Tape 187 - In search of an energy policy
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- | Welcome once again as MIT professor | 0:02 |
Paul Samuelson discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
This series is produced | 0:06 | |
by Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
Professor Samuelson, as we move | 0:10 | |
into the winter heating season | 0:12 | |
when there's an increased demand | 0:14 | |
for petroleum products and natural gas, | 0:15 | |
the question has to arise once again, | 0:18 | |
where are we in terms of an energy policy? | 0:20 | |
- | Well, to discuss that issue, | 0:23 |
let me first describe two unhedged views | 0:27 | |
on oil policy that are really | 0:31 | |
diametrically opposed to each other. | 0:33 | |
The first view, perhaps associated | 0:37 | |
with Republicans more than Democrats | 0:41 | |
and in part with the administration, | 0:46 | |
but still not completely typical of anybody | 0:49 | |
I would think, but certain economists, | 0:53 | |
would go as follows. | 0:56 | |
You begin with the axiom, | 0:58 | |
the only good price control program | 1:00 | |
is a repealed price control program. | 1:01 | |
The sooner we phase out all controls the better, | 1:05 | |
according to this view. | 1:08 | |
The same would apply actually | 1:10 | |
to President Ford's tariff on oil imports. | 1:12 | |
According to people of this way of thinking, | 1:17 | |
there is no real long run oil emergency. | 1:19 | |
Provided we let prices rise and fall | 1:23 | |
with supply and demand, | 1:25 | |
there's just nothing wrong with the US | 1:27 | |
importing half or more of its oil by the 1880s, | 1:30 | |
if that's the way the cookie of supply and demand crumbles. | 1:34 | |
Furthermore, provided we let the different kinds of energy, | 1:38 | |
natural gas, coal, oil, gasoline, | 1:42 | |
fissionable uranium, et cetera, | 1:46 | |
let them in effect be auctioned off at their market worths, | 1:49 | |
the problem will take care of itself. | 1:53 | |
Any rise in price that occurs | 1:56 | |
under this scenario is what ought to occur, | 1:58 | |
given the scarcities of the situation. | 2:01 | |
People of this persuasion, I think, | 2:07 | |
tend to go on to argue | 2:09 | |
that the temporary monopoly of OPEC, | 2:10 | |
like any temporary monopoly, | 2:14 | |
is going to disintegrate anyway. | 2:17 | |
And having free pricing of energy domestically is likely, | 2:20 | |
this school thinks, | 2:27 | |
to be the most efficient way of hastening | 2:28 | |
that day of disintegration of the OPEC oligopoly. | 2:30 | |
Well, that's | 2:36 | |
one view. | 2:38 | |
By contrast, let me try to describe | 2:40 | |
in an unhedged way, still another view. | 2:43 | |
Perhaps one associated with many | 2:47 | |
of the Democratic Congressmen. | 2:50 | |
According to this view, if you decontrol oil, | 2:54 | |
and if you try very hard in this immediate short run | 2:58 | |
to promote US independence from imports, | 3:02 | |
that that will do more of what it's already been doing. | 3:07 | |
Namely, increasing the rate of inflation | 3:11 | |
in the cost of living. | 3:13 | |
That acceleration of inflation from energy | 3:17 | |
will go farther, will be aggravated | 3:22 | |
if decontrol is allowed to take place suddenly. | 3:26 | |
And if the higher prices for fuel | 3:30 | |
will withdraw purchasing power | 3:35 | |
from our consumers and thereby slow down recovery, | 3:37 | |
first place some extra revenues may go abroad | 3:41 | |
and come back only slowly | 3:44 | |
into the purchasing power stream at home. | 3:46 | |
Secondly, some part of the domestic purchasing power will go | 3:49 | |
as rents to oil producers and oil companies, | 3:57 | |
and although they will ultimately | 4:02 | |
be recycled, there is no Say's law, | 4:04 | |
no valid Say's law according to this view, | 4:09 | |
which says that they'll be recycled at the same rate. | 4:11 | |
To put things in the language of monetary theorists, | 4:15 | |
the velocity of circulation of money is effected | 4:20 | |
by the qualitative composition of pricing | 4:25 | |
and countenancing | 4:30 | |
complete and sudden decontrol | 4:34 | |
will have a adverse effect | 4:38 | |
upon the recovery. | 4:41 | |
People of this viewpoint tend generally | 4:45 | |
to think of the recovery as in jeopardy anyway, | 4:48 | |
as not being too strong. | 4:51 | |
That will be another story to discuss, | 4:53 | |
whether our current recovery is all that fragile | 4:56 | |
and is such a tender beast that it will be killed off | 5:01 | |
by a shock of this sort. | 5:07 | |
But let me go on with this second view. | 5:09 | |
Since the wage rates tend to rise | 5:12 | |
when consumer prices rise, | 5:14 | |
you can see this, for example, | 5:16 | |
in the escalated contracts, but you also see it | 5:18 | |
in the course of collective bargaining. | 5:22 | |
There'll be a further increase | 5:25 | |
in costs and prices induced by the | 5:26 | |
decontrol of oil | 5:32 | |
resulting in an increase in energy prices. | 5:34 | |
All this will be further aggravated | 5:38 | |
by induced increases in airline costs and fares | 5:40 | |
and rises in prices of all those goods | 5:44 | |
whose production depends on energy | 5:46 | |
and which themselves are raw material cost components | 5:49 | |
for production of other goods. | 5:52 | |
Moreover, these days, this school argues, | 5:55 | |
there's not only a pass-through of higher energy costs, | 6:00 | |
but that there's also evidence of a markup, | 6:04 | |
some kind of a percentage markup, | 6:07 | |
on each such increment of costs. | 6:09 | |
So, the increase in the price of energy | 6:11 | |
cascades through the system, | 6:14 | |
not in an uncontrolled way but in an amplified way. | 6:16 | |
Moreover, just to go on with this, | 6:22 | |
if government policy on decontrol | 6:24 | |
and on insulating us from oil imports | 6:27 | |
does substantially worsen the rate of inflation, | 6:29 | |
how we will be doing in the Consumer Price Index | 6:33 | |
in the next two or three quarters | 6:36 | |
or in the overall GNP deflator, | 6:38 | |
then this school is afraid that Federal Reserve | 6:41 | |
and administration policy formulators | 6:45 | |
will feel forced into tightening the screws | 6:47 | |
of monetary and fiscal policies. | 6:50 | |
Tightening the screws on what already threatens | 6:53 | |
to be a drawn out and weak economic recovery. | 6:56 | |
So, being stampeded into the wrong activistic energy policy | 7:00 | |
will thus, according to people of this persuasion, | 7:06 | |
help to keep the unemployment rate high | 7:10 | |
in the remaining years of this decade | 7:12 | |
and will thereby put an intolerable load | 7:15 | |
on the unskilled earners and on the minority workers, | 7:18 | |
those parts of the labor force that are most subject | 7:21 | |
to unemployment, youth and so forth. | 7:24 | |
Now, I've stated two | 7:29 | |
quite opposed viewpoints. | 7:33 | |
Let me | 7:35 | |
try to | 7:36 | |
judge where there is strength | 7:39 | |
in each view and also what the effect would be | 7:42 | |
of various compromises between these different views. | 7:46 | |
Notice that neither school that I've been describing | 7:50 | |
is very gung-ho on project independence. | 7:55 | |
So, maybe I oughta complete the triangle | 7:58 | |
by putting Dr. Kissenger, Secretary of State, and | 8:01 | |
his erstwhile assistant Mr. Enders | 8:07 | |
into a third corner. | 8:11 | |
Those who think that the main problem | 8:13 | |
is to show the rest of the world | 8:15 | |
that the US can't be bullied by an oil boycott. | 8:16 | |
That we mean business | 8:21 | |
and are going to make ourselves independent | 8:23 | |
of foreign supplies of oils. | 8:28 | |
More realistically, this view would have to go | 8:32 | |
in the form that the trend of our dependence | 8:36 | |
of our increasing dependence, | 8:40 | |
which has been rather clear in the past data, | 8:42 | |
that trend must be changed by activistic action. | 8:49 | |
This third corner school, if I were | 8:54 | |
going to describe it in the same detail | 8:57 | |
that I've described the first two corners, | 8:59 | |
I would have to say, is a great believer | 9:01 | |
in organizing all of the consuming countries | 9:04 | |
into an oligopsony. | 9:10 | |
You fight oligopoly by oligopsony. | 9:13 | |
A monopoly of a few sellers | 9:17 | |
is to be checked by the countervailing power | 9:19 | |
of the monopoly of a few buyers. | 9:22 | |
And so, Dr. Kissenger is to get together | 9:26 | |
with the Japanese and the Germans and the French | 9:30 | |
and form a tight little buying cartel. | 9:34 | |
Then, in good Yankee fashion, | 9:39 | |
there's to be hard horse trading and dickering | 9:43 | |
at some international conference, | 9:48 | |
and armed with our cohesiveness, | 9:50 | |
we will then be able to hack out | 9:54 | |
and agree upon a pricing program, | 9:57 | |
which does what? | 10:01 | |
If it brings down the price that we pay for imported oil, | 10:03 | |
it doesn't play into the hands of project independence. | 10:09 | |
So, I guess the utopian version of this | 10:12 | |
would be that such limited | 10:16 | |
energy, as we continue to import, | 10:20 | |
should be imported at very low prices | 10:24 | |
compared to what OPEC, | 10:27 | |
by its unilateral monopoly, will do, | 10:29 | |
but we don't allow the sweet tooth | 10:31 | |
of the American users for energy | 10:35 | |
to be satiated by oil at cheap prices. | 10:39 | |
Well, the administration's views and programs | 10:45 | |
say as you would determine it | 10:50 | |
from monitoring the speeches of President Ford, | 10:53 | |
would be somewhere between the first corner view | 10:57 | |
that I stated and the third corner view that I stated | 11:00 | |
and I guess a number of the Democratic Congressmen | 11:05 | |
who've been resisting President Ford's suggestions | 11:10 | |
on compromise in oil would be at the second corner. | 11:14 | |
Well, what are we to think? | 11:20 | |
First, I would like to emphasize | 11:22 | |
that we must keep a sense of quantitative balance | 11:27 | |
as to how important the issues are | 11:31 | |
between these different schools. | 11:34 | |
Is it the case? | 11:38 | |
Because if it were the case | 11:41 | |
that the present system is intolerably inefficient | 11:43 | |
and the present system puts an intolerable burden | 11:47 | |
on the incentives to look for oil in North America. | 11:51 | |
Then the first view, whatever you may think | 11:57 | |
of its aesthetic and philosophical importance, | 12:01 | |
would take on a enhanced practical importance. | 12:04 | |
Well, as far as I can tell from studying | 12:09 | |
what there is that is known | 12:15 | |
about the present control system, | 12:16 | |
there is no intolerable | 12:19 | |
depressant of incentives under the present system. | 12:22 | |
If you have old oil, and if you can squeeze | 12:29 | |
an increment out of your old oil well | 12:34 | |
which puts the increment | 12:38 | |
above your quota of old oil, | 12:41 | |
then you have something which is called released oil | 12:45 | |
and you don't have to sell that released oil | 12:49 | |
at the controlled price | 12:52 | |
of five and a half dollars | 12:53 | |
a barrel for old oil. | 12:56 | |
You don't even, in effect, sell it | 12:59 | |
at the price of internationally imported oil, | 13:02 | |
let's say $11.50 or $13.50. | 13:07 | |
You in fact sell it | 13:11 | |
at something like $18 | 13:15 | |
because you get a chit, an entitlement | 13:18 | |
with that released oil | 13:20 | |
and in consequence, there is a tremendous incentive | 13:22 | |
to generate, at the present time, released oil. | 13:28 | |
And if you're a believer, as most of the people | 13:33 | |
in the first philosophical camp | 13:35 | |
that I've described would be, | 13:37 | |
in the efficacy of incentives, | 13:40 | |
in getting people to do things, | 13:43 | |
then you must be a believer under the present system | 13:44 | |
in the strong substitution effects | 13:47 | |
which are in the present pricing arrangements. | 13:50 | |
Now, what's important about that | 13:57 | |
is that to the degree that this is true, | 13:59 | |
that there is even under the present system | 14:01 | |
an artificial incentive | 14:03 | |
to | 14:07 | |
generate released oil, | 14:09 | |
we cannot look for any kind of a miracle | 14:12 | |
on that happy morn | 14:15 | |
when all controls are swept away | 14:18 | |
in the fashion that Erhard, | 14:21 | |
as the | 14:25 | |
Chancellor under Occupied Germany, | 14:29 | |
disregarding the American generals instructions, | 14:32 | |
swept away all price controls and then suddenly, | 14:35 | |
as story goes, it's a little bit overdrawn, | 14:38 | |
but it's a good story. | 14:41 | |
We oughta tell it. | 14:42 | |
Suddenly goods became available on the market, | 14:44 | |
flowers flourished and so forth. | 14:46 | |
Well, I don't think you can look for that. | 14:49 | |
Now, if time permitted, I would have to give | 14:51 | |
all of the various qualifications. | 14:54 | |
For example, let's suppose you have old oil | 14:56 | |
and you've been draining off | 15:00 | |
a depletable, limited supply of your reserves | 15:03 | |
so that by no superhuman effort | 15:07 | |
can you ever get back to your quota level. | 15:11 | |
Therefore you have no chance of ever | 15:14 | |
getting into the released oil category. | 15:16 | |
Still, as a nation, if we are interested | 15:20 | |
in promoting project independence, | 15:24 | |
we would like to generate a little bit more old oil | 15:26 | |
than is now motivated by the price under control of $5.50. | 15:31 | |
Well, you would have no motivation to do that | 15:37 | |
because that's all you get on the old oil is $5.50. | 15:39 | |
So, there are places in which there is a disincentive | 15:43 | |
under the present control system. | 15:49 | |
As I've mentioned on these tapes before, | 15:52 | |
there are stories told, anecdotes, | 15:53 | |
some of them are good anecdotes, | 15:55 | |
but it's surprising to me how few they are | 15:57 | |
and how hard they are to authenticate, | 15:59 | |
that there is some hoarding of old oil going on. | 16:02 | |
Well now, to the degree that there is hoarding | 16:07 | |
of old oil going on, of course that's like | 16:10 | |
money in the bank for the future | 16:12 | |
as part of project independence. | 16:15 | |
But for somebody who's concerned | 16:17 | |
that the monopoly power right now of OPEC | 16:20 | |
as it weighs whether in the next month or so | 16:23 | |
to raise the price of oil, as OPEC says, | 16:26 | |
to compensate it for the increase | 16:31 | |
in industrial prices by 10% or by 15%, | 16:33 | |
whether it's to be $1.50 a barrel | 16:36 | |
or whether it's to be $3.50 a barrel | 16:38 | |
or whether nominally it's to be no increase at all. | 16:41 | |
There is still another possibility, by the way, | 16:47 | |
which ought to be taken very seriously. | 16:49 | |
Namely that there is in a nominal increase of 10% of $1.50 | 16:50 | |
or even of $3.50, | 16:56 | |
but the discounting from list | 16:57 | |
which has been only very minor up until now, becomes major. | 17:01 | |
Well, if you wanted to reduce our demand | 17:06 | |
so as to embarrass OPEC with a lot of unsellable oil | 17:11 | |
by some of its cartel members at the pegged price, | 17:15 | |
then this hoarding of old old oil as I'll call it, | 17:18 | |
as against new old oil, | 17:22 | |
would be something which ought to be held | 17:25 | |
against the controls. | 17:30 | |
Take still another aspect of the control program. | 17:34 | |
One of the bad things about controls, | 17:37 | |
particularly if you start | 17:39 | |
controlling supply and demand prices, | 17:40 | |
and oil is not a supply and demand price | 17:41 | |
simply. | 17:47 | |
But if you start controlling the price | 17:48 | |
of lumber or the price of meat | 17:49 | |
when these are supply and demand prices | 17:52 | |
and lumber moves off to a different auction market, | 17:56 | |
the effect of a control program | 18:00 | |
is often to dry up supplies completely | 18:02 | |
in particular places. | 18:03 | |
And where I live, New England, would be a great | 18:05 | |
target for such a disappearance of supply. | 18:10 | |
However, that is not the way the present controls work. | 18:16 | |
I don't want to give the impression | 18:19 | |
that somebody in Washington cleverly contrived | 18:21 | |
all of these gimmicks and gadgets | 18:26 | |
which turn out, even though very few people | 18:29 | |
outside the industry and outside the bureaucracy | 18:32 | |
and very few in the bureaucracy understand this. | 18:34 | |
It was done the way the British Empire was formed, | 18:39 | |
in a fit of absent mindedness. | 18:41 | |
Nobody quite realized how it was working out | 18:42 | |
but it's worked out pretty well | 18:44 | |
as I want to go on to describe on the import side. | 18:45 | |
Well, on the import side, | 18:50 | |
if oil brought into the US | 18:52 | |
costs $13, | 18:57 | |
that is, | 18:58 | |
the barge captain plus the | 19:03 | |
Arabian company | 19:07 | |
collect $13.50 for oil delivered | 19:09 | |
in the Boston or New York port, | 19:13 | |
I don't think that that's what the cost is | 19:17 | |
to the oil company who brings it in | 19:21 | |
or the ultimate cost, | 19:24 | |
to the public utility in New England. | 19:26 | |
New England is at a natural disadvantage. | 19:28 | |
It should have thought twice before locating itself | 19:31 | |
in the far corner of the country. | 19:34 | |
Although, we have to remember that somebody | 19:36 | |
has to be in each corner | 19:38 | |
if the country is by nature rectangular in shape. | 19:39 | |
However, the other side of this chit | 19:44 | |
which the producer of released oil gets per barrel | 19:49 | |
and which sweetens up his return, | 19:52 | |
is the fact that there is kind of a negative chit | 19:55 | |
which reduces the price to the importers. | 20:00 | |
So, under the present system, | 20:04 | |
there is very elaborate way de facto | 20:06 | |
of taxing the oil rents | 20:10 | |
of all the things which have become more valuable | 20:13 | |
in Kansas and Oklahoma and in Texas and elsewhere. | 20:15 | |
And a very elaborate control of average cost pricing | 20:20 | |
and average profit pricing | 20:24 | |
compensated, though, by marginal effects | 20:27 | |
which are really quite tolerable. | 20:31 | |
So, the present system | 20:33 | |
is not like some price control systems. | 20:35 | |
Perhaps the German one in 1948 before the Erhard miracle | 20:38 | |
was perhaps an intolerable one, | 20:44 | |
made especially intolerable by the propensity | 20:47 | |
of the German people to obey the law. | 20:50 | |
A French system could never become as malignant | 20:52 | |
as a Scandinavian or German system | 20:55 | |
because of the rampant feeling of individualism | 20:57 | |
on the part of all the French citizenry | 21:00 | |
who prefer to go through the red light pedestrian | 21:02 | |
rather than otherwise in contrast to well-behaved Danes. | 21:09 | |
So it's a tolerable system. | 21:14 | |
The second thing is to debunk the fears | 21:16 | |
of the second school of thought | 21:21 | |
that if we instantly decontrol oil | 21:25 | |
or if we decontrol it too fast | 21:27 | |
that we go right back to the Great Depression | 21:28 | |
or right back the the recession we've been in or go | 21:31 | |
very definitely into | 21:37 | |
an anemic and abortive recovery. | 21:40 | |
Well, let's just look to see what difference it makes | 21:45 | |
and I just happen to have received in yesterday's mail, | 21:47 | |
so it's a convenient thing to refer to, | 21:49 | |
the new Wharton School | 21:52 | |
computer forecasts for the American economy | 21:56 | |
in the next two years, | 22:01 | |
from the middle of 1975 to the middle of 1977. | 22:02 | |
And one of the advantages of a structural model | 22:08 | |
like the Wharton model which brings it in contrast | 22:11 | |
with a very simplified monetarist model | 22:16 | |
or reduced form model or even a simple kind of model of the | 22:19 | |
Neo-Keynesian, Raymond Fair type, | 22:25 | |
is that you can run through different solutions | 22:28 | |
and so I'm going to first look at their control solution, | 22:33 | |
their single best guess as to what's going to happen. | 22:38 | |
That's the first thing. | 22:41 | |
Then I'm going to look through an alternative scenario | 22:42 | |
with instant oil price decontrol. | 22:46 | |
These runs were made | 22:49 | |
on September 2nd, | 22:52 | |
1975. | 22:55 | |
Since that time, of course, there have been | 22:56 | |
a little revised production index data | 22:58 | |
and I would say that the recovery | 23:01 | |
from September 2nd, that's the day after Labor Day, | 23:05 | |
until the time that I'm now speaking, | 23:08 | |
has gone a little bit better | 23:12 | |
than they could have known about in September 2nd. | 23:13 | |
Well, for one thing, the first 10 days of auto sales | 23:16 | |
have been strong and so forth and so forth. | 23:19 | |
Well, the first thing I looked at | 23:21 | |
was to see what happens to the rate of real growth | 23:23 | |
in the next four quarters, | 23:28 | |
for the middle of '75 to the middle of '76. | 23:30 | |
And the Wharton School model | 23:34 | |
is a less exuberant model than many | 23:36 | |
and it shows, under its control solution | 23:41 | |
without instant oil decontrol, | 23:44 | |
a 5 1/3% rate of growth in the current quarter, | 23:47 | |
that's the third quarter of the year, | 23:51 | |
the one that's soon coming to an end. | 23:53 | |
8% rate of growth in the fourth quarter of the year. | 23:55 | |
That's the strongest it's gonna show | 23:59 | |
for a long, long time. | 24:01 | |
Then, about 4.5% | 24:02 | |
rate of growth in the first half of '76. | 24:06 | |
The average for the year I make out to be | 24:11 | |
the average of four and a half and | 24:15 | |
six and a half, | 24:20 | |
which would be just 5.5%. | 24:24 | |
That would be a disappointing recovery | 24:26 | |
but remember that Wharton is a little bit | 24:29 | |
on the pessimistic side in comparison | 24:31 | |
with Alan Greenspan or in comparison with Arthur Burns. | 24:33 | |
I ought to mention for the record | 24:37 | |
that Congressional committees | 24:40 | |
kept badgering Dr. Arthur Burns | 24:43 | |
to give his forecast of what was going to happen | 24:45 | |
based upon his announced program of monetary growth | 24:49 | |
and finally, after many hours of badgering the poor bull, | 24:54 | |
the toreadors and picadors all poking at him, | 24:59 | |
he said, all right, you've forced it out of me, | 25:02 | |
I'm gonna give my opinion but I wanna tell you | 25:05 | |
it's only personal opinion. | 25:07 | |
It's not that of the official Open Market Committee | 25:08 | |
or the Federal Reserve or the staff. | 25:12 | |
He said, in my view, and he stated his words | 25:14 | |
very carefully, the present program of 5.5% to 7.5% | 25:17 | |
range for the aggregate monetary target | 25:24 | |
from the second quarter of '75 | 25:27 | |
to the second quarter of '76 | 25:31 | |
is fully compatible with an 8% real growth rate. | 25:33 | |
Now, if that means anything, and maybe it doesn't, | 25:38 | |
I read that, I wrote down in my little black book | 25:42 | |
that Arthur Burns thinks that | 25:45 | |
the real growth is gonna be fully up to | 25:48 | |
first year recovery and it's gonna be 8%. | 25:53 | |
Alan Greenspan more recently | 25:56 | |
has made an announcement for which he was | 25:58 | |
much criticized by a lot of private economists | 26:01 | |
and you can be sure the university economists | 26:03 | |
won't be very late in joining in, | 26:05 | |
saying we were gonna grow by 7%. | 26:09 | |
Well, this Wharton growth is about | 26:11 | |
six and a half, six and a third percent. | 26:16 | |
Now, let's deal with instant oil price decontrol. | 26:19 | |
So magic is the one month effect | 26:25 | |
that it reduces even the current quarter | 26:28 | |
from five and a third percent to four and a third, | 26:33 | |
by a full | 26:37 | |
percent. | 26:38 | |
Of course that's only a quarter of a percent | 26:39 | |
in the quarter because these are annual rates. | 26:41 | |
It reduces by a full percent the | 26:44 | |
booming, exuberant fourth quarter. | 26:49 | |
That goes down from 8% to 7% and reduces by a | 26:53 | |
full, well, I'd say a full percent | 27:01 | |
down to something like 3 3/4% instead of 4 1/2%. | 27:05 | |
Well, I guess that's by 3/4 of a percent. | 27:10 | |
What's gonna happen in the first half of 1976? | 27:12 | |
Well, I think that that would be regrettable | 27:18 | |
if the first year's | 27:23 | |
recovery | 27:26 | |
were not at least 7%. | 27:28 | |
That's been the target that I testified | 27:30 | |
before Congress on. | 27:32 | |
But it would be even more regrettable | 27:33 | |
if something which was going to be | 27:37 | |
about 6 1/3 or 6 1/2% were reduced almost | 27:39 | |
by a full percent to 5%. | 27:42 | |
However, what does it mean in terms | 27:46 | |
of the unemployment rate in the election quarter? | 27:47 | |
It's not as bad as you might think. | 27:55 | |
Instead of having | 27:57 | |
7.9% in the fourth quarter, | 28:04 | |
as under the control solution | 28:07 | |
without complete oil decontrol, you have 8.1. | 28:10 | |
You might say that these are within | 28:15 | |
the degree of accuracy of the numbers. | 28:17 | |
Well, that is true but I think that the spread | 28:19 | |
would be around 7.9 if this forecast is right | 28:23 | |
or around 8.1 and that is a significant difference. | 28:26 | |
I may say that these numbers | 28:31 | |
look a little bit high to me because | 28:32 | |
we're now | 28:36 | |
getting some rethinking | 28:39 | |
on how high unemployment ever reached at its peak. | 28:41 | |
We've had some revisions of the establishment data | 28:46 | |
which I disagreed with the census. | 28:48 | |
The census data of unemployment was showing rather lower | 28:50 | |
than even the Washington officials has expected | 28:54 | |
but the establishment data didn't bear that out. | 28:58 | |
But they've now revised their establishment data | 29:00 | |
and by August, the data are beginning to agree, | 29:02 | |
so that I think that unemployment | 29:05 | |
is not going to go back to 9%. | 29:08 | |
Earlier, as you know, I thought it | 29:11 | |
would go to 9 1/3% and it's about 8.4% | 29:12 | |
and I think it is on its way down very soon. | 29:18 | |
So, these numbers are high | 29:22 | |
but what I want you to learn from them | 29:23 | |
is the difference of about | 29:27 | |
two or three tenths of a percent | 29:32 | |
on the unemployment rate. | 29:33 | |
Now, for somebody who's unemployed, | 29:34 | |
this will seem very callous of me to disregard, | 29:36 | |
because this means some hundreds of thousands of people, | 29:40 | |
and I apologize for my beastliness. | 29:43 | |
But keeping this in perspective, | 29:46 | |
it is not the end of the world | 29:51 | |
if one view prevails and the other view | 29:53 | |
is correct. | 29:59 | |
I myself think that there's a powerful case | 30:01 | |
having discussed all that I've said to you | 30:04 | |
for going slow on solving our long run problem | 30:07 | |
when we're still in the acute phase of stagflation. | 30:10 | |
So, I have no trouble in finding a compromise | 30:13 | |
between the two main schools | 30:19 | |
that I have outlined for you. | 30:22 | |
I think the art of economic policy | 30:26 | |
and also the art of political economy, | 30:29 | |
of keeping our legislative system from getting polarized | 30:32 | |
is to find that compromise | 30:38 | |
and I don't think for all the noise | 30:41 | |
it's all that hard to find it. | 30:43 | |
- | If you have any comments or questions | 30:46 |
for Professor Samuelson, | 30:47 | |
address them to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 30:49 | |
450 East Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 30:51 |
Item Info
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