The Future of Economics (BBC Business Daily)

by Dollars and Sense

The BBC radio program Business Daily had a good segment on the future of economics, with good discussions of Keynesianism and behavioral economics (though not quite enough on heterodox approaches). The main off note (to my mind) was the bit with Michael Sandel, with his emphasis on the "normative" foundations of economics. I don't think economics needs to rediscover its ethical foundations (in Adam Smith) as much as it's political foundations (in Marx). But otherwise I thought this was worth a listen.

Listen to it here.

Labels: economics, economics profession, heterodox economics

 

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11/22/2009 10:51:00 AM 0 comments

 

Economic Ignorance (Michael Yates)

by Dollars and Sense

A great post from Michael Yates' blog.

Michael Steele is a Nitwit and Wolf Blitzer is a Jackass

Economic ignorance is widespread in the United States. People think they know something about the subject, but few do. My mother is convinced that China is the cause of all our economic problems. When I challenge her, she doesn't think it matters that I have spent forty years studying and teaching the dismal science. If Lou Dobbs says it's so, it must be true. I once taught classes for automobile workers who were employed at a General Motors plant near Pittsburgh. A man insisted that recessions were caused by the media. Newspapers and television were apparently so pessimistic and intent on presenting only bad news that the public became too demoralized to spend money. It never occurred to him to ask why the media, which depend on us spending money for their existence, would want this to happen.

Had my UAW student argued that the media were a constant source of economic misinformation, he would have been on to something. Every day I watch that talking heads on television and read the columnists in our newspapers and I marvel at the stupidity that passes for wisdom. Dick Morris, the prostitute-loving former presidential advisor and current Fox News savant, sagely advised nearly every night during the Obama-McCain campaign that economic recovery would not be possible unless the capital gains tax was eliminated. There is no evidence remotely consistent with this view, but analysis seems irrelevant to Morris and his Fox friends. To any suggestion that it might be necessary for the federal government to temporarily nationalize some troubled banks, most of which are now insolvent, Fox's wise men and women screamed "socialism." Never mind that this would be socialism for the rich, with the wealthy reaping the rewards of a boom but the public pays for the losses in the downturn. Their answer is always that markets will regulate themselves, though there is even less evidence that this ever happens. They also say that during a recession, taxes should never be increased. But if the taxes are levied on the highest incomes, the recipients of these incomes can pay them without reducing their spending at all. That is, they can pay the taxes out of their savings, money they wouldn't have spent anyway. Then if the government uses the taxes paid out of money that wouldn't have been spent in the first place to do things like build public transit systems or housing for the poor, total spending, output, and employment will all rise.

"Well," you say, "That's Fox." Let's hit the remote and tune into CNN. You might catch the demagogue Lou Dobbs blaming immigrants, again without proof, for all our economic woes. If you are really lucky, you'll see newscaster Wolf Blitzer. Here is a man with an empty head.

A few weeks ago, I saw something on his show that amazed even me. He was interviewing Michael Steele, who had just become the first black person to be selected to chair the Republican National Committee. Steele was a constant presence on Fox News during the recent presidential campaign, and like almost all Fox commentators, he said plenty of stupid things. Not as many as Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter. But no one would mistake Steel for a bright guy.

The topic of the exchange between Steele and Blitzer was the economic stimulus package proposed by the Obama administration. The U.S. economy is in the midst of its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Legendary Wall Street investment banks have failed, as have scores of commercial banks. Millions of homeowners have been either foreclosed or are expecting to be soon. Credit is frozen, as lenders don't trust that borrowers will pay them back and borrowers are so strapped with debt that they cannot take on new loans. The unemployment rate is at 7.6 percent and heading toward double digits. This translates into 11.6 million people, and these do not include the 7.6 million people who want full-time work but can only get part-time jobs and the 734,000 workers too demoralized by the lack of employment opportunities to look for work. If these two groups were counted as suffering labor market distress the same as the officially unemployed, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent. State governments across the country are facing serious tax revenue shortfalls and have or will cut their spending, which will cause spending, output, and employment to fall, and exacerbate the crisis. Economic misery has spread to every corner of the globe, and this means that U.S. exports, until recently the one bright spot in our economy, have started falling and will continue to do so, increasing unemployment still further. There is not a hopeful sign on the horizon. Not one. Over the past year or so, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have pumped a couple trillion dollars into the financial system with little result. The Fed has pushed its target interest rates to near zero without getting banks to lend or businesses to borrow.

Many mainstream economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, have concluded that only direct and massive fiscal stimulus, in the form of federal government spending can plug the hole in spending now plaguing the economy. Obama's economic team proposed a trillion dollar stimulus plan, since enacted into law, albeit with too many tax breaks for business and not large enough to compensate for the enormous drop in private sector spending. Included in the legislation is aid to state and local governments, which will help them to maintain employment and social services in the face of declining tax revenues. Monies are provided for the unemployed, as well as for infrastructure spending. Our roads, bridges, ports, sewage systems, schools, hospitals, communications and energy networks, and public transit systems are all in need of repair, upgrade, and expansion. Federal spending on these, especially those that are already in the planning pipeline, will have a dramatic impact on spending and employment.

When Blitzer interviewed Steele, the plan had yet to be voted on by Congress. I paraphrase but Steele said this about it: "The government has never created a single job." I did a double take. What??? Not one job? So the $787 billion dollars the Congress had just approved won't put anyone to work? It is bad enough that monetary policy hasn't worked. Now fiscal policy won't do the trick either, according to Mr. Steele. Boy, we are really in a bad way.

But wait a minute. Do you know a police officer? A firefighter? A public school teacher? A secretary at the local college? An air traffic controller? A career military officer? A clerk at the state liquor store? A janitor in a federal office building? A mail carrier? Do you have a son or daughter on duty in Iraq? All of these are public employees, hired directly by local, state, or federal government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects employment data every month in a survey of hundreds of thousands of private and public establishments. The BLS produces among the best labor market statistics in the world. It is a creation of the government, and all of its workers are public employees. For January 2009, the BLS estimated that there were 134,580,000 non-farm employees in the United States. Of these, 22,539,000 were public employees, 16.7 percent of all employment, divided as follows:

Federal government employees: 2,792,000

State government employees: 5,187,000

Local government employees: 14,560,000

I hate to tell Mr. Steele, but every one of these jobs was created by the government. And this does not tell the whole story. For three decades, governments have been busy privatizing, that is, contracting out public services to private businesses. Everything from local transit services to prisons to college food services to security forces in Iraq. The workers are private employees, but they are paid from public funds. What is more, all of these workers, direct and indirect public employees, spend their paychecks every month and this spending generates a lot more employment. These wages amount to at least 1.5 trillion dollars, which will support plenty of spending on outputs that someone has to produce.

When the Obama plan is implemented, it probably will not end our current economic crisis. But one thing is certain: the money spent will cause employment to rise. The government will create jobs, just as it has always done.

We could put Steele's statement to a test. If we put the most charitable light on what he said, perhaps he meant that public employment always "crowds out" private employment. A public worker just replaces a private one but doesn't add anything to total employment. This is an argument conservative economists have used to say that public investment just takes the place of private investment, which would have occurred but for the public spending.

Therefore, if Steel is right, we could eliminate every single government job and employment would not fall at all, because private employment would rise by he same amount that public employment fell. To put it so baldly tells us just how preposterous Steele's remark was. What mechanisms would cause the private sector's demand for labor to rise by more than 20,000,000 persons? Would falling wages from all the new unemployed scrambling for and willing to labor for next to nothing do the trick? How could it when the massive public layoffs would cause the demand for private sector goods and services to drop drastically? Employers don't hire when demand for what they make collapses. Steele and his fellow nitwits think that what another nitwit, Ronald Reagan, called the "magic of the marketplace" will somehow right our economic ship. This is not only a foolish idea. It is a dangerous one.

After Steele made his statement, Wolf Blitzer had a golden opportunity to challenge it and educate his audience. Instead he said nothing. He just moved on to his next question. It was as stunning example of the depths to which journalism has sunk as you'll ever see. That a jackass like Wolf Blitzer has a prime spot on a major news outlet anddraws a very large paycheck every month is enough to make me sick. I hope it makes you sick too.

Addendum: I just watched Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (he calls himself Bobby after a character on the Brady Bunch) give the Republican response to President Obama's speech to Congress. If Steele is a nitwit and Blitzer a jackass, Jindal is a dolt.

Labels: economics, ignorance, jobs, Lou Dobbs, Michael Steele, Michael Yates, recession, Wolf Blitzer

 

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2/25/2009 10:06:00 AM 2 comments

 

Why So Little Self-Recrimination? (Yves Smith)

by Dollars and Sense

This is from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. It's a long post, worth quoting in full. She quotes from a post by Jeff Madrick (editor of Challenge) at The Daily Beast. I was asking myself the same question at the ASSA. Hat-tip to D&S collective member Ben Collins. —CS

Why So Little Self-Recrimination Among Economists?

Why is it that economics is a Teflon discipline, seemingly unable to admit or recognize its errors?

Economic policies in the US and most advanced economies are to a significant degree devised by economists. They also serve as policy advocates, and are regularly quoted in the business and political media and contribute regularly to op-ed pages.

We have just witnessed them make a massive failure in diagnosis. Despite the fact that there was rampant evidence of trouble on various fronts—a housing bubble in many countries (the Economist had a major story on it in June 2005 and as readers well know, prices rose at an accelerating pace), rising levels of consumer debt, stagnant average worker wages, lack of corporate investment, a gaping US trade deficit, insanely low spreads for risky credits – the authorities took the "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" posture until the wheels started coming off. And even when they did, the vast majority were constitutionally unable to call its trajectory.

Now of course, a lonely few did sound alarms. Nouriel Roubini and Robert Shiller both saw the danger of the housing/asset bubble; Jim Hamilton at the 2007 Jackson Hole conference said that the markets would test the implicit government guarantee of Fannie and Freddie; Henry Kaufman warned how consumer and companies were confusing access to credit (which could be cut off) with liquidity, and about how technology would amplify a financial crisis. Other names no doubt belong on this list, but the bigger point is that these warnings were often ignored.

Shiller has offered a not-very-convincing defense, claiming that economists were subject to "groupthink" and no one wanted to stick his neck out. That seems peculiar given that many prominent policy influencers are tenured. They would seem to have greater freedom than people in any other field to speak their mind. And one would imagine that being early to identify new developments or structural shifts would enhance one's professional standing.

But if a doctor repeatedly deemed patients to be healthy that were soon found to have Stage Four cancer that was at least six years in the making, the doctor would be a likely candidate for a malpractice suit. Yet we have heard nary a peep about the almost willful blindiness of economists to the crisis-in-its-making, with the result that their central role in policy development remains beyond question.

Perhaps the conundrum results from the very fact that they are too close to the seat of power. Messengers that bear unpleasant news are generally not well received. And a government that wanted to engage in wishful, risky policies would want a document trail that said these moves were reasonable. "Whocouldanode" becomes a defense.

But how economists may be compromised by their policy role is way beyond the scope of a post. To return to the matter at hand: there appears to be an extraordinary lack of introspection within the discipline despite having presided over a Katrina-like failure. Jeff Madrik tells us:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists that just finished. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught.

There were no sessions about why the profession was not up in arms about the deregulation of so sensitive a sector as finance. They are quick to oppose anything that undermines free trade, by contrast, and have had substantial influence doing just that.
The sessions dedicated to what caused the crisis were filled, even those few sessions led by radical economists, who never saw turnouts for their events like the ones they just got. But no one was accepting any responsibility.

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their own work. No one questioned their contribution to the current frightening state of affairs, no one humbled by events.

Maybe I missed it all. There were hundreds of sessions. I asked others. They hadn’t heard any mea culpas, either.

Madrik goes on in the balance of his piece to offer a list of things economists got wrong. Unfortunately, it's off the mark in that he contends that economists (in effect) had unified beliefs on a lot of fronts. It's a bit more accurate to say that there was a policy consensus, and anyone who deviated from the major elements had a bloody hard time getting a hearing (Dean Baker regularly points out that the New York Times and Washington Post still keep quoting economists who got the crisis wrong). The particulars on his list need some work too, but at least it's a start (reader comments and improvements on it would be very much appreciated).

But Madrik does seem spot on about the lack of needed navel-gazing. I looked at the AEA schedule and did not see anything that questioned existing paradigms. And one paper that did was released recently, "The Crisis of 2008: Structural Lessons for and from Economics," fell so far short of asking tough questions that it proves Madrik's point. The analysis is shallow and profession serving. And that is not to say the author, Daron Acemoglu, is writing in bad faith, but to indicate how deeply inculcated economists are.

For instance, one of the three (only three?) ways in which he says economists took too much comfort in the Great Moderation;

The seeds of the crisis were sown in the Great Moderation... Everyone who patted themselves or others on the back during that time was really missing the point... The same interconnections that reduced the effects of small shocks created vulnerability to massive system-wide domino effects. No one saw this clearly.

Huh? The problems with the Great Moderation were far more deeply rooted than this depiction suggests. Acemoglu's take is that the economy became more susceptible to shocks (that is, absent the bad luck of a shock, things could have continued merrily along). Thomas Palley argues, persuasively, that it was destined to come a cropper:

The raised standing of central bankers rests on a phenomenon that economists have termed the “Great Moderation.” This phenomenon refers to the smoothing of the business cycle over the last two decades, during which expansions have become longer, recessions shorter, and inflation has fallen.

Many economists attribute this smoothing to improved monetary policy by central banks, and hence the boom in central banker reputations. This explanation is popular with economists since it implicitly applauds the economics profession by attributing improved policy to advances in economics and increased influence of economists within central banks. For instance, the Fed’s Chairman is a former academic economist, as are many of the Fed’s board of governors and many Presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks.

That said, there are other less celebratory accounts of the Great Moderation that view it as a transitional phenomenon, and one that has also come at a high cost. One reason for the changed business cycle is retreat from policy commitment to full employment. The great Polish economist Michal Kalecki observed that full employment would likely cause inflation because job security would prompt workers to demand higher wages. That is what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. However, rather than solving this political problem, economic policy retreated from full employment and assisted in the evisceration of unions. That lowered inflation, but it came at the high cost of two decades of wage stagnation and a rupturing of the link between wage and productivity growth.

Disinflation also lowered interest rates, particularly during downturns. This contributed to successive waves of mortgage refinancing and also reduced cash outflows on new mortgages. That improved household finances and supported consumer spending, thereby keeping recessions short and shallow.

With regard to lengthened economic expansions, the great moderation has been driven by asset price inflation and financial innovation, which have financed consumer spending. Higher asset prices have provided collateral to borrow against, while financial innovation has increased the volume and ease of access to credit. Together, that created a dynamic in which rising asset prices have supported increased debt-financed spending, thereby making for longer expansions. This dynamic is exemplified by the housing bubble of the last eight years.

The important implication is that the Great Moderation is the result of a retreat from full employment combined with the transitional factors of disinflation, asset price inflation, and increased consumer borrowing. Those factors now appear exhausted. Further disinflation will produce disruptive deflation.

Palley wrote this in April 2008, although he had touched on some of these issues earlier. Did this view reach a wide audience? No. Understanding why might help us understand better why the economics profession went astray.

Acemoglu's paper had a couple of other eye-popping items: Even though he gives lip service to the idea that the economics was unduly infused with ideas from Ayn Rand, he then backtracks:

On the contrary, the recognition that markets live on foundations laid by institutions— that free markets are not the same as unregulated markets— enriches both theory and its practice.

"Free markets" is Newspeak, and the sooner we collectively start to object to the use of that phrase, the better. Because it is imprecise and undefined, advocates can use it to mean different things in different contexts. I cannot take any economist seriously who uses "free markets" in anything more rigorous than a newspaper column (and even there it would annoy me). It has NO place in an academic paper (save perhaps on the evolution of the concept).

We also have this:

A deep and important contribution of the discipline of economics is the insight that greed is neither good nor bad in the abstract.

This reveals that Acemoglu has been corrupted by Rand more than he seems willing to recognize. No one would have dared write anything like that even as recently as ten years ago. Let us consider the definition of greed, from Merriam Webster:

a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed

Greed is different than, say, ambition. "Greed is good" was famously attributed to criminal Ivan Boesky, and later film felon Gordon Gekko.

Put more bluntly, greed is the id without restraint. Psychiatrists, social workers, policemen, and parents all know that unchecked, conscienceless desire is not a good thing. Acemoglu calls for external checks ("the right incentive and reward structures"), when the record of the last 20 years is that a neutral to positive view of greed allows for ambitious actors to increasingly bend the rules and amass power. The benefits are concentrated, and the costs often sufficiently diffuse as to provide for insufficient incentives (or even means) for checking such behavior. Like it or not, there is a role for social values, as nineteenth century that may sound. The costs of providing a sufficiently elaborate superstructure of rules and restrictions is far more costly than having a solid baseline of social norms. But our collective standards have fallen so far I am not sure we can reach a better equilibrium there.

Labels: ASSA, economics, financial crisis, Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith

 

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1/12/2009 10:05:00 AM 0 comments

 

Dean Baker: Why Economists Get It Wrong

by Dollars and Sense

Another insightful commentary from the inestimable Dean Baker:

Unlike custodians, cab drivers, or dishwashers, economists are not held accountable for their job performance. They can be wrong on everything they do every day of the week, and still be viewed as respected authorities by the Washington Post, and other media outlets, as well as members of Congress and others in policy positions.

Labels: Dean Baker, economics, financial crisis

 

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10/24/2008 01:30:00 PM 0 comments