Jón Steinsson wrote up some thoughts about the current state of macroeconomics. He begins:
There is a narrative within our field that macroeconomics has lost its way. While I have some sympathy with this narrative, I think it is a better description of the field 10 years ago than of the field today. Today, macroeconomics is in the process of regaining its footing. Because of this, in my view, the state of macroeconomics is actually better than it has been for quite some time.
I can’t help but be reminded of Olivier Blanchard’s 2008 article on the state of macroeconomics, which opened with a flat assertion that “the state of macro is good.” I am not convinced today’s positive assessment is going to hold up better than that one.
Where I do agree with Jón is that empirical work in macro is in better shape than theory. But I think theory is in much worse shape than he thinks. The problem is not some particular assumptions. It is the fundamental approach.
We need to be brutally honest: What is taught in today’s graduate programs as macroeconomics is entirely useless for the kinds of questions we are interested in.
I have in front of me the macro comp from a well-regarded mainstream economics PhD program. The comp starts with the familiar Euler equation with a representative agent maximizing their utility from consumption over an infinite future. Then we introduce various complications — instead of a single good we have a final and intermediate good, we allow firms to have some market power, we introduce random variation in the production technology or markup. The problem at each stage is to find what is the optimal path chosen by the representative household under the new set of constraints.
This is what macroeconomics education looks like in 2021. I submit that it provides no preparation whatsoever for thinking about the substantive questions we are interested in. It’s not that this or that assumption is unrealistic. It is that there is no point of contact between the world of these models and the real economies that we live in.
I don’t think that anyone in this conversation reasons this way when they are thinking about real economic questions. If you are asked how serious inflation is likely to be over the next year, or how much of a constraint public debt is on public spending, or how income distribution is likely to change based on labor market conditions, you will not base your answer on some kind of vaguely analogous questions about a world of rational households optimizing the tradeoff between labor and consumption over an infinite future. You will answer it based on your concrete institutional and historical knowledge of the world we live in today.
To be sure, once you have come up with a plausible answer to a real world question, you can go back and construct a microfounded model that supports it. But so what?Yes, with some ingenuity you can get a plausible Keynesian multiplier out of a microfounded model. But in terms of what we actually know about real economies, we don’t learn anything from the exercise that the simple Keynesian multiplier didn’t already tell us.
The heterogenous agent models that Jón talks about are to me symptoms of the problem, not signs of progress. You start with a fact about the world that we already knew, that consumption spending is sensitive to current income. Then you backfill a set of microfoundations that lead to that conclusion. The model doesn’t add anything, it just gets you back to your starting point, with a lot of time and effort that you could have been using elsewhere. Why not just start from the existence of a marginal propensity to consume well above zero, and go forward from there?
Then on the other hand, think about what is not included in macroeconomics education at the graduate level. Nothing about national accounting. Nothing about about policy. Nothing about history. Nothing about the concrete institutions that structure real labor and product markets.
My personal view is that we need to roll back the clock at least 40 years, and throw out the whole existing macroeconomics curriculum. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, of course. But if we want a macroeconomics that can contribute to public debates, that should be what we’re aiming for.
What should we be doing instead? There is no fully-fledged alternative to the mainstream, no heterodox theory that is ready to step in to replace the existing macro curriculum. Still, we don’t have to start from scratch. There are fragments, or building blocks, of a more scientific macroeconomics scattered around. We can find promising approaches in work from earlier generations, work in the margins of the profession, and work being done by people outside of economics, in the policy world, in finance, in other social sciences.
This work, it seems to me, shares a number of characteristics.
First, it is in close contact with broader public debates. Macroeconomics exists not to study “the economy” in the abstract — there isn’t any such thing — but to help us address concrete problems with the economies that we live in. The questions of what topics are important, what assumptions are reasonable, what considerations are relevant, can only be answered from a perspective outside of theory itself. A useful macroeconomic theory cannot be an axiomatic system developed from first principles. It needs to start with the conversations among policymakers, business people, journalists, and so on, and then generalize and systematize them.
A corollary of this is that we are looking not for a general model of the economy, but a lot of specialized models for particular questions.
Second, it has national accounting at its center. Physical scientists spend an enormous amount of time refining and mastering their data collection tools. For macroeconomics, that means the national accounts, along with other sources of macro data. A major part of graduate education in economics should be gaining a deep understanding of existing accounting and data collection practices. If models are going to be relevant for policy or empirical work, they need to be built around the categories of macro data. One of the great vices of today’s macroeconomics is to treat a variable in a model as equivalent to a similarly-named item in the national accounts, even when they are defined quite differently.
Third, this work is fundamentally aggregative. The questions that macroeconomics asks involve aggregate variables like output, inflation, the wage share, the trade balance, etc. No matter how it is derived, the operational content of the theory is a set of causal relationships between these aggregate variables. You can certainly shed light on relationships between aggregates using micro data. But the questions we are asking always need to be posed in terms of observable aggregates. The disdain for “reduced form” models is something we have to rid ourselves of.
Fourth, it is historical. There are few if any general laws for how “an economy” operates; what there are, are patterns that are more or less consistent over a certain span of time and space. Macroeconomics is also historical in a second sense: It deals with developments that unfold in historical time. (This, among other reasons, is why the intertemporal approach is fundamentally unsuitable.) We need fewer models of “the” business cycle, and more narrative descriptions of individual cycles. This requires a sort of figure-ground reversal in our thinking — instead of seeing concrete developments as case studies or tests of models, we need tosee models as embedded in concrete stories.
Fifth, it is monetary. The economies we live in are organized around money commitments and money flows, and most of the variables we are interested in are defined and measured in terms of money. These facts are not incidental. A model of a hypothetical non-monetary economy is not going to generate reliable intuitions about real economies. Of course it is sometimes useful to adjust money values for inflation, but it’s a bad habit to refer to the result quantities as “real” — it suggests that there is some objective quantity lying behind the monetary one, which is in no way the case.
In my ideal world, a macroeconomics education would proceed like this. First, here are the problems the external world is posing to us — the economic questions being asked by historians, policy makers, the business press. Second, here is the observable data relevant to those questions, here’s how the variables are defined and measured. Third, here are how those observables have evolved in some important historical cases. Fourth, here are some general patterns that seem to hold over a certain range— and just as important, here is the range where they don’t. Finally, here are some stories that might explain those patterns, that are plausible given what we know about how economic activity is organized.
Well, that’s my vision. Does it have anything to do with a plausible future of macroeconomics?
I certainly don’t expect established macroeconomists to throw out the work they’ve been doing their whole careers. Among younger economists, at least those whose interest in the economy is not strictly professional, I do think there is a fairly widespread recognition that macroeconomic theory is at an intellectual dead end. But the response is usually to do basically atheoretical empirical work, or go into a different field, like labor, where the constraints on theory are not so rigid. Then there is the heterodox community, which I come out of. I think there has been a great deal of interesting and valuable work within heterodox economics, and I’m glad to be associated with it. But as a project to change the views of the rest of the economics profession, it is clearly a failure.
As far as I can see, orthodox macroeconomic theory is basically unchallenged on its home ground.Nonetheless, I am moderately hopeful for the future, for two reasons.
First, academic macroeconomics has lost much of its hold on public debate. I have a fair amount of contact with policymakers, and in my experience, there is much less deference to mainstream economic theory than there used to be, and much more interest in alternative approaches. Strong deductive claims about the relationships between employment, inflation, wage growth, etc. are no longer taken seriously.
To be sure, there was always a gulf between macroeconomic theory and practical policymaking. But at one time, this could be papered over by a kind of folk wisdom — low unemployment leads to inflation, public deficits lead to higher interest rates, etc. — that both sides could accept. Under the pressure of the extraordinary developments of the past dozen years, the policy conversation has largely abandoned this folk wisdom — which, from my point of view, is real progress. At some point, I think, academic economics will recognize that it has lost contact with the policy conversation, and make a jump to catch up.
Keynes got a lot of things right, but one thing I think he got wrong was that “practical men are slaves to some defunct economist.” The relationship is more often the other way round. When practical people come to think about economy in new ways, economic theory eventually follows.
I think this is often true even of people who in their day job do theory in the approved style. They don’t think in terms of their models when they are answering real world questions. And this in turn makes our problem easier. We don’t need to create a new body of macroeconomic theory out of whole cloth. We just need to take the implicit models that we already use in conversations like this one, and bring them into scholarship.
That brings me to my second reason for optimism. Once people realize you don’t have to have microfoundations, that you don’t need to base your models on optimization by anyone, I think they will find that profoundly liberating. If you are wondering about, say, the effect of corporate taxation on productivity growth, there is absolutely no reason you need to model the labor supply decision of the representative household as some kind of intertemporal optimization. You can just, not do that. Whatever the story you’re telling, a simple aggregate relationship will capture it.
The microfounded approach is not helping people answer the questions they’re interested in. It’s just a hoop they have to jump through if they want other people in the profession to take their work seriously. As Jón suggests, a lot of what people see as essential in theory, is really just sociological conventions within the discipline. These sorts of professional norms can be powerful, but they are also brittle. The strongest prop of the current orthodoxy is that it is the orthodoxy. Once people realize they don’t have to do theory this way, it’s going to open up enormous space for asking substantive questions about the real world.
I think that once that dam breaks, it is going to sweep away most of what is now taught as macroeconomics. I hope that we’ll see something quite different in its place.
Once we stop chasing the will-o-wisp of general equilibrium, we can focus on developing a toolkit of models addressed to particular questions. I hope in the years ahead we’ll see a more modest but useful body of theory, one that is oriented to the concrete questions that motivate public debates; that embeds its formal models in a historical narrative; that starts from the economy as we observe it, rather than a set of abstract first principles; that dispenses with utility and other unobservables; and that is ready to learn from historians and other social scientists.
Mike Konczal and I have a piece in the New York Times arguing that the next few years could see a historic boom for the US economy, if policy makers recognize that strong demand and rising wages are good things, and don’t get panicked into turning toward austerity.
Mike and I and our colleagues at the Roosevelt Institute are planning a series of papers on “planning for the boom” over the coming year. The first, asking how high employment could plausibly rise under conditions of sustained strong demand, will be coming out later this month. In the meantime, here are some things I’ve written over the past few years, making the case that there is much more space for demand-led growth in the US economy than conventional estimates suggest, and that the benefits from pursuing it are broader than just producing more stuff.
In my recent post on the economics of the Rescue Plan, I highlighted the way in which the expansive public spending of the Biden administration implicitly embraces a bigger role for aggregate demand in the longer term trajectory of the economy and not just in short-run fluctuations:
Overheating may have short-term costs in higher inflation, inflated asset prices and a redistribution of income toward relatively scarce factors (e.g. urban land), but it also is associated with a long-term increase in productive capacity — one that may eventually close the inflationary gap on its own. Shortfalls on the other hand lead to a reduction in potential output, and so may become self-perpetuating as potential GDP declines.
I’ve continued making this argument in an ongoing debate with the University of Chicago’s Harold Uhlig at this new site Pairagraph. I also discussed it with David Beckworth on his excellent macroeconomics podcast.
In many ways, this story starts from debates in the mid 2010s about the need for continued stimulus, which got a big impetus from Bernie Sanders first campaign in 2016. I tried to pull together those arguments in my 2017 Roosevelt paper What Recovery? There, I argued that the failure of per-capita GDP to return to its previous trend after 2009 was a striking departure from previous recessions; that an aging population could not explain the fall in labor fore participation; that slower productivity growth could be explained at least in part by weak demand; and the the balance of macroeconomic risks favored stimulus rather than austerity.
In a more recent post, I noted that the strong growth and low unemployment of the later part of the decade, while good news in themselves, implied an even bigger demand shortfall in the aftermath of the recession:
In 2014, the headline unemployment rate averaged 6.2 percent. At that time, the benchmark for full employment (technically, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU) used by the federal government was 4.8 percent, suggesting a 1.4 point shortfall, equivalent to 2.2 million excess people out of work. But let’s suppose that today’s unemployment rate of 3.6 percent is sustainable—which it certainly seems to be, given that it is, in fact, being sustained. Then the unemployment rate in 2014 wasn’t 1.4 points too high but 2.6 points too high, nearly twice as big of a gap as policymakers thought at the time.
I made a similar set of arguments for a more academic audience in a chapter for a book on economics in the wake of the global financial crisis,“Macroeconomic Lessons from the Past Decade”. There, I argue that
the effects of demand cannot be limited to “the short run”. The division between a long-run supply-side and a short-run demand-side, while it may be useful analytically, does not work as a description of real world developments. Both the size of the labor force and productivity growth are substantially endogenous to aggregate demand.
This set of arguments is especially relevant in the context of climate change; if there is substantial slack in the economy, then public spending on decarbonization can raise current living standards even in the short run. Anders Fremstad, Mark Paul and I made this argument in a 2019 Roosevelt report, Decarbonizing the US Economy: Pathways toward a Green New Deal. I made the case much more briefly in a roundtable on decarbonization in The International Economy:
The response to climate change is often conceived as a form of austerity—how much consumption must we give up today to avoid the costs of an uninhabitable planet tomorrow? … The economics of climate change look quite different from a Keynesian perspective, in which demand constraints are pervasive and the fundamental economic problem is not scarcity but coordination. In this view, the real resources for decarbonization will not have to be withdrawn from other uses. They can come from an expansion of society’s productive capabilities, thanks to the demand created by clean-energy investment itself.
If you like your economics in brief video form, I’ve made this same argument about aggregate demand and climate change for Now This.
The World War II experience, which Mike and I highlight in the Times piece, is discussed at length in a pair of papers that Andrew Bossie and I wrote for Roosevelt last year. (Most of what I know about the economics of the war mobilization is thanks to Andrew.) In the first paper, The Public Role in Economic Transformation: Lessons from World War II, we look at the specific ways in which the US built a war economy practically overnight; the key takeaway is that while private contractors generally handled production itself, most investment, and almost all the financing of investment, came from the public sector. The second paper, Public Spending as an Engine of Growth and Equality: Lessons from World War II, looks at the macroeconomic side of the war mobilization.
Among the key points we make here are that potential output is much more elastic in response to demand than we usually assume; that both the labor force and productivity respond strongly to the level of spending; that the inflation associated with rapid growth often is a sign of temporary shortfalls or bottlenecks, which can be addressed in better ways than simply reducing aggregate spending; and that strong demand is a powerful force for equalizing the distribution of income. The lessons for the present are clear:
The wartime experience suggests that the chronic weak demand the US has suffered from for at least the past decade is even more costly than we had realized. Not only does inadequate spending lead to slower growth, it leads to lower wage gains particularly for those at the bottom and reinforces hierarchies of race and sex. Conversely, a massive public investment program in decarbonization or public health would not only directly address those crises, but could also be an important step toward reversing the concentration of income and wealth that is one of the great failures of economic policymaking over the past generation.
I also discuss the war experience in this earlier Dissent review of Mark Wilson’s book Destructive Creation, and in a talk I delivered at the University of Massachusetts in early 2020.
Alternative approaches to inflation control isn’t something I’ve written a lot about —until recently, the question hasn’t seemed very urgent. But Mike, me and our Roosevelt colleague Lauren Melodia did write a blog post last month about why it’s a mistake to worry about somewhat higher inflation numbers this year. One aspect of this is the “base effect” which is artificially increasing measured inflation, but it’s also important to stress that genuinely higher inflation is both a predictable result of a rapid recovery from the pandemic and not necessarily a bad thing.
A few years ago, Mike and I wrote a paper arguing for a broader toolkit at the Fed. Our focus at the time was on finding more ways to boost demand. But many of the arguments also apply to a situation — which we are definitely not in today, but may be at some point — where you’d want to rein demand in. Whichever way the Fed is pushing, it would be better to have more than one tool to push with.
Another important background debate for the Times piece is the idea of secular stagnation, which enjoyed a brief vogue in the mid 2010s. Unfortunately, the most visible proponent of this idea was Larry Summers, who … well, let’s not get into that here. But despite its dubious provenance, there’s a lot to be said for the idea that recent decades have seen a persistent tendency for total spending to fall short of the economy’s productive potential. In this (somewhat wonkish) blog post, I discussed this idea in terms of Roy Harrod’s model of economic growth, and suggested a number of factors that might be at work:
for secular, long-term trends tending to raise desired saving relative to desired investment we have: (1) the progressive satiation of consumption demand; (2) slowing population growth; (3) increasing monopoly power; and (4) the end of the industrialization process. Factors that might either raise or lower desired savings relative to investment are: (5) changes in the profit share; (6) changes in the fraction of profits retained in the business sector; (7) changes in the distribution of income; (8) changes in net exports; (9) changes in government deficits; and (10) changes in the physical longevity of capital goods. Finally, there are factors that will tend to raise desired investment relative to desired saving. The include: (11) consumption as status competition (this may offset or even reverse the effect of greater inequality on consumption); (12) social protections (public pensions, etc.) that reduce the need for precautionary and lifecycle saving; (13) easier access to credit, for consumption and/or investment; and (14) major technological changes that render existing capital goods obsolete, increasing the effective depreciation rate. These final four factors will offset any tendency toward secular stagnation.
Hysteresis — the effect of demand conditions on potential output — and secular stagnation are two important considerations that suggest that big boost in spending, as we are looking at now, could permanently raise the economy’s growth path. A third, less discussed consideration is that demand itself may be persistent. I discuss that possibility in a recent blog post.
An important aspect of an economic boom which we unfortunately could not fit into the op-ed is the way that faster growth and moderately higher inflation reduce the burden of debt for both the private and public sector. Historically, growth rates, inflation and interest rates have had a bigger effect on the household debt ratio than household borrowing has. This is a major focus of my scholarly work — see here and here. The same thing goes for public debt, as I’ve discussed in a blog post here. The degree to which both the past year’s stimulus and a possible future boom has/will strengthen balance sheets across the economy is seriously underappreciated, in my view.
The question of public debt has moved away from center stage recently. Criticism of public spending lately seems more focused on inflation and supposed ”labor supply constraints.” But if the anti-boom contingent shifts back toward scare stories about public debt, I’ve got pre-rebuttals written here and here.
Finally, I want to highlight something I wrote about a year ago: The Coronavirus Recession Is Just Beginning. There, I argued that the exceptional reduction in activity due to the pandemic would probably be followed by a conventional recession. You will note that this is more or less the opposite of the argument in the Times piece. That’s because my post least year was wrong! But I don’t think it was unreasonable to make that prediction at the time. What I didn’t take into account, what almost no one took into account, was the extraordinary scale of the stimulus over the past year. Well ok! Now, let’s build on that.
Here’s the very short version of this very long post:
Hysteresis means that a change in GDP today has effects on GDP many years in the future. In principle, this could be because it affects either future aggregate demand or potential output. These two cases aren’t distinguished clearly in the literature, but they have very different implications. The fact that the Great Recession was followed by a period of low inflation, slow wage growth and low interest rates, rather than the opposite, suggests that the persistent-demand form of hysteresis is more important than potential-output hysteresis. The experience of the Great Recession is consistent with perhaps 20 percent of a shock to demand in this period carrying over to demand in future periods. This value in turn lets us estimate how much additional spending would be needed to permanently return GDP to the pre-2007 trend: 50-60 percent of GDP, or $10-12 trillion, spread out over a number of years.
Supply Hysteresis and Demand Hysteresis
The last few years have seen renewed interest in hysteresis – the idea that shifts in demand can have persistent effects on GDP, well beyond the period of the “shock” itself. But it seems to me that the discussion of hysteresis doesn’t distinguish clearly between two quite different forms it could take.
On the one hand, demand could have persistent effects on output because demand influences supply – this seems to be what people usually have in mind. But on the other hand, demand itself might be persistent. In time-series terms, in this second story aggregate spending behaves like a random walk with drift. If we just look at the behavior of GDP, the two stories are equivalent. But in other ways they are quite different.
Let’s say we have a period in which total spending in the economy is sharply reduced for whatever reason. Following this, output is lower than we think it otherwise would have been. Is this because (a) the economy’s productive potential was permanently reduced by the period of reduced spending? Or is it (b) because the level of spending in the economy was permanently reduced? I will call the first case supply hysteresis and the second demand hysteresis.
On the left, supply hysteresis. On the right, demand hysteresis.
It might seem like a semantic distinction, but it’s not. The critical thing to remember is that what matters for much of macroeconomic policy is not the absolute level of output but the output gap — the difference between actual and potential output. If current output is above potential, then we expect to see rising inflation. (Depending on how “potential” is understood, this is more or less definitional.) We also expect to see rising wages and asset prices, shrinking inventories, longer delivery times, and other signs of an economy pushing against supply constraints. If current output is below potential, we expect the opposite — lower inflation or deflation, slower wage growth, markets in general that favor buyers over sellers. So while lower aggregate supply and lower aggregate demand may both translate into lower GDP, in other respects their effects are quite different. As you can see in my scribbles above, the two forms of hysteresis imply opposite output gaps in the period following a deep recession.
Imagine a hypothetical case where there is large fall in public spending for a few years, after which spending returns to its old level. For purposes of this thought experiment, assume there is no change in monetary policy – we’re at the ZLB the whole time, if you like. In the period after the depressed spending ends, will we have (1) lower unemployment and higher inflation than before, as the new income created during the period of high public spending leads to permanently higher demand. Or will we have (2) higher unemployment and lower inflation than if the spending had not occurred, because the period of high spending permanently raised labor force participation and productivity, while demand returns to its old level?
Supply hysteresis implies (1), that a temporary negative demand shock will lead to persistently higher inflation and lower unemployment (because the labor force will be smaller). Demand hysteresis implies (2), that a temporary negative demand shock will lead to permanently lower inflation and higher unemployment. Since the two forms of hysteresis make diametrically opposite predictions in this case, seems important to be clear which one we are imagining. Of course in the real world, could see a combination of both, but they are still logically distinct.
Most people reading this have probably seen a versions of the picture below. On the eve of the pandemic, real per-capita GDP was about 15 percent below where you’d expect it to be based on the pre-2007 trend. (Or based on pre-2007 forecasts, which largely followed the trend.) Let’s say we agree that the deviation is in some large part due to the financial crisis: Are we imagining that output has persistently fallen short of potential, or that potential has fallen below trend? Or again, it might be a combination of both.
In the first case, we would expect monetary policy to be generally looser in the period after a negative demand shock, in the second case tighter. In the first case we’d expect lower inflation in period after shock, in the second case higher.
It seems to me that most of the literature on hysteresis does not really distinguish these cases. This recent IMF paper by Antonio Fatas and coauthors, for example, defines hysteresis as a persistent effect of demand shocks on GDP. This could be either of the two cases. In the text of the paper,they generally assume hysteresis means an effect of demand on supply, and not a persistence of demand itself, but they don’t explicitly spell this out or make an argument for why the latter is not important.
It is clear that the original use of the term hysteresis was understood strictly as what I am calling supply hysteresis. (So perhaps it would be better to reserve the word for that, and make ups new name for the other thing.) If you read the early literature on hysteresis, like these widely-cited Laurence Ballpapers, the focus was on the European experience of the 1980s and 1990s; hysteresis is described as a change in the NAIRU, not as an effect on employment itself. The mechanism is supposed to be a specific labor-market phenomenon: the long term unemployed are no longer really available for work, even if they are counted in the statistics. In other words, sustained unemployment effectively shrinks the labor force, which means that in the absence of policy actions to reduce demand, the period following a deep recession will see faster wage growth and higher inflation than we would have expected.
(This specific form of supply hysteresis implies a persistent rise in unemployment following a downturn, just as demand hysteresis does. The other distinctions above still apply, and other forms of supply hysteresis would not have this implication.)
Set aside for now whether supply-hysteresis was a reasonable description of Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Certainly it was a welcome alternative to the then-dominant view that Europe needed high unemployment because of over-protective labor market institutions. But whether or not thinking of hysteresis in terms of the NAIRU made sense in that context, it does not make sense for either Europe or the US (or Japan) in the past decade. Everything we’ve seen has been consistent with a negative output gap — with actual output below potential — with a depressed level of demand, not of supply. Wage growth has been unexpectedly weak, not strong; inflation has been below target; and central banks have been making extra efforts to boost spending rather than to rein it in.
Assuming we think that all this is at least partly the result of the 2007-2009 financial crisis — and thinking that is pretty much the price of entry to this conversation — that suggests we should be thinking primarily about demand-hysteresis rather than supply-hysteresis. We should be asking not, or not only, how much and how durably the Great Recession reduced the country’s productive potential, but how how durably it reduced the flow of money through the economy.
It’s weird, once you think about it, how unexplored this possibility is in the literature. It seems to be taken for granted that if demand shocks have a lasting effect on GDP, that must be because they affect aggregate supply. I suspect one reason for this is the assumption — which profoundly shapes modern macroeconomics — that the level of spending in the economy is directly under the control of the central bank. As Peter Dorman observes, it’s a very odd feature of modern macroeconomic modeling that the central bank is inside the model — the reaction of the monetary authorities to, say, rising inflation is treated as a basic fact about the economy, like the degree to which investment responds to changes in the interest rate, rather than as a policy choice. In an intermediate macroeconomics textbook like Carlin and Soskice (a good one as far as they go), students are taught to think about the path of unemployment and inflation as coming out of a “central bank preference function,” which is taken as a fundamental parameter of the economy. Obviously there is no place for demand hysteresis in this framework. To the extent that we think of the actual path of spending in the economy as being chosen by the central bank as part of some kind of optimizing process, past spending in itself will have no effect on current spending.
Be that as it may, it seems hard to deny that in real economies, the level of spending today is strongly influenced by the level of spending in the recent past. This is the whole reason we see booms and depressions as discrete events rather than just random fluctuations, and why they’re described with metaphors of positive-feedback process like “stall speed” or “pump-priming.”1
How Persistent Is Demand?
Let’s say demand is at least somewhat persistent. That brings us to the next question: How persistent? If we were to get extra spending of 1 percent of GDP in one year, how much higher would we now expect demand to be several years later?
We can formalize this question if we write a simple model like:
Zt = Z*t + Xt
Z*t = (1+g) Z*t-1 + a(Zt-1 – Z*t-1)
Here Z is total spending or demand, Z* is the trend, what we might think of as normal or expected demand, g is the normal growth rate, and X is the influence of transitory influences outside of normal growth.
With a = 0, then, we have the familiar story where demand is a trend plus random fluctuations. If we see periods of above- and below-trend demand, that’s because the X influences are themselves extended over time. If a boom year is followed by another boom year, in this story, that’s because whatever forces generated it in the first year are still operating, not because the initial boom itself was persistent.
Alternatively, with a = 1, demand shocks are permanent. Anything that increases spending this year, should be expected to lead to just as much additional spending next year, the year after that, and so on.
Or, of course, a can have any intermediate value.
Think back to 2015, in the debate over the first Sanders’ campaign’s spending plans that was an important starting point for current discussions of hysteresis. The basic mistake Jerry Friedman was accused of making was assuming that changes in demand were persistent — that is, if the multiplier was, say 1.5, that an increase in spending of $500 billion would raise output by $750 billion not only in that year and but in all subsequent years. As his critics correctly pointed out, that is not how conventional multipliers work. In terms of my equations above, he was setting a=1, while the conventional models have a=0.
He didn’t spell this out, and I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I don’t think anyone did. But once you do, it seems to me that while Friedman was wrong in terms of the standard multiplier, he was not wrong about the economy — or at least, no more wrong than the critics. It seems to me that both sides were using unrealistically extreme values. Demand shocks aren’t entirely permanent, but they also aren’t entirely transitory. Arealistic model should have 0 < a < 1.
Demand Persistence and Fiscal Policy
There’s no point in refighting those old battles now. But the same question is very relevant for the future. Most obviously, if demand shocks are persistent to some significant degree, it becomes much more plausible that the economy has been well below potential for the past decade-plus. Which means there is correspondingly greater space for faster growth before we encounter supply constraints in the form of rising inflation.
Both forms of hysteresis should make us less worried about inflation. If we are mainly dealing with supply hysteresis, then rapid growth might well lead to inflation, but it would be a transitory phenomenon as supply catches up to the new higher level of demand.On the other hand, to the extent we are dealing with demand hysteresis, it will take much more growth before we even have to worry about inflation.
Of course, both forms of hysteresis may exist. In which case, both reason for worrying less about inflation would be valid. But we still need to be clear which we are talking about at any given moment.
A slightly trickier point is that the degree of demand persistence is critical for assessing how much spending it will take to get back to the pre-2007 trend.
If the failure to return to the pre-2007 is the lasting effect of the negative demand shock of the Great Recession, it follows thatsufficient spending should be able to reverse the damage and return GDP to its earlier trend. The obvious next question is, how much? The answer really depends on your preferred value for a. In the extreme (but traditional) case of a=0, each year we need enough spending to fill the entire gap, every year, forever. Given a gap of around 12 percent, if we assume a multiplier of 1.5 or so, that implies additional public spending of $1.6 trillion. In the opposite extreme case, where a=1, we just need enough total spending to fill the gap, spread out over however many years. In general, if we want to get close a permanent (as opposed to transitory) output gap of W, we need W/(a μ) total spending, where μ is the conventional multiplier.2
If you project forward the pre-2007 trend in real per-capita GDP to the end of 2019, you are going to get a number that is about 15% higher than the actual figure, implying an output gap on the order of $3.5 trillion. In the absence of demand persistence, that’s the gap that would need to be filled each year. But with persistent demand, a period of elevated public spending would gradually pull private spending up to the old trend, after which it would remain there without further stimulus.
What Does the Great Recession Tell Us about Demand Persistence?
At this point, it might seem that we need to turn to time-series econometrics and try to estimate a value for a, using whatever methods we prefer for such things. And I think that would be a great exercise!
But it seems to me we can actually put some fairly tight limits on a without any econometrics, simple by looking back to the Great Recession. Keep in mind, once we pick an output gap for a starting year, then given the actual path of GDP, each possible value of a implies a corresponding sequence of shocks Xt. (“Shock” here just means anything that causes a deviation of demand from its trend, that is not influenced by demand in the previous period.) In other words, whatever belief we may hold about the persistence of demand, that implies a corresponding belief about the size and duration of the initial fall in demand during the recession. And since we know a fair amount about the causes of the recession, some of these sequences are going to be more plausible than others.
The following figures are an attempt to do this. I start by assuming that the output gap was zero in the fourth quarter of 2004. We can debate this, of course,, but there’s nothing heterodox about this assumption — the CBO says the same thing. Then I assume that in the absence of exogenous disturbances, real GDP per capita would have subsequently grown at 1.4 percent per year. This is the growth rate during the expansion between the Great Recession and the pandemic; it’s a bit slower than the pre-recession trend.3 I then take the gap between this trend and actual GDP in each subsequent quarter and divide it into the part predictable from the previous quarter’s gap, given an assumed value for a, and the part that represents a new disturbance in that period. So each possible value of a, implies a corresponding series of disturbances. Those are what are shown in the figures.
If you’re not used to this kind of reasoning, this is probably a bit confusing. So let me put it a different way. The points in the graphs above show where real GDP would have been relative to the long-term trend if there had been no Great Recession. For example, if you think a = 0, then GDP in 2015 would have been just the same in the absence of the recession, so the values there are just the actual deviation from trend. So you can think of the different figures here as showing the exogenous shocks that would be required under different assumptions about persistence, to explain the actual deviation from trend. They are answering this question: Given your beliefs about how persistent demand is, what must you think GDP would have been in subsequent years in a world where the Great Recession did not take place? (Or maybe better, where the fall in demand form the housing bubble was fully offset by stimulus.)
The first graph, with persistence = 0, is easiest to understand. If there is no carryover of demand shocks from one period to the next, then there must be some factor reducing demand in each later period by the full extent of the gap from trend. If we move on to, say, the persistence=0.1 figure, that is saying that, if you think 10 percent of a demand shock is normally carried over into future periods, that means that there was something happening in 2012 that would have depressed demand by 2 percent relative to the earlier trend, even if there had been no Great Recession.
Because people are used to overcomplicated economics models, I want to stress again. What I am showing you here is what you definitionally believe, if you think that in the absence of the Great Recession, growth in the 2010s would have been at about the same rate it was, just from a higher base, and you think that whatever fraction of a change in spending in one year is carried over to the next year. There are no additional assumptions. I’m just showing what the logical corollary of those beliefs would be for the pattern of demand shocks,
Another important feature of these figures is how large the initial fall in demand is. Logically, if you think demand is very persistent, you must also think the initial shock was smaller. If most of the fall in spending in the first half of 2008, say, was carried over to the second half of 2008, then it takes little additional fall in spending in that period to match the observed path of GDP. Conversely, if you think that very little of a change in demand in one period carries over to the next one then the autonomous fall in demand in 2009 must have been larger.
The question now is, given what we know about the forces impacting demand a decade ago, which of these figures is most plausible? If there had been sufficient stimulus to completely eliminate the fall in demand in 2007-2009, how strong would the headwinds have been a few years late?
Based on what we know about the Great Recession, I think demand persistence in the 0.15 – 0.25 range most plausible. This suggests that a reasonable baseline guess for total spending required to return to the pre-2007 would be around 50 percent of GDP, spread out over a number of years. With an output gap of 15 percent of GDP, a multiplier of 1.5, and demand persistence of 0.2, we have 15 / (1.5 * 0.2) = 50 percent of GDP. This is, obviously, a very rough guess, but if you put me on the spot and asked how much spending over ten years it would take to get GDP permanently back to the pre-2007 trend, $10-12 trillion would be my best guess.
How do we arrive at persistence in the 0.15 – 0.25 range?
On the lower end, we can ask: What are the factors that would have pushed down demand in the mid 2010s, even in the absence of the Great Recession Remember, if we use demand persistence of 0.1, that implies there were factors operating in 2014 that would have reduced demand by 2 percent of GDP, even if the recession had not taken place. What would those be?
I don’t think it makes sense to say housing — housing prices had basically recovered by then. State and local spending is a better candidate — it remained quite depressed and I think it’s hard to see this as a direct effect of the recession. Relative to trend, state and local investment was down about 1 percent of GDP in 2014, while the federal stimulus was basically over. On the other hand, unless we think that monetary policy is totally ineffective, we have to include the stimulative effect of a zero policy rate and QE in our demand shocks. This makes me think that by 2014, the gap between actual GDP and the earlier trend was probably almost all overhang from the recession. And this implies a persistence of at least 0.15. (If you look back at the figures, you’ll see that with persistence=0.15, the implied shock reaches zero in 2014.)
Meanwhile, on the high end, a persistence of 0.5 would mean that the demand shock maxed out at a bit over 3 percent of GDP, and was essentially over by the second half of 2009. This seems implausibly small and implausibly brief. Residential investment fell from 6.5 percent of GDP in 2004 to less than 2.5 percent by 2010. And that is leaving aside housing wealth-driven consumption. Meanwhile, the ARRA stimulus didn’t really come online until the second half of 2009. I don’t believe monetary policy is totally ineffective, but I do think it operates slowly, especially on loosening side. So I find it hard to believe that the autonomous fall in demand in early 2009 was much less than 5 percent of GDP. That implies a demand persistence of no more than 0.25.
Within the 0.15 to 0.25 range, probably the most important variable is your judgement of the effectiveness of monetary policy and the ARRA stimulus. If you think that one or both was very effective, you might think that by mid-2010, they were fully offsetting the fall in demand from the housing bust. This would be consistent withpersistence around 0.25. Conversely, if you’re doubtful about the effectiveness of monetary policy and the ARRA (too little direct spending), you should prefer a value of 0.2 or 0.15.
In any case, it seems to me that the implied shocks with persistence in the 0.15 – 0.25 range look much more plausible than for values outside that range. I don’t believe that the underlying forces that reduced demand in the Great Recession had ceased to operate by the second half of 2009. I also don’t think that they were autonomously reducing demand by as much as 2 points still in early 2014.
You will have your own priors, of course. My fundamental point is that your priors on this stuff have wider implications. I have not seen anyone spell out the question of the persistence of demand in the way I have done here. But the idea is implicit in the way we talk about business cycles. Logically, a demand shortfall in any given period can be described as a mix of forces pulling down spending in that period, and the the ongoing effect of weak demand in earlier periods. And whatever opinion you have about the proportions of each, this can be quantified. What I am doing in this post, in other words, is not proposing a new theory, but trying to make explicit a theory that’s already present in these debates, but not normally spelled out.
Why Is Demand Persistent?
The history of real economies should be enough to convince us that demand can be persistent. Deep downturns — not only in the US after 2007, but in much of Europe, in Japan after 1990, and of course the Great Depression — show clearly that if the level of spending in an economy falls sharply for whatever reason, it is likely to remain low years later, even after the precipitating factor is removed. But why should economies behave this way?
I can think of a couple of reasons.
First, there’s the pure coordination story. Businesses pay wages to workers in order to carry out production. Production is carried out for sale. Sales are generated by spending. And spending depends on incomes, most of which are generated from production. This is the familiar reasoning of the multiplier, where it is used to show how an autonomous change in spending can lead to a larger (or smaller) change in output. The way the multiplier is taught, there is one unique level of output for each level of autonomous demand. But if we formalized the same intuition differently, we could imagine a system with multiple equilibria. Each would have a different level of income, expenditure and production, but in each one people would be making the “right” expenditure choices given their income.
We can make this more concrete in two ways. First, balance sheets. One reason that there is a link from current income to current expenditure is that most economic units are financially constrained to some degree. Even if you knew your lifetime income with great precision, you wouldn’t be able to make your spending decisions on that basis because, in general, you can’t spend the money you will receive in the distant future today.
Now obviously there is some capacity to shift spending around in time, both through credit and through spending down liquid assets. The degree to which this is possible depends on the state of the balance sheet. To the extent a period of depressed demand leaves households and businesses with weaker balance sheets and tighter financial constraints, it will result in lower spending for an extended period. A version of this idea was put forward by Richard Koo as a “balance sheet recession,” in a rather boldly titled book.
Finally there is expectations. There is not, after all, a true lifetime income out there for you to know. All you can do is extrapolate from the past, and from the experiences of other people like you. Businesses similarly must make decisions about how much investment to carry out based on extrapolation from the past – on what other basis could they do it?
A short period of unusually high or low demand may not move expectations much, but a sustained one almost certainly will. A business that has seen demand fall short of what they were counting on is going to make more conservative forecasts for the future. Again, how could they not? With the balance sheet channel, one could plausibly agree that demand shocks will be persistent but not permanent. But with expectations, once they have been adjusted, the resulting behavior will in general make them self-confirming, so there is no reason spending should ever return to its old path.
This, to me, is the critical point. Mainstream economists and policy makers worry a great deal about inflation expectations, and whether they are becoming “unanchored.” But expectations of inflation are not the only ones that can slip their moorings. Households and businesses make decisions based on expectations of future income and sales, and if those expectations turn out to be wrong, they will be adjusted accordingly. And, as with inflation, the outcomes of which people form expectations themselves largely depend on expectations.
This was a point emphasized by Keynes:
It is an essential characteristic of the boom that investments which will in fact yield, say, 2 per cent in conditions of full employment are made in the expectation of a yield of, say, 6 per cent, and are valued accordingly.
When the disillusion comes, this expectation is replaced by a contrary ‘error of pessimism’, with the result that the investments, which would in fact yield 2 per cent in conditions of full employment, are expected to yield less than nothing; and the resulting collapse of new investment then leads to a state of unemployment in which the investments, which would have yielded 2 per cent in conditions of full employment, in fact yield less than nothing. We reach a condition where there is a shortage of houses, but where nevertheless no one can afford to live in the houses that there are.
He continues the thought in terms that are very relevant today:
Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.
(Earlier this week, I gave a virtual presentation at an event organized by the Roosevelt Institute and the Green New Deal Network. Virtual events are inferior to live ones in many, many ways. But one way they are better, is that they are necessarily on video, and can be shared. Anyway, here is 25 minutes on why the economic situation calls for even more spending than the (surprisingly ambitious) proposals from the Biden administration, and also on why full employment shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to social justice and equity goals but as the best way of advancing them.)
The previous post got quite a bit of attention — more, I think, than anything I’ve written on this blog in the dozen years I’ve been doing it.
I would like to do a followup post replying to some of the comments and criticisms, but I haven’t had time and realistically may not any time soon, or ever. In the meantime, though, here is some existing content that might be relevant to people who would like to see the arguments in that post drawn out more fully.
Here is a podcast interview I did with some folks from Current Affairs a month or so ago. The ostensible topic is Modern Mone(tar)y Theory, but the conversation gave me space to talk more broadly about how to think about macroeconomic questions.
Here is a piece I wrote a couple years ago on Macroeconomic Lessons from the Past Decade. Bidenomics could be seen as a sort of deferred learning of the lessons from the Great Recession. So even though this was written before the pandemic and the election, there’s a lot of overlap here.
This report from Roosevelt, What Recovery? is an earlier stab at learning those lessons. I hope to be revisiting a lot of the topics here (and doing a better job with them, hopefully) in a new Roosevelt report that should be out in a couple of months.
If you like podcast interviews, here’s one I did with David Beckworth of Macro Musings following the What Recovery report, where we talked quite a bit about hysteresis and the limits of monetary policy, among other topics.
And here are some relevant previous past posts on this blog:
Some people are frustrated about the surrender on the minimum wage, the scaled-back unemployment insurance, the child tax credit that should have been a universal child allowance, the fact that most of the good things phase out over the next year or two.
On the other side are those who see it as a decisive break with neoliberalism. Both the Clinton and Obama administrations entered office with ambitious spending plans, only to abandon or sharply curtail them (respectively), and instead embrace a politics of austerity and deficit reduction. From this point of view, the fact that the Biden administration not only managed to push through an increase in public spending of close to 10 percent of GDP, but did so without any promises of longer-term deficit reduction, suggests a fundamental shift.
Personally, I share this second perspective. I am less surprised by the ways in which the bill was trimmed back, than by the extent that it breaks with the Clinton-Obama model. The fact that people like Lawrence Summers have been ignored in favor of progressives like Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, and deficit hawks like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have been left screeching irrelevantly from the sidelines, isn’t just gratifying as spectacle. It suggests a big move in the center of gravity of economic policy debates.
It really does seem that on the big macroeconomic questions, our side is winning.
To be clear, the bill did not pass because some economists out-argued other economists. It was a political outcome that was driven by political conditions and political work. Most obviously, it’s hard to imagine this Biden administration without the two Sanders campaigns that preceded it. (In the president’s speech after signing the bill, Bernie was the first second person credited.) If it’s true, as reported, that Schumer kept expanded unemployment benefits in the bill only by threatening Manchin that the thing would not pass the House without them, then the Squad also deserves a lot of credit.
Still, from my parochial corner, it’s interesting to think about the economic theory implied by the bill. Implicitly, it seems to me, it represents a big break with prevailing orthodoxy.
Over the past generation, macroeconomic policy discussions have been based on a kind of textbook catechism that goes something like this: Over the long run, potential GDP grows at a rate based on supply-side factors — demographics, technological growth, and whatever institutions we think influence investment and labor force participation. Over the short run, there are random events that can cause actual spending to deviate from potential, which will be reflected in a higher or lower rate of inflation. These fluctuations are more or less symmetrical, both in frequency and in cost. The job of the central bank is to adjust interest rates to minimize the size of these deviations. The best short-term measure of how close the economy is to potential is the unemployment rate; at any given moment, there’s a minimum level of unemployment consistent with price stability. Smoothing out these fluctuations has real short run benefits, but no effects on long-term growth. The government budget balance, meanwhile, should not be used to stabilize demand, but rather should be kept at a level that ensures a stable or falling debt ratio; large fiscal deficits may be very costly. Finally, while it may be necessary to stabilize overall spending in the economy, this should be done in a way that minimizes “distortions” of the pattern of economic activity and, in particular, does not reduce the incentive to work.
Policy debates — though not textbooks — have been moving away from this catechism for a while. Jason Furman’s New View of Fiscal Policy is an example I often point to; you can also see it in many statements from Powell and other Fed officials, as I’ve discussed here and here. But these are, obviously, just statements. The size and design of ARPA is a more consequential rejection of this catechism. Without being described as such, it’s a decisive recognition of half a dozen points that those of us on the left side of the macroeconomic debate have been making for years.
1. The official unemployment rate is an unreliable guide to the true degree of labor market slack, all the time and especially in downturns. Most of the movement into and out of employment is from people who are not officially counted as unemployed. To assess labor market slack, we should also look at the employment-population ratio, and also at more direct measures of workers’ bargaining power like quit rates and wage increases. By these measures, the US pre-pandemic was still well short of the late 1990s.More broadly, there is not a well defined labor force, but asmooth gradient of proximity to employment. The short-term unemployed are the closest, followed by the longer-term unemployed, employed people seeking additional work, discouraged workers, workers disfavored by employers due to ethnicity, credentials, etc. Beyond this are people whose claim on the social product is not normally exercised by paid labor – retired people, the disabled, full-time caregivers – but might come to be if labor market conditions were sufficiently favorable.
2. The balance of macroeconomic risks is not symmetrical. We don’t live in an economy that fluctuates around a long-term growth path, but one that periodically falls into recessions or depressions. These downturns are a distinct category of events, not a random “shock” to production or desired spending. Economic activity is a complex coordination problem; there are many ways it can break down or be interrupted that result in a fall inspending, but not really any way it can abruptly accelerate. (There are no “positive shocks” for the same reason that there are lots of poisons but no wonder drugs.) It’s easy to imagine real-world developments that could causes businesses to abruptly cut back their investment plans, but not that would cause them to suddenly and unexpectedly scale them up. In real economies, demand shortfalls are much more frequent, persistent and damaging than is overheating. And to the extent the latter is a problem, it is much easier to interrupt the flow of spending than to restart it.
3. The existence of hysteresis is one important reason that demand shortfalls are much more costly than overshooting. Overheating may have short-term costs in higher inflation, inflated asset prices and a redistribution of income toward relatively scarce factors (e.g. urban land), but it also is associated with a long-term increase in productive capacity — one that may eventually close the inflationary gap on its own. Shortfalls on the other hand lead to a reduction in potential output, and so may become self-perpetuating as potential GDP declines. Hysteresis also means that we cannot count on the economy returning to its long-term trend on its own — big falls in demand may persist indefinitely unless they are offset by some large exogenous boost to demand. Which in turn means that standard estimates of potential output understate the capacity of output to respond to higher spending.
4. A full employment or high pressure economy has benefits that go well beyond the direct benefits of higher incomes and output. Hysteresis is part of this — full employment is a spur to innovation and faster productivity growth. But there are also major implications for the distribution of income. Those who are most disadvantaged in the labor market, are the ones who benefit most from very low unemployment. The World War II experience, and the subsequent evolution of the racial wage gap, suggests that historically, sustained tight labor markets have been the most powerful force for closing the gap between black and white wages.
I’m not sure how much people in the administration and Congress were actually making arguments like these in framing the bill. But even if they weren’t explicitly argued for, some mix of them logically follows from the willingness to pass something so much larger than the conventional estimates of the output gap would imply. Some mix of them also must underly the repeated statements that we can’t do too much, only too little, and from the recognition that the costs of an inadequate stimulus in 2009 were not just lower output for a year or two, butan extended period of slow growth and stagnant wages. When Schumer says that in 2009, “we cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years,” he is espousing a model of hysteresis, even if he doesn’t use the word.
On other points, there’s a more direct link between the debate over the bill and the shift in economic vision it implies.
5. Public debt doesn’t matter. Maybe I missed it, but as far as I can tell, in the push for the Rescue Plan neither the administration nor the Congressional leadership made even a gesture toward deficit reduction, not even a pro forma comment that it might be desirable in principle or in the indefinite long run. The word “deficit” does not seem to have occurred in any official statement from the president since early February — and even then it was in the form of “it’s a mistake to worry about the deficit.” Your guide to being a savvy political insider suggests appropriate “yes, buts” to the Rescue Plan — too much demand will cause inflation, or alternatively that demand will collapse once the spending ends. Nothing about the debt. Things may change, of course, but at the moment it’s astonishing how completely we have won on this one.
6. Work incentives don’t matter. For decades, welfare measures in the US have been carefully tailored to ensure that they did not broaden people’s choices other than wage labor. The commitment to maintaining work incentives was strong enough to justify effectively cutting off all cash assistance to families without anyone in paid employment — which of course includes the poorest.The flat $600 pandemic unemployment insurance was a radical departure from this — reaching everyone who was out of work took priority over ensuring that no one was left better off than they would be with a job. The empirical evidence that this had no effect on employment is informative about income-support programs in general. Obviously $300 is less than $600, but it maintains the priority of broad eligibility. Similarly, by allowing families with no wages to get the full benefit, making the child tax credit full refundable effectively abandons work incentives as a design principle (even if it would be better at that point to just make it a universal child allowance.) As many people have pointed out, this is at least directionally 180 degrees from Clinton-era “welfare reform.”
7.Direct, visible spending is better than indirect spending or spending aimed at altering incentives. For anyone who remembers the debates over the ARRA at the start of the Obama administration, it’s striking how much the Rescue Plan leans into direct, visible payments to households. The plan to allow the child tax credit to be paid out in monthly installments may have some issues (and, again, would certainly work better if it were a flat allowance rather than a tax credit) but what’s interesting here is that it reflects a view that making the payments more salient is a good thing, not a bad thing.
In other areas, the conceptual framework hasn’t moved as far as I would have hoped, though we are making progress:
8. Means testing is costly and imprecise. As Claudia Sahm, Matt Bruenig and others have forcefully argued, there’s a big disconnect between the way means testing is discussed and the way it actually operates. When the merits of income-based spending are talked about in the abstract, it’s assumed that we know every household’s income and can assign spending precisely to different income groups. But when we come to implement it, we find that the main measure of income we use is based on tax records from one to two years earlier; there are many cases where the relevant income concept isn’t obvious; and the need to document income creates substantial costs and uncertainties for beneficiaries. Raising the income thresholds for things like the child tax credit is positive, but the other side of that is that once the threshold gets high enough it’s perverse to means-test at all: In order to exclude a relatively small number of high-income families you risk letting many lower-income families fall through the cracks.
9. Weak demand is an ongoing problem, not just a short-term one. The most serious criticism of the ARPA is, I think, that so many of its provisions are set to phase out at specific dates when they could be permanent (the child tax credit) or linked to economic conditions (the unemployment insurance provisions). This suggests an implicit view that the problems of weak demand and income insecurity are specific to the coronavirus, rather than acute forms of a chronic condition. This isn’t intended as a criticism of those who crafted the bill — it may well be true that a permanent child tax credit couldn’t be passed under current conditions.
Still, the arguments in support of many of the provisions are not specific to the pandemic, and clearly imply that these measures ought to be permanent. If the child tax credit will cut child poverty by half, why would you want to do that for only one year? If a substantial part of the Rescue Plan should on the merits be permanent, that implies a permanently larger flow of public spending. The case needs to be made for this.
10. The public sector has capacities the private sector lacks. While Biden’s ARPA is a big step forward from Obama’s ARRA in a lot of ways, one thing they have in common is a relative lack of direct public provision. The public health measures are an exception, of course, and the aid to state and local governments — a welcome contrast with ARRA — is public spending at one remove, but the great majority of the money is going to boost private spending. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in this specific context, but it does suggest that, unlike the case with public debt, theinstitutional and ideological obstacles to shifting activities from for-profit to public provision are still formidable.
My goal in listing these points isn’t, to be clear, to pass judgement on the bill one way or the other. Substantively, I do think it’s a big victory and a clear sign that elections matter. But my interest in this particular post is to think about what it says about how thinking about economic policy is shifting, and how those shifts might be projected back onto economic theory.
What would a macroeconomics look like that assumed that the economy was normally well short of supply constraints rather than at potential on average, or was agnostic about whether there was a meaningful level of potential output at all? What would it look like if we thought that demand-induced shifts in output are persistent, in both directions? Without the assumption of a supply-determined trend which output always converges to, it’s not clear there’s a meaningful long run at all. Can we have a macroeconomic theory that dispenses with that?
One idea that I find appealing is to think of supply as constraining the rate of growth of output, rather than its level. This would fit with some important observable facts about the world — not just that demand-induced changes in output are persistent, but also that employment tends to grow (and unemployment tends to fall) at a steady rate through expansions, rather than a quick recovery and then a return to long-run trend. The idea that there is a demographically fixed long-run employment-population ratio flies in the face of the major shifts of employment rates within demographic groups. A better story, it seems to me, is that there is a ceiling on the rate that employment can grow — say 1.5 or 2 percent a year — without any special adjustment process; faster growth requires drawing new people into the labor force, which typically requires faster wage growth and also involves various short run frictions. But, once strong growth does generate a larger labor force, there’s no reason for it to revert back to its old trend.
More broadly, thinking of supply constraints in terms of growth rates rather than levels would let us stop thinking about the supply side in terms of an abstract non monetary economy “endowed” with certain productive resources, and start thinking about it in terms of the coordination capabilities of markets. I feel sure this is the right direction to go. But a proper model needs to be worked out before it is ready for the textbooks.
The textbook model of labor markets that we still teach justifies a focus on “flexibility”, where real wages are determined by on productivity and a stronger position for labor can only lead to higher inflation or unemployment. Instead, we need a model where the relative position of labor affects real as well as nominal wages, andin which faster wage growth can be absorbed by faster productivity growth or a higher wage share as plausibly as by higher prices.
Or again, how do we think about public debt and deficits once we abandon the idea that a constant debt-GDP ratio is a hard constraint? One possibility is that we think the deficit matters, but debt does not, just as we now think think that the rate of inflation matters but the absolute price level does not.To earlier generations of economists, the idea that prices could just rise forever without limit, would have seemed insane. But today we find it perfectly reasonable, as long as the rise over any given period is not too great. Perhaps we’ll come to the same view of public debt. To the extent that we do care about the debt ratio, we need to foreground the fact that its growth over time depends as much on interest, inflation and growth rates as it does on new borrowing. For the moment, the fact that interest rates are much lower than growth rates is enough to convince people past concerns were overblown. But to regard that as a permanent rather than contingent solution, we need, at least, to get rid of the idea of a natural rate of interest.
In short, just as a generation of mainstream macroeconomic theory was retconned into an after-the-fact argument for an inflation-targeting central bank, what we need now is textbooks and theories that bring out, systematize and generalize the reasoning that justifies a great expansion of public spending, unconstrained by conventional estimates of potential output, public debt or the need to preserve labor-market incentives. The circumstances of the past year are obviously exceptional, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be made the basis of a general rule. For the past generation, macroeconomic theory has been largely an abstracted parable of the 1970s, when high interest rates (supposedly) saved us from inflation. With luck, perhaps the next generation will learn macroeconomics as a parable of our own time, when big deficits saved us from secular stagnation and the coronavirus.
(At the big economics conference earlier in January, I spoke on a virtual panel in response to Michael Hudon’s talk on the this topic. HIs paper isn’t yet available, but he has made similar arguments here and here. My comments were in part addressed to his specific paper, but were also a response to the broader discussion around financialization. A version of this post will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Review of Radical Political Economics.)
Michael Hudson argues that the industrial capitalism of a previous era has given way to a new form of financial capitalism. Unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, he argues, today’s financial capitalists claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents broadly. They resemble landlords and other non-capitalist elites, whose pursuit of private wealth does not do anything to develop the forces of production, broaden the social division of labor, or prepare the ground for socialism.
Historically, the progressive character of capitalism comes from three dimensions on which capitalists differ from most elites. First, they do not merely claim the surplus from production, but control the production process itself; second, they do not use the surplus directly but must realize it by selling it on a market; and third, unlike most elites who acquire their status by inheritance or some similar political process, a capitalist’s continued existence as a capitalist depends on their ability to generate a large enough money income to acquire new means of production. This means that capitalists are under constant pressure to reduce the costs through technical improvements to the production process. In some cases the pressure to reduce costs may also lead to support for measures to socialize the reproduction costs of labor power via programs like public education, or for public provision of infrastructure and other public services.
In Hudson’s telling, financial claims on the surplus are essentially extractive; the pursuit of profit by finance generates pressure neither for technical improvements in the production process, nor for cost-reducing public investment. The transition from one to the other as the dominant form of surplus appropriation is associated with a great many negative social and political developments — lower wages, privatization of public goods, anti-democratic political reforms, tax favoritism and so on. (The timing of this transition is not entirely clear.)
Otherwritershavetold versions of this story, but Hudson’s is one of the more compelling I have seen. I am impressed by the breadth of his analysis, and agree with him on almost everything he finds objectionable in contemporary capitalism.
I am not, however, convinced. I do not think that “financial” and “industrial” capital can be separated in the way he proposes. I think it is better to consider them two moments of a single process. Connected with this, I am skeptical of the simple before and after periodization he proposes. Looking at the relationship between finance and production historically, we can see movements in both directions, with different rhythms in different places and sectors. Often, the growth of industrial capitalism in one industry or area has gone hand in hand with a move toward more financial or extractive capitalism somewhere else. I also think the paper gives a somewhat one-sided account of developments in the contemporary United States. Finally, I have concerns about the political program the analysis points to.
1.
Let’s start with idea that industrial capitalists support public investments in areas like education, health care or transportation because they lower the reproduction costs of labor. This is less important for owners of land, natural resources or money, whose claim on the social surplus doesn’t mainly come through employing labor.
I wouldn’t say this argument is wrong, exactly, but I was struck by the absence of any discussion of the other ways in which industrial capitalists can reduce the costs of labor — by lowering the subsistence level of workers, or reducing their bargaining power, or extracting more work effort, or shifting employment to lower-wage regions or populations. The idea that the normal or usual result of industrial capitalists’ pursuit of lower labor costs is public investment seems rather optimistic.
Conversely, public spending on social reproduction only reduces costs for capitalist class insofar as the subsistence level is fixed. As soon as we allow for some degree of conflict or bargaining over workers share of the social product, we introduce possibility that socializing reproduction costs does not lower the price of labor, but instead raises the living standards of the human beings who embody that labor. Indeed, that’s why many people support such public spending in the first place!
On the flip side, the case against landlords as a force for capitalist progress is not as straightforward as the paper suggests.
Ellen Meiksins Wood argues, convincingly, that the origins of what Hudson calls industrial capitalism should really be placed in the British countryside, where competition among tenants spurred productivity-boosting improvements in agricultural land. It may be true that these gains were mostly captured by landlords in the form of higher rents, but that does not mean they did not take place. Similarly, Gavin Wright argues that one of the key reasons for greater public investment in the ante-bellum North compared with the South was precisely the fact that the main form of wealth in the North was urban land. Land speculators had a strong interest in promoting canals, roads and other forms of public investment, because they could expect to capture gains from them in the form of land value appreciation.
In New York City, the first subways were built by a company controlled by August Belmont, who was also a major land speculator. In a number of cases, Belmont — and later the builders of the competing BMT system — would extend transit service into areas where they or their partners had assembled large landholdings, to be able to develop or sell off the land at a premium after transit made it more valuable. The possibility of these gains was probably a big factor in spurring private investment in transit service early in the 20th century.
Belmont can stand as synecdoche for the relationship of industrial and financial capital in general. As the organizer of the labor engaged in subway construction, as the one who used the authority acquired through control of money to direct social resources to the creation of new means of transportation, he appears as an industrial capitalist, contributing to the development of the forces of production as well as reducing reproduction costs by giving workers access to better, lower-cost housing in outlying areas. As the real estate speculator profiting by selling off land in those areas at inflated prices, he appears as a parasitic financial capitalist. But it’s the same person sitting in both chairs. And he only engaged in the first activity in the expectation of the second one.
None of this is to defend landlords. But it is to make the point that the private capture of the gains from the development of the forces of production is, under capitalism, a condition of that development occurring in the first place, as is the coercive control over labor in the production process. If we can acknowledge the contributions of a representative industrial capitalist like Henry Frick, author of the Homestead massacre, to the development of society’s productive forces, I think we can do the same for a swindler like August Belmont.
More broadly, it seems to me that the two modes of profit-seeking that Hudson calls industrial and financial are not the distinct activities they appear as at first glance.
It might seem obvious that profiting from a new, more efficient production process is very different from profiting by using the power of the state to get some legal monopoly or just compel people to pay you. It is true that the first involves real gains for society while the second does not. But how do those social gains come to be claimed as profit by the capitalist? First, by the exclusive access they have to the means of production that allows them to claim the product, to the exclusion of everyone else who helped produce it. And second, by their ability to sell it at a price above its cost of production that allows them to profit, rather than everyone who consumes the product. In that sense, the features that Hudson points to as defining financial capitalism are just as fundamental to industrial capitalism. Under capitalism, making a product is not a distinct goal from extracting a rent. Capturing rents is the whole point.
The development of industry may be socially progressive in a way that the development of finance is not. But that doesn’t mean that the income and authority of the industrial capitalist is different from that of the financial capitalist, or even that they are distinct people.
Hudson is aware of this, of course, and mentions that from a Marxist standpoint the capitalist is also a rentier. If he followed this thought further I think he would find it creates problems for the dichotomy he is arguing for.
Let’s take a step back.
Capital is a process, a circuit: M – C – P – C’ – M’. Money is laid out to gain control of commodities and labor power, which are the combined in a production process. The results of this process are then converted back into money through sale on the market.
At some points in this circuit, capital is embodied in money, at other points in labor power and means of production. We often think of this circuit as happening at the level of an individual commodity, but it applies just as much at larger scales. We can think of the growth of an industrial firm as the earlier part of the circuit where value comes to be embodied in a concrete production process, and payouts to shareholders as the last part where value returns to the money form.
This return to money form just as essential to the circuit of capital as production is. It’s true that payouts to shareholders absorb large fraction of profits, much larger than what they put in. We might see this as a sign that finance is a kind of parasite. But we could also see shareholder payouts as where the M movement is happening. Industrial production doesn’t require that its results be eventually realized as money. But industrial capitalism does. From that point of view, the financial engineers who optimize the movement of profits out of the firm are as integral a part of industrial capital as the engineer-engineers who optimize the production process.
2.
My second concern is with the historical dimension of the story. The sense one gets from the paper is that there used to be industrial capitalism, and now there is financial capitalism. But I don’t think history works like that.
It is certainly true that the forms in which a surplus is realized as money have changed over time. And it is also true that while capital is a single process, there are often different human beings and institutions embodying it at different points in the circuit.
In a small business, the same person may have legal ownership of the enterprise, directly manage the production process, and receive the profits it generates. Hudson is certainly right that this form of enterprise was more common in the 19th century, which among other things allowed Marx to write in Volume One about “the capitalist” without having to worry too much about exactly where this person was located within the circuit. In a modern corporation, by contrast, production is normally in the hands of professional managers, while the surplus flows out to owners of stock or other financial claims. This creates the possibility for the contradiction between the conditions of generating a surplus and of realizing it, which always exists under capitalism, to now appear as a conflict between distinct social actors.
The conversion of most large enterprises to publicly traded corporations took place in the US in a relatively short period starting in the 1890s. The exact timing is of course different elsewhere, but this separation of ownership and control is a fairly universal phenomenon. Even at the time this was perceived as a momentous change, and if we are looking for a historical break that I think this is where to locate it. Already by the early 20th century, the majority of great fortunes took the form of financial assets, rather than direct ownership of businesses. And we can find contemporary observers like Veblen describing “sabotage” of productive enterprises by finance (in The Price System and the Engineers) in terms very similar to the ones that someone like Michael Hudson uses today.
It’s not unreasonable to describe this change as financialization. But important to realize it’s not a one-way or uniform transition.
In 1930s, Keynes famously described American capital development as byproduct of a casino, again in terms similar to Hudson’s. In The General Theory, an important part of the argument is that stock markets have a decisive influence on real investment decisions. But the funny thing is that at that moment the trend was clearly in the opposite direction. The influence of financial markets on corporate managers diminished after the 1920s, and reached its low point a generation or so after Keynes wrote.
If we think of financialization as the influence of financial markets over the organization of production, what we see historically is an oscillation, a back and forth or push and pull, rather than a well-defined before and after. Again, the timing differs, but the general phenomenon of a back and forth movement between more and less financialized capitalism seems to be a general phenomenon. Postwar Japan is often pointed to, with reason, as an example of a capitalist economy with a greatly reduced role for financial markets. But this was not a survival from some earlier era of industrial capitalism, but rather the result of wartime economic management, which displaced financial markets from their earlier central role.
Historically, we also find that moves in one direction in one place can coexist with or even reinforce moves the other way elsewhere. For example, the paper talks about the 19th-century alliance of English bankers and proto-industrialists against landlords in the fight to overturn the corn laws. Marx of course agreed that this was an example of the progressive side of capitalist development. But we should add that the flip side of Britain specializing in industry within the global division of labor was that other places came to specialize more in primary production, with a concomitant increase in the power of landlords and reliance on bound labor. Something we should all have learned from the new historians of capitalism like Sven Beckert is how intimately linked were the development of wage labor and industry in Britain and the US North with he development of slavery and cotton production in the US South; indeed they were two sides of the same process. Similar arguments have been made linking the development of English industry to slave-produced sugar (Williams), and to the second serfdom and de-urbanization in Eastern Europe (Braudel).
Meanwhile, as theorists of underdevelopment like Raul Prebisch have pointed out, it’s precisely the greater market power enjoyed by industry relative to primary products that allows productivity gains in industry to be captured by the producers, while productivity gains in primary production are largely captured by the consumers. We could point to the same thing within the US, where tremendous productivity advances in agriculture have led to cheap food, not rich farmers. Here again, the relationship between the land-industry binary and the monopoly-competition binary is the opposite as Hudson’s story. This doesn’t mean that they always line up that way, either, but it does suggest that the relationship is at least historically contingent.
3.
Let’s turn now to the present. As we all know, since 1980 the holders of financial assets have reasserted their claims against productive enterprises, in the US and in much of the rest of the world. But I do not think this implies, as Hudson suggests, that today’s leading capitalists are the equivalent of feudal landowners. While pure rentiers do exist, the greatest accumulations of capital remain tied to control over the production process.
Even within the financial sector, extraction is only part of the story. A major development in finance over the past generation has been the growth of specialized venture capital and private equity funds. Though quite different in some ways — private equity specializing in acquisition of existing firms, venture capital in financing new ones — both can be seen as a kind of de-financialization, in the sense that both function to re-unite management and ownership. It is true of course, that private equity ownership is often quite destructive to the concrete production activities and social existence of a firm. But private equity looting happens not through the sort of arm’s length tribute collection of al landlord, but through direct control over the firm’s activity. The need for specialized venture capital funds to invest in money-losing startups, on the other hand, is certainly consistent with the view that strict imposition of financial criteria is inconsistent with development of production. But it runs against a simple story in which industry has been replaced by finance. (Instead, the growth of these sectors looks like an example of the way the capital looks different at different moments in its circuit. Venture capitalists willing to throw money at even far-fetched money-losing enterprises, are specialists in the M-C moment, while the vampires of private equity are specialists in C-M.)
It is true, of course, that finance as an industry has grown relative to the economy over the past 50 years, as have the payments made by corporations to shareholders. Hudson describes these trends as a “relapse back toward feudalism and debt peonage”, but I don’t think that’s right. The creditor and the landlord stand outside the production process. A debt peon has direct access to means of production, but is forced to hand over part of the product to the creditor or landlord. Capitalists by contrast get their authority and claim on surplus from control over the production process. This is as true today as when Marx wrote.
There is a widespread view that gains from ownership of financial assets have displaced profits from production even more many nonfinancial corporations, and that household debt service is a form of exploitation that now rivals the work place as a source of surplus, as households are forced to take on more debt to meet their subsistence needs. But these claims are mistaken — they confuse the temporary rise in interest rates after 1980 for a deeper structural shift.
As Joel Rabinovichconvincingly shows, the increased financial holdings of nonfinancial corporations mostly represent goodwill from mergers and stakes in subsidiaries, not financial assets in the usual sense, while the apparent rise in their financial income of in the 1980s is explained by the higher interest on their cash holdings. With respect to household debt, it continues to overwhelmingly finance home ownership, not consumption; is concentrated in the upper part of the income distribution; and rose as a result of the high interest rates after 1980, not any increase in household borrowing. (See my discussion here.) With the more recent decline in interest rates, much of this supposed finacialization has reversed. Contrary to Hudson’s picture of an ever-rising share of income going to debt service, interest payments in the US now total about 17 percent of GDP, the same as in 1975.
On the other side, the transformation of the production process remains the source of the biggest concentrations of wealth. Looking at the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, it is striking how rare generalized financial wealth is, as opposed to claims on particular firms. Jeff Bezos (#1), Bill Gates (#2) and Mark Zuckerberg (#3) all gained their wealth through control over newly created production processes, not via financial claims on existing ones. Indeed, of the top 20 names on the list, all but one are founders and active managers of companies or their immediate families. (The lone exception is Warren Buffet.) Finance and real estate are the source of a somewhat greater share of the fortunes found further down the list, but nowhere near a majority.
Companies like Wal Mart and Google and Amazon are clearly examples of industrial capitalism. They sell products, they lower prices, they put strong downward pressure on costs. Cheap consumer goods at Wal Mart lower the costs of subsistence for workers today just as cheap imported food did for British workers in the 19th century.
Does this mean Amazon and Wal Mart are good? No, of course not. (Tho we shouldn’t deny that their logistical systems are genuine technological accomplishments that a socialist society could build on.) My point is that the greatest concentrations of wealth today still arise from the competition to sell more desirable goods at lower prices. This runs against the idea of dominance by rentiers or passive rent-extractors.
Finally, I have some concerns about the political implications of this analysis. If we take Hudson’s story seriously, we may see a political divide between industrial capital and finance capital, and the possibility of a popular movement seeking alliance with the former. I am doubtful about this. While finance is a distinct social actor, I do not think it is useful to think of it as a distinct type of capital, one that is antagonistic to productive capital. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s better to see finance as weapon by which the claims of wealth holders are asserted against the rest of society.
Certainly I don’t think the human embodiments of industrial capital would agree that they are victims of finance. Many of the features of contemporary capitalism he objects would appear to them as positive developments. Low wages, weak labor and light taxes are desired by capitalists in general, not just landlords and bankers. The examples Hudson points to of industrial capitalists and their political representatives supporting measures to socialize the costs of reproduction are real and worth learning from, but as products of specific historical circumstances rather than as generic features of industrial capitalism. We would need a better account of the specific conditions under which capital turns to programs for reducing labor costs in this way — rather than, for example, simply forcing down wages — to assess to what extent, and in which areas, they exist today.
Even if it were feasible, I am not sure this kind of program does much to support a more transformative political project. Hudson quotes Simon Patten’s turn-of-the-last-century description of public services like education as a “fourth factor of production” that is necessary to boost industrial competitiveness, with the implication that similar arguments might be successful today. Frankly, this kind of language strikes me as more characteristic of our neoliberal era than a basis for an alternative to it. As a public university teacher, I reject the idea that my job is to raise the productive capacity of workers, or reduce the overhead costs of American capital. Nor do I think we will be successful in defending education and other public goods from defunding and austerity using this language. And of course, it is not the only language available to us. As Mike Konczal notes in his new book Freedom from the Market, historically the case for public provision has often been made in terms of removing certain areas of life from the market, as well as the kinds of arguments Hudson describes.
More fundamentally, the framing here suggests that the objectionable features of capitalism stem from it not being capitalist enough. The focus on monopolies and rents suggests that what is wanted is more vigorous market competition. It is a strikingly Proudhonian position to say that the injustice and waste of existing capitalism stem from the failure of prices to track costs of production. Surely from a Marxist perspective it is precisely the pressure to compete on the basis of lower costs that is the source of that injustice and waste.
There is a great deal that is interesting and insightful in this paper, as there always is in Michael Hudson’s work. But I remain unconvinced that financial and industrial capitalism can be usefully thought of as two opposed systems, or that we can tell a meaningful historical story about a transition between them. Industry and finance are better thought of, in my view, as two different sides of the same system, or two moments in the same circuit of capital.Capitalism is a system in which human creative activity is subordinated to the endless accumulation of money. In this sense, finance is as integral to it as production. A focus on on the industrial-financial divide risks attributing the objectionable effects of accumulation to someone else — a rentier or landlord — leaving a one-sided and idealized picture of productive capital as the residual.
This being URPE, many people here will have at one time or another sung “is there aught we have in common with the greedy parasites?” Do we think those words refer to the banker only, or to the boss?
UPDATE: My colleague Julio Huato made similar arguments in response to an earlier version of Hudson’s paper a few years ago, here.
(A couple days ago I gave a talk — virtually, of course — to a group of activists about the state of the economy. This is an edied and somewha expanded version of what I said.)
The US economy has officially been in recession since February. But what we’ve seen so far looks very different from the kind of recessions we’re used to, both because of the unique nature of the coronavirus shock and because of the government response to it. In some ways, the real recession is only beginning now. And if federal stimulus is not restored, it’s likely to be a very deep and prolonged one.
In a normal recession, the fundamental problem is an interruption in the flow of money through the economy. People or businesses reduce their spending for whatever reason. But since your spending is someone else’s income, lower spending here reduces incomes and employment over there — this is what we call a fall in aggregate demand. Businesses that sell less need fewer workers and generate less profits for their owners. That lost income causes other people to reduce their spending, which reduces income even more, and so on.
Now, a small reduction in spending may not have any lasting effects — people and businesses have financial cushions, so they won’t have to cut spending the instant their income falls, especially if they expect the fall in income to be temporary. So if there’s just a small fall in demand, the economy can return to its old growth path quickly. But if the fall in spending is big enough to cause many workers and businesses to cut back their own spending, then it can perpetuate itself and grow larger instead of dying out. This downward spiral is what we call a recession. Usually it’s amplified by the financial system, as people who lose income can’t pay their debts, which makes banks less willing or able to lend, which forces people and businesses that needed to borrow to cut back on their spending. New housing and business investment in particular are very dependent on borrowed money, so they can fall steeply if loans become less available. That creates another spiral on top of the first. Or in recent recessions, often it’s the financial problems that come first.
But none of that is what happened in this case. Businesses didn’t close because there wasn’t enough money flowing through the economy, or because they couldn’t get loans. They closed because under conditions of pandemic and lockdown they couldn’t do specific things — serve food, offer live entertainment, etc. And to a surprising extent, the stimulus and unemployment benefits meant that people who stopped working did not lose income. So you could imagine that once the pandemic was controlled, we could return to normal much quicker than in a normal recession.
That was the situation as recently as August.
The problem is that much of the federal spending dried up at the end of July. And that is shifting the economy from a temporary lockdown toward a self-perpetuating fall in incomes and employment.
One way we see the difference between the lockdown and a recession is the industries affected. The biggest falls in employment were in entertainment and recreation and food service, which are industries that normally weather downturns pretty well, while construction and manufacturing, normally the most cyclical industries, have been largely unaffected. Meanwhile, employment in health and education, which in previous recessions has not fallen at all, this time has declined quite a bit.1
If we look at employment, for instance which is normally our best measure of business-cycle conditions, we again see something very different from past recessions. Total employment fell by 20 million in April and May of this year. In just two months, 15 percent of American workers lost their jobs. There’s nothing remotely comparable historically — more jobs were lost in the Depression, but that was a slow process over years not just two months. The post-World War II demobilization was the closest, but that only involved about half the fall in employment. So this is a job loss without precedent.
Since May, about half of those 20 million people have gone back to work. We’re about 10 million jobs down from a year ago. Still, that might look like a fairly strong recovery.
But in the spring, the vast majority of unemployed people described themselves as on temporary layoff — they expected to go back to their jobs. The recovery in employment has almost all come from that group. If we look at people who say they have lost their jobs permanently, that number has continued to grow. Back in May, almost 90 percent of the people out of work described it as temporary. Today, it’s less than half. Business closings and layoffs that were expected to be temporary in the spring are now becoming permanent. So in a certain sense, even though unemployment is officially much lower than it was a few months ago, unemployment as we usually think of it is still rising.
We can see this even more dramatically if we look at income. Most people don’t realize how large and effective the stimulus and pandemic unemployment insurance programs were. Back in the spring, most people — me included — thought there was no way the federal government would spend on the scale required to offset the hob losses. The history of stimulus in this country — definitely including the ARRA under Obama — has always been too little, too late. Unemployment insurance in particular has historically had such tight eligibility requirements that the majority of people who lose their jobs never get it.
But this time, surprisingly, the federal stimulus was actually big enough to fill the hole of lost incomes. The across-the-board $600 per week unemployment benefit reached a large share of people who had lost their jobs, including gig workers and others who would not have been able to get conventional UI. And of course the stimulus checks reached nearly everyone. As a result, if we look at household income, we see that as late as July, it was substantially above pre-recession levels. This is a far more effective response than the US has made to any previous downturn. And it’s nearly certain that the biggest beneficiaries were lower-wage workers.
We can see the effects of this in the Household Pulse surveys conducted by the Census. Every week since Mach, they’ve been asking a sample of households questions about their economic situation, including whether they have enough money to meet their basic needs. And the remarkable thing is that over that period, there has been no increase in the number of people who say they can’t pay their rent or their mortgage or can’t get enough to eat. About 9 percent of families said they sometimes or often couldn’t afford enough to eat, and about 20 percent of renters said they were unable to pay the last month’s rent in full. Those numbers are shockingly high. But they are no higher than they were before the pandemic.
To be clear – there are millions of people facing serious deprivation in this country, far more than in other rich countries. But this is a longstanding fact about the United States. It doesn’t seem to be any worse than it was a year ago. And given the scale of the job loss, that is powerful testimony to how effective the stimulus has been.
But the stimulus checks were one-off, and the pandemic unemployment insurance expired at end of July. Fortunately there are other federal unemployment supplements, but they are nowhere as generous. So we are now seeing the steep fall in income that we did not see in the first five months of the crisis.
That means we may now be about to see the deep recession that we did not really get in the spring and summer. And history suggests that recovery from that will be much slower. If we look at the last downturn, it took five full years after the official end of the recession for employment to just get back to its pre-recession level. And in many ways, the economy had still not fully recovered when the pandemic hit.
One thing we may not see, though, is a financial crisis. The Fed is in some ways one of the few parts of our macroeconomic policy apparatus that works well, and it’s become even more creative and aggressive as a result of the last crisis. In the spring, people were talking about a collapse in credit, businesses unable to get loans, people unable to borrow. But this really has not happened. And there’s good reason to think that the Fed has all the tools they need if a credit crunch did develop, if some financial institutions to end up in distress. Even if we look at state and local governments, where austerity is already starting and is going to be a big part of what makes this recession severe, all the evidence is that they aren’t willing to borrow, not that they can’t borrow.
Similarly with the stock market — people think it’s strange that it’s doing well, that it’s delinked from the real economy, or that it’s somehow an artificial result of Fed intervention. To be clear, there’s no question that low interest rates are good for stock prices, but that’s not artificial — there’s no such thing as a natural interest rate.
More to the point, by and large, stocks are doing well because profits are doing well. Stock market indexes dominated by a small number of large companies, and many of those have seen sales hold up or grow. Again, so far we haven’t seen a big fall in total income. So businesses in general are not losing sales. What we have seen is a division of businesses into winners and losers. The businesses most affected by the pandemic have seen big losses of sales and profits and their share prices have gone down. But the businesses that can continue to operate have done well. So there’s nothing mysterious in the fact that Amazon’s stock price, for instance, has risen, and there’s no reason to think it’s going to fall. If you look at specific stocks, you see that by and large the ones that are doing well, the underlying business is doing well.
This doesn’t mean that what’s good for the stock market is good for ordinary workers. But again, that’s always been true. Shareholders don’t care about workers, they only care about the flow of profits their shares entitle them to. And if you’re a shareholder in a company that makes most of its sales online, that flow of profits is looking reasonably healthy right now.
So going forward, I think the critical question is whether we see any kind of renewed stimulus. If we do, it’s still possible that the downward income-expenditure spiral can be halted. At some point soon that will be much harder.
While looking for something else, I came across this 1956 article on monetary policy by Erwin Miller. It’s a fascinating read, especially in light of current discussions about, well, monetary policy in a changing world. Reading the article was yet another reminder that, in many ways, debates about central banking were more sophisticated and far-reaching in the 1950s than they are today.
The recent discussions have been focused mainly on what the goals or targets of monetary policy should be. While the rethinking there is welcome — higher wages are not a reliable sign of rising inflation; there are good reasons to accept above-target inflation, if it developed — the tool the Fed is supposed to be using to hit these targets is the overnight interest rate faced by banks, just as it’s been for decades. The mechanism by which this tool works is basically taken for granted — economy-wide interest rates move with the rate set by the Fed, and economic activity reliably responds to changes in these interest rates. If this tool has been ineffective recently, that’s just about the special conditions of the zero lower bound. Still largely off limits are the ideas that, when effective, monetary policy affects income distribution and the composition of output and not just its level, and that, to be effective, monetary policy must actively direct the flow of credit within the economy and not just control the overall level of liquidity.
Miller is asking a more fundamental question: What are the institutional requirements for monetary policy to be effective at all? His answer is that conventional monetary policy makes sense in a world of competitive small businesses and small government, but that different tools are called for in a world of large corporations and where the public sector accounts for a substantial part of economic activity. It’s striking that the assumptions he already thought were outmoded in the 1950s still guide most discussions of macroeconomic policy today.1
From his point of view, relying on the interest rate as the main tool of macroeconomic management is just an unthinking holdover from the past — the “normal” world of the 1920s — without regard for the changed environment that would favor other approaches. It’s just the same today — with the one difference that you’ll no longer find these arguments in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.2
Rather than resort unimaginatively to traditional devices whose heyday was one with a far different institutional environment, authorities should seek newer solutions better in harmony with the current economic ‘facts of life.’ These newer solutions include, among others, real estate credit control, consumer credit control, and security reserve requirements…, all of which … restrain the volume of credit available in the private sector of the economy.
Miller has several criticisms of conventional monetary policy, or as he calls it, “flexible interest rate policies” — the implicit alternative being the wartime policy of holding key rates fixed. One straightforward criticism is that changing interest rates is itself a form of macroeconomic instability. Indeed, insofar as both interest rates and inflation describe the terms on which present goods trade for future goods, it’s not obvious why stable inflation should be a higher priority than stable interest rates.
A second, more practical problem is that to the extent that a large part of outstanding debt is owed by the public sector, the income effects of interest rate changes will become more important than the price effects. In a world of large public debts, conventional monetary policy will affect mainly the flow of interest payments on existing debt rather than new borrowing. Or as Miller puts it,
If government is compelled to borrow on a large scale for such reasons of social policy — i.e., if the expenditure programs are regarded as of such compelling social importance that they cannot be postponed merely for monetary considerations — then it would appear illogical to raise interest rates against government, the preponderant borrower, in order to restrict credit in the private sphere.
Arguably, this consideration applied more strongly in the 1950s, when government accounted for the majority of all debt outstanding; but even today governments (federal plus state and local) accounts for over a third of total US debt. And the same argument goes for many forms of private debt as well.
As a corollary to this argument — and my MMT friends will like this — Miller notes that a large fraction of federal debt is held by commercial banks, whose liabilities in turn serve as money. This two-step process is, in some sense, equivalent to simply having the government issue the money — except that the private banks get paid interest along the way. Why would inflation call for an increase in this subsidy?
Miller:
The continued existence of a large amount of that bank-held debt may be viewed as a sop to convention, a sophisticated device to issue needed money without appearing to do so. However, it is a device which requires that a subsidy (i.e., interest) be paid the banks to issue this money. It may therefore be argued that the government should redeem these bonds by an issue of paper money (or by an issue of debt to the central bank in exchange for deposit credit). … The upshot would be the removal of the governmental subsidy to banks for performing a function (i.e., creation of money) which constitutionally is the responsibility of the federal government.
This argument, I’m sorry to say, does not really work today — only a small fraction of federal debt is now owned by commercial banks, and there’s no longer a link, if there ever was, between their holdings of federal debt and the amount of money they create by lending. There are still good arguments for a public payments system, but they have to be made on other grounds.
The biggest argument against using a single interest rate as the main tool of macroeconomic management is that it doesn’t work very well. The interesting thing about this article is that Miller doesn’t spend much time on this point. He assumes his readers will already be skeptical:
There remains the question of the effectiveness of interest rates as a deterrent to potential private borrowing. The major arguments for each side of this issue are thoroughly familiar and surely demonstrate most serious doubt concerning that effectiveness.
Among other reasons, interest is a small part of overall cost for most business activity. And in any situation where macroeconomic stabilization is needed, it’s likely that expected returns will be moving for other reasons much faster than a change in interest rates can compensate for. Keynes says the same thing in the General Theory, though Miller doesn’t mention it.3 (Maybe in 1956 there wasn’t any need to.)
Because the direct link between interest rates and activity is so weak, Miller notes, more sophisticated defenders of the central bank’s stabilization role argue that it’s not so much a direct link between interest rates and activity as the effect of changes in the policy rate on banks’ lending decisions. These arguments “skillfully shift the points of emphasis … to show how even modest changes in interest rates can bring about significant credit control effects.”
Here Miller is responding to arguments made by a line of Fed-associated economists from his contemporary Robert Roosa through Ben Bernanke. The essence of these arguments is that the main effect of interest rate changes is not on the demand for credit but on the supply. Banks famously lend long and borrow short, so a bank’s lending decisions today must take into account financing conditions in the future. 4 A key piece of this argument — which makes it an improvement on orthodoxy, even if Miller is ultimately right to reject it — is that the effect of monetary policy can’t be reduced to a regular mathematical relationship, like the interest-output semi-elasticity of around 1 found in contemporary forecasting models. Rather, the effect of policy changes today depend on their effects on beliefs about policy tomorrow.
There’s a family resemblance here to modern ideas about forward guidance — though people like Roosa understood that managing market expectations was a trickier thing than just announcing a future policy. But even if one granted the effectiveness of this approach, an instrument that depends on changing beliefs about the long-term future is obviously unsuitable for managing transitory booms and busts.
A related point is that insofar as rising rates make it harder for banks to finance their existing positions, there is a chance this will create enough distress that the Fed will have to intervene — which will, of course, have the effect of making credit more available again. Once the focus shifts from the interest rate to credit conditions, there is no sharp line between the Fed’s monetary policy and lender of last resort roles.
A further criticism of conventional monetary policy is that it disproportionately impacts more interest-sensitive or liquidity-constrained sectors and units. Defenders of conventional monetary policy claim (or more often tacitly assume) that it affects all economic activity equally. The supposedly uniform effect of monetary policy is both supposed to make it an effective tool for macroeconomic management, and helps resolve the ideological tension between the need for such management and the belief in a self-regulating market economy. But of course the effect is not uniform. This is both because debtors and creditors are different, and because interest makes up a different share of the cost of different goods and services.
In particular, investment, especially investment in housing and other structures, is mo sensitive to interest and liquidity conditions than current production. Or as Miller puts it, “Interest rate flexibility uses instability of one variety to fight instability of a presumably more serious variety: the instability of the loanable funds price-level and of capital values is employed in an attempt to check commodity price-level and employment instability.” (emphasis added)
The point that interest rate changes, and monetary conditions generally, change the relative price of capital goods and consumption goods is important. Like much of Miller’s argument, it’s an unacknowledged borrowing from Keynes; more strikingly, it’s an anticipation of Minsky’s famous “two price” model, where the relative price of capital goods and current output is given a central role in explaining macroeconomic dynamics.
If we take a step back, of course, it’s obvious that some goods are more illiquid than others, and that liquidity conditions, or the availability of financing, will matter more for production of these goods than for the more immediately saleable ones. Which is one reason that it makes no sense to think that money is ever “neutral.”5
Miller continues:
In inflation, e.g., employment of interest rate flexibility would have as a consequence the spreading of windfall capital losses on security transactions, the impairment of capital values generally, the raising of interest costs of governmental units at all levels, the reduction in the liquidity of individuals and institutions in random fashion without regard for their underlying characteristics, the jeopardizing of the orderly completion of financing plans of nonfederal governmental units, and the spreading of fear and uncertainty generally.
Some businesses have large debts; when interest rates rise, their earnings fall relative to businesses that happen to have less debt. Some businesses depend on external finance for investment; when interest rates rise, their costs rise relative to businesses that are able to finance investment internally. In some industries, like residential construction, interest is a big part of overall costs; when interest rates rise, these industries will shrink relative to ones that don’t finance their current operations.
In all these ways, monetary policy is a form of central planning, redirecting activity from some units and sectors to other units and sectors. It’s just a concealed, and in large part for that reason crude and clumsy, form of planning.
Or as Miller puts it, conventional monetary policy
discriminates between those who have equity funds for purchases and those who must borrow to make similar purchases. … In so far as general restrictive action successfully reduces the volume of credit in use, some of those businesses and individuals dependent on bank credit are excluded from purchase marts, while no direct restraint is placed on those capable of financing themselves.
In an earlier era, Miller suggests, most borrowing was for business investment; most investment was externally financed; and business cycles were driven by fluctuations in investment. So there was a certain logic to focusing on interest rates as a tool of stabilization. Honestly, I’m not sure if that was ever true.But I certainly agree that by the 1950s — let alone today — it was not.
In a footnote, Miller offers a more compelling version of this story, attributing to the British economist R. S. Sayers the idea of
sensitive points in an economy. [Sayers] suggests that in the English economy mercantile credit in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and foreign lending in the later decades of that century were very sensitive spots and that the bank rate technique was particularly effective owing to its impact upon them. He then suggests that perhaps these sensitive points have given way to newer ones, namely, stock exchange speculation and consumer credit. Hence he concludes that central bank instruments should be employed which are designed to control these newer sensitive areas.
This, to me, is a remarkably sophisticated view of how we should think about monetary policy and credit conditions. It’s not an economywide increase or decrease in activity, which can be imagined as a representative household shifting their consumption over time; it’s a response of whatever specific sectors or activities are most dependent on credit markets, which will be different in different times and places. Which suggests that a useful education on monetary policy requires less calculus and more history and sociology.
Finally, we get to Miller’s own proposals. In part, these are for selective credit controls — direct limits on the volume of specific kinds of lending are likely to be more effective at reining in inflationary pressures, with less collateral damage. Yes, these kinds of direct controls pick winners and losers — no more than conventional policy does, just more visibly. As Miller notes, credit controls imposed for macroeconomic stabilization wouldn’t be qualitatively different from the various regulations on credit that are already imposed for other purposes — tho admittedly that argument probably went further in a time when private credit was tightly regulated than in the permanent financial Purge we live in today.
His other proposal is for comprehensive security reserve requirements — in effect generalizing the limits on bank lending to financial positions of all kinds. The logic of this idea is clear, but I’m not convinced — certainly I wouldn’t propose it today. I think when you have the kind of massive, complex financial system we have today, rules that have to be applied in detail, at the transaction level, are very hard to make effective. It’s better to focus regulation on the strategic high ground — but please don’t ask me where that is!
More fundamentally, I think the best route to limiting the power of finance is for the public sector itself to take over functions private finance currently provides, as with a public payments system, a public investment banks, etc. This also has the important advantage of supporting broader steps toward an economy built around human needs rather than private profit. And it’s the direction that, grudgingly but steadily, the response to various crises is already pushing us, with the Fed and other authorities reluctantly stepping in to perform various functions that the private financial system fails to. But this is a topic for another time.
Miller himself is rather tentative in his positive proposals. And he forthrightly admits that they are “like all credit control instruments, likely to be far more effective in controlling inflationary situations than in stimulating revival from a depressed condition.” This should be obvious — even Ronald Reagan knew you can’t push on a string. This basic asymmetry is one of the many everyday insights that was lost somewhere in the development of modern macro.
The conversation around monetary policy and macroeconomics is certainly broader and more realistic today than it was 15 or 20 years ago, when I started studying this stuff. And Jerome Powell — and even more the activists and advocates who’ve been shouting at him — deserves credit for the Fed;s tentative moves away from the reflexive fear of full employment that has governed monetary policy for so long. But when you take a longer look and compare today’s debates to earlier decades, it’s hard not to feel that we’re still living in the Dark Ages of macroeconomics
(Cross-posted from the Roosevelt Institute blog. I am hoping to start doing these kinds of posts on new economic data somewhat regularly.)
On Friday, the the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the unemployment figures for May. As expected, the reported unemployment rate was very low—3.6 percent, the same as last month. Combined with the steady growth in employment over the past few years, this level of unemployment—not seen since the 1960s—suggests an exceptionally strong labor market by historical standards.On one level this really is good news for the economy. But at the same time it is very bad news for economic policy: The fact that employment this low is possible, shows that we have fallen even farther short of full employment in earlier years than we thought.
Some skeptics, of course, will cast doubts on how meaningful the BLS numbers are. The headline unemployment rate, they will argue, understates true slack in the labor market; many of the jobs being created are low-wage and insecure; workers’ overall position is still weak and precarious by historical standards.
This is all true. But it is also true that the unemployment numbers are not an isolated outlier. Virtually every other measure also suggests a labor market that is relatively favorable to workers, at least by the standards of the past 20 years.
The broader unemployment measures published by the BLS, while higher than the headline rate, have come down more or less in lockstep with it. (The new release shows that the BLS’s broadest measure of unemployment, U-6, continued to decline in May, thanks to a steep fall in the number of people working part-time because they can’t find full-time work.) The labor force participation rate, after declining for a number of years, has now started to trend back upward, suggesting that people who might have given up on finding a job a few years ago are once again finding it worthwhile to look for one. The fraction of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs, at 2.3 percent, is now higher than it ever got during the previous business cycle. The quit rate is a good measure of labor market tightness—one of former Fed chair Janet Yellen’s preferred measures—because it shows you how people evaluate their own job prospects; people are much more likely to quit their current job if they expect to get a better one. Reported job openings, a longstanding measure of labor market conditions, are at their highest level on record, with employers reporting that nearly 5 percent of positions are unfilled. Wage growth, which was nowhere to be seen well into the official recovery, has finally begun to pick up, with wage growth noticeably faster since 2016 than in the first six years of the expansion. In the nonfinancial business sector—where the shares of labor and capital are most easily measured—the share of value added going to labor has finally begun to tick up, from a steady 57 percent from 2011 to 2014 up to 59 percent by 2017. Though still far short of the 65 percent of value added claimed by labor at the height of the late-1990s boom, the recent increase does suggest an environment in which bargaining power has at last begun to shift in favor of workers.
For progressives, it can be a challenge to talk about the strengthening labor market. Our first instinct is often to call attention to the ways in which workers’ position is still worse than it was a generation ago, and to all the ways that the labor market is still rigged in favor of employers. This instinct is not wrong, but it is only one side of the picture. At the same time, we need to call attention to the real gains to working people from a high-pressure economy—one where aggregate demand is running ahead of available labor.
A high-pressure economy is especially important for those at the back of the hiring queue. People sometimes say that full employment is fine, but that it doesn’t help people of color, younger people, or those without college degrees. This thinking, however, is backwards. It is educated white men with plenty of experience whose job prospects depend least on overall labor market conditions; their employment prospects are good whether overall unemployment rates are high or low. It is those at the back of the hiring queue—Black Americans, those who have received less education, people with criminal records, and others discriminated against by potential employers—who depend much more on a strong labor market. The Atlanta Fed’s useful wage tracker shows this clearly: Wage growth for lower-wage, non-white, and less-educated workers lagged behind that of college-educated white workers during the high-unemployment years following the recession. Since 2016, however, that pattern has reversed, with the biggest wage gains for nonwhite workers and those at the bottom of the wage distribution. This pattern has been documented in careful empirical work by Josh Bivens and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute, who show that, historically, tight labor markets have disproportionately benefited Black workers and raised wages most at the bottom.
Does this mean we should be satisfied with the state of macroeconomic policy—if not in every detail, at least with its broad direction?
No, it means just the opposite. Labor markets do seem to be doing well today. But that only shows that macroeconomic performance over the past decade was even worse than we thought.
This is true in a precise sense. Macroeconomic policy always aims at keeping the economy near some target. Whether we define the target as potential output or full employment, the goal of policy is to keep the actual level of activity as close to it as possible. But we can’t see the target directly. We know how high gross domestic product (GDP) growth is or how low unemployment is, but we don’t know how high or how low they could be. Everyone agrees that the US fell short of full employment for much of the past decade, but we don’t know how far short. Every month that the US records an unemployment rate below 4 percent suggests that these low unemployment rates are indeed sustainable. Which means that they should be the benchmark for full employment. Which also means that the economy fell that much further short of full employment in the years after the 2008-2009 recession—and, indeed, in the years before it.
For example: In 2014, the headline unemployment rate averaged 6.2 percent. At that time, the benchmark for full employment (technically, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU) used by the federal government was 4.8 percent, suggesting a 1.4 point shortfall, equivalent to 2.2 million excess people out of work. But let’s suppose that today’s unemployment rate of 3.6 percent is sustainable—which it certainly seems to be, given that it is, in fact, being sustained. Then the unemployment rate in 2014 wasn’t 1.4 points too high but 2.6 points too high, which is nearly twice as big of a gap as policymakers thought at the time. Again, this implies that the failure of demand management after the Great Recession was even worse than we thought.
And not just after it. For most of the previous expansion, unemployment was above 5 percent, and the labor share was falling. At the time, this was considered full employment – indeed, the self-congratulation over the so-called Great Moderation and “amazing success” of economic policy reached a crescendo in this period. But if a perofrmance like today’s was possible then — and why shouldn’t it have been? — then what policymakers were actually presiding over was an extended stagnation. As Minnesota Fed chair Narayan Kocherlakota – one of the the few people at the economic-policy high table who seems to have learned something from the past decade – points out, the US “output gap has been negative for almost the entirety of the current millenium.”
These mistakes have consequences. For years now, we have been repeatedly told that the US is at or above full employment—claims that have been repeatedly proved wrong as the labor market continues to strengthen. Only three years ago, respectable opinion dismissed the idea that, with sufficient stimulus, the unemployment could fall below 4 percent as absurd. As a result, we spent years talking about how to rein in demand and bring down the deficit, when in retrospect it is clear that we should have been talking about big new public spending programs to boost demand.
This, then, is a lesson we can draw from today’s strong unemployment numbers. Strong economic growth does improve the bargaining position of workers relative to employers, just as it has in the past. The fact that the genuine gains for working people over the past couple years have only begun to roll back the losses of the past 20 doesn’t mean that strong demand is not an important goal for policy. It means that we need much more of it, sustained for much longer. More fundamentally, strong labor markets today are no grounds for complacency about the state of macroeconomic policy. Again, the fact that today’s labor market outcomes are better than people thought possible a few years ago shows that the earlier outcomes were even worse than we thought. The lesson we should take is not that today’s good numbers are somehow fake; they are real, or at least they reflect a real shift from the position of a few years ago. Rather, the lesson we should take is that we need to set our sights higher. If today’s strong labor markets are sustainable—and there’s no reason to think that they are not—then we should not accept a macroeconomic policy consensus that has been willing to settle for so much less for so long.
