I ought to start a series on common macroeconomic misunderstandings. (I do not watch zombie films.) One would be that the central bank’s balance sheet normally matters, although this nice comment on my last post does the job pretty well. Here is one that crops up fairly regularly - that government debt does not involve redistribution between generations. The misunderstanding here is obvious once you see that generations overlap.
Take a really simple example. Suppose the amount of goods produced each period in the economy is always 100. Now if each period was the life of a generation, and generations did not overlap, then obviously each generation gets 100, and there can be no redistribution between them. But in real life generations do overlap.
So instead let each period involve two generations: the old and young. Suppose each produced 50 goods. But in one period, call it period T, the government decides that the young should pay 10 goods into a pension scheme, and the old should get that pension at T, even though they contributed nothing when young. In other words, the young pay the old. A fanciful idea? No, it is called an unfunded pension scheme, and it is how the state pension works in the UK. As a result of the scheme, the old at T get 60 goods, and the young only 40, of the 100 produced in period T. The old at T are clear winners. Who loses? Not the young at T if the scheme continues, because they get 60 when old (and assume for simplicity that people do not care when they get goods). The losers are the generation who are old in the period the scheme stops. Say that is period T+10, when the young get to keep their 50, but the old who only got 40 when young only get 50 when old. So we have a clear redistribution from the old in period T+10 to the old in period T. Yet output in period T and T+10 is unchanged at 100.
That example did not involve any debt, but I started with it because it shows so clearly how you can have redistribution between generations even if output is unchanged. To bring in debt, suppose government taxes both the old and young by 10 each period, and transforms this 20 into public goods. So each generation has a lifetime consumption of 80 of private goods.
Now in period T the government says that the young need pay no taxes, but will instead give 10 goods in exchange for a paper asset - government debt - that can be redeemed next period for 10 goods. In period T nothing changes, except that the young now have this asset. In period T+1 this allows them (the now old) to consume 50 private goods rather than 40: the 40 it produces less tax and the 10 it now gets from the government by selling the debt. Their total consumption of private goods has increased from 80 to 90. How does the government obtain these 10 to give the now old? It says to the young: either you pay 20 rather than 10 in taxes, or you can buy this government debt for 10. As people only care about their total consumption, the young obviously buy the debt. They now consume 30 in private goods in T+1, but 50 in T+2 when they sell their debt, which gets us back to the original 80 in total lifetime consumption.
This process continues until period T+10, say, when the government refuses to give the young the choice of buying debt, and just raises an extra 10 in taxes on the young. So the debt disappears, but the young are worse off, as they only have 30 of private goods to consume this period. Their total lifetime consumption of private goods is 70. We have a clear redistribution of 10 from the young in period T+10 to the young in period T enacted by the government issuing debt in period T.
If you are thinking that these redistributions need not occur if the debt is never repaid or the pension scheme never wound up, then we need to get a bit more realistic and bring in interest rates and growth (and the famous r<>g relationship), which these posts of mine (and these at least as good posts from Nick Rowe) discuss. But the idea with this post is to get across in a very simple way how redistribution between generations can work because generations overlap.
Nick Rowe
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