Following on from yesterday’s post on the broken-windows fallacy, Miguel’s
second point is that the broken windows fallacy rests on an assumption of full
utilisation of resources (so that resources devoted to repairing damage from a
natural disaster have an opportunity cost somewhere else). He notes:
We're clearly not in full employment now, and we weren't before the quakes, so what basis do we have for claiming that "all the resources now devoted to cleaning up and rebuilding would have been employed elsewhere"? My point is that economists are too content to simply make this assertion without actually demonstrating it.
I will
concede that it will be extremely difficult to provide evidence, but that is
not a cop out. Note that market economies are very good at utilising their resources.
We tend to look at unemployment and see the cup as being 5%-10% empty, but it
is also 90%-95% full. Employment is less than 1/6th the size in New
Zealand as it is in Australia, but that has nothing to do with the tendency for
natural disasters there compared to here. They have more population and so the
market economy creates more jobs. We understand pretty well how coordination
through price signals achieves this matching of jobs to available workers. What
we don’t understand well is why capacity utilisation consistently falls short
of 100% and why the utilisation rates fluctuate. We have plenty of plausible
stories involving frictions, asymmetric information, expectations, monopoly
power, sticky prices, etc. but it is likely that the relative importance of these factors is
very dependent on time and place.
So yes, we
know that we employment was not at 100% before or since the earthquakes, and
that following the GFC, unemployment rates have been higher than before; but we
don’t know exactly what determines those rates. We also know that the Reserve
Bank monitors economic activity and adjusts policy to try to keep activity at
the level consistent with stable inflation; we further know that New Zealand is
not close to being in a low-interest-rate liquidity trap, the story often
advanced for why monetary policy might not be effective.
With this backdrop, we can’t be sure that the rebuild from a disaster wouldn't result in a greater utilisation rate of resources, but nor can we be sure that it wouldn't result in a lower rate. The best guess, however, would be that rebuilds would be unrelated to whatever it is that results in utilisation rates of less than 100%, and so would have no effect.
