Uneasy Money

In my previous post, I reproduced a footnote from Armen Alchian’s classic article “Information Costs, Pricing and Resource Unemployment,” a footnote explaining the theoretical basis for Keynes’s somewhat tortured definition of involuntary unemployment. In this post, I offer another excerpt from Alchian’s article, elaborating on the microeconomic rationale for “slow” adjustments in wages. In an upcoming post, I will try to tie some threads together and discuss the issue of whether there might be, contrary to Alchian’s belief, a theoretical basis for wages to lag behind other prices, ata least during the initial stages of inflation. Herewith are the first four paragraphs of section II (Labor Markets) of Alchian’s paper.

Though most analyses of unemployment rely on wage conventions, restriction, and controls to retard wage adjustments above market-clearing levels, [J. R.] Hicks and [W. H.] Hutt penetrated deeper. Hicks suggested a solution consistent with conventional exchange theory. He stated that “knowledge of opportunities is imperfect” and that the time required to obtain that knowledge leads to unemployment and a delayed effect on wages. [fn. J. R. Hicks, The Theory of Wages, 2d ed. (London, 1963), 45, 58. And headed another type – “the unemployment of the man who gives up his job to look for a better.”] It is precisely this enhanced significance that this paper seeks to develop, and which Hicks ignored when he immediately turned to different factors – unions and wage regulations, placing major blame on both for England’s heavy unemployment in the 1920s and 30s.

We digress to note that Keynes, in using a quantity-, instead of a price-, adjustment theory of exchange, merely postulated a “slow” reacting price without showing that slow price responses were consistent with utility or wealth-maximizing behavior in open, unconstrained markets. Keynes’s analysis was altered in the subsequent income-expenditure models where reliance was placed on “conventional” or “noncompetitive” wage rates. Modern “income-expenditure” theorists assumed “institutionally” or “irrationally” inflexible wages resulting from unions, money illusions, regulations, or factors allegedly idiosyncratic to labor. Keynes did not assume inflexibility for only wages. His theory rested on a more general scope of price inflexibility. [fn. For a thorough exposition and justification of these remarks on Keynes, see A. Leijonhufvud, On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes (Oxford, 1968).] The present paper may in part be viewed as an attempt to “justify” Keynes’s presumption about price response to disturbances in demand.

In 1939 W. H. Hutt exposed many of the fallacious interpretations of idleness and unemployment. Hutt applied the analysis suggested by Hicks but later ignored it when discussing Keynes’s analysis of involuntary unemployment and policies to alleviate it. [fn. W. H. Hutt, The Theory of Idle Resources (London, 1939), 165-69.] This is unfortunate, because Hutt’s analysis seems to be capable of explaining and accounting for a substantial portion of that unemployment.

If we follow the lead of Hicks and Hutt and develop the implications of “frictional” unemployment for both human and nonhuman goods, we can perceive conditions that will imply massive “frictional” unemployment and depressions in open, unrestricted, competitive markets with rational, utility maximizing, individual behavior.

So Alchian is telling us that it is at least possible to conceive of conditions in which massive unemployment and depressions are consistent with “open, unrestricted, competitive markets with rational, utility maximizing, individual behavior.” And presumably would be more going on in such periods of massive unemployment than the efficient substitution of leisure for work in periods of relatively low marginal labor productivity.