Forum Post: How The Bank Bailouts Reduce Our Standard Of Living

FROM A FUND MANAGER (http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc111010.htm)

Background: If you think about the “standard of living” in a country, you can roughly define it as the amount of goods and services that individuals are able to consume in return for their work. If you think about the “productivity” of a country, you can roughly define it as the amount of goods and services that individuals are able to produce for their work. Clearly, over the long-term, the productivity and the standard-of-living of a country go hand in hand. The best way to create both, over the long-term, is for an economy to build a stock of productive capital (inventions, new technologies, plants, equipment, public infrastructure, etc), and human capital (labor skills, education).

Still, even a generally productive economy can produce a skewed distribution in the standard of living enjoyed by its citizens. In a competitive and undistorted economy, the distribution of wealth is determined by the ability of each individual to a) provide a useful service, b) distribute the services they provide over a large number of “units”, and c) maintain the scarcity of what they provide.

So for example, professional football players earn more than teachers not because playing football has more virtue, but because professional football players are among a very small group, and distribute their “services” over millions and millions of spectators, each which implicitly pays a few cents to each player per game. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook is able to distribute his services across hundreds of millions of users, each which implicitly pays him a tiny amount by viewing advertising. Bill Gates distributed his services over every computer that ran Windows, while the factory workers who built those computers were each able to distribute their skills over a smaller number of units. Teachers represent a large professional group, but are typically able to distribute their services over a limited number of students, each which implicitly pays a portion of their family’s income to the teacher. One-on-one aides tend to earn less, despite often being extremely skilled, because in order for them to earn a high income, their earnings would have to capture much of the income of their single student’s family.

The distribution of wealth has become increasingly skewed as trade has become more globalized and technology has allowed the innovations of a single person to be spread across millions of consuming “units.” At the same time, the economic emergence of China and India has brought forth literally billions of new workers who dilute the scarcity of the existing labor force. An economy where capital is scarce, protectable, and can easily be distributed over numerous units, while labor is plentiful, homogeneous and can only be applied to a smaller number of units, is an economy that is prone to an enormously skewed distrbution of wealth.

This process takes on a grotesque character when it becomes possible for a company to distribute its impact over a very large number of units, and government policy protects that ability even when the impact of the company reflects not skill but ineptitude. This is essentially what has happened with the “too big to fail” institutions. Despite inflicting massive damage on the economy, they are afforded a protected status that allows them to extract “rents” that don’t reflect the cost they have imposed. From that standpoint, the Occupy Wall Street protests are a welcome reflection of public frustration over Washington’s slavish coddling of reckless financial institutions