Central Perk

luni, 5 ianuarie 2015

Try Your Hand at A/B Testing for a Chance to Win the Email Subject Line Contest

Posted: 04 Jan 2015 04:10 PM PST

This blog post ends with an opportunity for you to win a stay at the ARIA in Vegas and a ticket to Email Summit, but it begins with an essential question for marketers…

How can you improve already successful marketing, advertising, websites and copywriting?

Today's Moz blog post is unique. Not only are we going to teach you how to address this challenge, we're going to offer an example that you can dig into to help drive home the lesson.

Give the people what they want

Some copy and design is so bad, the fixes are obvious. Maybe you shouldn't insult the customer in the headline. Maybe you should update the website that still uses a dot matrix font.

But when you're already doing well, how can you continue to improve?

I don't have the answer for you, but I'll tell you who does – your customers.

There are many tricks, gimmicks and technology you can use in marketing, but when you strip away all the hype and rhetoric, successful marketing is pretty straightforward – clearly communicate the value your offer provides to people who will pay you for that value.

Easier said than done, of course.

So how do you determine what customers want? And the best way to deliver it to them?

Well, there are many ways to learn from customers, such as focus groups, surveys and social listening. While there is value in asking people what they want, there is also a major challenge in it. "People's ability to understand the factors that affect their behavior is surprisingly poor," according to research from Dr. Noah J. Goldstein, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Or, as Malcolm Gladwell more glibly puts it when referring to coffee choices, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants."

Not to say that opinion-based customer preference research is bad. It can be helpful. However, it should be the beginning and not the end of your quest.

…by seeing what they actually do

You can use what you learn from opinion-based research to create a hypothesis about what customers want, and then run an experiment to see how they actually behave in real-world customer interactions with your product, marketing messages, and website.

The technique that powers this kind of research is often known as A/B testing, split testing, landing page optimization, and/or website optimization. If you are testing more than one thing at a time, it may also be referred to as multi-variate testing.

To offer a simple example, you might assume that customers buy your product because it tastes great. Or because it's less filling. So you could create two landing pages – one with a headline that promotes that taste (treatment A) and another that mentions the low carbs (treatment B). You then send half the traffic that visits that URL to each version and see which performs better.

Here is a simple visual that Joey Taravella, Content Writer, MECLABS create to illustrate the concept…

That's just one test. To really learn about your customers, you must continue the process and create a testing-optimization cycle in your organization – continue to run A/B tests, record the findings, learn from them, create more hypotheses, and test again based on these hypotheses.

This is true marketing experimentation, and helps you build your theory of the customer.

But you probably know all that already. So here's your chance to practice while helping us shape an A/B test. You might even win a prize in the process.

The email subject line contest

The Moz Blog and MarketingExperiments Blog have joined forces to run a unique marketing experimentation contest. We're presenting you with a real challenge from a real organization (VolunteerMatch) and asking you to write a subject line to test (it's simple, just leave your subject line as a comment in this blog post).

We're going to pick three subject lines suggested by readers of The Moz Blog and three from the MarketingExperiments Blog and run a test with this organization's customers. Whoever writes the best performing subject line will win a stay at the ARIA Resort in Las Vegas as well as a two-day ticket to MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 to help them gain lessons to further improve their marketing.

Sound good? OK, let's dive in and tell you more about your "client"…

Craft the best-performing subject line to win the prize

Every year at Email Summit, we run a live A/B test where the audience helps craft the experiment. We then run, validate, close the experiment, and share the results during Summit as a way to teach about marketing experimentation. We have typically run the experiment using MarketingSherpa as the "client" website to test (MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa are sister publications, both owned by MECLABS Institute).

However, this year we wanted to try something different and interviewed three national non-profits to find a new "client" for our tests.

We chose VolunteerMatch – a nonprofit organization that uses the power of technology to make it easier for good people and good causes to connect. One of the key reasons we chose VolunteerMatch is because it is an already successful organization looking to further improve. (Here is a case study explaining one of its successful implementations – Lead Management: How a B2B SaaS nonprofit decreased its sales cycle 99%).

Another reason we chose VolunteerMatch for this opportunity is that it has three types of customers, so the lessons from the content we create can help marketers across a wide range of sales models. VolunteerMatch's customers are:

People who want to volunteer (B2C)
Non-profit organizations looking for volunteers (non-profit)
Businesses looking for corporate volunteering solutions (B2B) to which it offers a Software-as-a-Service product through VolunteerMatch Solutions

Designing the experiment

After we took VolunteerMatch on as the Research Partner "client," Jon Powell, Senior Executive Research and Development Manager, MECLABS, worked with Shari Tishman, Director of Engagement and Lauren Wagner, Senior Manager of Engagement, VolunteerMatch, to understand their challenges, take a look at their current assets and performance, and craft a design of experiments to determine what further knowledge about its customers would help VolunteerMatch improve performance.

That design of experiments includes a series of split tests – including the live test we're going to run at Email Summit, as well as the one you have an opportunity to take part in by writing a subject line in the comments section of this blog post. Let's take a look at that experiment…

The challenge

VolunteerMatch wants to increase the response rate of the corporate email list (B2B) by discovering the best possible messaging to use. In order to find out, MarketingExperiments wants to run an A/B split test to determine the best messaging.

However the B2B list is relatively smaller than the volunteer/cause list (B2C) which makes it harder to test in (and gain statistical significance) and determine which messaging is most effective.

So we're going to run a messaging test to the B2C list. This isn't without its challenges though, because most individuals on the B2C list are not likely to immediately connect with B2B corporate solutions messaging.

So the question is…

How do we create an email that is relevant (to the B2C list), which doesn't ask too much, that simultaneously helps us discover the most relevant aspect of the solutions (B2B) product (if any)?

The approach – Here's where you come in

This is where the Moz and MarketingExperiments community comes in to help.

We would like you to craft subject lines relevant to the B2C list, which highlight various benefits of the corporate solutions tool.

We have broken down the corporate solutions tool into three main categories of benefit for the SaaS product. In the comments section below, include which category you are writing a subject line for along with what you think is an effective subject line.

The crew at Moz and MarketingExperiments will then choose the top subject line in each category to test. Below you will find the emails that will be sent as part of the test. They are identical, except for the subject lines (which you will write) and the bolded line in the third paragraph (that ties into that category of value).

Category #1: Proof, recognition, credibility

Category #2: Better, more opportunities to choose from

Category #3: Ease-of-use

About VolunteerMatch's brand

Since we're asking you to try your hand at crafting messaging for this example "client," here is some more information about the brand to inform your messaging…

VolunteerMatch's brand identity

VolunteerMatch's core values

Ten things VolunteerMatch believes:

People want to do good
Every great cause should be able to find the help it needs
People want to improve their lives and communities through volunteering
You can't make a difference without making a connection
In putting the power of technology to good use
Businesses are serious about making a difference
In building relationships based on trust and excellent service
In partnering with like-minded organizations to create systems that result in even greater impact
The passion of our employees drives the success of our products, services and mission
In being great at what we do

And now, we test…

To participate, you must leave your comment with your idea for a subject line before midnight on Tuesday, January 13, 2015. The contest is open to all residents of the 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older. If you want more info, here are the official rules.

When you enter your subject line in the comments section, also include which category you're entering for (and if you have an idea outside these categories, let us know…we just might drop it in the test).

Next, the Moz marketing team will pick the subject lines they think will perform best in each category from all the comments on The Moz Blog, and the MarketingExperiments team will pick the subject lines we think will perform the best in each category from all the comments on the MarketingExperiments Blog.

We'll give the VolunteerMatch team a chance to approve the subject lines based on their brand standards, then test all six to eight subject lines and report back to you through the Moz and MarketingExperiments blogs which subject lines won and why they won to help you improve your already successful marketing.

So, what have you got? Write your best subject lines in the comments section below. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Related resources

If you're interested in learning more about marketing experimentation and A/B testing, you might find these links helpful…

And here's a look at a previous subject line writing contest we've run to give you some ideas for your entry…

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : Uncertainty is not the same thing as risk

Uncertainty is not the same thing as risk

Often, the most important work we do doesn't bring a guaranteed, specific result. Usually, the result of any given action on our part is unknown.

Uncertainty implies a range of possible outcomes.

But a range of results, all uncertain, does not mean you are exposing yourself to risk. It merely means you're exposing yourself to an outcome you didn't have a chance to fall in love with in advance.

A simple example: the typical high school student applying to a range of colleges has very little risk of getting in nowhere. Apply to enough schools that match what you have to offer, and the odds are high indeed you'll get in somewhere. Low risk but a very high uncertainty about which college or colleges will say yes.

That's not risky. That's uncertain. It takes fortitude to live with a future that's not clearly imagined, but it's no reason not to apply.

Another example: If you speak to 100 people, it's uncertain which 40 people will be impacted by what you say. But the risk that you will resonate with no one is small indeed.

The question to ask every organization, manager, artist or yourself is, "are you hesitating because you're not sure the future will match your specific vision, or is there truly a project-endangering risk here?"

A portfolio of uncertain outcomes is very different from a large risk.

HT to Bert Spangenberg.

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duminică, 4 ianuarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

US and Canadian Expatriates Comment on US Healthcare

Posted: 04 Jan 2015 06:46 PM PST

I have a couple more emails from readers in response to Single-Payer "Medicare for All" Proposal; Live and Let Die; Why Does Single-Payer "Work" in Europe?

Comments From a US Expatriate

Reader David a US citizen living in Europe writes ...

Hi Mish,

I am a native born US citizen who has worked mainly outside of the USA since 2003. In 2012 I liquidated everything in the USA and moved to Europe for the foreseeable future.

In Europe the rules are different for every nation depending on whether you are working for a company, self employed, or a "person of means". France and Luxembourg have single-payer universal coverage. In Hungary and Spain, you don't need health insurance if you can prove you can pay your medical expenses (person of means). Switzerland mandates that all people must have some form of health insurance (private). Ireland has a couple of levels: public, private, etc. Germany allows you to take the state system or take a private system.

In most "Single Payer" systems that I have seen, the patient pays the bill and the bill is reimbursed at 80% (or whatever) via a SEPA transfer to their account. For those "of means" with no insurance, the person simply pays the bill.

Using Luxembourg as an example, if you go to a doctor and the bill is 50 euros for the visit, You pay the doctor the 50 euros and he hands you a receipt that you submit for reimbursement. The government wires you 80% of the bill within 2 weeks.

Note that the patient sees the bill, and pays the bill at the time of treatment and is typically reimbursed later.

David

Views From a Canadian Expatriate

Reader Peter, a now living in the US writes ...

Hello Mish

I have a few observations about single-payer healthcare. First, here are a few tidbits about me so you know where I get my perspective:

I grew up in Canada and lived in Canada for 29 years before moving to the US in 1994, so I have personal experience with both systems.
My family still resides in Canada and I was involved with my Father's experiences with the Canadian system before he passed in 2013.
I worked for a Blue Cross payer from 2008 to 2012.

First, Obamacare is 10,500+ pages of legislation, whereas the Canada Health Act is 18 pages.

Second, in spite of the massive number of pages of legislation, Obamacare failed to tackle many underlying problems in the US system:

Tort Reform. An Ob/Gyn is probably paying $50K or even $100K per year for liability insurance. That cost of doing business is transferred down to the consumer. Assuming $100K, 200 working days, and 25 patients per day (likely high!), the consumer is effectively paying $20 of the fee just for the physician's liability insurance.
Pharmaceutical Pricing. Many "wonder drugs" are being created and then slammed onto US consumers, along with high prices. These drugs typically go through a efficacy and pricing review before being introduced into single-payer systems. The US consumer tends to pay for the brunt of the R&D costs of these "wonder drugs".
Rationing - The "R" Word. In Canada and other single-payer systems, you queue up for an elective procedure. Period. You can go elsewhere and pay for it yourself if you have the money. Otherwise, expect to get in line for that elective MRI, surgery, or other procedure. The British Columbia Ministry of Health even has a website showing Surgical Wait Times.
Revenue Ask any US citizen if they're willing to pay 10-20% more in Federal taxes for a single-payer system. The response is always "the rich will pay". The math doesn't work because there simply aren't enough rich people out there.

People in single-payer systems have grown accustomed to the concept of waiting. In the US, who is willing to wait months? No US politician is willing to tackle the problem of the dirty "R" word.

Third, the single-payer systems in Canada and various European countries are showing their cracks too.

Revenue. Revenue streams are limited due to existing, high taxes.
Aging Populations Living Longer. In the US system and single-payer systems, a disproportionate amount of money is spent on keeping the aging living longer.
Limited Access to Care. My Mother experiences this now in Canada. Several types of physicians have been capped on the number of patients they can see per day. One needs to go early if they hope to see a physician at a walk-in clinic.
Death Panels. The UK's National Health System has started to implement some controls (some call them "Death Panels"), in that if you're terminally ill and only have a few months to live, the system is not going to pay for significant interventions and instead will try to just keep you comfortable until you pass.

I thought about this with my Father during his last two years of life after a significant fall, and I periodically wondered about the total cost and his marginal quality of life. There is no easy solution.

The US system will break down once the politicians are no longer able to print money to support it. Guys like Gruber are just there to make money off the system - they are not providing a long-term vision.

There is no easy solution.

Peter

No Easy Solution?

Actually there are plenty of solutions, some short-term, some long-term, all of them free market based.

Making healthcare both better and more affordable is easy. Finding the political will to cooperate in fixing the problems is what's hard.

I will propose eight healthcare reform ideas in a third post shortly. Even though they are free-market solutions, they are not at all incompatible with Obamacare.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

US Doctor Comments on Single-Payer "Medicare for All" Proposal

Posted: 04 Jan 2015 02:01 AM PST

I received many interesting comments from readers on Single-Payer "Medicare for All" Proposal; Live and Let Die; Why Does Single-Payer "Work" in Europe?

This email is from a US M.D. named Ken. Ken writes ...

I agree with everything you wrote, but you omitted a discussion of the variation of demand in relation to the cost. It is approximately correct to state that when the perceived cost to the user approaches zero, the demand for services approaches infinity. This is the crucial flaw in all "government-funded" single-provider programs. The demand for "free" services is impossibly huge.

I have read extensively in the research literature on the details of the health care systems in most developed countries. To make a long story short, what goes on in most government-run single payer programs is that you are promised you may receive all conceivable medical care without limit, and then care is denied to you by a variety of rationing systems.

In England the General Practitioners are charged with broad authority to deny and ration care. Canada has a system in which care is rationed via a hard limit on the annual budget, which is funded by the provincial government. The fiscal year starts in July, and what happens is that clinics which provide elective services (e.g. hip replacement) exhaust their budget by the early spring, and so the clinics close for several months in the late spring and reopen in July after their next annual funding allotment is received. During the intervening months the bereft Canadians have to go to the U.S. for treatment paid out of their own pocket if they cannot wait. This is an amusing variant of "Rationing by Queue" which is a prevalent device in all such government programs in the developed nations.

The entire approach in all socialized medicine countries can be summarized as "Promise everyone everything, and then deny them when when they request delivery." This of course is the time-honored modus operandi of the welfare state.

Thank you for your courageous leadership in tackling a number of crucial issues in your blog. Your clear thinking and number-crunching acumen are in short supply. Please stay safe.

Regards,
Ken

Ken is correct about unlimited demand for free services. I have talked about that issue before, just not in my recent post.

There is not one thing in Obamacare that increases competition or reduces overall costs. Obamacare did not even lift the ban on drug imports so US taxpayers effectively subsidize the entire rest of the world.

The government sets some prices but price setting and competition are certainly not the same thing. When prices are too low, shortages occur (or doctors drop out of the system), and the latter has happened. And nothing has been done about needless or repetitive tests.

A number of previously uninsured persons are now insured, but this comes at the expense of making many others pay far more. Those who pay less are happy, those who pay more aren't.

Obamacare is over 10,000 pages of legislation but did not fix a single problem with the "system". It did create a new set of winners and losers. "Medicare for All" with unlimited free services would be veritable disaster.

I have a couple more emails to share, one from Europe and one from Canada.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Doing calculus with Roman numerals

Doing calculus with Roman numerals

Quick, what's XIV squared?

You can't do advanced math without the zero. And you can't write precise prose without a well-developed vocabulary.

The magic of the alphabet is that twenty-six letters are all you need to spell every word. The beauty of Lego blocks is that you don't need very many to build something extraordinary.

Imagine how hard it would be to get anything done, though, if you only knew 17 letters.

In most fields your work is hindered if you only have a few of the most basic tools. Understanding more of the building blocks of finance, or marketing or technology are essential if you want to get something important done.

Here's my advice: Every time you hear an expert use a word or concept you don't understand, stop her and ask to be taught. Every time. After just a few interactions, you'll have a huge advantage over those who didn't ask.

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sâmbătă, 3 ianuarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Competing Views: Grexit Would Be "Lehman Squared" vs. No Problem; Where to Point the Finger When it Blows

Posted: 03 Jan 2015 02:35 PM PST

There's an amusing pair of headlines back-to-back today on what a Greek exit from the Eurozone might mean.

One view is catastrophic, the others is along the lines of no problem. Let's start with the catastrophe.

Economic historian Barry Eichengreen says Greek Euro Exit Would be 'Lehman Brothers Squared.

A decision by a new Greek government to leave the eurozone would set off devastating turmoil in financial markets even worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, a leading international economist warned Saturday.

A Greek exit would likely spark runs on Greek banks and the country's stock market and end with the imposition of severe capital controls, said , an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley. He spoke as part of a panel discussion on the euro crisis at the American Economic Association's annual meeting.

The exit would also spill into other countries as investors speculate about which might be next to leave the currency union, he said.

"In the short run, it would be Lehman Brothers squared," Eichengreen warned.

Martin Feldstein [professor of economics at Harvard University], a longtime critic of the euro project, said all the attempts to return Europe to healthy growth have failed.

"I think there may be no way to end to euro crisis," Feldstein said.

The options being discussed to stem the crisis, including launch of full scale quantitative easing by the European Central Bank, "are in my judgment not likely to be any more successful," Feldstein said.

The best way to ensure the euro's survival would be for each individual eurozone member state to enact its own tax policies to spur demand, including cutting the value-added tax for the next five years to increase consumer spending, Feldstein said.

He predicted that European politicians would "swallow hard once again" and make the compromises necessary to keep Greece in the currency union.

"While holding the eurozone together will be costly and difficult and painful for the politicians, breaking it up will be even more costly and more difficult," he said.

Limited Contagion Thesis

Yahoo!Finance reports Germany Believes Eurozone Could Cope with Greece Exit.

The German government believes that the euro zone would now be able to cope with a Greece exit if that proved to be necessary, Der Spiegel news magazine reported on Saturday, citing unnamed government sources.

Both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble believe the euro zone has implemented enough reforms since the height of the regional crisis in 2012 to make a potential Greece exit manageable, Der Spiegel reported.

"The danger of contagion is limited because Portugal and Ireland are considered rehabilitated," the weekly news magazine quoted one government source saying.

In addition, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone's bailout fund, is an "effective" rescue mechanism and was now available, another source added. Major banks would be protected by the banking union.

According to the report, the German government considers a Greece exit almost unavoidable if the leftwing Syriza opposition party led by Alexis Tsipras wins an election set for Jan. 25.

Competing Views on Funding Needs

Before taking a side in the above debate, let's take a look at competing views on Greek funding needs. Please consider a snip from SYRIZA Makes Fresh Pledge to Defend Greek Capitalism.

Analysts at Bank of America Merill Lynch, "think Tsipras will face a budget black hole of at least 28 billion euros in the first two years of his government, with nowhere to borrow from and 17 billion euros of repayments to make in the first year."

In contrast, the Wall Street Journal reports Greece Expects Primary Budget Surplus for 2015.

Greece's 2015 budget, submitted by the government to parliament on Friday, aims to meet the fiscal demands of the country's creditors but comes without the prior approval of its troika of international inspectors.

According to the budget, Greece will achieve a primary budget surplus—before taking into account debt payments—of €3.3 billion ($4.1 billion), equal to 3% of gross domestic product, next year, which is in line with the country's bailout program.

Overall, the government will record only a minor budget deficit of €338 million—equivalent to just 0.2% of gross domestic product—next year, in effect marking the first balanced budget Greece has produced in four decades.

Despite surpassing its budget targets for three years running, Greece is at loggerheads with the troika—made up of representatives from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank—over further fiscal measures the country must take, as well as a number of promised overhauls.

Primary Account Surplus or Not?

Does Greece have a €28 billion black hole or a surplus?

Both can technically be true. The €28 black hole counts interest on debt including the €245 bailout package. The primary surplus theory ignores interest on the debt.

If the Troika suspends the bailout, then Greece will have no choice but to default. Of course, that points to the absurdity of the alleged bailout setup in the first place.

Even if the interest rate on the bailout was 0%, at €3 surplus every year, it would take Greece 81 years to pay back that debt!

Economic Reality

There is no realistic way Greece can ever pay back €245 billion, so it won't.

With that thought, let's return to the first question. Would a Greece exit be "Lehman Squared" or would it have little effect?

Actually, no matter what happens with Greece, the entire eurozone setup is unstable. Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal all are in impossible payback setups. Even if Syriza loses the next election, sooner or later Greece, Spain, Italy, or possibly even France will exit the eurozone.

The "limited contagion" view is complete nonsense. The eurozone debt problem is going to explode, and whether or not it becomes "Lehman Squared" depends on the response.

My view is the longer the ECB and EU attempt to hold this mess together with no debt writedowns, the bigger the catastrophe.

Greece will not cause a catastrophe, but the EU/ECB handling of a Greece exit is highly likely to do just that.

Eventually, Will Come a Time

As I said in my November 23, 2011 post Eventually, Will Come a Time When ....

Eventually, there will come a time when a populist office-seeker will stand before the voters, hold up a copy of the EU treaty and (correctly) declare all the "bail out" debt foisted on their country to be null and void. That person will be elected.

Le Pen may be too early, and France may not be that country, but the time will come.

Greece, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and even France are possibilities. All it will take, is for one charismatic person, timing social mood correctly, to say precisely one right thing at exactly the right time. It will happen.

Possibilities

Greece: Alexis Tsipras - Syriza (Radical Left)
France: Marine Le Pen - Front National (Radical Right)
Italy: Beppe Grillo - M5S Five Star Movement (Radical Left)
Spain: Pablo Iglesias Turrión - Podemos (Radical Left)

Where to Point the Finger When it Blows

The pot is simmering and is likely to boil over at any time. When it does boil over, Greece will not really be to blame, even if Alexis Tsipras wins the election and carries out his threats.

Rather, be prepared to point the finger at the EU, ECB, and IMF for their collective insistence that Greece, Spain, Italy, etc. repay debt that cannot and will not be paid back.

By the way, there is a small chance Tsipras wins the election and Greece exits the eurozone with limited initial fallout. If so, the major problem will come when Spain or Italy does the same thing.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : When to decide

When to decide

Important decisions carry risk and can unnerve and distract us.

One instinct is to delay, merely because doing something risky and distracting later is better than doing it now. That's the wrong strategy.

You should decide the moment that new information relevant to the decision is more expensive to obtain than the cost, the inaction and the anxiety of waiting.

So, don't apply to 30 colleges and see which ones you get into before you decide. That'll cost you thousands of dollars and take up months of your life.

Don't delay hiring a great CMO merely because it's entirely possible that other resumes might appear one day. Your hesitation might cost you the person you've found, and going three more months without a great person on board is way more expensive than waiting for Ms. Perfect.

Make high leverage decisions early, and profit from your ability to take advantage of commitments when others are still in limbo.

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vineri, 2 ianuarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Income Inequality Author Turns Down Prestigious Award; Can you Solve a Problem When You Don't Know the Cause?

Posted: 02 Jan 2015 11:52 AM PST

French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the surprise best-selling Capital in the 21st Century turned down France's top award, the Legion D'Honneur.

"I do not think it is the government's role to decide who is honourable", said Piketty.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called it "the most important economics book of the year - and maybe of the decade".

Krugman likely says that because he believes in Piketty's socialist solutions to income inequality.

Thomas Piketty's Capital Review

Piketty's book is a massive 696-page slog. Fortunately, Harvard Business Review offers this synopsis: Piketty's "Capital," in a Lot Less than 696 Pages.

The argument. Capital (which by Piketty's definition is pretty much the same thing as wealth) has tended over time to grow faster than the overall economy. Income from capital is invariably much less evenly distributed than labor income. Together these amount to a powerful force for increasing inequality.

The method. Piketty does not offer his own theory of what drives economic growth, or what the optimal ratio of capital to labor income might be. In fact, a recurring theme of his book is that the theory-first approach of modern economics is a dead-end.

The evidence. The richest source of data for the book is France, thanks to the country's long tradition of excellent record-keeping and an estate tax that was enacted a couple of years after the 1789 Revolution. What the French numbers show is that the ratio of capital to income remained steady at about seven-to-one for centuries, plummeted around the start of World War I, and began recovering after World War II.

Piketty argues that the U.S. should consider a return to a "confiscatory" (his word) 80% top marginal tax rate even though it wouldn't bring in much money (he basically agrees with Arthur Laffer on that), well, that provokes some thoughts, doesn't it?

Everything You Need to Know

The Guardian offers an Everything You Need to Know synopsis of the surprise bestseller. I piece together some paragraphs out of order below to make rebuttals easier.

That capitalism is unfair has been said before. But it is the way Thomas Piketty says it – subtly but with relentless logic – that has sent rightwing economics into a frenzy, both here and in the US.

Piketty's argument is that, in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. So the fact that rich kids can swan aimlessly from gap year to internship to a job at father's bank/ministry/TV network – while the poor kids sweat into their barista uniforms – is not an accident: it is the system working normally.

If you get slow growth alongside better financial returns, then inherited wealth will, on average, "dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labour by a wide margin", says Piketty. Wealth will concentrate to levels incompatible with democracy, let alone social justice. Capitalism, in short, automatically creates levels of inequality that are unsustainable. The rising wealth of the 1% is neither a blip, nor rhetoric.

If he is right, the implications for capitalism are utterly negative: we face a low-growth capitalism, combined with high levels of inequality and low levels of social mobility. If you are not born into wealth to start with, life, for even for the best educated, will be like Jane Eyre without Mr Rochester.

Mish Comment: Already his thesis is suspect. One need only look at the developers of Google, Microsoft, and countless other extremely successful individuals who became the world's wealthiest by their actions, not their inheritance. Piketty attempts to explain this away later, but for now let's continue with the Guardian.

To understand why the mainstream finds this proposition so annoying, you have to understand that "distribution" – the polite name for inequality – was thought to be a closed subject. Simon Kuznets, the Belarussian émigré who became a major figure in American economics, used the available data to show that, while societies become more unequal in the first stages of industrialisation, inequality subsides as they achieve maturity. This "Kuznets Curve" had been accepted by most parts of the economics profession until Piketty and his collaborators produced the evidence that it is false.

In fact, the curve goes in exactly the opposite direction: capitalism started out unequal, flattened inequality for much of the 20th century, but is now headed back towards Dickensian levels of inequality worldwide.

One of the most compelling chapters is Piketty's discussion of the near-universal rise of what he calls the "social state". The relentless growth in the proportion of national income consumed by the state, spent on universal services, pensions and benefits, he argues, is an irreversible feature of modern capitalism. He notes that redistribution has become a question of "rights to" things – healthcare and pensions – rather than simply a problem of taxation rates. His solution is a specific, progressive tax on private wealth: an exceptional tax on capital, possibly combined with the overt use of inflation.

Piketty's Solution

Global Wealth Tax
15% tax on capital
80% tax on incomes above $500,000

Piketty in Three Minutes

Here is a very interesting video that offers still more perspectives.

link if video does not play: Piketty in Three Minutes

Can you Solve a Problem When You Don't Know the Cause?

France is in a horrific state because of excessive taxation and government interference in the free markets, yet Piketty asks for more of the above.

Ironically, Piketty wants an 80% confiscatory tax rate even though he agrees with Laffer it would not bring in much money. How stupid is that?

Confusing Symptoms of Problems with Problems

Piketty proposes solutions to economic problems even though he does not know what drives economic growth. He also confuses symptoms of problems with the problem.

Rising income inequality is a symptom of government interference in the free markets, of increasing government percentage of GDP growth, and of inane central bank inflation policies.

It's no wonder that Krugman, also a socialist, calls Piketty's work the best of the decade.

I have a simple question: If confiscatory taxes, big government, and "save the local bookstore mentality" solved problems, why isn't France the economic shining light of the world?

Law of Bad Ideas

My question is simple isn't it?

Yet economists would rather deal with mathematical nonsense than answer simple questions. And in another irony, Pikkety says "theory-first approach of modern economics is a dead-end" while proposing his own inane theories about how to fix problems!

For further discussion, please see ...

August 26, 2013: Income Inequality Explained: Why Wages Don't, Won't, and Can't Keep Up With Productivity

March 13, 2014: Democrat Sponsored "Income Inequality"; Law of Bad Ideas, Yet Again

October 17, 2014: Irony of the Day: Yellen Moans About Income Inequality; Seven Things That Cause Inequality

Will Piketty or Krugman address my rebuttal? Of course not. It does not meet their socialist agenda.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

luni, 5 ianuarie 2015

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