Uneasy Money

One of the good things about having a blog (which I launched July 5, 2011) is that I get comments about what I am writing about from a lot of people that I don’t know. One of my most popular posts – it’s about the sixteenth most visited — was one I wrote, just a couple of months after starting the blog, about the Hayek-Sraffa debate on the natural rate of interest. Unlike many popular posts, to which visitors are initially drawn from very popular blogs that linked to those posts, but don’t continue to drawing a lot of visitors, this post initially had only modest popularity, but still keeps on drawing visitors.

That post also led to a collaboration between me and my FTC colleague Paul Zimmerman on a paper “The Sraffa-Hayek Debate on the Natural Rate of Interest” which I presented two years ago at the History of Economics Society conference. We have now finished our revisions of the version we wrote for the conference, and I have just posted the new version on SSRN and will be submitting it for publication later this week.

Here’s the abstract posted on the SSRN site:

Hayek’s Prices and Production, based on his hugely successful lectures at LSE in 1931, was the first English presentation of Austrian business-cycle theory, and established Hayek as a leading business-cycle theorist. Sraffa’s 1932 review of Prices and Production seems to have been instrumental in turning opinion against Hayek and the Austrian theory. A key element of Sraffa’s attack was that Hayek’s idea of a natural rate of interest, reflecting underlying real relationships, undisturbed by monetary factors, was, even from Hayek’s own perspective, incoherent, because, without money, there is a multiplicity of own rates, none of which can be uniquely identified as the natural rate of interest. Although Hayek’s response failed to counter Sraffa’s argument, Ludwig Lachmann later observed that Keynes’s treatment of own rates in Chapter 17 of the General Theory (itself a generalization of Fisher’s (1896) distinction between the real and nominal rates of interest) undercut Sraffa’s criticism. Own rates, Keynes showed, cannot deviate from each other by more than expected price appreciation plus the cost of storage and the commodity service flow, so that anticipated asset yields are equalized in intertemporal equilibrium. Thus, on Keynes’s analysis in the General Theory, the natural rate of interest is indeed well-defined. However, Keynes’s revision of Sraffa’s own-rate analysis provides only a partial rehabilitation of Hayek’s natural rate. There being no unique price level or rate of inflation in a barter system, no unique money natural rate of interest can be specified. Hayek implicitly was reasoning in terms of a constant nominal value of GDP, but barter relationships cannot identify any path for nominal GDP, let alone a constant one, as uniquely compatible with intertemporal equilibrium.

Aside from clarifying the conceptual basis of the natural-rate analysis and its relationship to Sraffa’s own-rate analysis, the paper also highlights the connection (usually overlooked but mentioned by Harald Hagemann in his 2008 article on the own rate of interest for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) between the own-rate analysis, in either its Sraffian or Keynesian versions, and Fisher’s early distinction between the real and nominal rates of interest. The conceptual identity between Fisher’s real and nominal distinction and Keynes’s own-rate analysis in the General Theory only magnifies the mystery associated with Keynes’s attack in chapter 13 of the General Theory on Fisher’s distinction between the real and the nominal rates of interest.

I also feel that the following discussion of Hayek’s role in developing the concept of intertemporal equilibrium, though tangential to the main topic of the paper, makes an important point about how to think about intertemporal equilibrium.

Perhaps the key analytical concept developed by Hayek in his early work on monetary theory and business cycles was the idea of an intertemporal equilibrium. Before Hayek, the idea of equilibrium had been reserved for a static, unchanging, state in which economic agents continue doing what they have been doing. Equilibrium is the end state in which all adjustments to a set of initial conditions have been fully worked out. Hayek attempted to generalize this narrow equilibrium concept to make it applicable to the study of economic fluctuations – business cycles – in which he was engaged. Hayek chose to formulate a generalized equilibrium concept. He did not do so, as many have done, by simply adding a steady-state rate of growth to factor supplies and technology. Nor did Hayek define equilibrium in terms of any objective or measurable magnitudes. Rather, Hayek defined equilibrium as the mutual consistency of the independent plans of individual economic agents.

The potential consistency of such plans may be conceived of even if economic magnitudes do not remain constant or grow at a constant rate. Even if the magnitudes fluctuate, equilibrium is conceivable if the fluctuations are correctly foreseen. Correct foresight is not the same as perfect foresight. Perfect foresight is necessarily correct; correct foresight is only contingently correct. All that is necessary for equilibrium is that fluctuations (as reflected in future prices) be foreseen. It is not even necessary, as Hayek (1937) pointed out, that future price changes be foreseen correctly, provided that individual agents agree in their anticipations of future prices. If all agents agree in their expectations of future prices, then the individual plans formulated on the basis of those anticipations are, at least momentarily, equilibrium plans, conditional on the realization of those expectations, because the realization of those expectations would allow the plans formulated on the basis of those expectations to be executed without need for revision. What is required for intertemporal equilibrium is therefore a contingently correct anticipation by future agents of future prices, a contingent anticipation not the result of perfect foresight, but of contingently, even fortuitously, correct foresight. The seminal statement of this concept was given by Hayek in his classic 1937 paper, and the idea was restated by J. R. Hicks (1939), with no mention of Hayek, two years later in Value and Capital.

I made the following comment in a footnote to the penultimate sentence of the quotation:

By defining correct foresight as a contingent outcome rather than as an essential property of economic agents, Hayek elegantly avoided the problems that confounded Oskar Morgenstern ([1935] 1976) in his discussion of the meaning of equilibrium.

I look forward to reading your comments.