David Glasner

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Why Theories of National Income Based on Accounting Identities Are Nonsensical and Error-Ridden, Part II

Published March 3, 2015 R. G. Lipsey , savings-investment identity , Scott Sumner 37 Comments

In this installment of my series on Richard Lipsey’s essay “The Foundations of the Theory of National Income,” I am going to focus on a single issue: what inferences about reality are deducible from a definition about the meaning of the terms used in a scientific theory? In my first installment I listed seven common statements about the basic Keynesian income-expenditure model that are found in most textbooks. The first concerned the confusion between the equality of investment and saving (or between income and expenditure) as an equilibrium condition and a definitional identity. Interpreting the equality of savings and investment as an identity essentially means collapsing the entire model onto the 45-degree line and arbitrarily choosing some point on the 45-degree line as the solution of the model.

That nonsensical interpretation of the simple Keynesian cross is obviously unsatisfactory, so, in an effort to save both the definitional identity of savings and investment and the equality of investment and savings as an equilibrium condition, the textbooks have introduced a distinction between ex ante and ex post in which savings and investment are defined to be identically equal ex post, but planned (ex ante) savings may differ from planned (ex ante) investment, their equality being the condition for equilibrium.

Now, to be fair, it is perfectly legitimate to define an equilibrium in terms of plan consistency, and to say that the inconsistency of the plans occasions a process of readjustment in the plans, and that it is the readjustment in the plans which leads to a new equilibrium. The problem with the textbook treatment is that it draws factual inferences about the adjustment process to a disequilibrium in which planned saving is not equal to planned investment from the definitional identity between ex post savings and ex post investment. In particular, the typical textbook treatment infers that in a disequilibrium with planned savings not equal to planned investment, the adjustment process is characterized by unplanned positive or negative investment (inventory accumulation or decumulation) corresponding to the gap between planned savings and planned investment. Identifying a gap between planned saving and planned investment with unplanned inventory accumulation or decumulation, as textbook treatments of the income expenditure model typically do, is logically unfounded.

Again, I want to be careful, I am not saying that unplanned inventory accumulation or decumulation could not occur in response to a difference gap between planned savings and planned investment, or even that such unplanned inventory accumulation or decumulation is unlikely to occur. What I am saying is that the definitional identity between ex post savings and ex post investment does not imply that such inventory accumulation or decumulation takes place and certainly not that the amount by which inventories change is necessarily equal to the gap between planned savings and planned investment.

Richard Lipsey made the key point in his comment on my previous post:

The main issue in this whole discussion is, I think, can we use a definitional identity to rule out an imaginable state of the universe. The answer is “No”, which is why Keynes was wrong. The definitional identity of S ≡ I tells us nothing about what will happen if agents wish to save a different amount from what agents wish to invest.

Here is how Lipsey put it in his 1972 essay:

The error in this interpretation lies in the belief that the identity E ≡ Y can tell us what can and cannot happen in the world. If it were possible that a definitional identity could rule out certain imaginable events, then such a definitional identity would be an informative statement having empirical content! If it is a genuine definitional identity (which follows from our use of words and is compatible with all states of the universe) then it is only telling us that we are using E and Y to refer to the same thing, and this statement no more allows us to place restrictions on what happens in the world than does the statement that we are not using E and Y to refer to the same thing.

Lipsey illustrated the problem using the simple Keynesian cross diagram. To make the discussion a bit easier to follow, I am going to refer to my own slightly altered version (using a specific numerical example) of the familiar diagram. Setting investment (I) equal to 100 and assuming the following consumption function

C = 25 + .5Y

We can easily solve for an equilibrium income of 250 corresponding to the intersection of the expenditure function with the 45-degree line.

What happens if we posit that the system is at a disequilibrium point, say Y = 400. The usual interpretation is that at Y = 400, planned (ex ante) investment is less than savings and planned (ex ante) expenditure is less than income. Because, actual (ex post) investment is identically equal to savings and because actual (ex post) expenditure is identically equal to income, unplanned investment must occur to guarantee that the investment-savings identity is satisfied. The amount of unplanned investment is shown on the graph as the vertical distance between the expenditure function (E(Y)) at Y = 400 and the 45-degree line at Y = 400. This distance is shown in my diagram as the vertical distance between the points a and b on the diagram, and it is easy to check that the distance corresponds to a value of 75.

So the basic textbook interpretation of the Keynesian cross is using the savings-investment identity to derive a proposition about the behavior of the economy in disequilibrium. It is saying that an economy in disequilibrium with planned investment less than planned savings adjusts to the disequilibrium through unplanned inventory accumulation (unplanned investment) that exactly matches the difference between planned saving and planned investment. But it is logically impossible for a verbal identity (between savings and investment) — an identity that can never be violated in any actual state of the world — to give us any information about what actually happens in the world, because whatever happens in the world, the identity will always be satisfied.

Recall erroneous propositions 2, 3 and 4, listed in part I of this series:

2 Although people may try to save different amounts from what people try to invest, savings can’t be different from investment; realized (ex post) savings necessarily always equals realized (ex post) investment.

3 Out of equilibrium, planned savings do not equal planned investment, so it follows from (2) that someone’s plans are being disappointed, and there must be either unplanned savings or dissavings, or unplanned investment or disinvestment

4 The simultaneous fulfilment of the plans of savers and investors occurs only when income is at its equilibrium level just as the plans of buyers and sellers can be simultaneously fulfilled only at the equilibrium price.

If realized (ex post) savings necessarily always equals realized (ex post) investment, that equality is the result of how we have chosen to define those terms, not because of people actually are behaving, e.g., by unwillingly accumulating inventories or failing to save as much as they had intended to. However people behave, the identity between savings and investment will be satisfied. And whether savers and investors are able to fulfill their plans or are unable to do so cannot possibly be inferred from a definition that says that savings and investment mean the same thing.

In several of his comments on my recent posts, Scott Sumner has cited the professional consensus that savings and investment are defined to be equal. I am not so sure that there is really a consensus on that point, because I don’t think that most economists have thought carefully about what the identity actually means. But even if there is a consensus that savings is identical to investment, no empirical implication follows from that definition. But typical textbook expositions, and I think even Scott himself when he is not being careful, do use the savings-investment identity to make inferences about what actually happens in the real world.

In the next installment, I will go through a numerical example that shows, based on a simple lagged adjustment between consumption and income (household consumption in this period being a function of income in the previous period), that planned savings and planned investment can be realized and unequal in the transition from one equilibrium to another.

PS I apologize for having been unable to respond to a number of comments to previous posts. I will try to respond in the next day or two.

Imagination and Identity

Published February 26, 2015 Hawtrey , Keynes , savings-investment identity 17 Comments
Tags: Hawtrey, Keynes, Richard Lipsey, Scott Sumner

Before continuing my summary of the key points of Richard Lipsey’s important paper, “The Foundations of the Theory of National Income,” I want to clear up a point that the deliberately provocative title may have obscured. The accounting identities that I am singling out for criticism are the identities between income and expenditure (and output) and between savings and investment. It is true that, as Scott Sumner points out in a comment on my previous post, every theory has to define its terms in some way or another, so there is no point in asserting that a definition is wrong. Scott believes that I am a saying that it is wrong to define investment and savings as the same thing, but I am not saying that. I am saying that, in the context of the basic income-expenditure theory of national income, it makes the theory incoherent, so that there is a mismatch between the definition and the theory.

It is also true that sometimes identities follow directly from basic definitions. Such identities are like conservation laws in physics. For example, purchases must equal sales, because purchasing and selling are reciprocal activities; to assert that purchases are, or could be, unequal to sales would be self-contradictory. Keynes, when ridiculed by Hawtrey for asserting that a) savings and investment are equal by definition, and b) that the equality of savings and investment is achieved by variations in income, responded by comparing the equality of savings and investment to the equality of purchases and sales. Purchases are necessarily equal to sales, but prices adjust to achieve equality between desired purchases and desired sales.

The problem with Keynes’s response to Hawtrey is that to assert that purchases are unequal to sales is to misconstrue in a really fundamental way the meaning of the terms “purchase” and “sales.” But when it comes to national-income accounting, the identity of “investment” and “savings” does not follow immediately from the meaning of those terms. It must be derived from the meaning of two other terms: income and expenditure. So the question becomes whether the act of spending (i.e., expenditure) necessarily entails an immediate and corresponding accrual of income, in the same way that the act of purchasing necessarily entails the act of selling. To assert that expenditure and income are identical is then to assert that any expenditure necessarily and simultaneously entails a corresponding accrual of income.

Before pursuing this line of thought further, let’s just pause for a moment to recall the context for this discussion. We are talking about a fairly primitive model of an economy in which there are households that are units of consumption and providers of factor services. Households purchase consumption goods and provide factor services to business firms. Business firms are units of production that combine factor services provided by households with raw materials purchased from other business firms, and new or existing capital goods produced now or previously by other business firms, to produce raw materials, consumption goods, and capital goods. Raw materials and capital goods are sold to other business firms and consumption goods are sold to households. Business firms are owned by households, so profits earned by business firms are remitted, along with payments for factor services, to households. But although the flow of payments from households to business firms corresponds to a flow of payments from business firms to households, the two flows, which can be measured separately, are, at not identical, or at least not obviously so. When I bought a tall Starbucks coffee just now at a Barnes & Noble cafe, my purchase of $1.98 was exactly and necessarily matched by a sale by Barnes & Noble to the guy who writes for the Uneasy Money blog. But expenditure of $1.98 by the Uneasy Money blogger to Barnes & Noble did not trigger an immediate and corresponding flow of $1.98 to households from Barnes & Noble.

Now I grant that it is possible for income so to be defined that every act of expenditure involves a corresponding accrual of income to providers of factor services to the firm, and of profit to owners of the firm. But expenditure entails simultaneous accrual of income only by virtue of an imputation of income to providers of factor services and of profit to owners of firms. Mere imputation does not and cannot constitute an actual flow of payments by firms to households. The identity between purchases and sales is entailed by the definition of “purchase” and “sales,’ but the supposed identity between expenditure and income is entailed by nothing but an act of imagination. I am not criticizing imagination, which may often provide us with an excellent grasp of reality. But imagination, no matter how well attuned to reality, does not and cannot establish identity.

Why Theories of National Income Based on Accounting Identities Are Nonsensical and Error-Ridden, Part I

Published February 20, 2015 R. G. Lipsey , savings-investment identity 19 Comments

I have had occasion to make many references in the past to Richard Lipsey’s wonderful article “The Foundations of the Theory of National Income” which was included in the volume Essays in Honour of Lord Robbins. When some 40 years ago, while a grad student at UCLA, I luckily came upon Lipsey’s essay, it was a revelation to me, because it contradicted what I had been taught as an undergrad about the distinctions between planned (ex ante) investment and savings, and realized (ex post) investment and savings. Supposedly, planned investment and planned savings are equal only in equilibrium, but realized investment and savings are always equal. Lipsey explained why the ex ante/ex post distinction is both incorrect and misleading. In this post I want to begin to summarize some of the important points that Lipsey made in his essay.

Lipsey starts with a list of seven erroneous propositions commonly found in introductory and intermediate textbooks. Here they are (copied almost verbatim), grouped under three headings:

I The Static Model in Equilibrium

1 The equilibrium of the basic Keynesian model is given by the intersection of the aggregate demand (i.e., expenditure) function and the 45-degree line representing the accounting identity E ≡ Y.

II The Static Model in Disequilibrium

2 Although people may try to save different amounts from what people try to invest, savings can’t be different from investment; realized (ex post) savings necessarily always equals realized (ex post) investment.

3 Out of equilibrium, planned savings do not equal planned investment, so it follows from (2) that someone’s plans are being disappointed, and there must be either unplanned savings or dissavings, or unplanned investment or disinvestment

4 The simultaneous fulfilment of the plans of savers and investors occurs only when income is at its equilibrium level just as the plans of buyers and sellers can be simultaneously fulfilled only at the equilibrium price.

III The Dynamic Behavior of the Model

5 Whenever savers (households) plan to save an amount different from what investors (business firms) plan to invest, a mechanism operates to ensure that realized savings remain equal to realized investment, despite the attempts of savers and investors to make it otherwise. Indeed, this mechanism is what causes dynamic change in the circular flow of income and expenditure.

6 Since the real world, unlike the simple textbook model, contains a very complex set of interactions, it is not easy to see how savings stay equal to investment even in the worst disequilibrium and the most rapid change.

7 The dynamic behavior of the Keynesian circular flow model in which disequilibrium implies unintended investment or disinvestment can be shown by moving upwards or downwards along the gap between the expenditure function and the 45-degree line in the basic Keynesian model.

Although some or all of these propositions are found in most standard textbook treatments of national income theory, every one of them is wrong.

Let’s look at proposition 1. It says that the equilibrium level of income and expenditure is determined algebraically by the following two relations: the expenditure (or aggregate demand) function:

E = E(Y) + A

and the expenditure-income accounting identity

E ≡ Y.

An accounting identity provides no independent information about the real world, because there is no possible state of the world in which the accounting identity does not hold. It therefore adds no new information not contained in the expenditure function. So the equilibrium level of income and expenditure must be determined on the basis of only the expenditure function. But if the expenditure function remains as is, it cannot be solved, because there are two unknowns and only one equation. To solve the equation we have to make a substitution based on the accounting identity E ≡ Y. Using that substitution, we can rewrite the expenditure function this way.

E = E(E) + A

If the expenditure function is linear, we can write it as follows:

E = bE + A,

which leads to the following solution:

E = A/(1 – b).

That solution tells us that expenditure is a particular number, but it is not a functional relationship between two variables representing a theory, however naïve, of household behavior; it simply asserts that E takes on a particular value.

Thus treating the equality of investment and savings as an identity turns the simply Keynesian theory into a nonsense theory.

The point could be restated slightly differently. If we treat the equality of investment and savings as an identity, then if we follow the usual convention and label the vertical axis as E, it is a matter of indifference whether we label the horizontal axis Y or E, because Y and E are not distinct, they are identical. However we choose to label the horizontal axis, the solution of the model must occur along the 45-degree line representing either E = Y or E = E, which are equivalent. Because, the equality between E and itself or between E and Y is necessarily satisfied at any value of E, we can arbitrarily choose whatever value of E we want, and we will have a solution.

So the only reasonable way to interpret the equality between investment and saving, so that you can derive a solution to the simple Keynesian model is to treat E and Y as distinct variables that may differ, but will always be equal when the economy is in equilibrium.

So the only coherent theory of income is

E = E(Y) + A

and, an equilibrium condition

E = Y.

E and Y do not represent the same thing, so it makes sense to state a theory of how E varies in relation to Y, and to find a solution to the model corresponding to an equilibrium in which E and Y are equal, though they are distinct and not necessarily equal.

But the limitation of this model is that it provides us with no information about how the model behaves when it is not in equilibrium, not being in equilibrium meaning that E and Y are not the equal. Note, however, that if we restrict ourselves to the model in equilibrium, it is legitimate to write E ≡ Y, because the equality of E and Y is what defines equilibrium. But all the erroneous statements 2 through 7 listed above all refer to how the model.

The nonsensical implications of constructing a model of income in which expenditure is treated as a function of income while income and expenditure are defined to be identical has led to the widespread adoption of a distinction between planned (ex ante) investment and savings and realized (ex post) investment and savings. Using the ex ante/ex post distinction, textbooks usually say that in equilibrium planned investment equals planned savings, while in disequilibrium not all investment and savings plans are realized. The reasoning being that is that if planned saving exceeds planned investment, the necessity for realized savings to equal realized investment requires that there be unintended investment or unintended dissaving. In other words, the definitional identity between expenditure and income is being used to tell us whether investment plans are being executed as planned or being frustrated in the real world.

Question: How is it possible that an identity true by definition in all states of the world can have any empirical implications?

Answer: It’s not.

In my next installment in this series, I will go through Lipsey’s example showing how planned and realized saving can indeed exceed planned and realized investment over the disequilibrium adjustment induced by a reduction in planned investment relative to a pre-existing equilibrium.

UPDATE (2/21/2015]: In the second sentence of the paragraph beginning with the words “An accounting Identity provides,” I wrote: “It therefore adds information not contained in the expenditure function,” which, of course, is the exact opposite of what I meant to say. I should have written: “It therefore adds NO NEW information not contained in the expenditure function.” I have now inserted those two words into the text. Thanks to Richard Lipsey for catching that unfortunate mistake.

Savings and Investment Aren’t the Same Thing and There’s No Good Reason to Define them as Such

Published February 17, 2015 savings-iinvestment identity , Scott Sumner 29 Comments

Scott Sumner responded to my previous post criticizing his use of the investment-savings identity in a post on the advantages NGDI over NGDP, and to my posts from three years ago criticizing him for relying on the savings-investment identity. Scott remains unpersuaded by my criticism. I want to understand why my criticism appears so ineffective, so I’m going to try to understand Scott’s recent response, which begins by referring to economics textbooks. Since it is well documented that economics textbooks consistently misuse the savings-investment identity, it would not be surprising to find out that the textbooks disagree with my position (though Scott doesn’t actually cite chapter and verse).

Economics textbooks define savings as being equal to investment:

S = I

To say that something is equal to investment doesn’t seem to me to be much of a definition of whatever that something is. So Scott elaborates on the definition.

This means savings is defined as the funds used for investment.

OK, savings are the funds used for investment. Does that mean that savings and investment are identical? Savings are funds accruing (unconsumed income measured in dollars per unit time); investments are real physical assets produced per unit time, so they obviously are not identical physical entities. So it is not self-evident – at least not to me — how the funds for investment can be said to be identical to investment itself. The two don’t seem to be self-evidently identical to Scott either, because he invokes another identity.

It’s derived from another identity, which says that in a closed economy with no government, gross domestic product equals gross domestic income:

GDI = C + S = C + I = GDP

But once again, it is not self-evident that GDI and GDP are identical. Income usually refers to earnings per unit time derived by factors of production for services rendered. Or stated another way, GDI represents the payments per unit time – a flow of money — made by business firms to households. In contrast, GDP could represent either a flow of final output from business firms to households and to other business firms, or the expenditures made by households and business firms to business firms. These two flows of output and expenditure are not identical, though, for the most part, representing two sides of the same transactions, there is considerable overlap. But it is clear that payments made by business firms to households in exchange for factor services rendered are not identical to the expenditures made by households and business firms to business firms for final output.

Bill Woolsey in a post commenting on my post and Scott’s earlier post to which I responded attempts to explain why these two flows are identical:

In a closed private economy, saving must equal investment. This is a matter of definition. Saving is defined as income less consumption. All output is defined as either being consumer goods or capital goods. Consumption is spending on consumer goods and investment is spending on capital goods. All expenditure is either on consumer goods or capital goods. Since income equals expenditure, and consumption is itself, then income less consumption must equal expenditure less consumption. By the definition of saving and investment, saving and investment are always equal.

I guess someone might think that is all insightful, but it comes down to saying that purchases equals sales.

Bill is very careful in saying that savings is defined as income less consumption, and all output is defined as either being consumer goods or capital goods, and all consumption is (presumably also by definition) spending (aka expenditure) on consumer goods and investment is spending (aka expenditure) on capital goods. So all expenditures are made either on consumer goods or on capital goods. Then Bill concludes that by the definition of savings and investment, savings and investment are always equal (identical), because consumption is itself and income equals expenditure. But Bill does not say why income equals expenditure. Is it because income and expenditure are identical? But, as I just pointed out, it is not self-evident that income (defined as the earnings accruing to households per unit time) and expenditure (defined as the revenues accruing to business firms in payment for final output produced per unit time) are identical.

Now perhaps Bill (no doubt with Scott’s concurrence) is willing to define expenditure as being equal to income, but why is it necessary to define income and expenditure, which don’t obviously refer to the same thing, as being equal by definition? I mean we know that the Morningstar is Venus, but that identity was not established by definition, but by empirical observation. What observation establishes that income (the earnings of factors of production per unit time) and expenditure (revenues accruing to business firms for output sold per unit time) are identical? As Scott has himself noted on numerous occasions, measured NGDI can differ and has frequently differed substantially from measured NGDP.

It is certainly true that we are talking about a circular flow: expenditure turns into income and income into expenditure. Expenditures by households and by business firms for the final output produced by business firms generate the incomes paid by business firms to households and the income paid to households provides the wherewithal for households to pay for final output. But that doesn’t mean that income is identical to expenditure. Chickens generate eggs and eggs generate chickens. That doesn’t mean that a chicken is identical to an egg.

Then Scott addresses my criticism:

David Glasner doesn’t like these definitions, but for some reason that I haven’t been able to figure out he doesn’t say that he doesn’t like the definitions, but rather he claims they are wrong. But the economics profession is entitled to define terms as they wish; there is no fact of the matter. In contrast, Glasner suggests that my claim is only true as some sort of equilibrium condition:

It’s not a question of liking or not liking, but one ought to be parsimonious in choosing definitions. Is there any compelling reason to insist on defining expenditure to be the same as income? On the contrary, as far as I can tell, there is a decent prima facie case to be made that expenditure and income refer to distinct entities, and are not just different names for the same entity. Perhaps there is some theoretical advantage to defining expenditure and income to be the same thing. If so, I have yet to hear what it is. On the contrary, there is a huge theoretical disadvantage to defining income and expenditure to be identical: doing so makes the Keynesian income-expenditure model unintelligible. Come to think of it, perhaps Scott, a self-described hater of the Keynesian cross, likes that definition. But even if you hate a model, you should try to make it as good and as coherent as possible, before rejecting it. This post is already getting too long, so I will save for a separate post a discussion of why defining income and expenditure to be identical makes the Keynesian income-expenditure model, and the loanable funds doctrine, too, for that matter. For now, let me just say that if you insist that the savings-investment equality (or alternatively the income-expenditure equality) is an identity rather than an equilibrium condition, you have drained all the explanatory content out of your model.

Scott objects to this statement from my previous post:

Scott begins by discussing the simplest version of the income-expenditure model (aka the Keynesian cross or 45-degree model), while treating it, as did Keynes, as if it were interchangeable with the national-accounting identities:

In the standard national income accounting, gross domestic income equals gross domestic output. In the simplest model of all (with no government or trade) you have the following identity:

NGDI = C + S = C + I = NGDP (it also applies to RGDI and RGDP)

Because these two variables are identical, any model that explains one will, ipso facto, explain the other.

Here is Scott’s response:

David’s characterization of my views is simply incorrect. And it’s easy to explain why. I hate the Keynesian cross, and think it’s a lousy model, and yet I have no problem with the national income identities, and believe they occasionally help to clarify thinking. The quote he provides does not in any way “discuss” the Keynesian cross model, just as mentioning MV=PY would not be “discussing” the Quantity Theory of Money.

OK, I believe Scott when he says that he’s not a fan of the Keynesian cross, but it was Scott who brought up consumption smoothing in response to a decline in aggregate demand caused by central bank policy. Consumption smoothing is a neo-classical revision of the Keynesian consumption function, so I was just trying to put Scott’s ideas into the context of a familiar model that utilizes the equality of savings and investment to determine equilibrium income. My point was that Scott was positing a decrease in saving and asserting, by way of the savings-investment identity, that investment would necessarily drop by the same amount that saving had dropped. My response was that the savings-investment identity does not allow you to infer by how much investment falls in response to an assumed decrease in savings, because savings and investment are mutually determined within a macroeconomic model. It doesn’t have to be the Keynesian cross, but you need more than an accounting identity and an assumption that savings falls by x to determine what happens to investment.

Scott then makes the following point.

[I]t seems to me that David should not be focusing on me, but the broader profession. If economics textbooks define S=I as an identity, then it’s clear that I’m right. Whether they should define it as an identity is an entirely different question. I happen to think it makes sense, but I could certainly imagine David or anyone else having a different view.

If I am focusing on Scott rather than the broader profession, that simply shows how much more closely I pay attention to Scott than to the broader profession. In this particular case, I think Scott is manifesting a problem that sadly is very widely shared within the broader profession. Second, that Scott shares a problem with the rest of the profession does not establish that Scott is right in the sense that there is any good reason for the profession to have latched on to the savings-investment identity.

In response to my reference to posts from three years ago criticizing him for relying on the savings-investment identity, Scott writes:

I have never in my entire life made any sort of causal claim that relied solely on an identity. In other words, I never did what David claims I did. Like all economists, I may use identities as part of my argument. For instance, if I were to argue that rapid growth in the money supply would increase inflation, and that this would increase nominal interest rates, and that this would increase velocity, I might then go on to discuss the impact on NGDP. In that case I’d be using the MV=PY identity as part of my discussion, but I’d also be making causal arguments based on economic theory. I never rely solely on identities to make a causal claim.

We have a bit of a semantic issue here about what it means to rely on an identity. As I understand him, Scott is asserting that because savings is identical to investment he can make a causal statement about what happens to savings and then rely on the savings-investment identity to infer directly, by substituting the word “investment” for the word “saving” into a causal statement about investment. I don’t accept that the savings-investment identity allows a causal statement about savings to be transformed into a causal statement about investment without further explanation. My claim is that savings and investment are necessarily equal only in equilibrium. A causal statement about savings can’t automatically be transformed into a causal statement about investment without an explanation of how savings and investment were brought into equality in a new equilibrium.

Scott had trouble with my expression of puzzlement at his statement that Keynesians don’t deny that (ex post) less savings leads to less investment. I found that statement so confusing that apparently I wasn’t able to articulate clearly why I thought it was confusing. Let me try a different approach. First, if savings and investment are identical, then less savings can’t lead to less investment, less savings is less investment. A pound is defined as 2.2 kilograms. Does it make sense to reducing my weight in pounds leads to a reduction in my weight in kilograms? Second, if less savings is less investment, what exactly is the qualification “ex post” supposed to signify? Does it make sense to say that ex post if I lost weight in pounds I would lose weight in kilograms, as if I might plan to lose weight in pounds, but not lose weight in kilograms?

In the same post that I cited above, Bill Woolsey makes the following observation:

To say that at the natural interest rate saving equals investment is like saying at the equilibrium price quantity supplied equals quantity demanded. To say that savings always equals investment is like saying that purchases always equals sales by definition.

To compare the relationship between savings and investment to the relationship between purchases and sales is clearly not valid. The definition of the activity called “purchasing” is that a commodity or a service is transferred from a seller to a buyer. Similarly the definition of the activity called “selling” is that a commodity is transferred to a buyer from a seller. The reciprocity between purchasing and selling is inherent in the definition of either activity. But the definition of “saving” does not immediately tell us anything about the activity called “investing.” As Bill concedes in the passage I quoted earlier, the identity between saving and investment must be derived from the supposed identity between income and expenditure. But the definition of “income” does not immediately tell us anything about “expenditure.” Income and expenditure are not two reciprocal sides of the same transaction. When I buy a container of milk, there is a reciprocal relationship between me and the store that has no direct and immediate effect on the relationship between the store and the factors of production used by the store to be able to sell me that container of milk. I don’t deny that there is a relationship, just as there is a relationship between chickens and eggs, but the relationship is not at all like the reciprocal relationship between a buyer and a seller.

UPDATE: (2/18/2015): In a comment to this post, Bill Woolsey points that I did not accurately characterize his post when I said “Bill does not say why income equals expenditure,” by which I meant that he did not say why income is identical to expenditure. If I had been a more careful reader I would have realized that Bill did indeed explain why income is identical to output and output is identical to expenditure, which (by the transitive law) implies that income is identical to expenditure. However, Bill himself actually concedes that the identity between output and expenditure is arrived at only by imputing the value of unsold inventory to the profit of the firm. But this profit is generated not by an actual expenditure of money, it is generated by an accounting convention — a perfectly legitimate accounting convention, but a convention nonetheless. So I continue to maintain that income, defined as the flow of payments to factors of production per unit time, is not identical to either expenditure or to output. Bill also notes that, as Nick Rowe has argued, in a pure service economy in which there were no capital goods or inventories, output would identically equal expenditure. I agree, but only if no services were provided on credit. There would then be a lag between output and the expenditure corresponding to the output. It is precisely the existence of lags between output, expenditure and income that allows for the possibility of non-instantaneous adjustments to changes, thereby creating disequilibrium transitions between one equilibrium and another.

CAUTION Accounting Identity Handle with Care

Published February 11, 2015 accounting identities , Hawtrey , Keynes , R. G. Lipsey , Scott Sumner 17 Comments
Tags: J. R. Hicks, Milton Friedman

About three years ago, early in my blogging career, I wrote a series of blog posts (most or all aimed at Scott Sumner) criticizing him for an argument in a blog post about the inefficacy of fiscal stimulus that relied on the definitional equality of savings and investment. Here’s the statement I found objectionable.

Wren-Lewis seems to be . . . making a simple logical error (which is common among Keynesians.) He equates “spending” with “consumption.” But the part of income not “spent” is saved, which means it’s spent on investment projects. Remember that S=I, indeed saving is defined as the resources put into investment projects. So the tax on consumers will reduce their ability to save and invest.

I’m not going to quote any further from that discussion. If you’re interested here are links to the posts that I wrote (here, here, here, here, here, and this one in which I made an argument so obviously false that, in my embarrassment, I felt like giving up blogging, and this one in which I managed to undo, at least partially, the damage of the self-inflicted wound). But, probably out of exhaustion, that discussion came to an inconclusive end, and Scott and I went on with our lives with no hard feelings.

Well, in a recent post, Scott has again invoked the savings-equals-investment identity, so I am going to have to lodge another protest, even though I thought that, aside from his unfortunate reference to the savings-investment identity, his post made a lot of sense. So I am going to raise the issue one more time – we have had three years to get over our last discussion – hoping that I can now convince Scott to stop using accounting identities to make causal statements.

Scott begins by discussing the simplest version of the income-expenditure model (aka the Keynesian cross or 45-degree model), while treating it, as did Keynes, as if it were interchangeable with the national-accounting identities:

In the standard national income accounting, gross domestic income equals gross domestic output. In the simplest model of all (with no government or trade) you have the following identity:

NGDI = C + S = C + I = NGDP (it also applies to RGDI and RGDP)

Because these two variables are identical, any model that explains one will, ipso facto, explain the other.

There is a lot of ground to cover in these few lines. First of all, there are actually three relevant variables — income, output, and expenditure – not just two. Second aggregate income is not really the same thing as consumption and savings. Aggregate income is constituted by the aggregate earnings of all factors of production. However, an accounting identity assures us that all factor incomes accruing to factors of production, which are all ultimately owned by the households providing services to business firms, must be disposed of either by being spent on consumption or by being saved. Aggregate expenditure is different from aggregate income; expenditure is constituted not by the earnings of households, but by their spending on consumption and by the spending of businesses on investment, the purchase of durable equipment not physically embodied in output sold to households or other businesses. Aggregate expenditure is very close to but not identical with aggregate output. They can differ, because not all output is sold, some of it being retained within the firm as work in progress or as inventory. However, in an equilibrium situation in which variables were unchanging, aggregate income, expenditure and output would all be equal.

The equality of these three variables can be thought of as a condition of macroeconomic equilibrium. When a macroeconomic system is not in equilibrium, aggregate factor incomes are not equal to aggregate expenditure or to aggregate output. The inequality between factor incomes and expenditure induces further adjustments in spending and earnings ultimately leading to an equilibrium in which equality between those variables is restored.

So what Scott should have said is that because NGDI and NGDP are equal in equilibrium, any model that explains one will, ipso facto, explain the other, because the equality between the two is the condition for finding a solution to the model. It therefore follows that savings and investment are absolutely not the same thing. Savings is the portion of household earnings from providing factor services that is not spent on consumption. Investment is what business firms spend on plant and equipment. The two magnitudes are obviously not the same, and they do not have to be equal. However, equality between savings and investment is, like the equality between income and expenditure, a condition for macroeconomic equilibrium. In an economy not in equilibrium, savings does not equal investment. But the inequality between savings and investment induces adjustments that, in a stable macroeconomic system, move the economy toward equilibrium. Back to Scott:

Nonetheless, I think if we focus on NGDI we are more likely to be able to think clearly about macro issues. Consider the recent comment left by Doug:

Regarding Investment, changes in private investment are the single biggest dynamic in the business cycle. While I may be 1/4 the size of C in terms of the contribution to spending, it is 6x more volatile. The economy doesn’t slip into recession because of a fluctuation in Consumption. Changes in Investment drive AD.

This is probably how most people look at things, but in my view it’s highly misleading. Monetary policy drives AD, and AD drives investment. This is easier to explain if we think in terms of NGDI, not NGDP. Tight money reduces NGDI. That means the sum of nominal consumption and nominal saving must fall, by the amount that NGDI declines. What about real income? If wages are sticky, then as NGDI declines, hours worked will fall, and real income will decline.

So far we have no reason to assume that C or S will fall at a different rate than NGDI. But if real income falls for temporary reasons (the business cycle), then the public will typically smooth consumption. Thus if NGDP falls by 4%, consumption might fall by 2% while saving might fall by something like 10%. This is a prediction of the permanent income hypothesis. And of course if saving falls much more sharply than gross income, investment will also decline sharply, because savings is exactly equal to investment.

First, I observe that consumption smoothing and the permanent-income hypothesis are irrelevant to the discussion, because Scott does not explain where any of his hypothetical numbers come from or how they are related. Based on commenter Doug’s suggestion that savings is ¼ the size of consumption, one could surmise that a 4% reduction in NGDP and a 2% reduction in consumption imply a marginal propensity to consumer of 0.4. Suppose that consumption did not change at all (consumption smoothing to the max), then savings, bearing the entire burden of adjustment, would fall through the floor. What would that imply for the new equilibrium of NGDI? In the standard Keynesian model, a zero marginal propensity to consume would imply a smaller effect on NGDP from a given shock than you get with an MPC of 0.4.

It seems to me that Scott is simply positing numbers and performing calculations independently of any model, and then tells us that the numbers have to to be what he says they are because of an accounting identity. That does not seem like an assertion not an argument, or, maybe like reasoning from a price change. Scott is trying to make an inference about how the world operates from an accounting identity between two magnitudes. The problem is that the two magnitudes are variables in an economic model, and their values are determined by the interaction of all the variables in the model. Just because you can solve the model mathematically by using the equality of two variables as an equilibrium condition does not entitle you to posit a change in one and then conclude that the other must change by the same amount. You have to show how the numbers you have posited are derived from the model.

If two variables are really identical, rather than just being equal in equilibrium, then they are literally the same thing, and you can’t draw any inference about the real world from the fact that they are equal, there being no possible state of the world in which they are not equal. It is only because savings and investment are not the same thing, and because in some states of the world they are not equal, that we can make any empirical statement about what the world is like when savings and investment are equal. Back to Scott:

This is where Keynesian economics has caused endless confusion. Keynesians don’t deny that (ex post) less saving leads to less investment, but they think this claim is misleading, because (they claim) an attempt by the public to save less will boost NGDP, and this will lead to more investment (and more realized saving.) In their model when the public attempts to save less (ex ante), it may well end up saving more (ex post.)

I agree that Keynesian economics has caused a lot of confusion about savings and investment, largely because Keynes, who, as a philosopher and a mathematician, should have known better, tied himself into knots by insisting that savings and investment are identical, while at the same time saying that their equality was brought about, not by variations in the rate of interest, but by variations in income. Hawtrey, Robertson, and Haberler, among others, pointed out the confusion, but Keynes never seemed to grasp the point. Textbook treatments of national-income accounting and the simple Keynesian cross still don’t seem to have figured this out. But despite his disdain for Keynesian economics, Scott still has to figure it out, too. The best place to start is Richard Lipsey’s classic article “The Foundations of the Theory of National Income: An Analysis of Some Fundamental Errors” (a gated link is available here).

Scott begins by sayings that Keynesians don’t deny that (ex post) less saving leads to less investment. I don’t understand that assertion at all; Keynesians believe that a desired increase in savings, if desired savings exceeded investment, leads to a decrease in income that reduces saving. But the abortive attempt to increase savings has no effect on investment unless you posit an investment function (AKA an accelerator) that includes income as an independent variable. The accelerator was later added to the basic Keynesian model Hicks and others in order to generate cyclical fluctuations in income and employment, but non-Keynesians like Ralph Hawtrey had discussed the accelerator model long before Keynes wrote the General Theory. Scott then contradicts himself in the next sentence by saying that Keynesians believe that by attempting to save less, the public may wind up saving more. Again this result relies on the assumption of an accelerator-type investment function, which is a non-Keynesian assumption. In the basic Keynesian model investment is determined by entrepreneurial expectations. An increase (decrease) in thrift will be self-defeating, because in the new equilibrium income will have fallen (risen) sufficiently to reduce (increase) savings back to the fixed amount of investment entrepreneurs planned to undertake, entrepreneurial expectations being held fixed over the relevant time period.

I more or less agree with the rest of Scott’s post, but Scott seems to have the same knee-jerk negative reaction to Keynes and Keynesians that I have to Friedman and Friedmanians. Maybe it’s time for both of us to lighten up a bit. Anyway in honor of Scott’s recent appoint to the Ralph Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, I will just close with this quotation from Ralph Hawtrey’s review of the General Theory (chapter 7 of Hawtrey’s Capital and Employment) about Keynes’s treatment of savings and investment as identically equal.

[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.

A Keynesian Postscript on the Bright and Shining, Dearly Beloved, Depression of 1920-21

Published February 5, 2015 1920-21 Depression , Bank of France , gold standard , Great Depression , James Grant , Keynes 3 Comments
Tags: Cassel, Hawtrey, Paul Krugman

In his latest blog post Paul Krugman drew my attention to Keynes’s essay The Great Slump of 1930. In describing the enormity of the 1930 slump, Keynes properly compared the severity of the 1930 slump with the 1920-21 episode, noting that the price decline in 1920-21 was of a similar magnitude to that of 1930. James Grant, in his book on the Greatest Depression, argues that the Greatest Depression was so outstanding, because, in contrast to the Great Depression, there was no attempt by the government in 1920-21 to cushion the blow. Instead, the powers that be just stood back and let the devil take the hindmost.

Keynes had a different take on the difference between the Greatest Depression and the Great Depression:

First of all, the extreme violence of the slump is to be noticed. In the three leading industrial countries of the world—the United States, Great Britain, and Germany—10,000,000 workers stand idle. There is scarcely an important industry anywhere earning enough profit to make it expand—which is the test of progress. At the same time, in the countries of primary production the output of mining and of agriculture is selling, in the case of almost every important commodity, at a price which, for many or for the majority of producers, does not cover its cost. In 1921, when prices fell as heavily, the fall was from a boom level at which producers were making abnormal profits; and there is no example in modern history of so great and rapid a fall of prices from a normal figure as has occurred in the past year. Hence the magnitude of the catastrophe.

In diagnosing what went wrong in the Great Depression, Keynes largely, though not entirely, missed the most important cause of the catastrophe, the appreciation of gold caused by the attempt to restore an international gold standard without a means by which to control the monetary demand for gold of the world’s central banks — most notoriously, the insane Bank of France. Keynes should have paid more attention to Hawtrey and Cassel than he did. But Keynes was absolutely on target in explaining why the world more easily absorbed and recovered from a 40% deflation in 1920-21 than it was able to do in 1929-33.

Making Sense of the Phillips Curve

Published February 4, 2015 Milton Friedman , natural rate of unemployment , New Keynesians , Old Keynesians , Phillips Curve , R. G. Lipsey , Walrasian equilibrium 12 Comments
Tags: Joseph Schumpeter

In a comment on my previous post about supposedly vertical long run Phillips Curve, Richard Lipsey mentioned a paper he presented a couple of years ago at the History of Economics Society Meeting: “The Phillips Curve and the Tyranny of an Assumed Unique Macro Equilibrium.” In a subsequent comment, Richard also posted the abstract to his paper. The paper provides a succinct yet fascinating overview of the evolution macroeconomists’ interpretations of the Phillips curve since Phillips published his paper almost 60 years ago.

The two key points that I take away from Richard’s discussion are the following. 1) A key microeconomic assumption underlying the Keynesian model is that over a broad range of outputs, most firms are operating under conditions of constant short-run marginal cost, because in the short run firms keep the capital labor ratio fixed, varying their usage of capital along with the amount of labor utilized. With a fixed capital-labor ration, marginal cost is flat. In the usual textbook version, the short-run marginal cost is rising because of a declining capital-labor ratio, requiring an increasing number of workers to wring out successive equal increments of output from a fixed amount of capital. Given flat marginal cost, firms respond to changes in demand by varying output but not price until they hit a capacity bottleneck.

The second point, a straightforward implication of the first, is that there are multiple equilibria for such an economy, each equilibrium corresponding to a different level of total demand, with a price level more or less determined by costs, at any rate until total output approaches the limits of its capacity.

Thus, early on, the Phillips Curve was thought to be relatively flat, with little effect on inflation unless unemployment was forced down below some very low level. The key question was how far unemployment could be pushed down before significant inflationary pressure would begin to emerge. Doctrinaire Keynesians advocated driving unemployment down as low as possible, while skeptics argued that significant inflationary pressure would begin to emerge even at higher rates of unemployment, so that a prudent policy would be to operate at a level of unemployment sufficiently high to keep inflationary pressures in check.

Lipsey allows that, in the 1960s, the view that the Phillips Curve presented a menu of alternative combinations of unemployment and inflation from which policymakers could choose did take hold, acknowledging that he himself expressed such a view in a 1965 paper (“Structural and Deficient Demand Unemployment Reconsidered” in Employment Policy and the Labor Market edited by Arthur Ross), “inflationary points on the Phillips Curve represent[ing] disequilibrium points that had to be maintained by monetary policy that perpetuated the disequilibrium by suitable increases in the rate of monetary expansion.” It was this version of the Phillips Curve that was effectively attacked by Friedman and Phelps, who replaced it with a version in which the equilibrium rate of unemployment is uniquely determined by real factors, the natural rate of unemployment, any deviation from the natural rate resulting in a series of adjustments in inflation and expected inflation that would restore the natural rate of unemployment.

Sometime in the 1960s the Phillips curve came to be thought of as providing a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. When Lipsey did adopt this trade-off version, as for example Lipsey (1965), inflationary points on the Phillips curve represented disequilibrium points that had to be maintained by monetary policy that perpetuated the disequilibrium by suitable increases in the rate of monetary expansion. In the new Classical interpretation that began with Edmund Phelps (1967), Milton Friedman (1968) and Lucas and Rapping (1969), each point was an equilibrium point because demands and supplies of agents were shifted from their full-information locations when they misinterpreted the price signals. There was, however, only one full-information equilibrium of income, Y*, and unemployment, U*.

The Friedman-Phelps argument was made as inflation rose significantly in the late 1960s, and the mild 1969-70 recession reduce inflation by only a smidgen, setting the stage for Nixon’s imposition of his disastrous wage and price controls in 1971 combined with a loosening of monetary policy by a compliant Arthur Burns as part of Nixon’s 1972 reelection strategy. When the hangover to the 1972 monetary binge was combined with a quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC in late 1973, the result was a simultaneous increase in inflation and unemployment – stagflation — a combination widely perceived as a decisive refutation of Keynesian theory. To cope with that theoretical conundrum, the Keynesian model was expanded to incorporate the determination of the price level by deriving an aggregate supply and aggregate demand curve in price-level/output space.

Lipsey acknowledges a crucial misstep in constructing the Aggregate Demand/Aggregate Supply framework: assuming a unique macroeconomic equilibrium, an assumption that implied the existence of a unique natural rate of unemployment. Keynesians won the battle, providing a perfectly respectable theoretical explanation for stagflation, but, in doing so, they lost the war to Friedman, paving the way for the malign ascendancy of New Classical economics, with which New Keynesian economics became an effective collaborator. Whether the collaboration was willing or unwilling is unclear and unimportant; by assuming a unique equilibrium, New Keynesians gave up the game.

I was so intent in showing that this AD-AS construction provided a simple Keynesian explanation of stagflation, contrary to the accusation of the New Classical economists that stagflation provided a conclusive refutation of Keynesian economics that I paid too little attention to the enormous importance of the new assumption introduced into Keynesian models. The addition of an expectations-augmented Philips curve, negatively sloped in the short run but vertical in the long run, produced a unique macro equilibrium that would be reached whatever macroeconomic policy was adopted.

Lipsey does not want to go back to the old Keynesian paradigm; he prefers a third approach that can be traced back to, among others, Joseph Schumpeter in which the economy is viewed “as constantly evolving under the impact of endogenously generated technological change.” Such technological change can be vaguely foreseen, but also gives rise to genuine surprises. The course of economic development is not predetermined, but path-dependent. History matters.

I suggest that the explanation of the current behaviour of inflation, output and unemployment in modern industrial economies is provided not by any EWD [equilibrium with deviations] theory but by evolutionary theories. These build on the obvious observation that technological change is continual in modern economies (decade by decade at least since 1760), but uneven (tending to come in spurts), and path dependent (because, among other reasons, knowledge is cumulative with one advance enabling another). These changes are generated endogenously by private-sector, profit-seeking agents competing in terms of new products, new processes and new forms of organisation, and by public sector activities in such places as universities and government research laboratories. They continually alter the structure of the economy, causing waves of serially correlated investment expenditure that are a major cause of cycles, as well as driving the long-term growth that continually transforms our economic, social and political structures. In their important book As Time Goes By, Freeman and Louça (2001) trace these processes as they have operated since the beginnings of the First Industrial Revolution.

A critical distinction in all such theories is between risk, which is easily handled in neoclassical economics, and uncertainty, which is largely ignored in it except to pay it lip service. In risky situations, agents with the same objective function and identical knowledge will chose the same alternative: the one that maximizes the expected value of their profits or utility. This gives rise to unique predictable behaviour of agents acting under specified conditions. In contrast in uncertain situations, two identically situated and motivated agents can, and observably do, choose different alternatives — as for example when different firms all looking for the same technological breakthrough chose different lines of R&D — and there is no way to tell in advance of knowing the results which is the better choice. Importantly, agents typically make R&D decisions under conditions of genuine uncertainty. No one knows if a direction of technological investigation will go up a blind alley or open onto a rich field of applications until funds are spend investigating the route. Sometimes trivial expenses produce results of great value while major expenses produce nothing of value. Since there is no way to decide in advance which of two alternative actions with respect to invention or innovation is the best one until the results are known, there is no unique line of behaviour that maximises agents’ expected profits. Thus agents are better understood as groping into an uncertain future in a purposeful, profit- or utility-seeking manner, rather than as maximizing their profits or utility.

This is certainly the right way to think about how economies evolve over time, but I would just add that even if one stays within the more restricted framework of Walrasian general equilibrium, there is simply no persuasive theoretical reason to assume that there is a unique equilibrium or that an economy will necessarily arrive at that equilibrium no matter how long we wait. I have discussed this point several times before most recently here. The assumption that there is a natural rate of unemployment “ground out,” as Milton Friedman put it so awkwardly, “by the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations” simply lacks any theoretical foundation. Even in a static model in which knowledge and technology were not evolving, the natural rate of unemployment is a will o the wisp.

Because there is no unique static equilibrium in the evolutionary world in which history matters, no adjustment mechanism is required to maintain it. Instead, the constantly changing economy can exist over a wide range of income, employment and unemployment values, without behaving as it would if its inflation rate were determined by an expectations-augmented Phillips curve or any similar construct centred on unique general equilibrium values of Y and U. Thus there is no stable long-run vertical Phillips curve or aggregate supply curve.

Instead of the Phillips curve there is a band as shown in Figure 4 [See below]. Its midpoint is at the expected rate of inflation. If the central bank has a credible inflation target that it sticks to, the expected rate will be that target rate, shown as πe in the figure. The actual rate will vary around the expected rate depending on a number of influences such as changes in productivity, the price of oil and food, but not significantly on variations in U or Y. At either end of this band, there may be something closer to a conventional Phillips curve with prices and wages falling in the face of a major depression and rising in the face of a major boom financed by monetary expansion. Also, the whole band will be shifted by anything that changes the expected rate of inflation.

Lipsey concludes as follows:

So we seem to have gone full circle from early Keynesian view in which there was no unique level of income to which the economy was inevitably drawn, through a simple Phillips curve with its implied trade off, to an expectations-augmented Phillips curve (or any of its more modern equivalents) with its associated unique level of national income, and finally back to the early non-unique Keynesian view in which policy makers had an option as to the average pressure of aggregate demand at which the economy could be operated.

“Perhaps [then] Keynesians were too hasty in following the New Classical economists in accepting the view that follows from static [and all EWD] models that stable rates of wage and price inflation are poised on the razor’s edge of a unique NAIRU and its accompanying Y*. The alternative does not require a long term Phillips curve trade off, nor does it deny the possibility of accelerating inflations of the kind that have bedevilled many third world countries. It is merely states that industrialised economies with low expected inflation rates may be less precisely responsive than current theory assumes because they are subject to many lags and inertias, and are operating in an ever-changing and uncertain world of endogenous technological change, which has no unique long term static equilibrium. If so, the economy may not be similar to the smoothly functioning mechanical world of Newtonian mechanics but rather to the imperfectly evolving world of evolutionary biology. The Phillips relation then changes from being a precise curve to being a band within which various combinations of inflation and unemployment are possible but outside of which inflation tends to accelerate or decelerate. Perhaps then the great [pre-Phillips curve] debates of the 1940s and early 1950s that assumed that there was a range within which the economy could be run with varying pressures of demand, and varying amounts of unemployment and inflation[ary pressure], were not as silly as they were made to seem when both Keynesian and New Classical economists accepted the assumption of a perfectly inelastic, one-dimensional, long run Phillips curve located at a unique equilibrium Y* and NAIRU.” (Lipsey, “The Phillips Curve,” In Famous Figures and Diagrams in Economics, edited by Mark Blaug and Peter Lloyd, p. 389)

The Near Irrelevance of the Vertical Long-Run Phillips Curve

Published January 27, 2015 comparative statics , expectations , Milton Friedman , Phillips Curve 26 Comments
Tags: A. W. Phillips, Lucas Critique

From a discussion about how much credit Milton Friedman deserves for changing the way that economists thought about inflation, I want to nudge the conversation in a slightly different direction, to restate a point that I made some time ago in one of my favorite posts (The Lucas Critique Revisited). But if Friedman taught us anything it is that incessant repetition of the same already obvious point can do wonders for your reputation. That’s one lesson from Milton that I am willing to take to heart, though my tolerance for hearing myself say the same darn thing over and over again is probably not as great as Friedman’s was, which to be sure is not the only way in which I fall short of him by comparison. (I am almost a foot taller than he was by the way). Speaking of being a foot taller than Friedman, I don’t usually post pictures on this blog, but here is one that I have always found rather touching. And if you don’t know who the other guy is in the picture, you have no right to call yourself an economist.

At any rate, the expectations augmented, long-run Phillips Curve, as we all know, was shown by Friedman to be vertical. But what exactly does it mean for the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve to be vertical? Discussions about whether the evidence supports the proposition that the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is vertical (including some of the comments on my recent posts) suggest that people are not clear on what “long-run” means in the context of the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve and have not really thought carefully about what empirical content is contained by the proposition that the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is vertical.

Just to frame the discussion of the Phillips Curve, let’s talk about what the term “long-run” means in economics. What it certainly does not mean is an amount of calendar time, though I won’t deny that there are frequent attempts to correlate long-run with varying durations of calendar time. But all such attempts either completely misunderstand what the long-run actually represents, or they merely aim to provide the untutored with some illusion of concreteness in what is otherwise a completely abstract discussion. In fact, what “long run” connotes is simply a full transition from one equilibrium state to another in the context of a comparative-statics exercise.

If a change in some exogenous parameter is imposed on a pre-existing equilibrium, then the long-run represents the full transition to a new equilibrium in which all endogenous variables have fully adjusted to the parameter change. The short-run, then, refers to some intermediate adjustment to the parameter change in which some endogenous variables have been arbitrarily held fixed (presumably because of some possibly reasonable assumption that some variables are able to adjust more speedily than other variables to the posited parameter change).

Now the Phillips Curve that was discovered by A. W. Phillips in his original paper was a strictly empirical relation between observed (wage) inflation and observed unemployment. But the expectations-augmented long-run Phillips Curve is a theoretical construct. And what it represents is certainly not an observable relationship between inflation and unemployment; it rather is a locus of points of equilibrium, each point representing full adjustment of the labor market to a particular rate of inflation, where full adjustment means that the rate of inflation is fully anticipated by all economic agents in the model. So what the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is telling us is that if we perform a series of comparative-statics exercises in which, starting from full equilibrium with the given rate of inflation fully expected, we impose on the system a parameter change in which the exogenously imposed rate of inflation is changed and deduce a new equilibrium in which the fully and universally expected rate of inflation equals the alternative exogenously imposed inflation parameter, the equilibrium rate of unemployment corresponding to the new inflation parameter will not differ from the equilibrium rate of unemployment corresponding to the original inflation parameter.

Notice, as well, that the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is not saying that imposing a new rate of inflation on an actual economic system would lead to a new equilibrium in which there was no change in unemployment; it is merely comparing alternative equilibria of the same system with different exogenously imposed rates of inflation. To make a statement about the effect of a change in the rate of inflation on unemployment, one has to be able to specify an adjustment path in moving from one equilibrium to another. The comparative-statics method says nothing about the adjustment path; it simply compares two alternative equilibrium states and specifies the change in endogenous variable induced by the change in an exogenous parameter.

So the vertical shape of the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve tells us very little about how, in any given situation, a change in the rate of inflation would actually affect the rate of unemployment. Not only does the expectations-augmented long-run Phillips Curve fail to tell us how a real system starting from equilibrium would be affected by a change in the rate of inflation, the underlying comparative-statics exercise being unable to specify the adjustment path taken by a system once it departs from its original equilibrium state, the expectations augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is even less equipped to tell us about the adjustment to a change in the rate of inflation when a system is not even in equilibrium to begin with.

The entire discourse of the expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve is completely divorced from the kinds of questions that policy makers in the real world usually have to struggle with – questions like will increasing the rate of inflation of an economy in which there is abnormally high unemployment facilitate or obstruct the adjustment process that takes the economy back to a more normal unemployment rate. The expectations-augmented, long-run Phillips Curve may not be completely irrelevant to the making of economic policy – it is good to know, for example, that if we are trying to figure out which time path of NGDP to aim for, there is no particular reason to think that a time path with a 10% rate of growth of NGDP would probably not generate a significantly lower rate of unemployment than a time path with a 5% rate of growth – but its relationship to reality is sufficiently tenuous that it is irrelevant to any discussion of policy alternatives for economies unless those economies are already close to being in equilibrium.

Did David Hume Discover the Vertical Phillips Curve?

Published January 25, 2015 David Hume , Hayek , Milton Friedman , Nick Rowe , Phillips Curve 17 Comments
Tags: Friedman, Hayek, Hume, Phillips Curve, Scott Sumner

In my previous post about Nick Rowe and Milton Friedman, I pointed out to Nick Rowe that Friedman (and Phelps) did not discover the argument that the long-run Phillips Curve, defined so that every rate of inflation is correctly expected, is vertical. The argument I suggested can be traced back at least to Hume. My claim on Hume’s behalf was based on my vague recollection that Hume distinguished between the effect of a high price level and a rising price level, a high price level having no effect on output and employment, while a rising price level increases output and employment.

Scott Sumner offered the following comment, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what he meant by “didn’t quite get there.”:

As you know Friedman is one of the few areas where we disagree. Here I’ll just address one point, the expectations augmented Phillips Curve. Although I love Hume, he didn’t quite get there, although he did discuss the simple Phillips Curve.

I wrote the following response to Scott referring to the quote that I was thinking of without quoting it verbatim (because I couldn’t remember where to find it):

There is a wonderful quote by Hume about how low prices or high prices are irrelevant to total output, profits and employment, but that unexpected increases in prices are a stimulus to profits, output, and employment. I’ll look for it, and post it.

Nick Rowe then obligingly provided the quotation I was thinking of (but not all of it):

Here, to my mind, is the “money quote” (pun not originally intended) from David Hume’s “Of Money”:

“From the whole of this reasoning we may conclude, that it is of no manner of consequence, with regard to the domestic happiness of a state, whether money be in a greater or less quantity. The good policy of the magistrate consists only in keeping it, if possible, still encreasing; because, by that means, he keeps alive a spirit of industry in the nation, and encreases the stock of labour, in which consists all real power and riches.”

The first sentence is fine. But the second sentence is very clearly a problem.

Was it Friedman who said “we have only advanced one derivative since Hume”?

OK, so let’s see the whole relevant quotation from Hume’s essay “Of Money.”

Accordingly we find, that, in every kingdom, into which money begins to flow in greater abundance than formerly, everything takes a new face: labour and industry gain life; the merchant becomes more enterprising, the manufacturer more diligent and skilful, and even the farmer follows his plough with greater alacrity and attention. This is not easily to be accounted for, if we consider only the influence which a greater abundance of coin has in the kingdom itself, by heightening the price of Commodities, and obliging everyone to pay a greater number of these little yellow or white pieces for everything he purchases. And as to foreign trade, it appears, that great plenty of money is rather disadvantageous, by raising the price of every kind of labour.

To account, then, for this phenomenon, we must consider, that though the high price of commodities be a necessary consequence of the encrease of gold and silver, yet it follows not immediately upon that encrease; but some time is required before the money circulates through the whole state, and makes its effect be felt on all ranks of people. At first, no alteration is perceived; by degrees the price rises, first of one commodity, then of another; till the whole at last reaches a just proportion with the new quantity of specie which is in the kingdom. In my opinion, it is only in this interval or intermediate situation, between the acquisition of money and rise of prices, that the encreasing quantity of gold and silver is favourable to industry. When any quantity of money is imported into a nation, it is not at first dispersed into many hands; but is confined to the coffers of a few persons, who immediately seek to employ it to advantage. Here are a set of manufacturers or merchants, we shall suppose, who have received returns of gold and silver for goods which they sent to CADIZ. They are thereby enabled to employ more workmen than formerly, who never dream of demanding higher wages, but are glad of employment from such good paymasters. If workmen become scarce, the manufacturer gives higher wages, but at first requires an encrease of labour; and this is willingly submitted to by the artisan, who can now eat and drink better, to compensate his additional toil and fatigue.

He carries his money to market, where he, finds everything at the same price as formerly, but returns with greater quantity and of better kinds, for the use of his family. The farmer and gardener, finding, that all their commodities are taken off, apply themselves with alacrity to the raising more; and at the same time can afford to take better and more cloths from their tradesmen, whose price is the same as formerly, and their industry only whetted by so much new gain. It is easy to trace the money in its progress through the whole commonwealth; where we shall find, that it must first quicken the diligence of every individual, before it encrease the price of labour. And that the specie may encrease to a considerable pitch, before it have this latter effect, appears, amongst other instances, from the frequent operations of the FRENCH king on the money; where it was always found, that the augmenting of the numerary value did not produce a proportional rise of the prices, at least for some time. In the last year of LOUIS XIV, money was raised three-sevenths, but prices augmented only one. Corn in FRANCE is now sold at the same price, or for the same number of livres, it was in 1683; though silver was then at 30 livres the mark, and is now at 50. Not to mention the great addition of gold and silver, which may have come into that kingdom since the former period.

From the whole of this reasoning we may conclude, that it is of no manner of consequence, with regard to the domestic happiness of a state, whether money be in a greater or less quantity. The good policy of the magistrate consists only in keeping it, if possible, still encreasing; because, by that means, he keeps alive a spirit of industry in the nation, and encreases the stock of labour, in which consists all real power and riches. A nation, whose money decreases, is actually, at that time, weaker and more miserable than another nation, which possesses no more money, but is on the encreasing hand. This will be easily accounted for, if we consider, that the alterations in the quantity of money, either on one side or the other, are not immediately attended with proportionable alterations in the price of commodities. There is always an interval before matters be adjusted to their new situation; and this interval is as pernicious to industry, when gold and silver are diminishing, as it is advantageous when these metals are encreasing. The workman has not the same employment from the manufacturer and merchant; though he pays the same price for everything in the market. The farmer cannot dispose of his corn and cattle; though he must pay the same rent to his landlord. The poverty, and beggary, and sloth, which must ensue, are easily foreseen.

So Hume understands that once-and-for-all increases in the stock of money and in the price level are neutral, and also that in the transition from one price level to another, there will be a transitory effect on output and employment. However, when he says that the good policy of the magistrate consists only in keeping it, if possible, still increasing; because, by that means, he keeps alive a spirit of industry in the nation, he seems to be suggesting that the long-run Phillips Curve is actually positively sloped, thus confirming Milton Friedman (and Nick Rowe and Scott Sumner) in saying that Hume was off by one derivative.

While I think that is a fair reading of Hume, it is not the only one, because Hume really was thinking in terms of price levels, not rates of inflation. The idea that a good magistrate would keep the stock of money increasing could not have meant that the rate of inflation would indefinitely continue at a particular rate, only that the temporary increase in the price level would be extended a while longer. So I don’t think that Hume would ever have imagined that there could be a steady predicted rate of inflation lasting for an indefinite period of time. If he could have imagined a steady rate of inflation, I think he would have understood the simple argument that, once expected, the steady rate of inflation would not permanently increase output and employment.

At any rate, even if Hume did not explicitly anticipate Friedman’s argument for a vertical long-run Phillips Curve, certainly there many economists before Friedman who did. I will quote just one example from a source (Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty) that predates Friedman by about eight years. There is every reason to think that Friedman was familiar with the source, Hayek having been Friedman’s colleague at the University of Chicago between 1950 and 1962. The following excerpt is from p. 331 of the 1960 edition.

Inflation at first merely produces conditions in which more people make profits and in which profits are generally larger than usual. Almost everything succeeds, there are hardly any failures. The fact that profits again and again prove to be greater than had been expected and that an unusual number of ventures turn out to be successful produces a general atmosphere favorable to risk-taking. Even those who would have been driven out of business without the windfalls caused by the unexpected general rise in prices are able to hold on and to keep their employees in the expectation that they will soon share in the general prosperity. This situation will last, however, only until people begin to expect prices to continue to rise at the same rate. Once they begin to count on prices being so many per cent higher in so many months’ time, they will bid up the prices of the factors of production which determine the costs to a level corresponding to the future prices they expect. If prices then rise no more than had been expected, profits will return to normal, and the proportion of those making a profit also will fall; and since, during the period of exceptionally large profits, many have held on who would otherwise have been forced to change the direction of their efforts, a higher proportion than usual will suffer losses.

The stimulating effect of inflation will thus operate only so long as it has not been foreseen; as soon as it comes to be foreseen, only its continuation at an increased rate will maintain the same degree of prosperity. If in such a situation price rose less than expected, the effect would be the same as that of unforeseen deflation. Even if they rose only as much as was generally expected, this would no longer provide the expectational stimulus but would lay bare the whole backlog of adjustments that had been postponed while the temporary stimulus lasted. In order for inflation to retain its initial stimulating effect, it would have to continue at a rate always faster than expected.

This was certainly not the first time that Hayek made the same argument. See his Studies in Philosophy Politics and Economics, p. 295-96 for a 1958 version of the argument. Is there any part of Friedman’s argument in his 1968 essay (“The Role of Monetary Policy“) not contained in the quote from Hayek? Nor is there anything to indicate that Hayek thought he was making an argument that was not already familiar. The logic is so obvious that it is actually pointless to look for someone who “discovered” it. If Friedman somehow gets credit for making the discovery, it is simply because he was the one who made the argument at just the moment when the rest of the profession happened to be paying attention.

Nick Rowe Goes Bonkers over Milton Friedman

Published January 22, 2015 J. K. Galbraith , Milton Friedman , Nick Rowe 27 Comments
Tags: Hawtrey, Keynes, Marcus Nunes, Popper

Nick Rowe, usually a very cool guy, recently wrote a gushing post about the awesomeness of Milton Friedman. How uncool of him. As followers of this blog may know, even though I like free markets, am skeptical of big government programs, believe that the business cycle is largely a monetary phenomenon, I am not a fan of Milton Friedman. So I am going to offer some comments about Nick’s panegyric to Friedman.

I can’t think of any economist living today who has had as much influence on economics and economic policy as Milton Friedman had, and still has. Neither on the right, nor on the left.

Bob Lucas and Ned Prescott have not had as much influence on modern macroeconomics as Milton Friedman? I am less of a fan of Lucas and Prescott than I am of Friedman, but surely Nick can’t be serious.

If you had a time machine, went back to (say) 1985, picked up Milton Friedman, brought him forward to 2015, and showed him the current debate over macroeconomic policy, he could immediately join right in. Is there anything important that would be really new to him?

We are all Friedman’s children and grandchildren. The way that New Keynesians approach macroeconomics owes more to Friedman than to Keynes: the permanent income hypothesis; the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve; the idea that the central bank is responsible for inflation and should follow a transparent rule. The first two Friedman invented; the third pre-dates Friedman, but he persuaded us it was right. Using the nominal interest rate as the monetary policy instrument is non-Friedmanite, but the new-fangled “Quantitative Easing” is just a silly new name for Friedmanite base-control.

Certainly Friedman looms large, and New Keynesianism is indeed a way of rationalizing the price and wage stickiness that Friedman, like so many others, relied on to account for the correlation between downward cyclical movements in nominal GDP, or in its rate of growth, and real GDP. To be sure the permanent-income hypothesis was a great achievement, for it wasn’t just Friedman’s, but the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve was anticipated by far too many people (including David Hume) for Friedman to be given very much credit. He certainly gave an influential statement of the reasoning behind the expectations-augmented Phillips Curve, but that hardly counts as a breakthrough. So of the three key elements of New Keynesianism for which Nick credits Friedman only one was (co-)invented by Friedman; the other two were promoted by Friedman, and he certainly influenced the profession, but they were ideas already out there, when he picked them up. And just what does Nick mean by “Friedmanite base-control?” That Friedman invented open-market operations? Good grief!

Then Nick waxes nostalgic:

We easily forget how daft the 1970’s really were, and some ideas were much worse than pet rocks. (Marxism was by far the worst, of course, and had a lot of support amongst university intellectuals, though not much in economics departments.) When inflation was too high, and we wanted to bring inflation down, many (most?) macroeconomists advocated direct controls on prices and wages.

And governments in Canada, the US, the UK (there must have been more) actually implemented direct controls on prices and wages to bring inflation down. Milton Friedman actually had to argue against price and wage controls and against the prevailing wisdom that inflation was caused by monopoly power, monopoly unions, a grab-bag of sociological factors, and had nothing to do with monetary policy.

Many economists unfortunately either supported, or did not forthrightly oppose, wage and price controls when they were imposed successively in the US, UK and Canada in the early 1970s. And Friedman was certainly right to oppose them, and deserves credit for speaking out eloquently against them. But their failure became palpable to most economists, and it is not as if Friedman required any special insight to see the underlying fallacy that Nick nicely articulates. He was just straightforwardly applying Econ 101.

Imagine if I argued today: “Inflation is dangerously low. In order to increase inflation, governments should pass a law saying that all firms must raise all prices and wages by a minimum of 2% a year, unless they apply for and get special permission from the Prices and Incomes Board to raise them by less.” What are the chances my policy proposal would be accepted?

I hope zero, but are we indebted to Friedman for any argument against wage and price controls that was not understood by economists long before Friedman appeared on the scene?

Friedman had a mountain to move, and he moved it. And because he already moved it, we simply cannot have a Friedman today.

Great men like Friedman require a great job to do, or else they can’t become great men. They also require an aristocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy, where only a few voices can get heard, or else they can’t become one of the few voices. The internet actually makes it harder to create great public intellectuals, which is probably a good thing, simply because it’s harder to stand out as great, when there’s lots of competition.

The right won the economics debate; left and right are just haggling over details. The big debate is no longer about economics (sadly for me); and it won’t be held on the pages of the New York Times or in the economics journals.

Actually I agree with Nick that Friedman was a great man and a great economist. He did make a difference, but the difference was not mainly the result of any important theoretical discoveries or contributions, his theory of the consumption function being his main theoretical contribution. Otherwise, he was a great applied and empirical economist, specializing in US monetary history, but his knowledge of the history of monetary theory was sketchy, causing him to make huge blunders in describing the quantity theory of money as a theory of the demand for money, and in suggesting that his 1956 restatement of the quantity theory was inspired by an imagined Chicago oral tradition, when, in fact, his restatement was a reworking of the Cambridge theory of the demand for money that Keynes had turned into his theory of liquidity preference. He hardly cited the work of earlier monetary theorists, aside from Keynes and Irving Fisher, completely ignoring the monetary theory of Hawtrey and Hawtrey’s monetary explanation of the Great Depression, which preceded Friedman’s by some 30 years. Friedman also wrote a famous paper repackaging a slightly dumbed down version of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science as the methodology of positive economics, without acknowledging Popper, an omission that he seems never to have been called on. But his industriousness and diligence were epic, he had a fine intellect and a true mastery of microeconomic theory, coupled with great empirical and statistical insight when applying theory. His ability to express himself cogently and forcefully in writing and in speech was remarkable, and he had a gift for strategic simplification, which unfortunately often led him to convenient oversimplification. Nor do I doubt that he was sincerely motivated by an idealistic dedication to his conception of free-market principles, which he expounded and defended tirelessly.

Nick seems to believe that because hardly any younger economists recognize then name J. K. Galbraith, and because no one any longer advocates imposing wage and price controls to control or speed up inflation, it is obvious that the right won the economics debate. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I do think it is more complicated than that, the terms right and left being far too limited to portray a complex reality. Galbraith believed that the book he published in 1967 The New Industrial State was going to demonstrate the market economics was a snare and a delusion, because both the Soviet Union and the US were moving toward an economic system dominated by huge enterprises that engaged in long-term planning and were able to impose their plans on unwilling consumers and workers. The most devastating review of Galbraith’s book was published in the June 1968 edition of The Economic Journal by James Meade, an eminent British economist who had been a close disciple of Keynes at Cambridge, and was a kind of market socialist, or a self-described LibLaberal. The entire essay is worth reading, but I just want to highlight a few excerpts from it.

This argument for a national indicative plan is strangely overlooked by Professor Galbraith. Indeed, there is a great hiatus in his analysis of the economic system as a whole or, perhaps more accurately, in his implied analysis of what the economic system as a whole would be like when virtually the whole of it was controlled by large modern corporations. Professor Galbraith asserts that each modern corporation plans ahead the quantities of the various products which it will produce and the prices at which it will sell them; he assumes we will discuss this assumption later that as a general rule each corporation through its advertising and other sales activi-ties can so mould consumers’ demands that these planned quantities are actually sold at these planned prices. But he never explains why and by what mechanism these individual plans can be expected to build up into a coherent whole. . . .

In short, if all individual plans are to be simultaneously fulfilled they must in the first instance be consistent. But Professor Galbraith never considers this problem. It is a strange oversight in a modern professional economist-to overlook the problem of general, as contrasted with particular, equilibrium. (pp. 377-78)

Professor Galbraith writes always as if planning meant deciding in advance what should be produced and sold, in what quantities, at what cost and at what prices, and then taking effective steps to ensure that quantities and prices of inputs and outputs developed in precisely this way, and as if the market mechanism meant taking no thought for the morrow, taking no initiative in planning ahead the introduction of new products and processes, but just waiting for consumers to come to the firm and order a new car of such-and-such a bespoke design. It is by silly contrasts of this kind that Professor Galbraith pokes fun at his professional colleagues. (p. 382)

In the modern complex economy there are two major forces at work. One of these is that which Professor Galbraith rightly emphasises, namely the increased need for careful forward planning in a system which involves the commitment of large resources to inflexible uses over long periods of time.

But there is a second and equally important trend, which he entirely neglects: namely, the increased need in the modern industrial economy for a price mechanism, that is to say for reliance on a system of prices as a signaling device to indicate to producers and consumers what is and what is not scarce. This increased need for a price mechanism arises because in the modern industrial system input-output relationships have become so complex and the differentiation between products (many of which are the technically sophisticated inputs of other productive processes) has become so manifold that simple quantitative planning without a price or market mechanism becomes increasingly clumsy and inefficient. Moreover, this increased need for a signaling system through prices is occurring at a time when advances in mathematical economics and in the electronic and other technologies for measuring and metering have made a great extension of the price mechanism possible. Public authorities begin to make serious quantitative cost-benefit studies where previously pure hunches would have had to serve; and we nowadays seriously consider as, for example, in electronic metering devices for charging for the use of road space by motor vehicles-extensions of the use of pricing which would previously have been considered technologically impossible.

The particular brand of conventional wisdom which Professor Galbraith promotes in his recent book overlooks all these increased needs and opportunities for the use of the price mechanism. But many of the planned socialist societies are not falling into this error. Experiments which they are making in such devices as setting the maximisation of profit as the success criterion for the managers of socialised plants, in the direct use of the free market as in Yugoslavia, and generally in an increased reliance on price-mechanism indicators for many decentralised decisions constitute an undoubtedly significant development. The use of the price mechanism is, of course, not the same thing as the use of a market mechanism. A completely planned socialist economy could theoretically be run without any markets at all but with a complete system of “shadow prices” to measure relative scarcities and to be used as the decisive indicators for the adjustments to be made in the economy’s quantitative planned inputs and outputs. But in many, though not of course in all, cases an actual market mechanism will be found to be institutionally the best way of operating a price mechanism. There are many degrees and forms of such extensions of the market; for example, in some cases the prices at which transactions take place might be centrally controlled and adjusted, while in others they might be freely determined by supply and demand in the market. But in one form or an-other increased reliance on a price mechanism does imply increased reliance at least on something closely analogous to a market mechanism.

Professor Galbraith expressly denies that recent developments in the socialist countries have any significant connections with the use of the market as a controlling device. This denial would, by the uncouth, be called drivel-if I may be permitted to use Professor Galbraith’s own expression. But he has to hold this view simply because the socialist countries continue to plan while he, drawing no distinction between the price mechanism and a market mechanism, believes that one can have either planning or a market-price mechanism but not both. In fact, “planning and the price mechanism” not “planning or the price mechanism” should be a central theme of every modern economist’s work. (pp. 391-92)

In his 1977 Nobel Lecture, as Marcus Nunes informed us a few days ago, Meade explicitly advocated targeting nominal GDP writing as follows:

I have told this particular story simply to make the point that the choice between fiscal action and monetary action must often depend upon basic policy issues which should certainly be the responsibility of the government rather than of any independent monetary authority. Perhaps the best compromise is an independent monetary authority charged so to manage the money supply and the market rate of interest as to maintain the growth of total money income on its 5-per-cent-per-annum target path, after taking into account whatever fiscal policies the government may adopt.

So let me ask Nick the following: Was Meade right or left? And was he on the winning side or the losing side?

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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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