Free market?

I’ve been reading quite a lot of articles and comments about the recent Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) and there is – as you would imagine – a wide variety of different views. What I find quite interesting (to put it politely) are those people with what I think of as right wing (or conservative) views who seem to believe that the state should be smaller and that there should be more of a free market approach to how to provide things in society. The kind of things that I’ve read are along the lines of “get money out of the public sector into the private where it can work to generate wealth”.

What I would really like is for someone to explain (without using the typical rhetoric that uses words like “waste” and “efficiency”) why a smaller state with services being provided through a free market would be better than what we have now. Let me lay out, in general, the reason why I find this free market ideology confusing in certain circumstances. I assume that most people accept that there are some things that should be provided by the public sector. Examples would be the military, policing, etc. There are others, such as education and healthcare, that are probably amongst the kind of things that some would like to see provided by the private sector, rather than by the public sector.

Here’s where I get slightly confused – and hence would like someone to explain the free market ideology to me. If we consider healthcare, it has a total cost of something like £100 billion per year and makes up about 15% of public spending. We could presumably privatise healthcare, reduce public spending by 15%, and return £100 billion back into the marketplace (assuming that we actually do reduce the deficit). Let’s assume that the goal is to continue to provide healthcare for all, but just to do so through the private sector rather than the public. How do we achieve this? To first order, providing healthcare for all must cost about the same whether done through the private or public sector (any efficiency savings will probably be cancelled out by the fact that some profits will have to be made for those who have invested). The cost per person will therefore be about £1500 per year and the cost per family will be something like £5000 – £6000 per year. Currently 50% of jobs in the UK pay £19000 per year or less and 50% of household have income of £25000 per year or less. Given that very little of the £100 billion that is returned to the private sector will go to the lowest earners, how are these people meant to suddenly start paying for healthcare?

One option is that the private sector redistributes wealth so that everyone in employment can afford healthcare. The other is that it is provided directly by employers, although this then begs the questions of what happens to the unemployed and those who are retired. What I want to know is how this is significantly different from what we already have? Roughly £100 billion a year will be spent providing healthcare for people in the UK. This money isn’t going to be available for anything other than providing health coverage, so how does it suddenly generate wealth in the private sector when it supposedly wasn’t when in the public sector?

Possibly my initial assumption is wrong and that those who want a reduced public sector actually do not believe that everyone should get reasonable healthcare. Maybe the idea is that providing health coverage through the private sector would introduce choice. You could choose to have no healthcare, pay very little and get very basic healthcare, or pay a lot and get the best possible healthcare. Presumably this then implies that the unemployed would have no coverage, the lowest earners would only have basic coverage, and only the highest earners could afford coverage similar to what we all get today. If this is what is essentially being suggested by those who support small government, then they are probably correct that the total cost of healthcare will be less than it is today and some money will be consequently available for other, potentially wealth creating, enterprises. What is possibly not recognised, however, is that having a healthy workforce is, in itself, a way of creating wealth (or at least of creating more wealth than a comparable society in which many do not have health coverage).

The third possibility that I can imagine is that those who want small government and more private sector involvement in providing services, really haven’t given it much thought at all and simply believe all the rhetoric that is being thrown around by various conservative thinktanks. You can probably work out that my view, at this stage, is that providing services like healthcare and education through the public sector is preferable to providing it through the private sector. I’m more than happy to accept that some kind of savings could be made and that there may well be inefficiencies in the system, but I’m not – at this stage – convinced that it would be significantly different if it were in the private sector. I am, however, genuinely interested in having someone explain – including all goals and assumptions – why providing certain services through the private sector is preferable to providing it through the public sector.

Gross Domestic Product

I was in the process of writing a post about science becoming an election issue, but have been somewhat distracted by an article in the Guardian by George Monbiot. The basic idea of the article is essentially that we are so fixated on growth that some people now believe that we should consider using all the resources on our planet if it allows us to then explore other worlds. What I found interesting was, however, the discussion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in particular the use of GDP growth as a measure of an economy’s success.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with using GDP as a measure of a country’s wealth. Although I’m not an economist, it seems a little simplistic to just use this, especially since it gives no real indication of how the wealth is distributed. It is simply a measure of a country’s total economic output. I have argued before (here) that we should really use something like the Gini coefficient (indicating wealth distribution) and GDP, in order to optimise a country’s wealth together with how it is distributed. We could consider accepting a lower GDP if the wealth is more evenly distributed, especially since there doesn’t seem to be any strong evidence showing that giving excessive amounts of money to a select few ultimately benefits everyone.

What I found interesting in George Monbiot’s article was the suggestion – which came from a paper published by someone called Sir Parth Dasgupta – that another problem with GDP is that it doesn’t take into account the effect of GDP growth on a country’s resources. A country with a rapid growth in GDP could be doing this by depleting its resources in an unsustainable way so that even though GDP is growing, the total effective wealth is decreasing. Maybe we need to consider total wealth, GDP and how the wealth is distributed when trying to determine the strength of an economy. Maybe we also need to stop being so fixated on growth and start to consider how sustainable our economy’s are. As the current financial crisis has shown us, rapid growth is unsustainable and we would probably have been much better off if the financial sector had been more cautious and accepted a lower growth rate that would have been more sustainable (we probably can’t get rid of boom and bust completely, but we can probably minimise the amplitude of the perturbations).

Although I’m pleased to see more discussion about how a country’s economy is measured and would personally be very in favour of us considering how wealth is distributed and how sustainable our economy’s are when determining the wealth of a country, I’m not convinced that we are going to be seeing any paradigm shifting changes in the near future. It’s not really in the interests of today’s business leaders (who probably have a great deal of influence with our political leaders) to change the way in which we measure a country’s economic strength, especially if – in order to have an sustainable economy that would ultimately be of long-term benefit to the country, and possible even the world – this would involve them accepting a smaller fraction of the total wealth.

The Gini coefficient

In a previous post, I wrote about the wealth gap in the UK and I should acknowledge that I started with the preconceived view that there was indeed a wealth gap. What I mean by a wealth gap (and I presume this is roughly consistent with what is generally meant) is that wealth/income is distributed in such a way that a small portion of the population get most of the income. By the end of the post, I found myself slightly confused and although the numbers I had looked up didn’t indicate that there wasn’t a wealth gap, they also didn’t seem to indicate that there was. One of the problems is probably that simply considering numbers like median and mean income and looking at graphs showing how income is distributed doesn’t necessarily allow one to determine if there is indeed a income gap.

There is, however, a way of quantifying the income distribution. This is known as the Gini coefficient which is determined from the Lorentz curve. The Lorentz curve (shown in the figure on the right) shows what percentage of the total income the bottom x % of households have. If income is completely evenly distributed, the Lorentz curve is a diagonal line known as the line of equality (bottom 10% have 10% of the income, bottom 50 % have 50 % of the income etc.). The other extreme is the case where one person has all the income and everyone else has nothing. The Lorentz curve would then be a straight horizontal line along the x-axis that suddenly turns up at the end. In reality the Lorentz curve is somewhere between these two extremes. The Gini coefficient is then the ratio of the area between the line of equality and the Lorentz curve itself (A) and the total area below the line of equality (A+B). In the figure shown the Gini coefficient is A/(A+B). If we assume that the x and y axes run from 0 to 1 (rather than from 0 – 100 %), A+B = 0.5 and the Gini coeffiicient is 2A. The Gini coefficient would then be a number between 0 and 1, although it is sometimes multiplied by 100.

The Gini coefficient can vary wildly throughout the world, with poorer countries tending to have larger Gini coefficients. Namibia has one of the largest Gini coefficients (0.71) while Sweden has one of the lowest (0.23). The UK has a Gini coefficient of about 0.34 while the USA has a Gini coefficient of about 0.45.

So, what does this all mean? The UK has a Gini coefficient that appears to be quite similar to many other developed nations, although there are a number of countries that do have considerably lower Gini indexes (Norway, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, to name a few). What is possibly more interesting is that the UK’s Gini coefficient has changed quite considerably in the last 30 years, increasing from about 0.24 in the late 1970s to about 0.34 (maybe even 0.38) today. There appears, in the UK at least, to be a general view that it is worth giving most of the income to a small proportion of the population (in theory the most motivated, creative and skilled members of our society) because this will lead to economic growth and wealth will anyway then trickle down to the rest of society. If this were true you might expect there to be a significant change in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the last 30 years or so because the highest earners are taking a bigger fraction of the total income today than they were in the late 1970s. This doesn’t however, seem to be the case. According to the IMF data the growth rate of UK GDP has been highly variable from 1980 till today. It does not seem to be the case that as a smaller proportion of the population has taken a larger portion of the income, there has been a corresponding rise in the growth rate of the UK economy.

All in all, it seems that the UK has a Gini coefficient that is similar to other developed nations and doesn’t seem to indicate some kind of massive wealth gap. The wealth/income distribution has however changed quite substantially over the last 30 years or so with a bigger fraction of the income going to a smaller fraction of the population. If this has lead to a corresponding rise in GDP, ultimately benefiting everyone, this may seem perfectly reasonably. This, however, doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s my view, therefore, that we should be aiming to optimise GDP together with the Gini coefficient. There is no point in having a small Gini coefficient if the GDP is so low that no one has any wealth. By the same token, there is no point (at least not for the majority) in having a large Gini coefficient if again the GDP is such that the majority of the population is living in poverty. If anything, being moderately socialist, I feel that we should be aiming to reduce the Gini coefficient (i.e., distributing wealth more evenly) until it appears to be having a negative impact on GDP at which point we could assume that we have reached the optimum wealth distribution. A smaller Gini coefficient and we would start having a negative impact on the economy. A larger Gini coefficient and we would be giving more income to a smaller proportion of society for no real obvious reason.

Data is from various sources including wikipedia, the CIA world handbook, and the IMF

The Wealth Gap

I have recently become quite interested in the wealth (or more accurately income) distribution in the UK. This was partly motivated by a couple of what I thought were interesting articles by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. In the first article (which I can no longer find – maybe it wasn’t Polly Toynbee) a group of people are asked if they believe that a wealth gap exists in the UK. Most answered that they did, but when asked to guess the salaries of some top earners (solicitors, investment bankers, etc.), they generally guessed salaries significantly lower that what these top earners typically earned.

In the second article (which you can find here ) a group of high earners are again asked some questions about the wealth distribution in the UK. More than 50 % of people in the UK earn less than what this group thought was the poverty line, and less than 1 % earned more than what this group thought would put you in the top 10 %. Essentially these two articles illustrate – or supposedly illustrate – that the lowest earners believe there is a substantial wealth gap, but don’t realise quite how big it is, and the highest earners believe there isn’t really a substantial wealth gap, but only because they don’t really realise how little most people earn.

Although I haven’t investigated this in extensive detail, I have looked up some numbers related to the distribution of wealth in the UK. When considering any distribution it is quite important to understand the difference between things like the median and the mean (Stephen Jay Gould has an excellent book called Full House that explains some of these statistical terms extremely clearly). In the UK in 2004/2005 the mean annual income (pre tax) was about £23000. This, however, can be distorted by a small proportion of the population earning extremely high salaries. A better measure is the median which tells you, in some sense, the middle salary (i.e., 50 % of the population earns less than the median and 50 % earns more). In 2004/2005 the median, pre-tax income was about £16500, significantly less than the mean.

Although the median income has increased somewhat since 2004/2005, to something around £18500, I still find it quite remarkable that 50 % of the British working population earn £18500 per year or less. If, rather than considering indivduals, one considers households, it is slightly higher, but not by much. The mean household income for 2004/2005 was £31800 while the median was £24700. Again, these numbers will have increased slightly in the last couple of years, but I still find somewhat disturbing that 50 % of households survive on about £25000 or less, but does this indicate the presence of a wealth gap in the UK? Certainly, trying to run a household on less than £25000 per year must be pretty tough. That the top 1 % of earners have salaries more than 17 times greater than the bottom 10 % may suggest that a gap does indeed exist.

None of these numbers, however, convincingly illustrates that there is a substantial wealth gap in the UK. I then found a figure from the government’s office of national statistics which illustrates to a certain extent how wealth is redistributed. The figure (which you can read more about here) shows the average annual household income broken up into 5 groups (bottom 20 %, next 20 % etc. – known as quintile groups). The dark blue columns are the original annual household incomes and the light blue columns show the annual household incomes after tax and benefits. The bottom 20 % more than double their income to about £ 15000 per year, while the top 20 % lose almost 30 % of their income. The median (which would be roughly the 3rd quintile group) have a household incomes of just over £20000 per year which isn’t affected much by tax or benefits. The figure suggests that the top 20 % have average household incomes only 3 times greater than the bottom 20 %. The figures also suggests that the top 40 % of households end up with about 60 % of the total amount of money earned in a year, and the top 20 % end up with about 37 % of the total. Does this suggest an unfair distribution – I don’t really know. My first impression was that it actually looks quite reasonable.

Having started this post expecting to illustrate that there is indeed a wealth gap in the UK, I am finding myself now less convinced than I was when I started (interestingly Polly Tonybee was on the BBC news this morning stating once again that the UK – along with the US – does indeed have a very big wealth gap). Having said that, I do still find it disturbing that most households survive on less than about £25000 per year (after tax and benefits). I have also been using wealth here to mean income, so this doesn’t really illustrate how the actual wealth is distributed. Most of the numbers here are also based on taxable income. What I also don’t know is how much of the country’s income is given out in a manner that allows the receiver to avoid tax and therefore isn’t included in the analysis here. I was going to continue and talk about the Gini index which is an index for illustrating how income/wealth is distributed in a country but, since this is already quite long, I will leave it for a later post.