More Krugman deconstructed

Krugman has been deconstructing himself a lot lately, but when he tries to revise Carter / Reagan history, I'd like to post some points by Tom Firey:

In short, Krugman makes four criticisms: Reagan’s policies resulted in (1) stagnant middle-class incomes, (2) an increase in the poverty rate, (3) stagnancy in productivity growth, and (4) stagnancy in “American business prestige.”

Are those claims true and do they show that Reagan’s economic policies “did fail”? Let’s look at the data. (Hyperlinks connect to the relevant federal data sets.)

From 1981 to 1988 (which roughly corresponds with Reagan’s tenure), median real family income grew 11.1 percent while real household income grew 10.3 percent. Those growth rates are in the top third of the 30 eight-year periods from 1968–1975 to 1998–2005.

Poverty topped out at 12.3 percent for families and 15.2 percent for individuals in 1983. From there, though, poverty under Reagan moved downward steadily, reaching 10.4 percent for families and 13.0 percent for individuals in 1988.

Krugman is correct that the data show productivity growth under Reagan was around 1.4 percent a year, not much higher than the previous period 1973–1979 (1.2 percent) and a little less than the subsequent period 1990–1995 (1.5 percent). Those numbers are all considerably lower than the 2.8 average annual increase for 1947–1973 and the 2.5 percent for 1996-2000.

Krugman does not mention the productivity rate for 2000–2006; at 2.7 percent, productivity growth is even higher under the George W. Bush administration than it was in the best of the Clinton years. Again, curiously, Krugman does not credit G.W. Bush with being even more successful economically than Reagan or Clinton.

This raises a question: If the average productivity growth rate increased over the last five years of the Clinton administration, and that growth continued (at a slightly higher rate) through the first five years of the G.W. Bush administration, then does policy (or politics) have much to do with productivity?

Krugman’s claims about the Reagan record are misleading and, in the case of middle-class income, outright false. But more significantly, the concept underlying Krugman’s column is facile.

and his colleague Daniel Griswold:

Krugman wrote in a January 21 column for the New York Times that the economic record of President Reagan was one of failure. The Reagan years did encompass a recovery from a steep recession, he acknowledges, but then, “By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.”

Let’s bore in on the poverty numbers and the operative phrase “a decade before.”

As everyone knows, Reagan was in office for exactly eight years, from January 1981 to January 1989. To compare his last full year in office (1988) to “a decade before” would take us back to 1978, a period that would include the last two years of Jimmy Carter’s single term. Those two years, it turns out, were absolutely brutal for America’s poor.

The last half of Carter’s tenure was marked by double digit inflation, record high interest rates, and a sputtering economy that fell into recession in the first half of 1980. That stagflationary mix caused the poverty numbers to soar. From 1978 to 1980, according to the Census Bureau, the number of Americans living below the poverty line rose by 4.8 million and the poverty rate jumped from 11.4 to 13.0 percent.

The poverty rate continued to climb under Reagan as the nation labored through a steep recession in 1981-82, a recession largely caused by the Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to slay the Carter-era inflation. After peaking at 15.2 percent in 1983, the rate declined steadily through the rest of Reagan’s time in office. By his last year in office, the poverty rate was exactly the same—13 percent—as it was in Carter’s last year in office. That’s nothing to crow about, but neither is it an increase or an obvious sign of failure.

To compare the last year of Reagan’s presidency to 1978 has the effect of saddling the Reagan record with the last half of the Carter presidency—a neat statistical trick worthy of the current presidential campaign season.

C'mon, Professor. Even Carter's aides have embraced the truth.