Archive for October, 2015

Keynes on the Theory of Interest

Published October 22, 2015 D. H. Robertson , Hawtrey , Irving Fisher , Keynes 124 Comments
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In my previous post, I asserted that Keynes used the idea that savings and investment (in the aggregated) are identically equal to dismiss the neoclassical theory of interest of Irving Fisher, which was based on the idea that the interest rate equilibrates savings and investment. One of the commenters on my post, George Blackford, challenged my characterization of Keynes’s position.

I find this to be a rather odd statement for when I read Keynes I didn’t find anywhere that he argued this sort of thing. He often argued that “an act of saving” or “an act of investing” in itself could not have an direct effect on the rate of interest, and he said things like: “Assuming that the decisions to invest become effective, they must in doing so either curtail consumption or expand income”, but I don’t find him saying that savings and investment could not determine the rate of interest are identical.

A quote from Keynes in which he actually says something to this effect would be helpful here.

Now I must admit that in writing this characterization of what Keynes was doing, I was relying on my memory of how Hawtrey characterized Keynes’s theory of interest in his review of the General Theory, and did not look up the relevant passages in the General Theory. Of course, I do believe that Hawtrey’s characterization of what Keynes said to be very reliable, but it is certainly not as authoritative as a direct quotation from Keynes himself, so I have been checking up on the General Theory for the last couple of days. I actually found that Keynes’s discussion in the General Theory was less helpful than Keynes’s 1937 article “Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest” in which Keynes responded to criticisms by Ohlin, Robertson, and Hawtrey, of his liquidity-preference theory of interest. So I will use that source rather than what seems to me to be the less direct and more disjointed exposition in the General Theory.

Let me also remark parenthetically that Keynes did not refer to Fisher at all in discussing what he called the “classical” theory of interest which he associated with Alfred Marshall, his only discussion of Fisher in the General Theory being limited to a puzzling criticism of the Fisher relation between the real and nominal rates of interest. That seems to me to be an astonishing omission, perhaps reflecting a deplorable Cambridgian provincialism or chauvinism that would not deign to acknowledge Fisher’s magisterial accomplishment in incorporating the theory of interest into the neoclassical theory of general equilibrium. Equally puzzling is that Keynes chose to refer to Marshall’s theory (which I am assuming he considered an adequate proxy for Fisher’s) as the “classical” theory while reserving the term “neo-classical” for the Austrian theory that he explicitly associates with Mises, Hayek, and Robbins.

Here is how Keynes described his liquidity-preference theory:

The liquidity-preference theory of the rate of interest which I have set forth in my General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money makes the rate of interest to depend on the present supply of money and the demand schedule for a present claim on money in terms of a deferred claim on money. This can be put briefly by saying that the rate of interest depends on the demand and supply of money. . . . (p. 241)

The theory of the rate of interest which prevailed before (let us say) 1914 regarded it as the factor which ensured equality between saving and investment. It was never suggested that saving and investment could be unequal. This idea arose (for the first time, so far as I am aware) with certain post-war theories. In maintaining the equality of saving and investment, I am, therefore, returning to old-fashioned orthodoxy. The novelty in my treatment of saving and investment consists, not in my maintaining their necessary aggregate equality, but in the proposition that it is, not the rate of interest, but the level of incomes which (in conjunction with certain other factors) ensures this equality. (pp. 248-49)

As Hawtrey and Robertson explained in their rejoinders to Keynes, the necessary equality in the “classical” system between aggregate savings and aggregate investment of which Keynes spoke was not a definitional equality but a condition of equilibrium. Plans to save and plans to invest will be consistent in equilibrium and the rate of interest – along with all the other variables in the system — must be such that the independent plans of savers and investors will be mutually consistent. Keynes had no basis for simply asserting that this consistency of plans is ensured entirely by way of adjustments in income to the exclusion of adjustments in the rate of interest. Nor did he have a basis for asserting that the adjustment to a discrepancy between planned savings and planned investment was necessarily an adjustment in income rather than an adjustment in the rate of interest. If prices adjust in response to excess demands and excess supplies in the normal fashion, it would be natural to assume that an excess of planned savings over planned investment would cause the rate of interest to fall. That’s why most economists would say that the drop in real interest rates since 2008 has been occasioned by a persistent tendency for planned savings to exceed planned investment.

Keynes then explicitly stated that his liquidity preference theory was designed to fill the theoretical gap left by his realization that a change income not in the interest rate is what equalizes savings and investment (even while insisting that savings and investment are necessarily equal by definition).

As I have said above, the initial novelty lies in my maintaining that it is not the rate of interest, but the level of incomes which ensures equality between saving and investment. The arguments which lead up to this initial conclusion are independent of my subsequent theory of the rate of interest, and in fact I reached it before I had reached the latter theory. But the result of it was to leave the rate of interest in the air. If the rate of interest is not determined by saving and investment in the same way in which price is determined by supply and demand, how is it determined? One naturally began by supposing that the rate of interest must be determined in some sense by productivity-that it was, perhaps, simply the monetary equivalent of the marginal efficiency of capital, the latter being independently fixed by physical and technical considerations in conjunction with the expected demand. It was only when this line of approach led repeatedly to what seemed to be circular reasoning, that I hit on what I now think to be the true explanation. The resulting theory, whether right or wrong, is exceedingly simple-namely, that the rate of interest on a loan of given quality and maturity has to be established at the level which, in the opinion of those who have the opportunity of choice -i.e. of wealth-holders-equalises the attractions of holding idle cash and of holding the loan. It would be true to say that this by itself does not carry us very far. But it gives us firm and intelligible ground from which to proceed. (p. 250)

Thus, Keynes denied forthrightly the notion that the rate of interest is in any way determined by the real forces of what in Fisherian terms are known as the impatience to spend income and the opportunity to invest it. However, his argument was belied by his own breathtakingly acute analysis in chapter 17 of the General Theory (“The Properties of Interest and Money”) in which, applying and revising ideas discussed by Sraffa in his 1932 review of Hayek’s Prices and Production he introduced the idea of own rates of interest.

The rate of interest (as we call it for short) is, strictly speaking, a monetary phenomenon in the special sense that it is the own-rate of interest (General Theory, p. 223) on money itself, i.e. that it equalises the advantages of holding actual cash and a deferred claim on cash. (p. 245)

The huge gap in Keynes’s reasoning here is that he neglected to say at what rate of return “the advantages of holding actual cash and a deferred claim on cash” or, for that matter, of holding any other real asset are equalized. That’s the rate of return – the real rate of interest — for which Irving Fisher provided an explanation. Keynes simply ignored — or forgot about — it, leaving the real rate of interest totally unexplained.

Keynes and Accounting Identities

Published October 20, 2015 accounting identities , Hawtrey , Irving Fisher , Keynes , Michael Pettis , savings-investment identity , Uncategorized 39 Comments
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In a post earlier this week, Michael Pettis was kind enough to refer to a passage from Ralph Hawtrey’s review of Keynes’s General Theory, which I had quoted in an earlier post, criticizing Keynes’s reliance on accounting identities to refute the neoclassical proposition that it is the rate of interest which equilibrates savings and investment. Here’s what Pettis wrote:

Keynes, who besides being one of the most intelligent people of the 20th century was also so ferociously logical (and these two qualities do not necessarily overlap) that he was almost certainly incapable of making a logical mistake or of forgetting accounting identities. Not everyone appreciated his logic. For example his also-brilliant contemporary (but perhaps less than absolutely logical), Ralph Hawtrey, was “sharply critical of Keynes’s tendency to argue from definitions rather than from causal relationships”, according to FTC economist David Glasner, whose gem of a blog, Uneasy Money, is dedicated to reviving interest in the work of Ralph Hawtrey. In a recent entry Glasner quotes Hawtrey:

[A]n essential step in [Keynes’s] train of reasoning is the proposition that investment and saving are necessarily equal. That proposition Mr. Keynes never really establishes; he evades the necessity doing so by defining investment and saving as different names for the same thing. He so defines income to be the same thing as output, and therefore, if investment is the excess of output over consumption, and saving is the excess of income over consumption, the two are identical. Identity so established cannot prove anything. The idea that a tendency for investment and saving to become different has to be counteracted by an expansion or contraction of the total of incomes is an absurdity; such a tendency cannot strain the economic system, it can only strain Mr. Keynes’s vocabulary.

This is a very typical criticism of certain kinds of logical thinking in economics, and of course it misses the point because Keynes is not arguing from definition. It is certainly true that “identity so established cannot prove anything”, if by that we mean creating or supporting a hypothesis, but Keynes does not use identities to prove any creation. He uses them for at least two reasons. First, because accounting identities cannot be violated, any model or hypothesis whose logical corollaries or conclusions implicitly violate an accounting identity is automatically wrong, and the model can be safely ignored. Second, and much more usefully, even when accounting identities have not been explicitly violated, by identifying the relevant identities we can make explicit the sometimes very fuzzy assumptions that are implicit to the model an analyst is using, and focus the discussion, appropriately, on these assumptions.

I agree with Pettis that Keynes had an extraordinary mind, but even great minds are capable of making mistakes, and I don’t think Keynes was an exception. And on the specific topic of Keynes’s use of the accounting identity that expenditure must equal income and savings must equal investment, I think that the context of Keynes’s discussion of that identity makes it clear that Keynes was not simply invoking the identity to prevent some logical slipup, as Pettis suggests, but was using it to deny the neoclassical Fisherian theory of interest which says that the rate of interest represents the intertemporal rate of substitution between present and future goods in consumption and the rate of transformation between present and future goods in production. Or, in less rigorous terminology, the rate of interest reflects the marginal rate of time preference and the marginal rate of productivity of capital. In its place, Keynes wanted to substitute a pure monetary or liquidity-preference theory of the rate of interest.

Keynes tried to show that the neoclassical theory could not possibly be right, inasmuch as, according to the theory, the equilibrium rate of interest is the rate that equilibrates the supply of with the demand for loanable funds. Keynes argued that because investment and savings are identically equal, savings and investment could not determine the rate of interest. But Keynes then turned right around and said that actually the equality of savings and investment determines the level of income. Well, if savings and investment are identically equal, so that the rate of interest can’t be determined by equilibrating the market for loanable funds, it is equally impossible for savings and investment to determine the level of income.

Keynes was unable to distinguish the necessary accounting identity of savings and investment from the contingent equality of savings and investment as an equilibrium condition. For savings and investment to determine the level of income, there must be some alternative definition of savings and investment that allows them to be unequal except at equilibrium. But if there are alternative definitions of savings and investment that allow those magnitudes to be unequal out of equilibrium — and there must be such alternative definitions if the equality of savings and investment determines the level of income — there is no reason why the equality of savings and investment could not be an equilibrium condition for the rate of interest. So Keynes’s attempt to refute the neoclassical theory of interest failed. That was Hawtrey’s criticism of Keynes’s use of the savings-investment accounting identity.

Pettis goes on to cite Keynes’s criticism of the Versailles Treaty in The Economic Consequences of the Peace as another example of Keynes’s adroit use of accounting identities to expose fallacious thinking.

A case in point is The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the heart of whose argument rests on one of those accounting identities that are both obvious and easily ignored. When Keynes wrote the book, several members of the Entente – dominated by England, France, and the United States – were determined to force Germany to make reparations payments that were extraordinarily high relative to the economy’s productive capacity. They also demanded, especially France, conditions that would protect them from Germany’s export prowess (including the expropriation of coal mines, trains, rails, and capital equipment) while they rebuilt their shattered manufacturing capacity and infrastructure.

The argument Keynes made in objecting to these policies demands was based on a very simple accounting identity, namely that the balance of payments for any country must balance, i.e. it must always add to zero. The various demands made by France, Belgium, England and the other countries that had been ravaged by war were mutually contradictory when expressed in balance of payments terms, and if this wasn’t obvious to the former belligerents, it should be once they were reminded of the identity that required outflows to be perfectly matched by inflows.

In principle, I have no problem with such a use of accounting identities. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the logical inconsistency between wanting Germany to pay reparations and being unwilling to accept payment in anything but gold. Using an accounting identity in this way is akin to using the law of conservation of energy to point out that perpetual motion is impossible. However, essentially the same argument could be made using an equilibrium condition for the balance of payments instead of an identity. The difference is that the accounting identity tells you nothing about how the system evolves over time. For that you need a behavioral theory that explains how the system adjusts when the equilibrium conditions are not satisfied. Accounting identities and conservation laws don’t give you any information about how the system adjusts when it is out of equilibrium. So as Pettis goes on to elaborate on Keynes’s analysis of the reparations issue, one or more behavioral theories must be tacitly called upon to explain how the international system would adjust to a balance-of-payments disequilibrium.

If Germany had to make substantial reparation payments, Keynes explained, Germany’s capital account would tend towards a massive deficit. The accounting identity made clear that there were only three possible ways that together could resolve the capital account imbalance. First, Germany could draw down against its gold supply, liquidate its foreign assets, and sell domestic assets to foreigners, including art, real estate, and factories. The problem here was that Germany simply did not have anywhere near enough gold or transferable assets left after it had paid for the war, and it was hard to imagine any sustainable way of liquidating real estate. This option was always a non-starter.

Second, Germany could run massive current account surpluses to match the reparations payments. The obvious problem here, of course, was that this was unacceptable to the belligerents, especially France, because it meant that German manufacturing would displace their own, both at home and among their export clients. Finally, Germany could borrow every year an amount equal to its annual capital and current account deficits. For a few years during the heyday of the 1920s bubble, Germany was able to do just this, borrowing more than half of its reparation payments from the US markets, but much of this borrowing occurred because the great hyperinflation of the early 1920s had wiped out the country’s debt burden. But as German debt grew once again after the hyperinflation, so did the reluctance to continue to fund reparations payments. It should have been obvious anyway that American banks would never accept funding the full amount of the reparations bill.

What the Entente wanted, in other words, required an unrealistic resolution of the need to balance inflows and outflows. Keynes resorted to accounting identities not to generate a model of reparations, but rather to show that the existing model implicit in the negotiations was contradictory. The identity should have made it clear that because of assumptions about what Germany could and couldn’t do, the global economy in the 1920s was being built around a set of imbalances whose smooth resolution required a set of circumstances that were either logically inconsistent or unsustainable. For that reason they would necessarily be resolved in a very disruptive way, one that required out of arithmetical necessity a substantial number of sovereign defaults. Of course this is what happened.

Actually, if it had not been for the insane Bank of France and the misguided attempt by the Fed to burst the supposed stock-market bubble, the international system could have continued for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, with US banks lending enough to Germany to prevent default until rapid economic growth in the US and western Europe enabled the Germans to service their debt and persuaded the French to allow the Germans to do so via an export surplus. Instead, the insane Bank of France, with the unwitting cooperation of the clueless (following Benjamin Strong’s untimely demise) Federal Reserve precipitated a worldwide deflation that triggered that debt-deflationary downward spiral that we call the Great Depression.

Bernanke’s Continuing Confusion about How Monetary Policy Works

Published October 15, 2015 Austrian Business-Cycle Theory , Ben Bernanke , Fisher effect , Keynes 10 Comments
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TravisV recently posted a comment on this blog with a link to his comment on Scott Sumner’s blog flagging two apparently contradictory rationales for the Fed’s quantitative easing policy in chapter 19 of Ben Bernanke’s new book in which he demurely takes credit for saving Western Civilization. Here are the two quotes from Bernanke:

1              Our goal was to bring down longer-term interest rates, such as the rates on thirty-year mortgages and corporate bonds. If we could do that, we might stimulate spending—on housing and business capital investment, for example…..Similarly, when we bought longer-term Treasury securities, such as a note maturing in ten years, the yields on those securities tended to decline.

2              A new era of monetary policy activism had arrived, and our announcement had powerful effects. Between the day before the meeting and the end of the year, the Dow would rise more than 3,000 points—more than 40 percent—to 10,428. Longer-term interest rates fell on our announcement, with the yield on ten-year Treasury securities dropping from about 3 percent to about 2.5 percent in one day, a very large move. Over the summer, longer-term yields would reverse and rise to above 4 percent. We would see that increase as a sign of success. Higher yields suggested that investors were expecting both more growth and higher inflation, consistent with our goal of economic revival. Indeed, after four quarters of contraction, revised data would show that the economy would grow at a 1.3 percent rate in the third quarter and a 3.9 percent rate in the fourth.

Over my four years of blogging — especially the first two – I have written a number of posts pointing out that the Fed’s articulated rationale for its quantitative easing – the one expressed in quote number 1 above: that quantitative easing would reduce long-term interest rates and stimulate the economy by promoting investment – was largely irrelevant, because the magnitude of the effect would be far too small to have any noticeable macroeconomic effect.

In making this argument, Bernanke bought into one of the few propositions shared by both Keynes and the Austrians: that monetary policy is effective by operating on long-term interest rates, and that significant investments by business in plant and equipment are responsive to relatively small changes in long-term rates. Keynes, at any rate, had the good sense to realize that long-term investment in plant and equipment is not very responsive to changes in long-term interest rates – a view he had espoused in his Treatise on Money before emphasizing, in the General Theory, expectations about future prices and profitability as the key factor governing investment. Austrians, however, never gave up their theoretical preoccupation with the idea that the entire structural profile of a modern economy is dominated by small changes in the long-term rate of interest.

So for Bernanke’s theory of how QE would be effective to be internally consistent, he would have had to buy into a hyper-Austrian view of how the economy works, which he obviously doesn’t and never did. Sometimes internal inconsistency can be a sign that being misled by bad theory hasn’t overwhelmed a person’s good judgment. So I say even though he botched the theory, give Bernanke credit for his good judgment. Unfortunately, Bernanke’s confusion made it impossible for him to communicate a coherent story about how monetary policy, undermining, or at least compromising, his ability to build popular support for the policy.

Of course the problem was even deeper than expecting a marginal reduction in long-term interest rates to have any effect on the economy. The Fed’s refusal to budge from its two-percent inflation target, drastically limited the potential stimulus that monetary policy could provide.

I might add that I just noticed that I had already drawn attention to Bernanke’s inconsistent rationale for adopting QE in my paper “The Fisher Effect Under Deflationary Expectations” written before I started this blog, which both Scott Sumner and Paul Krugman plugged after I posted it on SSRN.

Here’s what I said in my paper (p. 18):

If so, the expressed rationale for the Fed’s quantitative easing policy (Bernanke 2010), namely to reduce long term interest rates, thereby stimulating spending on investment and consumption, reflects a misapprehension of the mechanism by which the policy would be most likely to operate, increasing expectations of both inflation and future profitability and, hence, of the cash flows derived from real assets, causing asset values to rise in step with both inflation expectations and real interest rates. Rather than a policy to reduce interest rates, quantitative easing appears to be a policy for increasing interest rates, though only as a consequence of increasing expected future prices and cash flows.

I wrote that almost five years ago, and it still seems pretty much on the mark.

Representative Agents, Homunculi and Faith-Based Macroeconomics

Published October 12, 2015 general equilibrium , homunculus , intertemporal equilibrium , macroeconomics , microfoundations , mind-body problem , New Classical macroeconomics , representative agent 35 Comments
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After my previous post comparing the neoclassical synthesis in its various versions to the mind-body problem, there was an interesting Twitter exchange between Steve Randy Waldman and David Andolfatto in which Andolfatto queried whether Waldman and I are aware that there are representative-agent models in which the equilibrium is not Pareto-optimal. Andalfatto raised an interesting point, but what I found interesting about it might be different from what Andalfatto was trying to show, which, I am guessing, was that a representative-agent modeling strategy doesn’t necessarily commit the theorist to the conclusion that the world is optimal and that the solutions of the model can never be improved upon by a monetary/fiscal-policy intervention. I concede the point. It is well-known I think that, given the appropriate assumptions, a general-equilibrium model can have a sub-optimal solution. Given those assumptions, the corresponding representative-agent will also choose a sub-optimal solution. So I think I get that, but perhaps there’s a more subtle point  that I’m missing. If so, please set me straight.

But what I was trying to argue was not that representative-agent models are necessarily optimal, but that representative-agent models suffer from an inherent, and, in my view, fatal, flaw: they can’t explain any real macroeconomic phenomenon, because a macroeconomic phenomenon has to encompass something more than the decision of a single agent, even an omniscient central planner. At best, the representative agent is just a device for solving an otherwise intractable general-equilibrium model, which is how I think Lucas originally justified the assumption.

Yet just because a general-equilibrium model can be formulated so that it can be solved as the solution of an optimizing agent does not explain the economic mechanism or process that generates the solution. The mathematical solution of a model does not necessarily provide any insight into the adjustment process or mechanism by which the solution actually is, or could be, achieved in the real world. Your ability to find a solution for a mathematical problem does not mean that you understand the real-world mechanism to which the solution of your model corresponds. The correspondence between your model may be a strictly mathematical correspondence which may not really be in any way descriptive of how any real-world mechanism or process actually operates.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. Consider a traffic-flow model explaining how congestion affects vehicle speed and the flow of traffic. It seems obvious that traffic congestion is caused by interactions between the different vehicles traversing a thoroughfare, just as it seems obvious that market exchange arises as the result of interactions between the different agents seeking to advance their own interests. OK, can you imagine building a useful traffic-flow model based on solving for the optimal plan of a representative vehicle?

I don’t think so. Once you frame the model in terms of a representative vehicle, you have abstracted from the phenomenon to be explained. The entire exercise would be pointless – unless, that is, you assumed that interactions between vehicles are so minimal that they can be ignored. But then why would you be interested in congestion effects? If you want to claim that your model has any relevance to the effect of congestion on traffic flow, you can’t base the claim on an assumption that there is no congestion.

Or to take another example, suppose you want to explain the phenomenon that, at sporting events, all, or almost all, the spectators sit in their seats but occasionally get up simultaneously from their seats to watch the play on the field or court. Would anyone ever think that an explanation in terms of a representative spectator could explain that phenomenon?

In just the same way, a representative-agent macroeconomic model necessarily abstracts from the interactions between actual agents. Obviously, by abstracting from the interactions, the model can’t demonstrate that there are no interactions between agents in the real world or that their interactions are too insignificant to matter. I would be shocked if anyone really believed that the interactions between agents are unimportant, much less, negligible; nor have I seen an argument that interactions between agents are unimportant, the concept of network effects, to give just one example, being an important topic in microeconomics.

It’s no answer to say that all the interactions are accounted for within the general-equilibrium model. That is just a form of question-begging. The representative agent is being assumed because without him the problem of finding a general-equilibrium solution of the model is very difficult or intractable. Taking into account interactions makes the model too complicated to work with analytically, so it is much easier — but still hard enough to allow the theorist to perform some fancy mathematical techniques — to ignore those pesky interactions. On top of that, the process by which the real world arrives at outcomes to which a general-equilibrium model supposedly bears at least some vague resemblance can’t even be described by conventional modeling techniques.

The modeling approach seems like that of a neuroscientist saying that, because he could simulate the functions, electrical impulses, chemical reactions, and neural connections in the brain – which he can’t do and isn’t even close to doing, even though a neuroscientist’s understanding of the brain far surpasses any economist’s understanding of the economy – he can explain consciousness. Simulating the operation of a brain would not explain consciousness, because the computer on which the neuroscientist performed the simulation would not become conscious in the course of the simulation.

Many neuroscientists and other materialists like to claim that consciousness is not real, that it’s just an epiphenomenon. But we all have the subjective experience of consciousness, so whatever it is that someone wants to call it, consciousness — indeed the entire world of mental phenomena denoted by that term — remains an unexplained phenomenon, a phenomenon that can only be dismissed as unreal on the basis of a metaphysical dogma that denies the existence of anything that can’t be explained as the result of material and physical causes.

I call that metaphysical belief a dogma not because it’s false — I have no way of proving that it’s false — but because materialism is just as much a metaphysical belief as deism or monotheism. It graduates from belief to dogma when people assert not only that the belief is true but that there’s something wrong with you if you are unwilling to believe it as well. The most that I would say against the belief in materialism is that I can’t understand how it could possibly be true. But I admit that there are a lot of things that I just don’t understand, and I will even admit to believing in some of those things.

New Classical macroeconomists, like, say, Robert Lucas and, perhaps, Thomas Sargent, like to claim that unless a macroeconomic model is microfounded — by which they mean derived from an explicit intertemporal optimization exercise typically involving a representative agent or possibly a small number of different representative agents — it’s not an economic model, because the model, being vulnerable to the Lucas critique, is theoretically superficial and vacuous. But only models of intertemporal equilibrium — a set of one or more mutually consistent optimal plans — are immune to the Lucas critique, so insisting on immunity to the Lucas critique as a prerequisite for a macroeconomic model is a guarantee of failure if your aim to explain anything other than an intertemporal equilibrium.

Unless, that is, you believe that real world is in fact the realization of a general equilibrium model, which is what real-business-cycle theorists, like Edward Prescott, at least claim to believe. Like materialist believers that all mental states are epiphenomenous, and that consciousness is an (unexplained) illusion, real-business-cycle theorists purport to deny that there is such a thing as a disequilibrium phenomenon, the so-called business cycle, in their view, being nothing but a manifestation of the intertemporal-equilibrium adjustment of an economy to random (unexplained) productivity shocks. According to real-business-cycle theorists, such characteristic phenomena of business cycles as surprise, regret, disappointed expectations, abandoned and failed plans, the inability to find work at wages comparable to wages that other similar workers are being paid are not real phenomena; they are (unexplained) illusions and misnomers. The real-business-cycle theorists don’t just fail to construct macroeconomic models; they deny the very existence of macroeconomics, just as strict materialists deny the existence of consciousness.

What is so preposterous about the New-Classical/real-business-cycle methodological position is not the belief that the business cycle can somehow be modeled as a purely equilibrium phenomenon, implausible as that idea seems, but the insistence that only micro-founded business-cycle models are methodologically acceptable. It is one thing to believe that ultimately macroeconomics and business-cycle theory will be reduced to the analysis of individual agents and their interactions. But current micro-founded models can’t provide explanations for what many of us think are basic features of macroeconomic and business-cycle phenomena. If non-micro-founded models can provide explanations for those phenomena, even if those explanations are not fully satisfactory, what basis is there for rejecting them just because of a methodological precept that disqualifies all non-micro-founded models?

According to Kevin Hoover, the basis for insisting that only micro-founded macroeconomic models are acceptable, even if the microfoundation consists in a single representative agent optimizing for an entire economy, is eschatological. In other words, because of a belief that economics will eventually develop analytical or computational techniques sufficiently advanced to model an entire economy in terms of individual interacting agents, an analysis based on a single representative agent, as the first step on this theoretical odyssey, is somehow methodologically privileged over alternative models that do not share that destiny. Hoover properly rejects the presumptuous notion that an avowed, but unrealized, theoretical destiny, can provide a privileged methodological status to an explanatory strategy. The reductionist microfoundationalism of New-Classical macroeconomics and real-business-cycle theory, with which New Keynesian economists have formed an alliance of convenience, is truly a faith-based macroeconomics.

The remarkable similarity between the reductionist microfoundational methodology of New-Classical macroeconomics and the reductionist materialist approach to the concept of mind suggests to me that there is also a close analogy between the representative agent and what philosophers of mind call a homunculus. The Cartesian materialist theory of mind maintains that, at some place or places inside the brain, there resides information corresponding to our conscious experience. The question then arises: how does our conscious experience access the latent information inside the brain? And the answer is that there is a homunculus (or little man) that processes the information for us so that we can perceive it through him. For example, the homunculus (see the attached picture of the little guy) views the image cast by light on the retina as if he were watching a movie projected onto a screen.

homunculus

But there is an obvious fallacy, because the follow-up question is: how does our little friend see anything? Well, the answer must be that there’s another, smaller, homunculus inside his brain. You can probably already tell that this argument is going to take us on an infinite regress. So what purports to be an explanation turns out to be just a form of question-begging. Sound familiar? The only difference between the representative agent and the homunculus is that the representative agent begs the question immediately without having to go on an infinite regress.

PS I have been sidetracked by other responsibilities, so I have not been blogging much, if at all, for the last few weeks. I hope to post more frequently, but I am afraid that my posting and replies to comments are likely to remain infrequent for the next couple of months.

About Me

David Glasner
Washington, DC

I am an economist in the Washington DC area. My research and writing has been mostly on monetary economics and policy and the history of economics. In my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform, I argued for a non-Monetarist non-Keynesian approach to monetary policy, based on a theory of a competitive supply of money. Over the years, I have become increasingly impressed by the similarities between my approach and that of R. G. Hawtrey and hope to bring Hawtrey’s unduly neglected contributions to the attention of a wider audience.

My new book Studies in the History of Monetary Theory: Controversies and Clarifications has been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Follow me on Twitter @david_glasner

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