The Slack Wire

The Dressmaker

An interesting fact about the world we live in is that, for all the talk about robots replacing human labor, every item of clothing you own was made by a human being sitting at a sewing machine. In fact, you could argue that the whole idea of a robot revolution is, like most science fiction fantasies, simply a literalization of a current social fact — in this case, the disappearance of manual workers from the social world of rich Westerners. Everyone who writes about the Star Trek future works in a building where living people empty the trash cans and scrub the toilets; but since they are never required to treat those people as human beings, they might as well be robots. In some cases I would go a step further, and say the robot revolution expresses a wish: The wish that the people whose bodies create the conditions for our existence could be dismissed from humanity once and for all.

Robot fantasies are everywhere. Much rarer is work that reveals the human hands behind the commodities. I’m a big fan of David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China. Especially striking in that movie is the contrast between the way the American importer of mardis gras beads talks about the Chinese workers who produce them, and the way the factory manager in China does. In the imagination of the importer, the Chinese workers are antlike automatons, with no desire except for labor. The factory has a high fence around it, he explains, in order to keep out all the eager workers who would otherwise sneak in to join the assembly line. For the manager, on the other hand, discipline is the overriding problem. He says he only hires young women because they are more obedient, but even so they are constantly refusing to comply with his orders, distracted by friendships and love affairs, sneaking out of their dormitories. They must be punished often and harshly, he says, otherwise they won’t work. The change in perspective once you pass that sign that says “No admittance except on business” is no different than 150 years ago.

I don’t know of any similar tracing of the path of an ordinary piece of clothing from the shopfloor to the display racks, though there must be some. But I just read a nice piece by Roberto Saviano on the origins of one extraordinary piece of clothing, in a sweatshop in southern Italy. Here’s an excerpt — it’s a bit long but worth reading.

From Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano:

The workers, men and women, came up to toast the new contract. They faced a grueling schedule: first shift from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., with an hour’s break to eat, second shift from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. The women were wearing makeup and earrings, and aprons to protect their clothes from the glue, dust, and machine grease. Like Superman, who takes off his shirt and reveals his blue costume underneath, they were ready to go out to dinner as soon as they removed their aprons. The men were sloppier, in sweatshirts and work pants. …

One of the winning contractor’s workers was particularly skilled: Pasquale. A lanky figure, tall, slim, and a bit hunchbacked; his frame curved behind his neck onto his shoulders, a bit like a hook. The stylists sent designs directly to him, articles intended for his hands only. His salary didn’t fluctuate, but his tasks varied, and he some how conveyed an air of satisfaction. I liked him immediately, the moment I caught sight of his big nose. Even though he was still young, Pasquale had the face of an old man. A face that was constantly buried in fabric, fingertips that ran along seams. Pasquale was one of the only workers who could buy fabric direct. Some brandname houses even trusted him to order materials directly from China and inspect the quality himself. …

Pasquale and I became close. He was like a prophet when he spoke about fabric and was overly fastidious in clothing stores; it was impossible even to go for a stroll with him because he’d plant himself in front of every shop window and criticize the cut of a jacket or feel ashamed for the tailor who’d designed such a skirt. He could predict the longevity of a particular style of pants, jacket, or dress, and the exact number of washings before the fabric would start to sag. Pasquale initiated me into the complicated world of textiles. I even started going to his home. His family—his wife and three children—made me happy. They were always busy without ever being frenetic.

That evening the smaller children were running around the house barefoot as usual, but without making a racket. Pasquale had turned on the television and was flipping channels, but all of a sudden he froze. He squinted at the screen, as if he were nearsighted, though he could see perfectly well. No one was talking, but the silence became more intense. His wife, Luisa, must have sensed something because she went over to “the television and clasped her hand over her mouth, as if she’d just witnessed something terrible and were holding back a scream. On TV Angelina Jolie was treading the red carpet at the Oscars, dressed in a gorgeous garment. One of those custom-made outfits that Italian designers fall over each other to offer to the stars. An outfit that Pasquale had made in an underground factory in Arzano. All they’d said to him was “This one’s going to America.” Pasquale had worked on hundreds of outfits going to America, but that white suit was something else. He still remembered all the measurements. The cut of the neck, the circumference of the wrists. And the pants. He’d run his hands inside the legs and could still picture the naked body that every tailor forms in his mind—not an erotic figure but one defined by the curves of muscles, the ceramics of bones. A body to dress, a meditation of muscle, bone, and bearing. Pasquale still remembered the day he’d gone to the port to pick up the fabric. They’d commissioned three suits from him, without saying anything else. They knew whom they were for, but no one had told Pasquale.

In Japan the tailor of the bride to the heir to the throne had had a state reception given in his honor. A Berlin newspaper had dedicated six pages to the tailor of Germany’s first woman chancellor, pages that spoke of craftsmanship, imagination, and elegance. Pasquale was filled with rage, a rage that it’s impossible to express. And yet satisfaction is a right, and merit deserves recognition. Deep in his gut he knew he’d done a superb job and he wanted to be able to say so. He knew he deserved something more. But no one had said a word to him. He’d discovered it by accident, by mistake. His rage was an end in itself, justified but pointless. He couldn’t tell anyone, couldn’t even whisper as he sat looking at the newspaper the next morning. He couldn’t say, “I made that suit.” No one would have believed that Angelina Jolie would go to the Academy Awards wearing an outfit made in Arzano, by Pasquale. The best and the worst. Millions of dollars and 600 euros a month. Neither Angelina Jolie nor the designer could have known. When everything possible has been done, when talent, skill, ability, and commitment are fused in a single act, when all this isn’t enough to change anything, then you just want to lie down, stretch out on nothing, in nothing. To vanish slowly, let the minutes wash over you, sink into them as if they were quicksand. To do nothing but breathe. Besides, nothing will change things, not even an outfit for Angelina Jolie at the Oscars.

Pasquale left the house without even bothering to shut the door. Luisa knew where he was going; she knew he was headed to Secondigliano and whom he was going to see. She threw herself on the couch and buried her face in a pillow like a child. I don’t know why, but when Luisa started to cry, it made me think of a poem by Vittorio Bodini. Lines that tell of the strategies southern Italian peasants used to keep from becoming soldiers, to avoid going off to fill the trenches of World War I in defense of borders they knew nothing of.

At the time of the other war, 
peasants and smugglers
put tobacco leaves under their arms
to make themselves ill.
The artificial fevers, the supposed malaria
that made their bodies tremble and their teeth rattle
were their verdict
on governments and history.

That’s how Luisa’s weeping seemed to me—a verdict on government and history. Not a lament for a satisfaction that went uncelebrated. It seemed to me an amended chapter of Marx’s Capital, a paragraph added to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a new sentence in John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, a note in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. A page added or removed, a forgotten page that never got written or that perhaps was written many times over but never recorded on paper. Not a desperate act but an analysis. Severe, detailed, precise, reasoned. I imagined Pasquale in the street, stomping his feet as if knocking snow from his “boots. Like a child who is surprised to discover that life has to be so painful. He’d managed up till then. Managed to hold himself back, to do his job, to want to do it. And do it better than anyone else. But the minute he saw that outfit, saw that body moving inside the very fabric he’d caressed, he felt alone, all alone. Because when you know something only within the confines of your own flesh and blood, it’s as if you don’t really know it. And when work is only about staying afloat, surviving, when it’s merely an end in itself, it becomes the worst kind of loneliness.

I saw Pasquale two months later. They’d put him on truck detail. He hauled all sorts of stuff—legal and illegal—for the Licciardi family businesses. Or at least that’s what they said. The best tailor in the world was driving trucks for the Camorra, back and forth between Secondigliano and Lago di Garda. He asked me to lunch and gave me a ride in his enormous vehicle. His hands were red, his knuckles split. As with every truck driver who grips a steering wheel for hours, his hands freeze up and his circulation is bad. His expression was troubled; he’d chosen the job out of spite, out of spite for his destiny, a kick in the ass of his life. But you can’t tolerate things indefinitely, even if walking away means you’re worse off. During lunch he got up to go say hello to some of his accomplices, leaving his wallet on the table. A folded-up page from a newspaper fell out. I opened it. It was a photograph, a cover shot of Angelina Jolie dressed in white. She was wearing the suit Pasquale had made, the jacket caressing her bare skin. You need talent to dress skin without hiding it; the fabric has to follow the body, has to be designed to trace its movements.

I’m sure that every once in a while, when he’s alone, maybe when he’s finished eating, when the children have fallen asleep on the couch, worn-out from playing, while his wife is talking on the phone with her mother before starting on the dishes, right at that moment Pasquale opens his wallet and stares at that newspaper photo.

Review of Dumenil and Levy

The new issue of Rethinking Marxism has my review of The Crisis of Neoliberalism by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy. Since RM is paywalled — a topic for another day — I’m putting the full text here.

Incidentally, I do recommend the book, but I would suggest just reading chapters 3-6, where the core arguments are developed, and then skipping to the final three chapters, 23-25.  The intervening material is narrowly focused on the 2008-2009 financial crisis and is of less interest today.

* * *

Historical turning points aren’t usually visible until well after the fact. But the period of financial and economic turmoil that began in 2008 may be one of the rare exceptions. If capitalism historically has evolved through a series of distinct regimes — from competition to monopoly in the late 19th century, to a regulated capitalism after World War II and then to neoliberalism after the crises of the 1970s, then 2008 may mark the beginning of another sharp turn.

That, anyway, is the central claim of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy (hereafter D&L). The book brings together a great deal of material, broadly grouped under two heads. First is an argument about the sociology of  capitalism, hinging on the relationship between capitalists in the strict sense and the managerial class. And second is an account of the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. A concluding survey of possibilities for the post-neoliberal world unites the two strands.

For D&L, the key to understanding the transformations of capitalism over the past hundred years lies in the sociology of the capitalist class. With the rise of the modern corporation at the turn of the 20th century, it became more problematic to follow Marx in treating the capitalist as simply the “personification of capital.” While the logic of capital is the same — it remains, in their preferred formulation, “value in a movement of self-expansion” — distinct groups of human beings now stand at different points in that process. In particular, “the emergence of a bourgeois class more or less separated from the enterprise” (13) created a new sociological gulf between the ownership of capital and the management of production.

Bridging this gulf was a new social actor, Finance. While banks and other financial institutions predate industrial capitalism, they now took on an important new role: representation of the capitalist class vis-a-vis corporate management, a function not needed when ownership and management were united in the same person. “Financial institutions,” D&L write, “are an instrument in the hands of the capitalist class as a whole in the domination they exercise over the entire economy.” (57) This gives finance a dual character, as on the one hand one industry among others providing a particular good (intermediation, liquidity, etc.) but also as, on the other hand, the enforcers or administrators who ensure that industry as a whole remains organized according to the logic of profit.

The stringency of this enforcement varies over time. For D&L, the pre-Depression and post-Volcker eras are two periods of “financial hegemony,” in which holders of financial claims actively intervened in the governance of nonfinancial firms, compelling mergers of industrial companies in the first period, and engineering leveraged buyouts and takeovers in the second. By contrast, the postwar period was one of relative autonomy for the managerial class, with the owners of capital accepting a relatively passive role. One way to think of it is that since capital is a process, its expression as an active subject can occur at different moments of that process. Under financial hegemony, the political and sociological projections of capital emanated mostly from the M moment, but in the mid-century more from C-C’. Concretely, this means firms pursued objectives like growth, technical efficiency, market share or technological advance rather than (or in addition to) profit maximization – this is the “soulful corporation” of Galbraith or Chandler. Unlike those writers, however, D&L see this corporation-as-polis, balancing the interests of its various stakeholders under the steady hand of technocratic management, as neither the result of a natural evolution nor a normative ideal; instead, it’s a specific political-economic configuration that existed under certain historical conditions. In particular, managerial capitalism was the result of both the crisis of the previous period of financial hegemony and, crucially, of the mobilization of the popular classes, which opened up space for the top managers to pursue a strategy of “compromise to the left” while continuing to pay the necessary tribute to “the big capitalist families.”

Those families — the owners of capital, in the form of financial assets — were willing to accept a relatively passive role as long as the tribute flowed. But the fall in the profit rate in the 1970s forced the owners to recohere as a class for themselves. Their most important project was, of course, the attack on labor, in which capital and management were united. But a second, less visible fight was the capitalists’ attack on the managers, with finance as their weapon. The wave of corporate takeovers, buyouts and restructurings of the 1980s was not just a normal competitive push for efficiencies, nor was it the work of a few freebooting pirates and swindlers. As theorized by people like Michael Jensen, it was a self-conscious project to reorient management’s goals from the survival and growth of the firm, to “shareholder value”. In this, it succeeded – first by bullying and bludgeoning recalcitrant managers, then by incorporating their top tier into the capitalist class. “During the 1980s the disciplinary aspect of the new relationship between the capitalist and managerial classes was dominant,” write D&L, but “after 2000, … managers had become a pillar of Finance.” (84) Today, the “financial facet of management tends to overwhelmingly dominate” and “a process of ‘hybridization’ or merger is under way.” (85)

These are not entirely new ideas. D&L cite Veblen, certainly one of the first to critically investigate the separation of management and control, and to observe that the “importance of securities in ownership of the means of production [gives] … the capitalist class a strong financial character.” But they make no mention of the important debates on these issues among Marxists in the 1970s, especially Fitch and Oppenheimer’s Socialist Revolution articles on “Who Rules the Corporations?” and David Kotz’s Bank Control of Large Corporations in the United States. Most glaringly, they fail to cite Doug Henwood’s Wall Street, whose Chapter 6 gives a strikingly similar account of the revolt of the rentiers, and which remains the best guide to relations between finance and nonfinancial businesses within a broad Marxist framework. While Henwood shares the same basic analysis as The Crisis of Neoliberalism, he backs it up with a wealth of concrete examples and careful attention to the language of the financiers and their apologists. D&L, by contrast, despite their welcome interest in the sociology of the capitalist class, never descend from a high level of abstraction. D&L would have advanced the conversation more if they had tried to build on the contributions of Fitch and Oppenheimer, Kotz, and Henwood, instead of reinventing them.

Still, it’s an immensely valuable book. Both mainstream economists and Marxists often imbue capitalist firms with a false homogeneity, as if the pursuit of profit was just a natural fact or imposed straightforwardly by competition. D&L offer an important corrective, that firms (and social life in general) are only kept subordinate to the self-expansion of value through active, ongoing efforts to enforce and universalize financial criteria.

The last third of the book is an account of the global financial crisis of the past five years. Much of the specifics will be familiar to readers of the business press, but the central argument makes sense only in light of the earlier chapters: that the ultimate source of the crisis was precisely the success of the reestablishment of financial hegemony. In particular, deregulation — especially the freeing of cross-border capital flows — weakened the tools states had previously used to keep the growth of financial claims in line with the productive capacity of the economy. (It’s an irony of history that the cult of central banking “maestros” reached its height at the point when they had lost most of their real power.) Meanwhile, increased payouts to shareholders and other financial claimants starved firms of funds for accumulation. A corollary of this second point is that the crisis was characterized by underaccumulation rather than by underconsumption. The underlying demand problem wasn’t insufficient funds flowing to workers for consumption — the rich consume plenty — but insufficient funds remaining within corporations for the purpose of investment. Just as investment suffered at the end of the postwar boom when the surplus available to capitalist firms was squeezed from below by rising wage claims, it suffered in the past decade when that surplus was squeezed from above by the claims of rentiers. So higher wages might only have made the crisis worse. This argument needs to be taken seriously, unpalatable though it may be. We need to avoid the theodicy of liberal economists, in which the conditions of social justice and the conditions of steady accumulation are always the same.

The Crisis of Neoliberalism is not the last word on the crisis, but it is one of the more convincing efforts to situate it in the longer-term trajectory of capitalism. The most likely outcome of the crisis, they suggest, is a shift in the locus of power back toward managers. Profit maximization will again be subordinated to other objectives. The maintenance of US hegemony will require a “reterritorialization” of production, which will inevitably weaken the position of fincance. There is an inherent conflict between a reassertion of state authority and the borderless class constituted by ownership of financial claims. But there is no such conflict between the interests of particular states, and the class constituted by authority within particular firms. “This is an important factor … strengthening of the comparative position of nonfinancial managers.”

Are we starting to see the dethroning of Finance, a return to the soulful corporation, and a retreat from the universalizing logic of profit? It’s too soon to tell. It’s interesting, though, to see Michael Jensen, the master theorist of the shareholder revolution, sounding a more soulful note. Shareholder value, he recently told The New Yorker, “is the score that shows up on the scoreboard. It’s not the objective… Your life can’t just be about you, or your life will be shit. You see that on Wall Street.” That  business serves a higher calling than Wall Street, is the first item in the managerialist catechism.  We might look at Occupy Wall Street and the growing movement against student debt in the same light: By singling out as the enemy those elites whose power takes directly financial form, they implicitly legitimate power more linked to control of the production process. Strange to think that a movement of anarchists could be heralding a return to power of corporate management. But history can be funny that way.

Functional Finance in Rome and Kansas City

Arjun and I have continued to work on our project on fiscal and monetary policy, which develops the simple — but strangely overlooked [1] — point that both the level of output and the trajectory of the public debt-GDP ratio are jointly determined by both the government budget balance and the interest rate set by the monetary authority. (An early stage in our thinking on this was the subject of a post on this blog last year.) Part of our argument is that the fiscal space metaphor is backward — that the case for countercyclical fiscal policy gets stronger, not weaker, when debt ratios are already high. I’m hoping there will be a working paper version of this soon. But in the meantime, the work is getting presented at various places — by me at the Eastern Economic Association this past spring, by both of us at the International Economics Association in June, by Arjun at an OECD conference in Rome earlier this week, and by me at the University of Missouri at Kansas City tomorrow. If you’re interested, here are our current slides.

[1] This paper by Michael Woodford, which I haven’t yet had time to read properly, seems to have a similar starting point but ends up somewhere quite different.

Liza Featherstone on Focus Groups

Yesterday, we at the John Jay Economics Department hosted my friend Liza Featherstone, author of Students Against Sweatshops and Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers Rights at Wal Mart, for a talk about her new book, on the history and politics of focus groups. (That’s me introducing her.)

The whole thing is worth watching. As with so many institutions, the history of the focus group has interesting twists and turns that you wouldn’t guess just from its current state. I hadn’t realized, for example, that the focus group originated — like so many technologies — in the US war effort of the 1940s. The first focus groups, apparently, were convened to improve the quality of radio propaganda. Only later was the technique adopted by commercial advertising, before migrating into the electoral arena in the 1980s and 1990s.

The most interesting part, though — for met at least — is the end, where Liza talks about the funny parallels between focus groups and the kind of consensus decision making practiced by mass movements like Occupy. (And by popular movements at least back to the 18th century, for that matter.) In contrast to surveys, polls and elections, focus groups and assemblies do not assume that people enter the process with well-formed views that just have to be registered and tallied. Instead, they assume that people’s true views only emerge in a process of active exchange with others.

The classic example in the marketing context is New Coke. In blind tests, clear majorities preferred the new flavor, but in a setting where the two cokes were discussed, people were somehow convinced that they preferred the old flavor after all. Apparently focus groups sponsors often complain in cases like this that one strong personality bullies everyone else. But isn’t that how people’s choices get shaped in the rest of life too?

Is it better to keep our private views intact? There’s a view that instability in asset markets arises precisely because people allow their views to be shaped by interaction with others — herd behavior, the madness of crowds. To have efficient asset markets, it’s important that people trade on their private information. We use secret ballots in elections and some people even consider it rude to ask who you are voting for. Too much discussion corrupts the process of aggregating up private beliefs. More generally, there’s a sense that the way our ideas change in contact with others can be a problem, and that we may need to protect our authentic selves from social pressures.

To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on — in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort. 

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

That’s Larkin, who would not have had much time for either focus groups or general assemblies.

Meanwhile, on the other side, along with the focus groups we have 12-step groups, psychoanalysis, the self-criticism practiced in some revolutionary groups. All of these elevate the process of communication itself as the source of beliefs and desires, as opposed to the liberal idea that we first come into possession of these individually and then act on them or communicate them.

What do we make of this similarity? The negative answer is that focus-group politics have displaced more effective forms of political organization on the left as well as in the mainstream. People have come to feel that communication is an end in itself — that the important thing is to have your voice heard, and only incidentally to exercise power. (Liza shared a rather depressing anecdote after the talk, about a union staffer who said that it was impossible to get members to come to meetings by saying there would be an important vote, but they would come if you told them they’d be taking part in a focus group.) Of course even this way of looking at things isn’t entirely negative — people do need to get their voices heard, especially people without the privileges that make it easy to be listened to.

But there’s another way to look at these parallels. Maybe the marketers, in their desperation to “catapult the propaganda” (in the words of one of our most focus-grouped, and focus group-deriding, politicians) have stumbled on a truth about human nature that the left has always known. We are not monads, with a fixed set of preferences. As Liza says in the talk, human beings are profoundly social creatures — our selves don’t exist in isolation from others. (This is why solitary confinement is a form of torture.) Capitalism is intolerable but it has, historically, produced genuine progress in science and technology, and there’s a sense in which focus groups could be an example. It’s grotesque that this insight — that people’s beliefs and desires only emerge in exchange with others — has been mainly used to sell soft drinks and candidates. But it’s a real insight nonetheless.

Why Not Just Mail Out Checks?

A friend writes:

Let’s suppose that the United States could get a Universal Basic Income, but it had to trade a bunch of stuff for it. What would be important to keep after a UBI?

Obviously, various income support could right out the door (food stamps, unemployment insurance). But would we be willing to trade labor regulations (minimum wage, union laws)? Public schools? Medicare? Curious as to your thoughts.

This sort of choice comes up all the time these days. Of course in practice it’s a false choice: They take our parks and public insurance, and never send out those UBI checks. Or occasionally, as in New York, they give us our universal pre-K and parks and bike lanes, and we don’t have to give up our meager income-support checks to get them.

Still, it’s an interesting question. How should we answer it?

1. At least for an important current on the left, the goal isn’t to distribute commodities more equally, but to liberate human life from the logic of the market. Or, a society that maximizes positive freedom and the development of people’s capacities, as opposed to one that maximizes consumption of goods. From that point of view, diminishing the scope of the market — incremental decommodification, as Naomi Klein used to say — is the important thing, so we’d always reject this kind of trade. (Assuming it’s on more or less “even” terms.)

2. Setting that aside. Shouldn’t we have a presumption that the goods that are currently publicly supplied are subject to some kind of market failure? Presumably there’s some reason why many governments provide insurance against old age and health costs, housing, education, police and fire services, and very few governments provide clothing or restaurant meals. Of course one wouldn’t want to say the current mix of public-private provision is ideal. But one wouldn’t want to say it carries no information, either.

3. There’s a genuine value in institutions that pursue a public purpose, rather than profit. We can debate whether hospitals should be public, nonprofit or even private at the level of management, but presumably in the operating room we want our doctor thinking about what’s most likely to make this surgery successful and not what’s most likely to make him money. (And we don’t think reputation costs are enough to guarantee those motives coincide — so back to market failures as above.) In the same category, and close to many of our hearts, are professors and other teachers, who teach better when they’re focused on just that, and not worrying about their paycheck.

4. Related to (3), how do we manage a system in which the public sector is disappearing? Seems to me the logical outcome of the UBI-and-let-markets-do-the-rest approach is stuff like this. Either you agree that intrinsic motivation is important, in which case you have to honestly ask in each particular case whether self-interest adds more than it detracts. Or you deny it, but then you’re left with the problem of how to you assure the honesty of the people sending out the checks. (Not to mention all the zillion commercial transactions that happen every day.) DeLong somewhere calls neoliberalism a counsel of despair, which makes sense only once you’ve given up on the capacity of the state. But without minimal state capacity even neoliberalism doesn’t work. If the nightwatchman won’t do what’s right because it is right, you can’t have markets either. Better pledge yourself to a feudal lord. And if the nightwatchman will, then why not the doctor, teacher, etc.?

5. How confident are we that unfettered markets plus UBI is politically sustainable? Being a worker expecting a certain wage gives you some social power. Being a participant in a public institution gives you, arguably, some social power, an identity, it helps solve the collective action problem of the poor. (Which is the big problem in all of this.) But receiving your UBI check doesn’t give you any power, any capacity to disrupt, it doesn’t give you a sense of collective identity, it doesn’t form a basis of collective action. My hypothesis is that the parents at the local public school are more able to act together — they have the PTA, to begin with — than the same number of voucher recipients are.

Piketty and the Money View: A Reply to MisterMR

The last post got some very helpful comments from MisterMR (the regular commenter formerly known as Random Lurker) and Kevin Donoghue. Both of them raise issues that are worth posts of their own. I’ll reply to MisterMR now, and perhaps to Kevin Donoghue later. Or perhaps not — the biggest thing I’ve learned in four years of blogging is: Never make promises about future posts.

* * *

MisterMR is coming from what I hope he won’t mind my calling a classical Marxian perspective — a perspective I’m simpatico with, tho I haven’t been taking it here. One aspect of this perspective is the idea that capital can be understood in physical terms, as embodied labor. Now I agree that Marx does clearly say this, but I think this can be seen as a concession he is making to the orthodoxy of the day for the sake of the argument. Capital is subtitled “A Critique of Political Economy,” and I think we should take that subtitle seriously. In effect, he is saying to Ricardo: OK, let’s accept your way of thinking about capital, the system based on it is still conflictual, exploitative and in contradiction with its own conditions of existence.

I’m not sure how widely this view is held — that Marx adopts the labor theory of value ironically. Anyway, that’s not the argument I want to have here. What I want to do is clarify the perspective I’m offering in place of the labor theory. It’s more in the spirit of the other core Marxian idea about capital, that it is a social relation between people.

MisterMR writes:

I think that there are 4 different kinds of capital assets (though in reality most capital assets are a mix of the four kinds). 

1) There are some capital goods that are stuff that is materially produced, such as factories. This stuff has a cost of production, that arguably has some relationship with its “value”. This is what I would call “real” capital. The ambiguity in Piketty comes from the fact that he speaks as if all capital is “real” capital, and as if every money flow translates in “real” capital. 

2) There are some assets that are a finite resource that someone controls, like land. In fact, classical economists distinguished between “capital” and “land”. The value of land can’t be linked to the “cost of production” of land, because said cost doesn’t exist. So arguably the value is just the cashflow derived from the asset divided by the normal rate of profit. I’d call this kind of assets simply “land”. 

3) While land is certainly something that exists, there are some assets that have an economic value but that don’t relate to something that clearly exists or that can be produced: for example, ownership on patents, or a famous brand that has an high market penetration and visibility etc. I think that these assets have dinamics that are similar to land, although they are mostly non material. 

4) Finally, there is credit. Credit also is a non material thing, and is different from all the 3 previous classes of capital for these reasons: 

4.1) It doesn’t have a “cost of production”;
4.2) It isn’t related to any fixed resource, something that differentiates credit from both 2 and 3;
4.3) It has a fixed nominal value (which implies that the currency provider can literally print it out of existence).
4.4) It usually has a nominally fixed interest rate, something that can obviously cause chain bankruptcies. 

My problem with the “monetary view” is that it sounds like if assets of the 2 and 3 classes all are just a “montary” thing, as opposed to a “real stuff view” that sees all assets as if they were of the 1 class.

My response is that the money view is not a substantive claim about the nature of particular assets, but a way of looking at assets in general — “real” capital goods as much as the more vaporous claims in categories 2 through 4. It does imply some kind of ontology, but in itself, the money view is just a choice to focus on money payments.

But I do want to explain the broader view of social reality that, for me at least, lies behind the money view.  Here’s the way I want to look at things.

* * *

On the one hand, there is the human productive activity of collectively transforming the world and maintaining our conditions of existence, along with the conditions that make that activity possible. When you sit down and write a blog post, you are engaged in creative activity with the goal of building up our collective knowledge of the world, and you are also maintaining the network of social ties through which this kind of activity is carried out. Your ability to engage in this activity depends on a great number of objective conditions, ranging from your physical health to the infrastructure that communicates your words to the rest of the world. Many of these conditions are the result of past human activity.

Under capitalism, a subset of human productive activity gets marked off as “labor.” Labor has a number of special characteristics, most obviously that it is carried out at the direction of a boss. But for current purposes, the most important distinctive characteristics of the activity that we call “labor”  are (a) it carries a price tag, the “wage,” with labor that is somehow similar carrying a similar wage. And (b) labor becomes substantively more similar over time, with the disappearance of specific skills and increasing interchangeability among the human beings performing it; it follows from this that the wage also become uniform. To the extent that (a) is true, we can attribute a “cost” to some particular set of conditions and to the extent (b) is also true, that cost will correspond to the hours of labor expended maintaining those conditions. Of course all productive activity additionally requires many conditions, both natural and social, that are not reflected in labor hours. In particular, a great deal of passive social cooperation is required for any productive activity, especially when there is an extensive division of labor.

Even in the pure case, where labor is completely homogeneous and all production is carried out for profit, under identical conditions and with no barriers to competition, there will not in general be a unique mapping from labor hours to costs or relative prices. The best we can do is to reduce all the infinite possible sets of relative prices to variation along a single dimension, with one set of relative prices corresponding to each possible profit rate. (I think this is Sraffa’s point.)

So the description of assets in group 1 is correct — but only with respect to one particular way of describing one particular way of organizing production, not as statements about reality in general. The productive activity that takes place in a factory does, of course, require the past activity that resulted in the existence of the factory. But it requires lots of other activity as well, much of which is not counted as “labor.” And the fact that “labor” is a measurable input at all only holds to the extent that the productive activity has been deskilled and homogenized, a sociological fact that is never completely true and is not true at all in most historical contexts.

The think you have to avoid is believing that quantities like “value” or “cost” have any existence outside the specific social relations of capitalism.

The next question is what it means to “own” some conditions for productive activity, like a factory. The beginning of wisdom here is to recognize that ownership is a legal relationship between persons, not a relationship with a physical object. To own a piece of land means you have certain legal rights with respect to other people — to exclude them from the use of that land, to receive some equivalent from them if you do permit use of the land, to transfer those rights to someone else — and that no one else has those rights with respect to you. However, that’s only the first step. Next, we have to recognize that what constitutes “use” of piece of an asset is not a physical fact, but a social one. (As in the old story, the baker can exclude others from eating his rolls, but not from enjoying the smell of them.) So it would be more accurate to say that ownership of a piece of property is simply a form of social authority — a bundle of rights over other people. Indeed, if we want to relate the world of money flows to broader social reality, the most fundamental fact is probably this: The person who receives a money payment labeled “profit” gives orders, and the people who receive money payments labeled “wages” have to follow them. To say you own a piece of property is simply to say there is a set of commands that, if you issue them, other people are compelled to obey. Those rights are metonymously referred to by a label which bears a picture of some tangible good, just like the insignia on an officer’s uniform bear a picture of a leaf or a bird.

So:

When you say, here is a means of production, a factory, with a certain cost, you have already chosen: to ignore all the various conditions that make a certain form of collective productive activity possible, and let the existence of this one tangible object, the factory, stand in for all the rest; to ignore all the various forms of productive activity and social coordination that were necessary to bring the factory  (and the rest of the conditions of production) into existence, except for those we class as wage labor; to convert that wage labor to some common quantitative standard by measuring it in wage payments;  to assume some exogenously given profit rate, to give you the discount rate you need to add up wage payments made at different dates. Only then can you say the factory has a cost — and even then, this money cost is calculated by adding up a certain set of money payments.

At that point we have MisterMR’s category (1) as a concrete social reality. We still have to establish the profit rate, since it cannot be reduced to a marginal physical product. Only then do the issues specific to the other three categories come into play.

I should be clear: the money view is not a complete account of the sphere of social reality we call the economy. (And again, I’ve adopted the term from Perry Mehrling, it’s not my invention.) The money view is defined by making the atomic units of analysis bundles of money payments. I would argue that it is logically consistent to think of any capital good as simply a bundle of income streams contingent on different states of the world, in a way that it is not logically consistent to think of it as a physical object producing a stream of physical outputs.

The fact that this is a logically consistent account doesn’t mean it’s sufficient. Obviously the money view doesn’t give a complete story, since we don’t know why the income streams attached to different assets are what they are, or why they change over time, or why assets in the monetary sense are attached to tangible goods or production processes, or for that matter why anyone cares about money payments in the first place. But by adopting a consistent story about money payments and assets, we get a clearer view of these other questions. We distinguish the questions that can be addressed with the formal techniques of economics from other questions that require a different approach. This is a step forward from the perspective that mixes up questions about money flows with questions about tangible productive activities and so can’t give a coherent story about either.

Piketty and the Money View

I recently picked up Capital and the 21st Century again. And what’s striking to me, on revisiting it, is the contrast between the descriptive material and the theory used to make sense of it.

Piketty’s great accomplishment is the comprehensive data on wealth he has compiled, going back to the 18th century. He deserves nothing but praise for making that data easily accessible. (You could think of his project as an iceberg, with most of the substance hidden below the waterline in the online appendixes.) I have not seen any serious doubts raised about the accuracy of this data; and the descriptive generalizations he draws from it, while not above criticism, are obviously based in a deep study of the concrete historical material. But the connections between this material and the theoretical claims it’s mixed in with — r > g and all that — are tenuous at best.

It’s important to remember that all the underlying data is in nominal terms. All the empirical material in the book relates to stocks and flows of money. But when he turns to explain the patterns he finds in this data, he does it in terms of physical inputs to physical production. The money wealth present in a country is assumed to correspond to the physical capital goods, somehow converted to a scalar quantity. And the incomes received by wealth owners is assumed to correspond to a physical product somehow attributable to these capital goods. I am hardly the first person to suggest that this is not a sensible way to explain trends in private wealth as measured in money, and the money-income derived from it. But what I haven’t seen people say — even people who jump at the chance to revisit the Cambridge Capital Controversies — is the remarkable difference in the attitudes of Piketty the historian and Piketty the economic theorist to data. Shifts in the scale and distribution of private wealth are described on the basis of years of meticulous study of the tax records of various countries. But the production processes that are supposed to explain these shifts are described without any data at all, purely deductively.  You would think that if Piketty believed that the share of property income in total income depends on physical production technologies, returns to scale, depreciation, etc., then at least half the book would be taken up with technological history. You’d think he would spend as much energy studying the inputs and outputs associated with different degrees of mechanization of major production processes, how long is the useful life of different kinds of buildings in different eras and how much annual maintenance they require, and so on. After all, these are the kinds of factors that he believes — or claims to believe — drive the money-wealth outcomes the book is about. In fact, of course, these topics are not discussed at all. Terms like “production” and “depreciation” are black boxes, pure mathematical formalism. You would think that Piketty, who presents himself as a historian and is admirably critical of the deductive character of so much of economics, would have hesitated before staking so much on deductive, evidence-free claims about physical production.

Because when you take a step back and think about it, this is what Piketty has done:  He has carefully described the historical evolution of monetary wealth, and then postulated an imaginary physical reality that exactly matches that evolution. It’s a kind of economic preformationism, or like the folk psychology that tries to explain your actions by imagining a little homunculus in your head that is choosing them.  The “real economy” in Piketty is just a ghostly mirror-image of the network of money payments and money claims that is actually observed.

* * *

Let me give a concrete example. Piketty shows that around 1800, the wealth-income ratio was relatively low in the United States — about 300% of national income, compared with 600-700% in England and France. About half of this difference was the lower value of agricultural land, which totaled about 150% of national income in the US and over 300% in both England and France. Piketty suggests that this is because the great abundance of land in the New World meant that its marginal product was relatively low. This sounds reasonable enough — but it flies in the face of Piketty’s larger argument about the capital share. His big theoretical claim is that the capital share is determined by the growth rate of cumulated savings relative to the growth rate of income. And this only works if the return on “capital” is relatively insensitive to its scarcity or abundance. (This is the question of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor, which has dominated economists’ debates about the book.) If having more land makes the share of land rents in national income go down, why won’t the growth of “capital” similarly push down its return?

This isn’t meant as a gotcha. Piketty frankly acknowledges the problem. He suggests two possible solutions: First, constant returns might only apply over some range of capital-output ratios. Beyond that that range, further accumulation might make capitalists as a group poorer rather than richer. Second, it might be easier to substitute between labor and modern capital goods, than between labor and agricultural land. Both these assumptions sound reasonable, altho I think they are both more problematic than they seem at first glance. But that’s not the argument I want to have right now. The point I want to make now is that Piketty just takes it for granted that behind the smaller flow of money going to land owners in US circa 1800, there must have been a smaller physical flow of output coming off the marginal piece of land. Of course this isn’t logically necessary — the money-value of agricultural land will also depend on the legal rights associated with land ownership, the terms on which new land can be acquired, the ease with which land can be sold or borrowed against, etc. Presumably the same physical mix of land, tools and people would have led to a different share of money income being claimed as land rents if frontier land in the early United States had been owned by a few large landlords, instead of being freely distributed to white families by the government. But these types of explanations are not even considered. For Piketty, behind each flow of money there must be an identical flow of stuff.

The other strange thing is that, despite his insistence that money flows are fully explained by physical conditions of production, Piketty shows no interest in investigating those conditions. The numbers on the level and composition of money wealth in US are meticulously sourced and documented. The claims about physical production conditions, on the other hand, are entirely speculative. There is no shortage of material you could turn to if you wanted to ask whether whether land was really more abundant, in an economically meaningful sense, in the early US than in France or Britain, or if you wanted to know if adding an acre to an 1800-era American farm would increase its output proportionately less or more than adding an acre to a similar-sized British or French farm. But Piketty doesn’t even gesture at this literature.

* * *

I draw two conclusions. First, it’s hard to say anything sensible about the book until you realize it consists of two distinct, almost unrelated projects. There is the historical data on money wealth and money incomes. And then there is the whole rigamarole of “laws of capitalism.” The book is mostly written as if the latter somehow distill or summarize the former, but they are really very loosely articulated. Let me give one more quick — but important — example. You might think that with all the huffing and puffing about r > g, the data would tell a story in which the share of wealth in national income rises in periods when r is relatively high and g is relatively low, and falls when g is high and r is low. But the data tell no such story.

The great fall in the capital share took place between 1913 and 1950, according to Piketty. But his own data show that this was the period of the highest returns to capital, and the lowest growth rates, in the whole 240 years the book covers. I’ve reproduced his graph of r in the UK below; the figures for other Western European countries look similar. Meanwhile, he gives an average growth rate for Western Europe over 1913-1950 of 1.4%, compared with 1.8% in the high-capital share 19th century, and 2.1% in the period of rising capital shares since 1970. This is exactly the opposite pattern that we would expect if r and g were the central actors in the story.

Of course Piketty has an answer for this too: The fall in the capital share in the first half of the 20th century is explained by the World Wars and the destruction of the old social order in Europe. No doubt — but if factors like these dominate the historical trajectory of wealth and income, why not tell your story in terms of them, instead of a few dubious equations from the orthodox growth model? Unfortunately, discussion of the book has been almost entirely about the irrelevant formalism. I think that is why the conversation has been so noisy yet advanced so little. To return to the earlier metaphor, it’s as if everyone is ignoring the iceberg and talking about a little igloo built on top of it.

My second conclusion is that the disconnect between the two different Pikettys shows, in a negative way, why what I’ve been calling the money view is so important. The historical data assembled in Capital in the 21st Century is a magnificent accomplishment and will be drawn on by economic historians for years to come. Many of the concrete observations he makes about this material are original and insightful. But all of this is lost when translated into Piketty’s preferred theoretical framework. To make sense of the historical evolution of money payments and claims, we need an approach that takes those payments and claims as objects of study in themselves.

LATE UPDATE: A friend forwards the following (verbal) comment from Joe Stiglitz:

“There is a confusion in Piketty on valuation and physical stocks. In France, the main ‘increase’ in wealth is because of higher prices of land. Do we really think that France has become wealthier (using Piketty’s physical understanding of wealth in his model) because while the manufacturing capital stock has declined, the Riviera has become more expensive?”

Liquidity Preference on the F Line

Sitting on the subway today, I was struck by the fact that the three ads immediately opposite me were all for what you might call liquidity services. On the left was an ad for “personal asset loans” from something called Borro: “With this necklace … I funded my first business,” says a satisfied customer. Next to it was an MTA ad trumpeting the fact that you can pay your fare with a credit card. And then one from AptDeco.com, which I guess is a clearinghouse for used furniture sales, with the tagline “NYC is now your furniture store.”

the Borro ad was the next one to the left

This was interesting to me because I’ve just been thinking about the neutrality of money, and what an incoherent and contradictory idea it is.

The orthodox view is that the level of “real” economic activity is determined by “real” factors — endowments, tastes, technology — and people simply hold money balances proportionate to this level of activity. In this view, a change in the money supply can’t make anyone better or worse off, at least in the long run, or change anything about the economy except the price level.

Just looking at these ads shows us why that can’t be true. First of all, the question of what constitutes money. All three of these ads are, in effect, inviting you to use something as money that you couldn’t previously. Without the specialized intermediary services being hawked here, you couldn’t pay the startup costs of a business with a necklace (what’s this thing made of, plutonium?), or pay for a subway ride with a promise to pay later, or pay for much of anything with a used couch. And this new liquidity has real benefits — otherwise, no one would be buying it, and it wouldn’t be worth the cost of producing (or advertising) it. The idea — stated explicitly in the Borro ad — is that the liquidity they provide allows transactions to take place that otherwise wouldn’t. The ability to turn a piece of jewelry or a car into cash allows people to use productive capacities that otherwise would go to waste.

And of course this makes sense. The orthodox view is that money is useful — there must be a reason that we don’t live in a barter world, and more than that, that all this huge industry of liquidity provision exists. But money, for some reason, is not subject to the same kind of smoothly diminishing returns that other useful things are. There is a fixed amount you need, you can’t get by with less, and there’s no benefit at all in having more. The problem is worse than that, since the standard view is that money demand is strictly proportionate to the volume of transactions. But, which transactions? Presumably, the amount of economic activity depends on the availability of money — that’s what it means to say that money is useful. And furthermore, as these ads implicitly make clear, some transactions are more liquidity-intensive than others. No one is offering specialized intermediary services to help you buy a hamburger. So both the level and composition of economic activity must depend on money holdings. But in that case, you can’t say that money holdings depend only on the volume of activity — that would be circular. In a world where money is used at all, it can’t be neutral. An increase in the money supply (or better, in liquidity) may raise prices, but it won’t do so proportionately, since it also enables people to benefit from increasing their money holdings (or: shifting toward more liquid balance sheet positions) and to carry out liquidity-intensive transactions that were formerly unable to.

This is a very old issue in economics. The idea that money should be neutral is as old as the discipline, and so is this line of criticism of it. You can find both already in Hume. In “Of Money,” he lays out the argument that money must be neutral in the long run, since it is just an intrinsically meaningless unit of measure; real wealth depends on real resources, not on the units we count them in. Unlike most later writers, he follows this argument to its logical conclusion, that any resources devoted to liquidity provision are wasted:

This has made me entertain a doubt concerning the benefit of banks and paper-credit, which are so generally esteemed advantageous to every nation. That provisions and labour should become dear by the encrease of trade and money, is, in many respects, an inconvenience; but an inconvenience that is unavoidable, and the effect of that public wealth and prosperity which are the end of all our wishes. … But there appears no reason for encreasing that inconvenience by a counterfeit money, which foreigners will not accept of in any payment, and which any great disorder in the state will reduce to nothing. There are, it is true, many people in every rich state, who having large sums of money, would prefer paper with good security; as being of more easy transport and more safe custody. … And therefore it is better, it may be thought, that a public company should enjoy the benefit of that paper-credit, which always will have place in every opulent kingdom. But to endeavour artificially to encrease such a credit, can never be the interest of any trading nation; but must lay them under disadvantages, by encreasing money beyond its natural proportion to labour and commodities, and thereby heightening their price to the merchant and manufacturer. And in this view, it must be allowed, that no bank could be more advantageous, than such a one as locked up all the money it received, and never augmented the circulating coin, as is usual, by returning part of its treasure into commerce.

You can find similar language in “On the Balance of Trade”:

I scarcely know any method of sinking money below its level [i.e. producing inflation], but those institutions of banks, funds, and paper-credit, which are so much practised in this kingdom. These render paper equivalent to money, circulate it throughout the whole state, make it supply the place of gold and silver, raise proportionably the price of labour and commodities, and by that means either banish a great part of those precious metals, or prevent their farther encrease. What can be more shortsighted than our reasonings on this head? We fancy, because an individual would be much richer, were his stock of money doubled, that the same good effect would follow were the money of every one encreased; not considering, that this would raise as much the price of every commodity, and reduce every man, in time, to the same condition as before. …

It is indeed evident, that money is nothing but the representation of labour and commodities, and serves only as a method of rating or estimating them. Where coin is in greater plenty; as a greater quantity of it is required to represent the same quantity of goods; it can have no effect, either good or bad, taking a nation within itself; any more than it would make an alteration on a merchant’s books, if, instead of the Arabian method of notation, which requires few characters, he should make use of the Roman, which requires a great many. 

From this view — which is, again, just taking the neutrality of money to its logical conclusion — services like the ones being advertised on the F train are the exact opposite of what we want. By making more goods usable as money, they are only contributing to inflation. Rather than making it easier for people to use necklaces, furniture, etc. as means of payment, we should rather be discouraging people form using even currency as means of payment, by reducing banks to safe-deposit boxes.

That was where Hume left the matter when he first wrote the essays around 1750. But when he republished “On the Balance of Trade” in 1764, he was no longer so confident. [1] The new edition added a discussion of the development of banking in Scotland with a strikingly different tone:

It must, however, be confessed, that, as all these questions of trade and money are extremely complicated, there are certain lights, in which this subject may be placed, so as to represent the advantages of paper-credit and banks to be superior to their disadvantages. … The encrease of industry and of credit … may be promoted by the right use of paper-money. It is well known of what advantage it is to a merchant to be able to discount his bills upon occasion; and every thing that facilitates this species of traffic is favourable to the general commerce of a state. But private bankers are enabled to give such credit by the credit they receive from the depositing of money in their shops; and the bank of England in the same manner, from the liberty it has to issue its notes in all payments. There was an invention of this kind, which was fallen upon some years ago by the banks of Edinburgh; and which, as it is one of the most ingenious ideas that has been executed in commerce, has also been thought advantageous to Scotland. It is there called a Bank-Credit; and is of this nature. A man goes to the bank and finds surety to the amount, we shall suppose, of a 1000 pounds. This money, or any part of it, he has the liberty of drawing out whenever he pleases, and he pays only the ordinary interest for it, while it is in his hands. … The advantages, resulting from this contrivance, are manifold. As a man may find surety nearly to the amount of his substance, and his bank-credit is equivalent to ready money, a merchant does hereby in a manner coin his houses, his household furniture, the goods in his warehouse, the foreign debts due to him, his ships at sea; and can, upon occasion, employ them in all payments, as if they were the current money of the country.

Hume is describing something like a secured line of credit, not so different from the services being advertised on the F line, which also offer ways to coin your houses and household furniture. The puzzle is why he thinks this is a good thing. The trade credit provided by banks, which is now “favourable to the general commerce of the state,” is precisely what he was trying to prevent when he wrote that the best bank was one that “locked up all the money it received.”Why does he now think that increasing liquidity will stimulate industry, instead of just producing a rise in prices that will “reduce every man, in time, to the same condition as before”?

You can’t really hold it against Hume that he never resolved this contradiction. But what’s striking is how little the debate has advanced in the 250 years since. Indeed, in some ways it’s regressed. Hume at least drew the logical conclusion that in a world of neutral money, liquidity services like the ones advertised on the F train would not exist.

[1] I hadn’t realized this section was a later addition until reading Arie Arnon’s discussion of the essay in Monetary Theory and Policy from Hume and Smith to Wicksell. I hope to be posting more about this superb book in the near future.

Innovation in Higher Ed, 1680 Edition

Does anybody read Bagehot’s Lombard Street any more? You totally should, it’s full of good stuff. It’s baffling to me, as a sometime teacher of History of Economic Thought, that most of the textbooks and anthologies don’t mention him at all. Anyway, here he’s quoting Macaulay:

During the interval between the Restoration and the  Revolution the riches of the nation had been rapidly increasing. Thousands of busy men found every Christmas that, after the expenses of  the year’s housekeeping had been defrayed out of the year’s income, a surplus remained ; and how that surplus was to be employed was a question of some difficulty. In … the seventeenth century, a lawyer, a physician, a retired merchant, who had saved some thousands, and who wished to place them safely and profitably, was often greatly embarrassed. … Many, too, wished to put their money where they could find it at an hour’s notice, and looked about for some species of property which could be more readily transferred than a house or a field. A capitalist might lend … on personal security : but, if he did so, he ran a great risk of losing interest and principal. There were a few joint-stock companies, among which the East India Company held the foremost place : but the demand for the stock of such companies was far greater than the supply. … So great was that difficulty that the practice of hoarding was common. We are told that the father  of Pope, the poet, who retired from business in the City about the time of the Revolution, carried to a retreat in the country a strong-box containing near twenty thousand pounds, and took out from time to time what was required for household expenses… 

The natural effect of this state of things was that a crowd of projectors, ingenious and absurd, honest and knavish, employed themselves in devising new schemes for the employment of redundant capital. It was about the year 1688 that the word stock-jobber was first heard London. In the short space of four years a crowd of companies, every one of which confidently held out to subscribers the hope of immense gains, sprang into existence… There was a Tapestry Company, which would soon furnish pretty hangings for all the parlors of the middle class and for all the bedchambers of the higher. There was a Copper Company, which proposed to explore the mines of England, and held out a hope that they would prove not less valuable than those of Potosi. There was a Diving Company, which undertook to bring up precious effects from shipwrecked vessels, and which announced that it had laid in a stock of wonderful machines resembling complete suits of armor. In front of the helmet was a huge glass eye like that of Polyphemus ; and out of the crest went a pipe through which the air was to be admitted. … There was a society which undertook the office of giving gentlemen a liberal education on low terms, and which assumed the sounding name of the Royal Academies Company. In a pompous advertisement it was announced that the directors of the Royal Academies Company had engaged the best masters in every branch of knowledge, and were about to issue twenty thousand tickets at twenty shillings each. There was to be a lottery : two thousand prizes were to be drawn; and the fortunate holders of the prizes were to be taught, at the charge of the Company, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, conic sections, trigonometry, heraldry, japanning, fortification, book-keeping, and the art of playing the theorbo.

Many of Macaulay’s examples, which I’ve left out here, are familiar, thanks to Charles Mackay and more recent historians of financial folly. (Including everyone’s favorite, the company that raised funds “for an Undertaking which in due time shall be revealed.”) The line about Pope is also familiar, at least to reader of The General Theory: Keynes cites it as an illustration of the position of the wealth-holder in a world where the rentier had been successfully euthanized. But I, at least, had never realized that the diving suit was a product of the South Sea bubble. And I’d never heard of this spiritual ancestor of Chris Whittle and Michelle Rhee.

It would be interesting to learn more about the claims that were made for this company, and what happened to it. Alas, Google is no help. Although, “Royal Academies Company” turns out to be a weirdly popular phrase among the Markov-chain text generators that populate fake spam blogs. (Seriously, guys, this is poetry.) We can only hope that today’s enterprises that promise to give gentlemen a liberal education on low terms  (or at least an education in japanning and/or ski area management) will vanish as ignominiously.

Strange Defeat: An Exchange

My EPW article with Arjun prompted an interesting exchange with Parag Waknis. Since the letters, like the article, are behind a paywall, I’m reposting them here, below the fold. Waknis’ letter is first, followed by our response.

Austerity or Fiscal Stimulus? On Modern Macroeconomics and the Importance of Context

Parag Waknis, Assistant Professor of Economics, UMass Dartmouth.
Email: parag.waknis@umassd.edu
This discussion refers to the article titled, “Strange Defeat” by J W Mason and Arjun Jayadev in the Economic and Political Weekly, August 10, 2013 Vol. 48 No. 32. Though in general, the paper rightly points out the similarities in the New Keynesian and New Classical macroeconomics and the prescriptions that follow from them concerning austerity vs. fiscal stimulus, it fails to highlight the importance of context in resolution of such debates. According to me the austerity issue in the European Union (EU) has to be treated differently than in the US and certainly different in countries like India and there is a good amount of literature in modern macroeconomics itself that provides justification for this approach.
Also, it should be noted that the tendency to immediately dismiss the idea of dynamic optimizing agents as absurd, however tempting, only comes at the cost of clarity and rigor. If plausibility of such assumptions is to be questioned, then why not question the analysis based simply on macroeconomic aggregates with no regard to the process of their emergence! I think, as a social scientist, one has to have some faith in people’s ability of making choices and that they have some agency. However, once we do that policy prescriptions cannot be made without considering how people would react to it- a point, which simplistic analysis based on Hicks-Hansen IS-LM or AS-AD framework seems to so often miss[1]. 

Austerity vs. Fiscal Stimulus- Importance of Context:

Let us take the example of the EU debt crisis. The fact that EU is a monetary union but not a fiscal union creates inherent instability in the system and I think that the EU debt crisis is just its logical consequence. Ideally, Greece should not have been able to borrow at the interest rate Germany is able to borrow. However, in the pre housing crisis world, creditors treated the debt issued by these countries at the same level and corrected their perceptions only after the crisis (Martin & Waller 2011). Without a fiscal union such free riding by members, otherwise not having creditworthiness to borrow at a lower rate, is bound to happen. Hence, the question of an appropriate policy in this context becomes important.  Should we allow such free riding or take away each member’s individual right to issue bonds and just float Eurobonds? The answer I guess depends on how far do the EU members want to take the idea of a union.  As argued by Sargent (2012) for a monetary union to be successful it also needs to be a fiscal union.  In fact, I think that is an economic definition of a country- a fiscal and a monetary union.
Does that make austerity good for every country? Let us first talk about the US. In a couple of influential papers, Valerie Ramey addresses this issue. Based on theoretical work, aggregate empirical estimates from the United States, and cross-locality estimates, Ramey (2011a) shows that for a temporary, deficit-financed increase in government purchases, the expenditure multiplier estimates are between 0.80- 1.5 and based on a narrative methodology of identifying government spending shocks, Ramey (2011b) shows them to be between 0.6-1.2. These estimates mean that not much can be expected through stimulus spending, at least in the US, because a dollar spent by the US government either crowds out private consumption and investment or at best adds 50 cents to the real GDP.
What about the monetary policy? There is not much hope from this front either. The fact that the Federal Reserve currently pays a positive interest on reserves and has kept the federal funds rate (the US counterpart to call money rate in India) hovering at zero means that any swap of debt through quantitative easing is not going to do much in terms of increasing the spending in the economy (Williamson 2012). Most of the funds that the Fed is releasing in the system just stay put as reserves because short term lending is not profitable. So as a plausible alternative, it might be a good idea to look at some tax or other supply side incentives to create jobs or to stimulate investment spending. There is also the issue of fixing the financial system that still needs to be effectively addressed despite the passing of Dodd-Frank Act.
Where does this leave the developing countries on the question of appropriate fiscal and monetary policy? To answer this question we should look at the unique features of developing countries that separate them from developed countries. I think these features provide a sufficient rationale for running government deficits in developing countries like India. One such factor is presence and size of the informal sector. If the informal sector is substantial then the ability to raise tax revenues from it is limited and then a viable alternative is an inflation tax. This public finance motive has been shown to account for cross-country dispersion of inflation rates quite well (Koreshkova 2006).
According to Ghate, Pandey & Patnaik (2013), private consumption expenditure in India is more variable than the real GDP at business cycle frequencies. This is in contrast to the US and other developed countries where consumption is bit less volatile than real GDP. These differences imply that unlike consumers in the US, consumers in India seem to be less able to smooth consumption suggesting a lack or substantial inequity in access to credit markets. In such situations, government expenditure might provide an opportunity to smooth consumption. Expenditure on employment support schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA), which has been argued to be influential in reducing poverty from 2004 to 2013 (Kotwal & Sen2013), are a case in point.
These intellectual justifications come with some caveats though. It has been highlighted time and again that a large part of inflation in countries like India is a supply side phenomenon putting a limitation on the ability to control or alleviate inflation through just monetary policy or reduced government spending. Add to these the pressures of maintaining stability in the foreign exchange market and policy conundrum just worsens because of the exchange rate pass through (Bhattacharya, Patnaik and Shah, 2011). Also, government’s intertemporal budget constraint is not merely a figment of imagination of New Classical macroeconomists. It does bind at some point as clearly shown by the case of Zimbabwe recently.  The only way to give some incentives to the creditors for a debt rollover is robust economic growth. So what should be the optimal policy given these benefits and costs of government spending or should the fiscal and monetary authorities continue relying on discretionary responses only to address pertinent issues at a given point in time? I think that answer to this question will only come from rigorous research followed by a substantial debate on the appropriate or optimal fiscal and monetary policy mix in the Indian context.

Unemployment in Western Europe vs. US:

The authors claim that, “These core intellectual commitments of modern economics have contributed to the weakness of efforts to reduce unemployment in the US and Europe.”  I am not sure if that is true either. It is by now common knowledge that many countries in Western Europe offer extremely generous unemployment benefits and higher minimum wages than the United States. This in itself is one of the reasons why many west European countries have much higher unemployment rate than the US. This outcome is well predicted by modern macroeconomics where agents choose how much to work depending on the opportunity cost of not working. Generous unemployment support systems reduce incentives to look for work (Kreuger & Muller 2009). How would this insight into people’s behavior contribute to weakness in effort to reduce unemployment? In fact it tells you exactly what needs to be done to increase employment. I think the political costs of reducing unemployment benefits are the ones that are keeping these economies back, not modern macroeconomics.
The similar seems to be the story of unemployment in the US during the Great Recession.  Mulligan (2012) argues that many changes in the labor market policies that have been enacted after the 2007 recession have actually ended changing the incentives for people to work and firms to hire making this recession deepest and longest to recover. Again most of this analysis has come from a macroeconomic framework that emphasizes microfoundations.

Concluding Comments:

While it is true that certain research gains primacy as intellectual justification for policy choices, albeit even without explicit support from the authors themselves (for example Rogoff and Reinhart paper pointed by the authors), the crisis and the recession that followed have brought diverse perspectives to contribute to the debate[2]. I have tried to point out some of such research in this write up. Also, availability of large scale data sets on prices of various goods and services have helped to situate the debate on price and wage stickiness in a firm empirical ground (Klenow and Malin, 2010).  Given this and the rich possibilities of improved data collection and computing power, I sincerely hope that economists keep on researching and debating theories in the light of current macroeconomic problems. I certainly do not see any defeat in it.  


References
Bhattacharya Rudrani, Ila Patnaik & Ajay Shah &, 2011. "Monetary policy transmission in an emerging market setting," IMF Working Papers 11/5, International Monetary Fund.
 
Ghate, Chetan & Pandey, Radhika & Patnaik, Ila, 2013. "Has India emerged? Business cycle stylized facts from a transitioning economy," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 157-172.
 
Klenow, Peter J. & Malin, Benjamin A., 2010. “Microeconomic Evidence on Price-Setting,” Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: Benjamin M. Friedman & Michael Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 6, pages 231-284 Elsevier.
 
Koreshkova, Tatyana A., 2006. "A quantitative analysis of inflation as a tax on the underground economy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(4), pages 773-796, May.
Kotwal Ashok and Pranob Sen, 2013, What explains the steep poverty decline in India from 2004 to 2011? http://ideasforindia.in/article.aspx?article_id=171 accessed on August 12, 2013.
 
Krueger Alan B.  & Andreas Mueller, Job search and unemployment insurance: New evidence from time use data, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 94, Issues 3–4, April 2010, Pages 298-307
Martin Fernando M.  & Christopher J. Waller, 2011. “Sovereign debt: a Modern Greek tragedy,” Annual Report, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, pages 4-19.
Mulligan, Casey, 2012, “The Redistribution Recession- How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy” Oxford University Press, New York.
 
Ramey Valerie A., 2011b. "Identifying Government Spending Shocks: It's all in the Timing," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 126(1), pages 1-50.
 
Ramey Valerie A., 2011a. "Can Government Purchases Stimulate the Economy?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 673-85, September.
 
Sargent Thomas J., 2012. “Nobel Lecture: United States Then, Europe Now,” Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(1), pages 1 – 40.
Williamson Stephen D., 2012. “New Monetarist Economics: Understanding Unconventional Monetary Policy,” The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 88(s1), pages 10-21, 06.

[1] Paul Krugman has been dabbling in Kalecki’s approach along with IS-LM. However, he does not follow through to get to the implications. See Stephen Williamson’s post “Deconstructing Krugman” athttp://newmonetarism.blogspot.com/2013/07/krugman-deconstructed.html for an illuminating analysis.
[2] Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have responded to the criticism of their “Growth in the time of Debt” paper.  Readers should take a look at it to get a balanced perspective.
We thank Parag Waknis for his comment. If nothing else, it succeeds  -albeit unintentionally -in providing a fine illustration of the problems with contemporary economics that our article described.
In our article, we suggested that the methodology that has dominated economics for the last generation leaves economists unequipped to make arguments for active macroeconomic policy. Since agents know the true parameters of the distribution of future outcomes and intertemporally optimize at all points based on that, the link between current income and current expenditure, and the consequent centrality of aggregate demand, are broken. The result of this approach is that recessions and periods of high unemployment are simply assumed to be the result of optimizing choices on the part of agents. Waknis does not challenge the accuracy of this description of current economic practice; he just doesn’t see anything wrong with it.
Waknis employs a common rhetorical sleight of hand, conflating the undisputed importance of expectations and profit-seeking behavior, with one specific approach to them. Economists have always been interested in how people make choices, and analysis of aggregates has always incorporated stories about the individual behavior underlying them. What is new to the modern consensus is the idea that the only legitimate way to handle expectations, is to assume that all economic actors know the true probability distribution of all possible future events. When people like Waknis say that we must think about expectations, what they really mean is that we must not think about what happens when expectations are distorted or differ between actors, or about the concrete process through which expectations are formed.
However much this approach monopolizes the textbooks, it is not useful for describing real-world booms, cycles and crises, as Waknis himself inadvertently demonstrates. In the paragraph immediately following his lecture urging “faith in people’s ability to make choices,” he announces that investors in Europe made consistently wrong choices about the riskiness of public debt! Waknis may be right that Southern European public debt was systematically mispriced, but it is logically incompatible with the models economists use to think about government budgets, which assume that financial market participants know the true expected values of government spending and taxing across all future time.
Turning to questions of policy, it appears that Waknis does not understand what a multiplier is. He notes a range of multiplier estimates around one, and takes this to mean that increased public borrowing crowds out an equal quantity of private spending. But as anyone who has sat through an undergraduate macroeconomics course should know, what the multiplier measures is the ratio of the change in total output to the change in government output. So with a multiplier of one, there is no crowding out; government spending increases real output dollar for dollar. Under today’s conditions, most empirical economists prefer estimates at the high end of Waknis’ range; the chief economist of the IMF recently suggested a typical value “substantially greater than one.” (Blanchard and Leigh, 2013) But even lower values still mean that higher government spending will raise output and reduce unemployment. Waknis thinks he is bringing these estimates up as arguments for austerity, but he is really offering testimony for the other side. His confusion on this elementary point suggests a harsher judgment on the state of economics than anything in our original article.
Waknis’ inability to grasp the role of aggregate demand is striking, but sadly not unusual. It leads naturally to the claim that high unemployment, especially in Europe, is due to over-generous benefits to those out of work. There is an immense empirical literature on this claim, which finds the evidence for it somewhere between weak and nonexistent. (Howell et al., 2007) Indeed, the countries with the highest and most comprehensive unemployment benefits (Norway and Denmark) have substantially lower unemployment than the US (OECD, 2013). The argument also fails the test of common sense. Today, unemployment in the European Union is about five points higher than in the US. But as recently as the fall of 2009, US and EU unemployment rates were identical. Surely the European welfare state is not a fresh creation of the past four years? More fundamentally, if the rise in unemployment is due to declining “incentives to work,” it follows that newly unemployed prefer their current state of leisure to the jobs they had before.  Professor Waknis ends his letter with a call for continued research. One useful contribution he might make is interviewing unemployed workers, and asking them how they are enjoying the vacations they’ve chosen. We expect he will find the answers most stimulating.
Arjun Jayadev and J. W. Mason
Works cited:
Howell, David R., Dean Baker, Andrew Glyn, and John Schmitt. “Are protective labor market institutions at the root of unemployment? A critical review of the evidence.” Capitalism and Society 2, no. 1 (2007).
Blanchard, Olivier J., and Daniel Leigh. Growth forecast errors and fiscal multipliers. No. w18779. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013.

OECD (2013). Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Short-Term Labour Market Statistics Description: etaData : Harmonised Unemployment Rates (HURs). Available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=36324