Author: JW Mason

Leaping Lizards

At a party last night, I ran into a biologist who studies lizards. So we got to talking, as you do, about bipedalism. The habit of running on two legs has arisen in several different lineages of lizards, but why did it evolve? Speed, energetic efficiency, heat loss, vision, or that all-purpose explanation sexual selection? or maybe, like us and the birds, they’ve got something better to do with their front limbs?

None of the above, says the biologist. Sure, there are bipedal lizards. But very likely, bipedalism in lizards did not evolve.

Wait, how’s that?

Aerts et al., Bipedalism in Lizards:

The exact advantages of bipedal locomotion in lizards remain debated. Earlier claims that bipedalism would increase maximal running speed or would be energetically advantageous have been questioned. Here, we use ‘whole body’ mechanical modelling to provide an alternative solution to the riddle. The starting point is the intermittent running style combined with the need for a high manoeuvrability characterizing many small lizard species. Manoeuvrability benefits from a caudal [rearward] shift of the centre of mass of the body (body-COM), because forces to change the heading and to align the body to this new heading do not conflict with each other. The caudally situated body-COM, however, might result in a lift of the front part of the body when accelerating … [leading to] observable distances passively covered bipedally as a consequence of the acceleration. In this way, no functional explanation of the phenomenon of lizard bipedalism is required and bipedalism can probably be considered non-adaptive in many cases.

In other words, if you, being a lizard, need to change direction quickly when you’re running, it’s better to have your center of mass situated in the back, near your pelvis. That makes it easier to swing the front of your body around when you turn. But a side effect of having your center of gravity toward your back end is that your front end tends to rise when you accelerate sharply, as, being a lizard, you often do. (You, being a person now, have experienced this if you’ve ridden a bike up a steep hill. Conversely, brake suddenly, the back end of the bike goes up.) Air resistance adds to this effect, as does the fact that one of the ways the center of gravity is moved backwards is an overdevelopment of the rear legs relative to the front ones. The result is that lizards evolved for junk in the trunk end up sometimes running on their rear legs, even if that was not selected for at all.

(The linked article is based on experiments with a mechanical model of a lizard. According to dude at the party, the same conclusions are suggested by observations of lizard bipedalism in nature.)

I’m writing about this partly just because it’s cool (go science!) but also because it’s a nice illustration of an aspect of evolution that’s not widely understood, especially, perhaps, by some of its more aggressive proselytes. Darwinism is certainly correct, on some level: on the level that the appearance of design in an organism in no way implies the existence of a designer. But the statement that complex adaptive traits are the result of natural selection, while true, tells us much less than it seems to at first glance, because it’s seldom obvious what constitutes a “trait”; even more seldom what universe of alternatives it was selected from. In this case, we, proud bipeds, see a lizard running on its hind legs and think, that’s a trait; whereas, dancers and gymnasts perhaps aside, we’re not much conscious of where our center of mass is. But what we see as a trait isn’t necessarily what evolution sees; not everything in Borges’ encyclopedia is selected on. Perhaps the majority of what we see as traits are, as in this case, spandrels.

Needless to say, this is especially true when the organisms are human beings and the alleged trait is something psychological, especially something relating to sex and gender roles. A true evolutionary explanation should provide both concrete evidence (not just a just-so story) for the selective advantage of the supposed trait, and an account of the specific developmental pathways through which it arises; at least it should have one of the two. But in many of the “evolutionary” stories that people get most excited about, both are entirely lacking. Certainly when it comes to higher brain functions, with the exception of vision, the only statement genuinely grounded in evolutionary biology is, “We don’t know.”

How Many Rooms Does a Man Need?

I’m generally a big fan of Rick Bookstaber. His posts have a depth and originality that’s rare among economics blogs. But he goes seriously off the rails with this one, on commodity prices. In the long term, he argues, they are bound to fall, because a paradigm shift is underway:

with the increased focus on technology – where we spend more and more of our time on our cell phone, doing emails, watching DVDs and surfing the web – there is less of a difference between how the super rich and the reasonably well off spend their time hour by hour during their typical days. … in the not-so-distant future the main items we will demand, beyond food, clothing and shelter, are “game systems”…

Our demand for housing and transportation, two of the biggest commodity hogs, will be lower. McMansions will be totally passe. It should already be dawning on people that most all of our non-sleeping hours at home are spent in the kitchen and its adjacent family room. Living rooms and dining rooms are relics. 

This is a classic example of what we might call Dow 36,000 syndrome, after the perfectly timed punchline to the tech bubble, which argued that stocks were no riskier than bonds and should be priced accordingly, people just hadn’t realized it yet. The syndrome consists of coming up with a theory that implies people will behave quite differently than they do, and then, rather than concluding there must be something wrong with the theory, predicting that people will start behaving in accord with it any day now. There’s no explanation for why people haven’t followed the theory up til now, just the assurance that they’re about to, just wait. Tomorrow, tomorrow, people will realize stocks should be priced like bonds. And they’ll realize there’s no reason to have a bigger house than you need for your daily routine.

I don’t think so.

I happen to be sitting, as I type this, in a bedroom in John D. Rockefeller’s old 40-room mansion in Pocantico.I don’t know how much time he spent in most of those rooms … or in the enormous coachhouse down the hill … or in the “Orangerie, modeled after the original at Versailles” … or in the guesthouse, the consumption value of which presumablydidn’t much depend on the fact that it was initially exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and then disassembled and shipped to the estate.

There may be a paradigm shift that leads to decreasing demand for commodities. I hope so; sooner or later, there needs to be. But Bookstaber, smart as he is, is being too much of an economist here. Anyone who thinks that the consumption of the rich (or of those in status competition with the rich) can be derived from some rational assessment of what a person needs, has not grokked what being rich is about.

Krugman: Irish Monk or Norse Raider?

Paul Krugman is fond of describing the current state of macroeconomics as a dark age — starting around 1980, the past 50 years’ progress in economics was forgotten. True that. If we want to tell a coherent story about the operation of modern capitalist economies, we could do a lot worse than start with the mainstream macro of 1978.

Thing is, as Steve Keen among others has pointed out, liberal New Keynesians like Krugman are every bit as responsible for that Dark Age as their rivals at Chicago and Minnesota. Case in point: His widely-cited 1989 paper on Income Elasticities and Real Exchange Rates. The starting point of the paper is that floating exchange rates have not, in general, adjusted to balance trade flows. Instead, relative growth rates have roughly matched the growth in relative demand for exports, so that trade flows have remained roughly balanced without systematic currency appreciation in surplus countries or depreciation in deficit countries. Krugman:

The empirical regularity is that the apparent income elasticities of demand for a country’s imports and exports are systematically related to the country’s long-term rate of growth. Fast-growing countries seem to face a high income elasticity of demand for their exports, while having a low income elasticity of demand for imports. The converse is true of slow-growing countries. This difference in income elasticities is, it turns out, just about sufficient to make trend changes in real exchange rates unnecessary.

The obvious explanation of this regularity, going back at least to 1933 and Roy Harrod’s International Economics, is that many countries face balance-of-payments constraints, so their growth is limited by their export earnings. Faster growth draws in more imports, forcing the authorities to increase interest rates or take other steps that reduce growth back under the constraint. There are plenty of clear historical examples of this dynamic, for both poor and industrialized countries. The British economy between the 1940s and the 1980s, for instance, repeatedly experienced episodes of start-stop growth as Keynesian stimulus ran up against balance of payments constraints. Krugman, though, is having none of it:

 I am simply going to dismiss a priori the argument that income elasticities determine economic growth… It just seems fundamentally implausible that over stretches of decades balance of payments problems could be preventing long term growth… Furthermore, we all know that differences in growth rates among countries are primarily determined in the rate of growth of total factor productivity, not differences in the rate of growth of employment; it is hard to see what channel links balance of payments due to unfavorable income elasticities to total factor productivity growth. Thus we are driven to a supply-side explanation…

Lucas or Sargent couldn’t have said it better!

Of course there is a vast literature on balance of payments constraints within structuralist and Post Keynesian economics, exploring when external constraints do and do not bind  (see for instance here and here), and what channels might link demand conditions to productivity growth. [1] Indeed, Keynes himself thought that avoiding balance-of-payments constraints on growth was the most important goal in the design of a postwar international financial order. But Krugman doesn’t cite any of this literature. [2] Instead, he comes up with a highly artificial model of product differentiation in which every country consumes an identical basket of goods, which always includes goods from different countries in proportion to their productive capacities. In this model, measured income elasticities actually reflect changes in supply. But the model has no relation to actual trade patterns, as Krugman more or less admits. Widespread balance of payments constraints, the explanation he rejects “a priori,” is far more parsimonious and realistic.

But I’m not writing this post just to mock one bad article that Krugman wrote 20 years ago. (Well, maybe a little.) Rather, I want to make two points.

First, this piece exhibits all the pathologies that Krugman attributes to freshwater macroeconomists — the privileging of theoretical priors over historical evidence; the exclusive use of deductive reasoning; the insistence on supply-side explanations, however implausible, over demand-side ones; and the scrupulous ignorance of alternative approaches. Someone who at the pinnacle of his career was writing like this needs to take some responsibility for the current state of macroeconomics. As far as I know, Krugman never has.

Second, there’s a real cost to this sort of thing. I constantly have these debates with friends closer to the economics mainstream, about why one should define oneself as “heterodox”. Wouldn’t it be better to do like Krugman, clamber as far up the professional ladder as you can, and then use that perch to sound the alarm? But the work you do doesn’t just affect your own career. Every time you write an article, like this one, embracing the conventional general-equilibrium vision and dismissing the Keynesian (or other) alternatives, you’re sending a signal to your colleagues and students about what kind of economics you think is worth doing. You’re inserting yourself into some conversations and cutting yourself off from others. Sure, if you’re Clark medal-winning Nobelist NYT columnist Paul Krugman, you can turn around and reintroduce Keynesian dynamics in some ad hoc way whenever you want.  But if you’ve spent the past two decade denigrating and dismissing more  systematic attempts to develop such models, you shouldn’t complain when  you find you have no one to talk to. Or as a friend says, “If you kick out Joan Robinson  and let Casey Mulligan in the room, don’t be surprised if you spend all  your time trying to explain why the unemployed aren’t on vacation.”

[1] “In practice there are many channels linking slow growth imposed by a balance of payments constraint to low productivity, and the opposite, where the possibility of fast output growth unhindered by balance-of-payments problems leads to fast productivity growth. There is a rich literature on export-led growth models (including the Hicks supermultiplier), incorporating the notion of circular and cumulative causation (Myrdal 1957) working through induced investment, embodied technical progress, learning by doing, scale economies, etc. (Dixon and Thirlwall, 1975) that will produce fast productivity growth in countries where exports and output are growing fast. The evidence testing Verdoorn’s Law shows a strong feedback from output growth to productivity growth.”

[2] Who was it who talked about “the phenomenon of well-known economists ‘rediscovering’ [various supply-side stories], not because  they’ve transcended the Keynesian refutation of these views, but because  they were unaware that there had ever been such a debate”?

Bond Market Vigilantes: Invisible or Inconceivable?

Brad DeLong is annoyed with people who are scared of invisible bond-market vigilantes. And he’s right to be annoyed! It’s extraordinarily silly — or dishonest — to claim that the confidence of bondholders constrains fiscal policy in the United States. As he puts it, “Any loss of confidence in the long-term fiscal stability of the United States of America” is an “economic thing that does not exist.”

So he’s right. But does he have the right to be right?

I’m going to say No. Because the error he is pointing to, is one that the economics he teaches gives no help in avoiding.

The graduate macroeconomics course at Berkeley uses David Romer’s Advanced Macroeconomics, 3rd Edition. (The same text I used at UMass.) Here’s what it says about government budget constraints:

What this means is that the present value of government spending across all future time must be less than or equal to the present value of taxation across all future time, minus the current value of government debt. This is pretty much the starting point for all mainstream discussions of government budgets. In Blanchard and Fischer, another widely-used graduate macro textbook, the entire discussion of government budgets is just the working-out of that same equation. (Except they make it an equality rather than an inequality.) If you’ve studied economics at a graduate level, this is what government budget constraint means to you.

But here’s the thing: That kind of constraint has nothing to do with the kind of constraint DeLong’s post is talking about.

The textbook constraint is based on the idea that government is setting tax and spending levels for all periods once and for all. There’s no difference between past and future — the equation is unchanged if you reverse the sign of the t terms (i.e. flip the past and future) and simultaneously reverse the sign of the interest rate. (In the special case where the interest rate is zero, you can put the periods in any order you like.) This approach isn’t specific to government budget constraints, it’s the way everything is approached in contemporary macroeconomics. The starting point of the Blanchard and Fischer book, like many macro textbooks, is the Ramsey  model of a household (central planner) allocating known production and consumption possibilities across an infinite time horizon. (The Romer book starts with the Solow growth model and derives it from the Ramsey model in chapter two.) Economic growth simply means that the parameters are such that the household, or planner, chooses a path of output with higher values in later periods than in earlier ones. Financial markets and aggregate demand aren’t completely ignored, of course, but they’re treated as details to be saved for the final chapters, not part of the main structure.

You may think that’s a silly way to think about the economy (I may agree), but one important feature of these models is that the interest rate is not the cost of credit or finance; rather, it’s the fixed marginal rate of substitution of spending or taxing between different periods. By contrast, that interest is the cost of money, not the cost of substitution between the future and the present, was maybe the most important single point in Keynes’ General Theory. But it’s completely missing from contemporary textbooks, even though it’s only under this sense of interest that there’s even the possibility of bond market vigilantism. When we are talking about the state of confidence in the bond market, we are talking about a finance constraint — the cost of money — not a budget constraint. But the whole logic of contemporary macroeconomics (intertemporal allocation of real goods as the fundamental structure, with finance coming in only as an afterthought) excludes the possibility of government financing constraints. At no point in either Romer or Blanchard and Fischer are they ever discussed.

You can’t expect people to have a clear sense of when government financing constraints do and don’t bind, if you teach them a theory in which they don’t exist.

EDIT: Let me spell the argument out a little more. In conventional economics, time is just another dimension on which goods vary. Jam today, jam tomorrow, jam next week are treated just like strawberry jam, elderberry jam, ginger-zucchini jam, etc. Either way, you’re choosing the highest-utility basket that lies within your budget constraint. An alternative point of view – Post Keynesian if you like – is that we can’t make choices today about future periods. (Fundamental uncertainty is one way of motivating this, but not the only way.) The tradeoff facing us is not between jam today and jam tomorrow, but between jam today and money today. Money today presumably translates into jam tomorrow, but not on sufficiently definite terms that we can put it into the equations. (It’s in this sense that a monetary theory and a theory of intertemporal optimization are strict alternatives.) Once you take this point of view, it’s perfectly logical to think of the government budget constraint as a financing constraint, i.e. as the terms on which expenditure today trades off with net financial claims today. Which is to say, you’re now in the discursive universe where things like bond markets exist. Again, yes, modern macro textbooks do eventually introduce bond markets — but only after hundreds of pages of intertemporal optimization. If I wrote the textbooks, the first model wouldn’t be of goods today vs. goods tomorrow, but goods today vs. money today. DeLong presumably disagrees. But in that world, macroeconomic policy discussions might annoy him less.

More Anti-Krugmanism

[Some days it feels like that could be the title for about 40 percent of the posts on here.]

Steve Keen takes up the cudgels. (Via.)

There is a pattern to neoclassical attempts to increase the realism of their models… The author takes the core model – which cannot generate the real world phenomenon under discussion – and then adds some twist to the basic assumptions which, hey presto, generate the phenomenon in some highly stylised way. The mathematics (or geometry) of the twist is explicated, policy conclusions (if any) are then drawn, and the paper ends.

The flaw with this game is the very starting point, and since Minsky put it best, I’ll use his words to explain it: “Can ‘It’ – a Great Depression – happen again? And if ‘It’ can happen, why didn’t ‘It’ occur in the years since World War II? … To answer these questions it is necessary to have an economic theory which makes great depressions one of the possible states in which our type of capitalist economy can find itself.”

The flaw in the neoclassical game is that it never achieves Minsky’s final objective, because the “twists” that the author adds to the basic assumptions of the neoclassical model are never incorporated into its core. The basic theory therefore remains one in which the key phenomenon under investigation … cannot happen. The core theory remains unaltered – rather like a dog that learns how to walk on its hind legs, but which then reverts to four legged locomotion when the performance is over.

Right.

Any theory is an abstraction of the real world, but the question is which features of the world you can abstract from, and which, for the purposes of theory, are fundamental. Today’s consensus macroeconomics [1] treats intertemporal maximization of a utility function (with consumption and labor as the only arguments) under given endowments and production functions, and unique, stable market-clearing equilibria as the essential features that any acceptable theory has to start from. It treats firms (profit-maximizing or otherwise), money, credit, uncertainty, the existence of classes, and technological change as non-essential features that need to be derived from intertemporal maximization by households, can be safely ignored, or at best added in an ad hoc way. And change is treated in terms of comparative statics rather than dynamic processes or historical evolution.

Now people will say, But can’t you make the arguments you want to within standard techniques? And in that case, shouldn’t you? Even if it’s not strictly necessary, isn’t it wise to show your story is compatible with the consensus approach, since that way you’ll be more likely to convince other economists, have more political influence, etc.?

If you’re a super smart micro guy (as are the two friends I’ve recently had this conversation with) then there’s probably a lot of truth to this. The type of work you do if you genuinely want to understand a labor market question, say, and the type of work you do if you want to win an argument within the economics profession about labor markets, may not be exactly the same, but they’re reasonably compatible. Maybe the main difference is that you need fancier econometrics to convince economists than to learn about the world?

But if you’re doing macroeconomics, the concessions you have to make to make your arguments acceptable are more costly. When you try to force Minsky into a DSGE box, as Krugman does; or when half of your paper on real exchange rates is taken up with models of utility maximization by households; then you’re not just wasting an enormous amount of time and brainpower. You’re arguing against everyone else trying top do realistic work on other questions, including yourself on other occasions. And you’re ensuring that your arguments will have a one-off, ad hoc quality, instead of being developed in a systematic way.

(Not to mention that the consensus view isn’t even coherent on its own terms. Microfoundations are a fraud, since the representative household can’t be derived from a more general model of utility maximizing agents; and it seems clear that intertemporal maximization and comparative statics are logically incompatible.) 

If we want to get here, we shouldn’t start from there. We need an economics whose starting points are production for profit by firms employing wage labor, under uncertainty, in a monetary economy,  that evolves in historical terms. That’s what Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter in their different ways were all doing. They, and their students, have given us a lot to build on. But to do so, we [2] have to give up on trying to incorporate their insights piecemeal into the consensus framework, and cultivate a separate space to develop a different kind of economics, one that starts from premises corresponding to the fundamental features of modern capitalist economies.

[1] I’ve decided to stop using “mainstream” in favor of “consensus”, largely because the latter term is used by people to describe themselves.

[2] By “we,” again, I mean heterodox macroeconomists specifically. I’m not sure how much other economists face the same sharp tradeoff between winning particular debates within the economics profession and building an economics that gives us genuine, useful knowledge about the world.

Toward a Unified Theory of Anti-Krugmanism

You know, there’s a fundamental parallel between what’s wrong with Krugman’s takes on monetary policy and on trade.

In the first case, his argument is that the interest rate (a price, administered to be sure) would normally equilibrate savings and investment at something like full employment. It’s the barrier to that price’s adjustment in the form of the zero lower bound that causes income to adjust instead, leading to the Great Recession (and the need for fiscal policy). Similarly trade flows are normally equilibrated by the adjustment of the exchange rate, a price. It’s barriers to that price’s adjustment, in the form of the Euro and the RMB-dollar peg, that cause income to adjust instead, leading to austerity in peripheral Europe and unemployment in the United States.

From a Post Keynesian perspective, these are kludges that get good conclusions from bad premises.

From a Post Keynesian (or for that matter Keynesian straight-up) perspective, flexible interest rates and exchange rates have never reliably delivered macroeconomic balance. Income adjustments aren’t a once-in-a-lifetime feature of the current conjuncture, they’re a routine and central feature of capitalism.

New Keynesian economists like Krugman can see that macroeconomic reality today doesn’t conform to the textbook, where prices smoothly converging to market-clearing levels. (Well, maybe to the 1978 edition.) But they’re not going to throw the textbook away, so the departures are explained as a series of ad hoc special cases. And so the textbook has a way of sneaking back in whenever their attention is elsewhere. That’s why Krugman insists something big changed when the federal funds rate hit zero, even though the federal funds rate has been more or less disconnected from most longer rates for a decade or more. And that’s why he insists that the Asian crisis countries were better off than Greece, etc. because they could devalue their currencies instead of resorting to austerity, when it seems clear that devaluations contributed little to Asian countries’ improved current account balances after 1997; they drastically cut domestic spending, just as peripheral Europe is being forced to. When he’s looking right at a non-price adjustment mechanism, he can see it; but wherever he’s not looking, he assumes that prices are doing their thing.

Or at least that’s how it looks to me.

What’s Good Enough for GE Is Good Enough for America

[Originally posted at New Deal 2.0.]

S&P’s threat to downgrade the US government’s credit rating has been dismissed by economist-bloggers as a political intervention by bondowners and compared to “adorable children wearing their underpants outside their trousers.” As far as the chances of the US someday defaulting on its debt go, the announcement has zero informational value.

Still, it’s true that federal debt held by the public has reached 60 percent of GDP, while tax revenues remain around 20 percent of GDP. 60 percent of GDP is a lot! And double, nearly triple, tax revenue! What would we call a company with outstanding debt double or even triple its revenues, and expected to keep the highest bond rating?

We could call it General Electric. 

As recently as 2007, GE had an S&P rating of AAA with outstanding debt at over three time revenues. Or we could call it the Tennessee Valley Authority; TVA managed outstanding debt of 3.9 times revenue in the late ’90s (it’s since come down a bit), and S&P never downgraded its bond rating from AAA. Or, we could call it Hydro Quebec, with debt of over 4.5 times revenues (altho, admittedly, its S&P rating is only A+). Or the natural gas and energy supplier TransCanada, with debt equal to 2.2 time revenues and an A rating from S&P. Even Transocean, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig for BP, managed an A- rating prior to the spill, with a debt-revenue ratio similar to what the federal government has now.

Now, it’s perfectly sensible for a big utility, with its high proportion of long-lived fixed capital and stable revenue streams, to carry a lot of debt. If I ran Hydro Quebec (and converting the company to a worker- and consumer-owned cooperative wasn’t an option), I’d take on a lot of debt too. But here’s the point. If the question is, what if the government had to fund itself like a private business, the answer isn’t necessarily that it would do anything different from what it’s doing now.

In the real world, of course, there are lots of differences between the government of the United States and a private business. The federal government issues the currency that its debt is denominated in. It has effectively unlimited authority to increase taxes on the private sector. And its liabilities are the most important store of value and means of payment for the private sector. (When Alan Greenspan said that the financial system would have a real problem without holdings of federal debt, he may have been arguing in bad faith, but he wasn’t wrong.) And of course, the US government is responsible for output and employment in the economy as a whole, and not just for its own balance sheet. All these differences mean that it makes sense for the US government to carry more debt than a private business. If GE or Transocean are safe bets for lenders with debt of two or three times revenue, then the federal government must be ultra ultra safe. Which, interestingly enough, is just what the bond market says.

So perhaps we can get away from the “oooh, that’s a really big number!” school of analysis of federal borrowing. And instead ask what levels of federal deficit and outstanding debt are most compatible with economic growth and financial stability. For the foreseeable future, I’d suggest, the answer has a lot more to do with the role of government spending in aggregate demand, and with government debt as a risk-free asset for the private sector, than with the level of debt that’s “sustainable”. Because if you think there are more states of the world where TVA or GE make their payments to bondholders than where the US government does, you must be smoking something from S&P’s private stash.

UPDATE: This excellent post from Mike Konczal makes the same point more systematically.

Nelson Algren, Asshole

Never Come Morning is my favorite American novel, full stop. But this here is a remarkably bitchy memoir/parody.

Mailer as Norman Manlifellow, “the boyish author of The Elk Paddock or Look Ma, My Fly Is Open? Ok, heavy-handed but ok. Alfred Paperfish must be Edmund Wilson, and his wife with “just time for a quickie” is Mary McCarthy. Leon Urine, author of The Whole World Looks Jewish When You’re in Love, Roth maybe? Ginny Ginstruck? I don’t know, an editor or agent, a woman anyway, certainly someone he didn’t like. But Baldwin as Giovanni Johnson, lisping in cliche Gay and singing Dis train don’t carry no gamblers, that’s not funny, sorry, no. The parts that are genuinely respectful only make the nasty bits nastier. And a speech about how Negroes have been “‘knocked down, strung up, run over, banjaxed, castrated, jillflirted, stomped, harassed, jeered at, vilified, despised, warped’ — he paused to change fingers, as he tires easily…” No, again not funny. Black men really were castrated. It isn’t funny even if you juxtapose it with a couple nonsense words.

Algren, beautiful writer, bitter man.

Selfish Masters, Selfless Servants

Via Mike the Mad Biologist, a Confucian parable for the financial crisis:

Mencius replied, “Why must your Majesty use that word ‘profit?’ What I am provided with, are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.
“If your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and the common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit the one from the other, and the kingdom will be endangered….

Indeed, there are deep contradictions hidden in that word “profit.” Reminds me of a classic article on corporate governance, Bruce Greenwood’s Enronitis: Why Good Corporations Go Bad.

The Enron problem is … the predictable result of too strong of a share-centered view of the public corporation… Corporate law demands that managers simultaneously be selfless servants and selfish masters. On the one hand, it directs managers to be faithful agents, setting aside their own interests entirely in order to act only on behalf of their principals, the shares. On the other hand, in the service of this extreme altruism, they must ruthlessly exploit everyone around them, projecting on to the shares an extreme selfishness that takes no account of any interests but the shares themselves. Having maximally exploited their fellow human corporate participants, managers are then expected to selflessly hand over their gains…

Altruism and rationally self-interested exploitation are extreme and radically opposed positions, psychologically and politically. … For managers, one easy resolution of these tensions is a simple, cynical selfishness in which managers see themselves as entitled, and perhaps even required, to exploit shareholders as ruthlessly as they understand the law to require them to exploit everyone else. …

Internally, the share-centered paradigm is just as self-destructive. Corporations succeed because they are not markets and do not follow market norms of behavior. Rather, they operate under fiduciary norms as a matter of law and team norms as a matter of sociology. However, the share-centered paradigm of corporate law teaches managers to treat employees as outsiders and tools to corporate ends with no intrinsic value. Just as managers are unlikely to learn simultaneously to be selfish maximizers and selfless altruists, they are unlikely to be simultaneously cooperative team players and self-interested defectors. Thus, the share-centered view undermines the prerequisite to operating the firm in the interests of shareholders. …

Managers constructing the firm as a tool to the end of share value maximization treat the people with whom they work as means, not ends. …they learn as part of their ordinary life to break ordinary social solidarity. Learning to exploit ruthlessly is surprisingly difficult. … But cynicism can be learned, and managers subjected to the powerful incentives of the share value maximization principle do eventually learn it. … This training, however, surely creates cynics, not faithful agents. … A manager whose lived experience is a pretense of selflessness (with respect to employees, customers and business partners) covering real disinterested exploitation (on behalf of shares) is unlikely to suddenly see himself as “in a position in which thought of self was to be renounced, however hard the abnegation” and voluntarily hand over these hard-won gains of competitive practice to his principal. If you can properly lie to your subordinates, why not lie to your superior as well? … In the end, the cynicism of the share value maximization view must eat itself alive.

Something like Enronitis was clearly involved in the financial crisis. Indeed, some of the most famous controversies around the crisis hinge precisely on disputes about whether a transaction was between the parties linked by a fiduciary duty, or was an arm’s-length one where predatory behavior was expected, and even a moral duty. You can get yourself out of legal trouble, as Goldman has in the case of the Paulson trade, by establishing that you were on the war-of-all-against-all side of the line; but obviously, a system where predatory and trust-based relationships are expected to exist side by side, or even to overlap, is not likely to be a sustainable one. (Of course if the goal of our rentier elite is simply to stripmine the postwar social compromise, then sustainability is moot.) Friedman’s idea that a corporation’s duty is “to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society” isn’t coherent psychologically or logically, since it demands that management regard certain norms as absolutely binding and others as absolutely non-binding, without any reliable way of saying which is which.

Greenwood is talking about the “corporation as polis.” But the same point applies to the polis as polis.

It may not be the benevolence that makes the butcher, baker or brewer hand over the beef, bread or beer. But it is benevolence– or at least something other than self-interest — that ensures that it’s not full of E. coli. And if you say, well, it’s just their self-interest in avoiding the penalties of the law, that begs the question of why the authorities enforce the law. Or as Hume famously observed,

as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.

Boris Groys develops a similar line of thought in The Communist Postscript:

The theory of Marxism-Lenisnism is ambivalent in its understanding of language, as it is in most matters. On the one hand, everyone who knows this theory has learnt that the dominant language is always the language of the dominant classes. On the other hand, they have learnt too that an idea that has gripped the masses becomes a material force, and that on this basis Marxism itself is (or will be) victorious because it is correct.

This is a particular instance of Groys’ broader argument about the inherent power of rational speech:

The listener or reader of an evident statement can of course willfully decide to contradict the  compelling effect of this statement… But someone who adopts such a counter-evident position does not really believe it himself. Those who do not accept what is logically evident become internally divided, and this division weakens them in comparison to those who accept and affirm the evidence. The acceptance of logical evidence makes one stronger; to reject it, conversely, makes one weaker.

Similarly, the decisionmaker who acts on norms consistently is stronger, in the long run, than the Enronitic manager whose honest service to “shareholder value” requires dishonest, strictly instrumental treatment of workers, customers, regulators, and the rest of humanity.

All of which is another way of saying that, despite the fantasies of libertarians, and cynics, that it’s self-interest all the way down, we can’t dispense with intrinsic motivation, analytically or in practice.

UPDATE: Added Groys quote. Had intended to include it in the original post, but I’d lent the book to someone…

Do Prices Matter?

Do exchange rates drive trade flows? Yes, says Dean Baker David Rosnick. Prices matter:

What happens to the economy as the dollar falls? …Over time, Americans notice that British goods have become more expensive in comparison to domestically produced goods. In other words, the price of U.S.-made sweaters becomes cheaper relative to the price of sweaters imported from Britain. This will lead us to buy fewer sweaters from Britain and more domestically manufactured sweaters.

At the same time, the British notice that American goods have become relatively inexpensive in comparison to goods made at home. This means it takes fewer pounds to buy a sweater made in the United States, so the British will buy more sweaters made in the United States and fewer of their domestically manufactured sweaters.

While American producers notice the increased demand for their exports, allowing them to raise their prices somewhat and still sell more than they had before the dollar fell. Similarly, for British exporters to continue selling they must lower prices.
Thus, as everyone eventually adjusts to the fall in the dollar, the trade deficit shrinks. This is not new economics by any stretch…

Indeed it’s not. Changes in prices induce changes in transaction volumes that smoothly restore equilibrium, is the first article of the economist’s catechism. But how much a given volume responds to a given price change, and whether the response is reliable and strong enough to make the resulting equilibrium relevant to real economies, are empirical questions. You could tell a similar parable about an increase in the minimum wage leading to a lower demand for low-wage labor, but as I’m sure Dean folks at CEPR would agree, that doesn’t it mean it’s what we actually see. You have to look at the evidence.

So what’s the evidence on this point? Dean Rosnick offers a graph showing two big falls in the value of the dollar after peaks in the mid-80s and mid-2000s, and falls in the trade deficit a few years later, in the early 90s and late 2000s. Early 90s and late 2000s … hm, what else was happening in those years? Oh, right, deep recessions. (The early 2000s recession was very mild.) Funny that the same guy who’s constantly chastising economists for ignoring the growth and collapse of a huge housing bubble, when he turns to trade … ignores a huge housing bubble.

Still, isn’t the picture is basically consistent with the story that when the dollar declines, US imports get more expensive and fall, and US exports get cheaper and rise? Not necessarily: Dean’s Rosnick’s graph doesn’t show imports and exports separately. And when we separate them out, we see something funny.

Click the graph to make it legible.

In a world where trade flows were mainly governed by exchange rates, a country’s imports and exports would show a negative correlation. After all, the same exchange-rate change that makes exports more expensive on world markets makes imports cheaper here, and vice versa. But that isn’t what we see at all. Except in the 1980s (when the exchange rate clearly did matter, but not in the way Dean Rosnick supposes; see Robert Blecker) exports and imports very clearly move together. And it’s not just a matter of a long-term rise in both imports and exports. Every period that saw a significant fall in imports — 1980-1984; 2000-2002; 2007-2009 — saw a large fall in exports as well. This is simply not what happens in a world where prices (are the main things that) matter.

(This discrepancy between real-world trade patterns and the textbook vision applies to almost all industrialized countries, and always has. It was noticed long ago by Robert Triffin, who brought it up to argue that movements in relative price levels did not govern trade patterns under the gold standard, as Ricardo and his successors had claimed. But it is just a strong counterargument to today’s conventional wisdom that exchange rates govern trade.)

So if changes in exchange rates don’t drive trade, what does? Lots of things, many of them no doubt hard to measure, or to influence through policy. But one obvious candidate is changes in incomes. One of the big advances of the first generation of Keynesian economists — people like Triffin, and especially Joan Robinson — was to show how, just as prices (the wage and interest rates) fail to equilibrate the domestic economy, leaving aggregate income to adjust, relative prices internationally don’t equilibrate the global economy, leaving output or growth rates to adjust. In the short run, business cycle-type fluctuations reliably involve changes in investment and consumer-durable purchases larger disproportionate to the change in output as a whole; given the mix of traded and non-trade goods for most countries, this creates an allometry in which short-run changes in output are accompanied by even larger short-run changes in imports and exports. For a country that runs a trade deficit in “normal” times, this means that recessions are reliably associated with smaller deficits and booms with larger ones. In the long run, there is also a reliable tendency for increments to income to involve demand for a changing mix of goods, with a greater share of demand falling on “leading sectors,” historically manufactured goods. (The flipside of this is Engels’ law, which states that the share of income spent on food falls as income rises.) Given that both a country’s mix of industries and its trade partners are relatively fixed, this creates a stable relationship between relative growth rates and trade balance movements. Neither of these channels is perfectly reliable, by any means — and the whole point of the industrial policy is to circumvent the second one — but they are still much stronger influences on trade flows than exchange rates (or other relative prices) are.

So with that in mind, let’s look at another version of the graph. This one shows the year-over-year change in the trade balance as a share of GDP, the same change as predicted by an OLS regression on total GDP growth over the past three years, and as predicted by the change in the value of the dollar over the past three years. [1]

It will be legible if you click it.

Not surprisingly, neither prediction gives a terribly close fit. But qualitatively, at least, the predictions based on GDP do a reasonable job: They capture every major worsening and improvement in the trade balance. True, they under-predict the improvement in the trade balance in the later 80s — the Plaza Accords mattered — but it’s clear that if you knew the rate of GDP growth over the next three years, you could make a reasonably reliable prediction about the the behavior of the trade balance. Knowing the change in the value of the dollar, on the other hand,wouldn’t help you much at all. (And just to be clear, this isn’t about the particular choice of three years. Two years and four years look roughly similar, and at a one-year horizon exchange rates aren’t predictive at all.)

Here’s another presentation of the same data, a scatterplot comparing the three-year change in the trade balance to the three-year growth of GDP (blue, left axis) and three-year change in the exchange rate (red, right axis). Again, while the correlation is fairly loose for both, it’s clearly tighter for GDP. All the periods of strongest improvement in the trade balance are associated with weak GDP growth, and vice versa; similarly all the periods of strong GDP growth are associated with worsening of the trade balance, and vice versa. There’s no such consistent association for the trade balance and changes in the exchange rate.

If you want to be able to read the graph, you should click it.

The fit could be improved by using some measure of disposable income — ideally adjusted for wealth effects — in place of GDP, and by using some better measure of relative prices in place of the exchange-rate index — altho there’s some controversy about what that better measure would be. And theoretically, instead of just the three-year change, you should use the individual lags.

Still, the takeaway, if you’re a policymaker, is clear. If you want to improve the trade balance, slower growth is the way to go. And if you want to boost growth, you probably are going to have to ignore the trade balance. Personally, I want door number two. I assume Dean Rosnick doesn’t want door one. But what I’m not at all sure about, is what concrete evidence makes him think that exchange-rate policy opens up a third door.

[1] Technicalities. I separately regressed the changes in imports and exports (as a percent of GDP) over three years earlier, on the percentage change over the same period in GDP and in the Fed’s trade-weighted major-partners dollar index, respectively. It’s all quarterly data, downloaded from FRED. The graphs shows the predicted values from the two regressions. This is admittedly crude, but I would argue that the more sophisticated approaches are in some respects less appropriate for the specific question being addressed here. For example, suppose hypothetically that a currency devaluation really did tend to improve the trade balance, but that it also tended to raise GDP growth, raising imports and offsetting the initial improvement. From an analytic standpoint, it might be appropriate to correct for the induced GDP change to get a better estimate of the pure exchange-rate effect. But from a policy perspective, the offsetting growth-imports effect has to be taken into account in evaluating the effects of a devaluation, just as much as the initial trade-balance improvement. Maybe we should say: Academics are interested in partial derivatives, policymakers in total derivatives?
EDIT: Oops! How did I not notice that this article was by somebody named David Rosnick, not Dean Baker? Makes me feel a bit better — I know Dean does share this article’s basic view of trade and the dollar, but I would hope his take would be a little less dependent on textbook syllogisms, and a little more attentive to actual patterns of trade. Clothing from the UK is hardly representative of US imports; to the extent we do import any, it’s like to be high-end branded stuff that is particularly price-inelastic.