Uneasy Money

I arrived in Toronto last Thursday for the History of Economics Society Meeting at the University of Toronto (Trinity College to be exact) to give talks on Friday about two papers, one of which (“Hayek and Three Equilibrium Concepts: Sequential, Temporary and Rational Expectations”) I have been posting over the past few weeks on this blog (here, here, here, here, and here). I want to thank those of you who have posted your comments, which have been very helpful, and apologize for not responding to the more recent comments. The other paper about which I gave a talk was based on a post from three of years ago (“Real and Pseudo Gold Standards: Did Friedman Know the Difference?”) on which one of the sections of that paper was based.

Here I am talking about Friedman.

Here are the abstracts of the two papers:

“Hayek and Three Equilibrium Concepts: Sequential, Temporary, and Rational Expectations”

Almost 40 years ago, Murray Milgate (1979) drew attention to the neglected contribution of F. A. Hayek to the concept of intertemporal equilibrium, which had previously been associated with Erik Lindahl and J. R. Hicks. Milgate showed that although Lindahl had developed the concept of intertemporal equilibrium independently, Hayek’s original 1928 contribution was published before Lindahl’s and that, curiously, Hicks in Value and Capital had credited Lindahl with having developed the concept despite having been Hayek’s colleague at LSE in the early 1930s and having previously credited Hayek for the idea of intertemporal equilibrium. Aside from Milgate’s contribution, few developments of the idea of intertemporal equilibrium have adequately credited Hayek’s contribution. This paper attempts to compare three important subsequent developments of that idea with Hayek’s 1937 refinement of the key idea of his 1928 paper. In non-chronological order, the three developments of interest are: 1) Radner’s model of sequential equilibrium with incomplete markets as an alternative to the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model of full equilibrium with complete markets; 2) Hicks’s temporary equilibrium model, and 3) the Muth-Lucas rational expectations model. While Hayek’s 1937 treatment most closely resembles Radner’s sequential equilibrium model, which Radner, echoing Hayek, describes as an equilibrium of plans, prices, and price expectations, Hicks’s temporary equilibrium model seems to be the natural development of Hayek’s approach. The Muth-Lucas rational-expectations model, however, develops the concept of intertemporal equilibrium in a way that runs counter to the fundamental Hayekian insight about the nature of intertemporal equilibrium

“Milton Friedman and the Gold Standard”

Milton Friedman discussed the gold standard in a number of works. His two main discussions of the gold standard appear in a 1951 paper on commodity-reserve currencies and in a 1961 paper on real and pseudo gold standards. In the 1951 paper, he distinguished between a gold standard in which only gold or warehouse certificates to equivalent amounts of gold circulated as a medium of exchange and one in which mere fiduciary claims to gold also circulated as media of exchange. Friedman called the former a strict gold standard and the latter as a partial gold standard. In the later paper, he distinguished between a gold standard in which gold is used as money, and a gold standard in which the government merely fixes the price of gold, dismissing the latter as a “pseudo” gold standard. In this paper, I first discuss the origin for the real/partial distinction, an analytical error, derived from David Hume via the nineteenth-century Currency School, about the incentives of banks to overissue convertible claims to base money, which inspired the Chicago plan for 100-percent reserve banking. I then discuss the real/pseudo distinction and argue that it was primarily motivated by the ideological objective of persuading libertarian and classical-liberal supporters of the gold standard to support a fiat standard supplemented by the k-percent quantity rule that Friedman was about to propose.

And here is my concluding section from the Friedman paper:

Milton Friedman’s view of the gold standard was derived from his mentors at the University Chicago, an inheritance that, in a different context, he misleadingly described as the Chicago oral tradition. The Chicago view of the gold standard was, in turn, derived from the English Currency School of the mid-nineteenth century, which successfully promoted the enactment of the Bank Charter Act of 1844, imposing a 100-percent marginal reserve requirement on the banknotes issued by the Bank of England, and served as a model for the Chicago Plan for 100-percent-reserve banking. The Currency School, in turn, based its proposals for reform on the price-specie-flow analysis of David Hume (1742).

The pure quantity-theoretic lineage of Friedman’s views of the gold standard and the intellectual debt that he owed to the Currency School and the Bank Charter Act disposed him to view the gold standard as nothing more than a mechanism for limiting the quantity of money. If the really compelling purpose and justification of the gold standard was to provide a limitation on the capacity of a government or a monetary authority to increase the quantity of money, then there was nothing special or exceptional about the gold standard.

I have no interest in exploring the reasons why supporters of, and true believers in, the gold standard feel a strong ideological or emotional attachment to that institution, and even if I had such an interest, this would not be the place to enter into such an exploration, but I conjecture that the sources of that attachment to the gold standard go deeper than merely to provide a constraint on the power of the government to increase the quantity of money.

But from Friedman’s quantity-theoretical perspective, if the primary virtue of the gold standard was that it served to limit the ability of the government to increase the quantity of money, if another institution could perform that service, it would serve just as well as the gold standard. The lesson that Friedman took from the efforts of the Currency School to enact the Bank Charter Act was that the gold standard, on its own, did not provide a sufficient constraint on the ability of private banks to increase the quantity of money. Otherwise, the 100-percent marginal reserve requirement of the Bank Charter Act would have been unnecessary.

Now if the gold standard could not function well without additional constraints on the quantity of money, then obviously the constraint on the quantity of money that really matters is not the gold standard itself, but the 100-percent marginal reserve requirement imposed on the banking system. But if the relevant constraint on the quantity of money is the 100 percent marginal reserve requirement, then the gold standard is really just excess baggage.

That was the view of Henry Simons and the other authors of the Chicago Plan. For a long time, Friedman accepted the Chicago Plan as the best prescription for monetary stability, but at about the time that he was writing his paper on real and pseudo gold standards, Friedman was frcoming to position that a k-percent rule would be a superior alternative to the old Chicago Plan. His paper on Pseudo gold standards for the Mont Pelerin Society was his initial attempt to persuade his libertarian and classical-liberal friends and colleagues to reconsider their support for the gold standard and prepare the ground for the k-percent rule that he was about to offer. But in his ideological enthusiasm he, in effect, denied the reality of the historical gold standard.

Aside from the getting to talk about my papers, the other highlights of the HES meeting for me included the opportunity to renew a very old acquaintance with the eminent Samuel Hollander whom I met about 35 years ago at the first History of Economics Society meeting that I ever attended and making the acquaintance for the first time with the eminent Deidre McCloskey who was at both of my sessions and with the eminent E. Roy Weintraub who has been doing important research on my illustrious cousin Abraham Wald, the first one to prove the existence of a competitive equilibrium almost 20 years before Arrow, Debreu and McKenzie came up with their proofs. Doing impressive and painstaking historical research Weintraub found a paper, long thought to have been lost in which Wald, using the fixed-point theorem that Arrow, Debreu and McKenzie had independently used in their proofs, gave a more general existence proof than he had provided in his published existence proofs, clearly establishing Wald’s priority over Arrow, Debreu and McKenzie in proving the existence of general equilibrium.

HT: Rebeca Betancourt