his post at WaPo.  But the recent release of the Trustees’ Report has not only gotten the Associated Press all bent out and shrieking “insolvency,” but I think with the push coming from the recent massive tax cuts that are swelling the budget deficit, the usual old gang of “cut the entitlements!” VSPs are out in force and raging pretty hard.  So Samuelson is denouncing “The Cowardice of the political class,” just unwilling to cut those benefits like they should, darn them, and calling for us “to rewrite the contract between the generations,” even thought about the only new thing in the report is that indeed Medicare is looking more financially troubled, and it has always been in much bigger trouble than Social Security.  But it and Medicaid involve medical care, and we know that is a political nightmare, so time to go  after those Social Security benefits in the name of helping out those young people by cutting their future SS benefits now, because otherwise they might get cut later.

Dean Baker has an excellent post on this today (I am never abler to link to him for some reason) at Beat the Press, and makes lots of valid and excellent points about how totally misguided RJS is, which I shall not repeat here.  I shall simply pound the point in more with some further observations.

One is that while RJS starts out going on about the Trustees report as if it is telling us something new, it really has no new news about Social Security.  While he hyperventilates quite dramatically, late in the column he admits that “The trustees’ reports don’t help us much, because they focus on the minutiae of various trust funds rather than fundamental questions about the proper role of government” (which should not be to help old people so darned much!).  Darn.  The “us” here, of course is all these ranting VSP ninnies who keep crying out that the sky is falling so the benefits must be cut, but the report simply does not say anything of the sort or particularly support such a push.

Also near the end, RJS does admit that “Yes, taxes have to go up…” but that is it on the tax issue, with not a whisper about the massive tax cut we just had.  No, undoing that nonsense is not the priority, it is cutting those darned benefits now! Maybe we could have cut the benefits more gradually if we had started way back when the VSPs started all their whining about this, but no, now only drastic action will forestall SS recipients in 2034 receiving real benefits equal to what they do now (no, RJS has never heard of the Rosser equation, poor thing).

“The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) to rally public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a better life. It was the principal ideological weapon in the arsenal of capital in its disputes with labor over the level of wages.” — Kenneth Lapides, Marx’s Wage Theory in Historical Perspective

The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM is the wage-fund doctrine in disguise. The fallacy claim’s conclusions about the ultimate futility of workers’ demands are indistinguishable from the doctrine’s conclusions.. Only the premise from which those conclusions are deduced has been altered. Instead of asserting a certain quantity of work to be done, the fallacy claim attributes that fixed assumption to a designated scapegoat: workers, unions, populists. The claimants’ own assumptions are left undefined, as an amorphous “in reality.”

That undefined “reality” is a given amount of capital for employing workers that can only be increased or decreased as a result, respectively, of a decrease or increase in the cost of labor. That is to say, a wage-fund lump!

The wage-fund doctrine was debunked in 1826 by Sir Edward West. It was “recanted” in 1869 by John Stuart Mill. The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM was shown to rely on the discredited fixed wage-fund assumption by Charles Beardsley in 1893. So why do economists (& CEOs) still cling to this dogma?

Because it conceals real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifies them, on the other.

Because it disarms working-class movements and rallies public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a better life.

Because it is the principal ideological weapon in the arsenal of capital in its disputes with labor over the the hours of work.