Archive for the 'Irving Fisher' Category

T. C. Koopmans Demolishes the Phillips Curve as a Guide to Policy

Published February 4, 2024 Arthur Burns , Irving Fisher , T. C. Koopmans , Wesley C. Mitchell 2 Comments
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Nobel Laureate T. C. Koopmans wrote one of the most famous economics articles of the twentieth century, “Measurement Without Theory,” a devastating review of an important, and in many ways useful and meritorious, study of business cycles by two of the fathers of empirical business-cycles research, Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business Cycles. Burns was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which had been founded by Mitchell, Burns’s mentor, to promote the empirical study and measurement of business cycles. Koopmans, who was then head of the Cowles Commission, another foundation dedicated to the study of business cycles, but with a theoretical, rather than a purely empirical, orientation, explained why attempting to gather empirical facts about business cycles and to measure aspects of business cycles in an atheoretical manner would fail to produce knowledge that useful for trying to understand business cycles as a characteristic feature of modern economic activity, or for devising policies mitigate their undesirable effects.

Koopmans’s review, a rhetorical masterpiece, brilliantly deploying his analytical skill and erudition as a Ph.D. physicist, compared the work of Burns and Mitchell to pre-Newtonian attempts to develop theories of planetary motion through the accumulation of data from planetary observations, largely shut down the program of the National Bureau as a center for business-cycle research, though it has continued to function usefully as a sponsor of a variety of important research efforts on business cycles and other fields of study. Whether the shift in emphasis from atheoretical empirics and data accumulation to theoretical research was a positive development is still controversial, but that discussion is not the point of this post.

All I want to do here is to reproduce a single paragraph from Koopmans’s review in which, without mentioning the Phillips Curve, which had still not been discovered (apologies to Irving Fisher who, almost completely unnoticed, actually discovered it about 30 years before Phillips did), beautifully explains why the Phillips Curve cannot be used as a guide to conducting monetary policy or countercyclical policy of any kind.

[Economic] theories are based on evidence of a different kind than the observations embodied in time series: knowledge of the motives and habits of consumers and of the profit-making objectives of business enterprise, based partly on introspection, partly on interview or on inferences from observed actions of individuals–briefly, a more or less systematized knowledge of man’s behavior and its motives. While much in these theories is incomplete and in need of reformulation and elaboration (particularly in regard to behavior over time under conditions of uncertainty), such theory es we have is an indispensable element in understanding in a quantitative way the formation of economic variables. For according to that theory the relevant economic variables are determined by the simultaneous validity of. an equal number of “structural” equations (of behavior, of law or rule, of technology). The very fact that so many relations are simultaneously valid makes the observation of any one of them difficult, and sometimes even impossible. For any observed regularity between simultaneous and/or successive values of certain variables may have to be ascribed to the validity of several structural equations rather than any one of them. The mere observation of regularities in the interrelations of variables then does not permit us to recognize or to identify behavior equations among such regularities. In the absence of experimentation, such identification is possible, if at all, only if the form of each structural equation is specified, i.e., in particular, if we can indicate the set of variables involved in each equation, and perhaps also the manner in which they are to be combined. In each case, a preliminary study of the system of structural equations held applicable is required to decide whether the specifications regarding any particular equation are sufficiently detailed to permit its identification. Without such identification, measurement of the structural equation involved is not possible, and should therefore not be attempted. 

One might object: why should measurement of the behavior equations of consumers, workers, entrepreneurs be necessary? If observed regularities are due to the simultaneous validity of several behavior equations, these regularities will persist as long as each of the underlying (unknown) behavior patterns persists. However, there are important arguments to counter this objection. Sheer scientific curiosity still urges us on to penetrate to the underlying structural equations. This curiosity is reinforced and justified (if you wish) by the awareness that knowledge of the behavior patterns will help in nderstanding or analyzing different situations, for instance, problems of secular trend, or cyclical problems in other countries or periods–in the same way (although one would not expect with the same exactness) in which the law of gravitation explains celestial and terrestrial phenomena alike. This point has particular relevance with regard to the different situations expected to arise in an impending future period of the same country that has been studied. Behavior patterns are subject to change: gradually through changing habits and tastes, urbanization and industrialization; gradually or unevenly through technological change; abruptly through economic policies or the economic effects of political events. While one particular behavior pattern may be deemed fairly stable over a certain period, a much greater risk is involved in assuming that a whole system of structural equations is stable over time. An observed regularity not traced to underlying behavior patterns, institutional rules, and laws of production, is therefore an instrument of unknown reliability. The predictions it yields cannot be qualified with the help even of known trends in behavior or technology. It is of no help whatever in assessing the probable effects of stated economic policies or institutional changes.

There is no sign in the book of an awareness of the problems of determining the identifiability of, and measuring, structural equations as a prerequisite to the practically important types of prediction. Measurable effects of economic actions are scrutinized, to all appearance, in almost complete detachment from any knowledge we may have of the motives of such actions. The movements of economic variables are studied as if they were the eruptions of a mysterious volcano whose boiling caldron can never be penetrated. There is no explicit discussion at all of the problem of prediction, its possibilities and limitations, with or without structural change, although surely the history of the volcano is important primarily as a key to its future activities. There is no discussion whatever as to what bearing the methods used, and the provisional results reached, may have on questions of economic policy.

This, then, is my second argument against the empiricist position: Without resort to theory, in the sense indicated, conclusions relevant to the guidance of economic policies cannot be drawn.

T. C. Koopmans, “Measurement Without Theory,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 29(3): 161-72, pp. 166-67

Hetzel Withholds Credit from Hawtrey for his Monetary Explanation of the Great Depression

Published December 13, 2023 Bank of France , gold standard , Great Depression , Gustav Cassel , Irving Fisher , Milton Friedman , Monetarism , monetary policy , R. G. Hawtrey , Robert Hetzel , Uncategorized 4 Comments
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In my previous post, I explained how the real-bills doctrine originally espoused by Adam Smith was later misunderstood and misapplied as a policy guide for central banking, not, as Smith understood it, as a guide for individual fractional-reserve banks. In his recent book on the history of the Federal Reserve, Robert Hetzel recounts how the Federal Reserve was founded, and to a large extent guided in its early years, by believers in the real-bills doctrine. On top of their misunderstanding of what the real-bills doctrine really meant, they also misunderstood the transformation of the international monetary system from the classical gold standard that had been in effect as an international system from the early 1870s to the outbreak of World War I. Before World War I, no central bank, even the Bank of England, dominant central bank at the time, could determine the international price level shared by all countries on the gold standard. But by the early 1920s, the Federal Reserve System, after huge wartime and postwar gold inflows, held almost half of the world’s gold reserves. Its gold holdings empowered the Fed to control the value of gold, and thereby the price level, not only for itself but for all the other countries rejoining the restored gold standard during the 1920s.

All of this was understood by Hawtrey in 1919 when he first warned that restoring the gold standard after the war could cause catastrophic deflation unless the countries restoring the gold standard agreed to restrain their demands for gold. The cooperation, while informal and imperfect, did moderate the increased demand for gold as over 30 countries rejoined the gold standard in the 1920s until the cooperation broke down in 1928.

Unlike most other Monetarists, especially Milton Friedman and his followers, whose explanatory focus was almost entirely on the US quantity of money rather than on the international monetary conditions resulting from the fraught attempt to restore the international gold standard, Hetzel acknowledges Hawtrey’s contributions and his understanding of the confluence of forces that led to a downturn in the summer of 1929 followed by a stock-market crash in October.

Recounting events during the 1920s and the early stages of the Great Depression, Hetzel mentions or quotes Hawtrey a number of times, for example, crediting (p. 100) both Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel, for “predicting that a return to the gold standard as it existed prior to World War I would destabilize Europe through deflation.” Discussing the Fed’s exaggerated concerns about the inflationary consequences of stock-market spectulation, Hetzel (p. 136) quotes Hawtrey’s remark that the Fed’s dear-money policy, aiming to curb stock-market speculation “stopped speculation by stopping prosperity.” Hetzel (p. 142) also quotes Hawtrey approvingly about the importance of keeping value of money stable and the futility of urging monetary authorities to stabilize the value of money if they believe themselves incapable of doing so. Later (p. 156), Hetzel, calling Hawtrey a lone voice (thereby ignoring Cassel), quotes Hawtrey’s scathing criticism of the monetary authorities for their slow response to the sudden onset of rapid deflation in late 1929 and early 1930, including his remark: “Deflation may become so intense that it is difficult to induce traders to borrow on any terms, and that in that event the only remedy is the purchase of securities by the central bank with a view to directly increase the supply of money.”

In Chapter 9 (entitled “The Great Contraction” in a nod to the corresponding chapter in A Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz), Hetzel understandably focuses on Federal Reserve policy. Friedman insisted that the Great Contraction started as a normal business-cycle downturn caused by Fed tightening to quell stock-market speculation that was needlessly exacerbated by the Fed’s failure to stop a collapse of the US money stock precipitated by a series of bank failures in 1930, and was then transmitted to the rest of the world through the fixed-exchange-rate regime of the restored gold standard. Unlike Friedman Hetzel acknowledges the essential role of the gold standard in not only propagating, but in causing, the Great Depression.

But Hetzel leaves the seriously mistaken impression that the international causes and dimensions of the Great Depression (as opposed to the US-centered account advanced by Friedman) was neither known nor understood until the recent research undertaken by such economists as Barry Eichengreen, Peter Temin, Douglas Irwin, Clark Johnson, and Scott Sumner, decades after publication of the Monetary History. What Hetzel leaves unsaid is that the recent work he cites largely rediscoveed the contemporaneous work of Hawtrey and Cassel. While recent research provides further, and perhaps more sophisticated, quantitative confirmation of the Hawtrey-Cassel monetary explanation of the Great Depression, it adds little, if anything, to their broad and deep analytical and historical account of the downward deflationary spiral from 1929 to 1933 and its causes.

In section 9.11 (with the heading “Why Did Learning Prove Impossible?”) Hetzel (p. 187) actually quotes a lengthy passage from Hawtrey (1932, pp. 204-05) describing the widely held view that the stock-market crash and subsequent downturn were the result of a bursting speculative bubble that had been encouraged and sustained by easy-money policies of the Fed and the loose lending practices of the banking system. It was of course a view that Hawtrey rejected, but was quoted by Hetzel to show that contemporary opinion during the Great Depression viewed easy monetary policy as both the cause of the crash and Great Depression, and as powerless to prevent or reverse the downward spiral that followed the bust.

Although Hetzel is familiar enough with Hawtrey’s writings to know that he believed that the Great Depression had been caused by misguided monetary stringency, Hetzel is perplexed by the long failure to recognize that the Great Depression was caused by mistaken monetary policy. Hetzel (p. 189) quotes Friedman’s solution to the puzzle:

It was believed [in the Depression] . . . that monetary policy had been tried and had been found wanting. In part that view reflected the natural tendency for the monetary authorities to blame other forces for the terrible economic events that were occurring. The people who run monetary policy are human beings, even as you and I, and a common human characteristic is that if anything bad happens it is somebody else’s fault.

Friedman, The Counter-revolution in Monetary Theory. London: Institute for Economic Affairs, p. 12.

To which Hetzel, as if totally unaware of Hawtrey and Cassel, adds: “Nevertheless, no one even outside the Fed [my emphasis] mounted a sustained, effective attack on monetary policy as uniformly contractionary in the Depression.”

Apparently further searching for a solution, Hetzel in Chapter twelve (“Contemporary Critics in the Depression”), provides a general overview of contemporary opinion about the causes of the Depression, focusing on 14 economists—all Americans, except for Joseph Schumpeter (arriving at Harvard in 1932), Gottfried Haberler (arriving at Harvard in 1936), Hawtrey and Cassel. Although acknowledging the difficulty of applying the quantity theory to a gold-standard monetary regime, especially when international in scope, Hetzel classifies them either as proponents or opponents of the quantity theory. Remarkably, Hetzel includes Hawtrey among those quantity theorists who “lacked a theory attributing money to the behavior of the Fed rather than to the commercial banking system” and who “lacked a monetary explanation of the Depression highlighting the role of the Fed as opposed to the maladjustment of relative prices.” Only one economist, Laughlin Currie, did not, in Hetzel’s view, lack those two theories.

Hetzel then briefly describes the views of each of the 14 economists: first opponents and then proponents of the quantity theory. He begins his summary of Hawtrey’s views with a favorable assessment of Hawtrey’s repeated warnings as early as 1919 that, unless the gold standard were restored in a way that did not substantially increase the demand for gold, a severe deflation would result.

Despite having already included Hawtrey among those lacking “a theory attributing money to the behavior of the Fed rather than to the commercial banking system,” Hetzel (p. 281-82) credits Hawtrey with having “almost alone among his contemporaries advanced the idea that central banks can create money,” quoting from Hawtrey’s The Art of Central Banking.

Now the central bank has the power of creating money. If it chooses to buy assets of any kind, it assumes corresponding liabilities and its liabilities, whether notes or deposits, are money. . . . When they [central banks] buy, they create money, and place it in the hands of the sellers. There must ultimately be a limit to the amount of money that the sellers will hold idle, and it follows that by this process the vicious cycle of deflation can always be broken, however great the stagnation of business and the reluctance of borrowers may be.

Hawtrey, The Art of Central Banking: London: Frank Cass, 1932 [1962], p. 172

Having already quoted Hawtrey’s explicit assertion that central banks can create money, Hetzel struggles to justify classifying Hawtrey among those denying that central banks can do so, by quoting later statements that, according to Hetzel, show that Hawtrey doubted that central banks could cause a recovery from depression, and “accepted the . . . view that central banks had tried to stimulate the economy, and . . . no longer mentioned the idea of central banks creating money.”

Efforts have been made over and over again to induce that expansion of demand which is the essential condition of a revival of activity. In the United States, particularly, cheap money, open-market purchases, mounting cash reserves, public works, budget deficits . . . in fact the whole apparatus of inflation has been applied, and inflation has not supervened.

Hawtrey, “The Credit Deadlock” in A. D. Gayer, ed., The Lessons of Monetary Experience, New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, p. 141.

Hetzel here confuses the two distinct and different deficiencies supposedly shared by quantity theorists other than Laughlin Currie: “[lack] of a theory attributing money to the . . . Fed rather than to the commercial banking system” and “[lack] of a monetary explanation of the Depression highlighting the role of the Fed as opposed to the maladjustment of relative prices.” Explicitly mentioning open-market purchases, Hawtrey obviously did not withdraw the attribution of money to the behavior of the Fed. It’s true that he questioned whether the increase in the money stock resulting from open-market purchases had been effective, but that would relate only to Hetzel’s second criterion–lack of a monetary explanation of the Depression highlighting the role of the Fed as opposed to the maladjustment of relative prices—not the first.

But even the relevance of the second criterion to Hawtrey is dubious, because Hawtrey explained both the monetary origins of the Depression and the ineffectiveness of the monetary response to the downturn, namely the monetary response having been delayed until the onset of a credit deadlock. The possibility of a credit deadlock doesn’t negate the underlying monetary theory of the Depression; it only suggests an explanation of why the delayed monetary expansion didn’t trigger a recovery as strong as a prompt expansion would have.

Turning to Hawtrey’s discussion of the brief, but powerful, revival that began almost immediately after FDR suspended the gold standard and raised the dollar gold price (i.e., direct monetary stimulus) upon taking office, Hetzel (Id.) misrepresents Hawtrey as saying that the problem was pessimism not contractionary monetary policy; Hawtrey actually attributed the weakening of the recovery to “an all-round increase of costs” following enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act, that dissipated “expectations of profit on which the movement had been built.” In modern terminology it would be described as a negative supply-side shock.

In a further misrepresentation, Hetzel writes (p. 282), “despite the isolated reference above to ‘creating money,’ Hawtrey understood the central bank as operating through its influence on financial intermediation, with the corollary that in depression a lack of demand for funds would limit the ability of the central bank to stimulate the economy.” Insofar as that reference was isolated, the isolation was due to Hetzel’s selectivity, not Hawtrey’s understanding of the capacity of a central bank. Hawtrey undoubtedly wrote more extensively about the intermediation channel of monetary policy than about open-market purchases, inasmuch as it was through the intermediation channel that, historically, monetary policy had operated. But as early as 1925, Hawtrey wrote in his paper “Public Expenditure and the Demand for Labour”:

It is conceivable that . . . a low bank rate by itself might be found to be an insufficient restorative. But the effect of a low bank rate can be reinforced by purchase of securities on the part of the central bank in the open market.

Although Hawtrey was pessimistic that a low bank rate could counter a credit deadlock, he never denied the efficacy of open-market purchases. Hetzel cites the first (1931) edition of Hawtrey’s Trade Depression and the Way Out, to support his contention that “Hawtrey (1931, 24) believed that in the Depression ‘cheap money’ failed to revive the economy.” In the cited passage, Hawtrey observed that between 1844 and 1924 Bank rate had never fallen below 2% while in 1930 the New York Fed discount rate fell to 2.5% in June 1930, to 2% in December and to 1.5% in May 1931.

Apparently, Hetzel neglected to read the passage (pp. 30-31) (though he later quotes a passage on p. 32) in the next chapter (entitled “Deadlock in the Credit Market”), or he would not have cited the passage on p. 24 to show that Hawtrey denied that monetary policy could counter the Depression.

A moderate trade depression can be cured by cheap money. The cure will be prompter if a low Bank rate is reinforced by purchases of securities in the open market by the Central Bank. But so long as the depression is moderate, low rates will of themselves suffice to stimulate borrowing.

On the other hand, if the depression is very severe, enterprise will be killed. It is possible that no rate of interest, however low, will tempt dealers to buy goods. Even lending money without interest would not help if the borrower anticipated a loss on every conceivable use . . . of the money. In that case the purchase of securities by the Central Bank, which is otherwise no more than a useful reinforcement of the low Bank rate, hastening the progress of revival, becomes an essential condition of the revival beginning at all. By buying securities the Central Bank creates money [my emphasis], which appears in the form of deposits credited to the banks whose customers have sold the securities. The banks can thus be flooded with idle money, and given . . . powerful inducement to find additional borrowers.

Something like this situation occurred in the years 1894-96. The trade reaction which began after 1891 was disastrously aggravated by the American crisis of 1893. Enterprise seemed . . . absolutely dead. Bank rate was reduced to 2% in February 1894, and remained continuously at that rate for 2.5 years.

The Bank of England received unprecedented quantities of gold, and yet added to its holdings of Government securities. Its deposits rose to a substantially higher total than was ever reached either before or after, till the outbreak of war in 1914. Nevertheless, revival was slow. The fall of prices was not stopped till 1896. But by that time the unemployment percentage, which had exceeded 10% in the winter of 1893, had fallen to 3.3%.

Hawtrey, Trade Depression and the Way Out. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1931.

This passage was likely written in mid-1931, the first edition having been published in September 1931. In the second edition published two years later, Hawtrey elaborated on the conditions in 1931 discussed in the first edition. Describing the context of the monetary policy of the Bank of England in 1930, Hawtrey wrote:

For some time the gold situation had been a source of anxiety in London. The inflow of “distress gold” was only a stop-gap defence against the apparently limitless demands of France and the United States. When it failed, and the country lost £20,000,000 of gold in three months, the Bank resorted to restrictive measures.

Bank rate was not raised, but the Government securities in the Banking Department were reduced from £52,000,000 in the middle of January 1931 to £28,000,000 at the end of March. That was the lowest figure since August 1928. The 3% bank rate became “effective,” the market rate on 3-months bills rising above 2.5%. Here was a restrictive open market policy, designed to curtail the amount of idle money in the banking system.

Between May 1930 and January 1931, the drain of gold to France and the United States had not caused any active measures of credit restriction. Even in that period credit relaxation had been less consistent and whole-hearted than it might have been. In the years 1894-96 the 2% bank rate was almost continuously ineffective, the market rate in 1895 averaging less than 1%. In 1930 the market rate never fell below 2%.

So, notwithstanding Hetzel’s suggestion to contrary, Hawtrey clearly did not believe that the failure of easy-money policy to promote a recovery in 1930-31 showed that monetary policy is necessarily ineffective in a deep depression; it showed that the open-market purchases of central banks had been too timid. Hawtrey made this point explicitly in the second edition (1933, p. 141) of Trade Depression and the Way Out:

When . . . expanding currency and expanding bank deposits do not bring revival, it is sometimes contended that it is no use creating additional credit, because it will not circulate, but will merely be added to the idle balances. And without doubt it ought not to be taken for granted that every addition to the volume of bank balances will necessarily and automatically be accompanied by a proportional addition to demand.

But people do not have an unlimited desire to hold idle balances. Because they already hold more than usual, it does not follow that they are willing to hold more still. And if in the first instance a credit expansion seems to do no more than swell balances without increasing demand, further expansion is bound ultimately to reach a point at which demand responds.

Trying to bolster his argument that Hawtrey conceded the inability of monetary policy to promote recovery from the Depression, Hetzel quotes from Hawtrey’s writings in 1937 and 1938. In his 1937 paper on “The Credit Deadlock,” Hawtrey considered the Fisher equation breaking down the nominal rate of interest into a real rate of interest (corresponding to the expected real rate of return on capital) and expected inflation. Hawtrey explored the theoretical possibility that agents’ expectations could become so pessimistic that the expected rate of deflation would exceed the expected rate of return on capital, so that holding money became more profitable than any capital investment; no investments would be forthcoming in such an economy, which would then descend into the downward deflationary spiral that Hawtrey called a credit deadlock.

In those circumstances, monetary policy couldn’t break the credit deadlock unless the pessimistic expectations preventing capital investments from being made were dispelled. In his gloss on the Fisher equation, a foundational proposition of monetary theory, Hawtrey didn’t deny that a central bank could increase the quantity of money via open-market operations; he questioned whether increasing the quantity of money could sufficiently increase spending and output to restore full employment if pessimistic expectations were not dispelled. Hawtrey’s argument was purely theoretical, but he believed it at least possible that the weak recovery from the Great Depression in the 1930s, even after abandonment of the gold standard and the widespread shift to easy money, had been dampened by entrepreneurial pessimism.

Hetzel also quotes two passages from Hawtrey’s 1938 volume A Century of Bank Rate to show that Hawtrey believed easy money was incapable of inducing increased investment spending and expanded output by business once pessimism and credit deadlock took hold. But those passages refer only to the inefficacy of reductions in bank rate, not of open-market purchases.

Hetzel (p. 283-84) then turns to a broad summary criticism of Hawtrey’s view of the Great Depression.

With no conception of the price system as the organizing principle behind the behavior of the economy, economists invented disequilibrium theories in which the psychology of businessmen and investors (herd behavior) powered cyclical fluctuations. The concept of the central bank causing recessions by interfering with the price system lay only in the future. Initially, Hawtrey found encouraging the Fed’s experiment in the 1920s with open market operations and economic stabilization. By the time Hawtrey wrote in 1938, it appeared evident that the experiment had failed.

Hetzel again mischaracterizes Hawtrey who certainly did not lack a conception of the price system as the organizing principle behind the behavior of the economy, and, unless Hetzel is prepared to repudiate the Fisher equation and the critical role it assigns to expectations of future prices as an explanation of macroeconomic fluctuations, it is hard to understand how the pejorative references psychology and herd behavior have any relevance to Hawtrey. And Hetzel’s suggestion that Hawtrey did not hold central banks responsible for recessions after Hetzel had earlier (p. 136) quoted Hawtrey’s statement that dear money had stopped speculation by stopping prosperity seems puzzling indeed.

Offering faint praise to Hawtrey, Hetzel calls him “especially interesting because of his deep and sophisticated knowledge of central banking,” whose “failure to understand the Great Depression as caused by an unremittingly contractionary monetary policy [is also] especially interesting.” Unfortunately, the only failure of understanding I can find in that sentence is Hetzel’s.

Hetzel concludes his summary of Hawtrey’s contribution to the understanding of the Great Depression with the observation that correction of the misperception that, in the Great Depression, a policy of easy money by the Fed had failed lay in the distant monetarist future. That dismissive observation about Hawtrey’s contribution is a misperception whose corretion I hope does not lie in the distant future.

General Equilibrium, Partial Equilibrium and Costs

Published August 4, 2021 Alfred Marshall , comparative statics , general equilibrium , Irving Fisher , Kenneth Arrow , Keynes , Leon Walras , macroeconomics , microfoundations , partial equilibrium , supply-demand analysis , Walrasian equilibrium 27 Comments

Neoclassical economics is now bifurcated between Marshallian partial-equilibrium and Walrasian general-equilibrium analyses. With the apparent inability of neoclassical theory to explain the coordination failure of the Great Depression, J. M. Keynes proposed an alternative paradigm to explain the involuntary unemployment of the 1930s. But within two decades, Keynes’s contribution was subsumed under what became known as the neoclassical synthesis of the Keynesian and Walrasian theories (about which I have written frequently, e.g., here and here). Lacking microfoundations that could be reconciled with the assumptions of Walrasian general-equilibrium theory, the neoclassical synthesis collapsed, owing to the supposedly inadequate microfoundations of Keynesian theory.

But Walrasian general-equilibrium theory provides no plausible, much less axiomatic, account of how general equilibrium is, or could be, achieved. Even the imaginary tatonnement process lacks an algorithm that guarantees that a general-equilibrium solution, if it exists, would be found. Whatever plausibility is attributed to the assumption that price flexibility leads to equilibrium derives from Marshallian partial-equilibrium analysis, with market prices adjusting to equilibrate supply and demand.

Yet modern macroeconomics, despite its explicit Walrasian assumptions, implicitly relies on the Marshallian intuition that the fundamentals of general-equilibrium, prices and costs are known to agents who, except for random disturbances, continuously form rational expectations of market-clearing equilibrium prices in all markets.

I’ve written many earlier posts (e.g., here and here) contesting, in one way or another, the notion that all macroeconomic theories must be founded on first principles (i.e., microeconomic axioms about optimizing individuals). Any macroeconomic theory not appropriately founded on the axioms of individual optimization by consumers and producers is now dismissed as scientifically defective and unworthy of attention by serious scientific practitioners of macroeconomics.

When contesting the presumed necessity for macroeconomics to be microeconomically founded, I’ve often used Marshall’s partial-equilibrium method as a point of reference. Though derived from underlying preference functions that are independent of prices, the demand curves of partial-equilibrium analysis presume that all product prices, except the price of the product under analysis, are held constant. Similarly, the supply curves are derived from individual firm marginal-cost curves whose geometric position or algebraic description depends critically on the prices of raw materials and factors of production used in the production process. But neither the prices of alternative products to be purchased by consumers nor the prices of raw materials and factors of production are given independently of the general-equilibrium solution of the whole system.

Thus, partial-equilibrium analysis, to be analytically defensible, requires a ceteris-paribus proviso. But to be analytically tenable, that proviso must posit an initial position of general equilibrium. Unless the analysis starts from a state of general equilibrium, the assumption that all prices but one remain constant can’t be maintained, the constancy of disequilibrium prices being a nonsensical assumption.

The ceteris-paribus proviso also entails an assumption about the market under analysis; either the market itself, or the disturbance to which it’s subject, must be so small that any change in the equilibrium price of the product in question has de minimus repercussions on the prices of every other product and of every input and factor of production used in producing that product. Thus, the validity of partial-equilibrium analysis depends on the presumption that the unique and locally stable general-equilibrium is approximately undisturbed by whatever changes result from by the posited change in the single market being analyzed. But that presumption is not so self-evidently plausible that our reliance on it to make empirical predictions is always, or even usually, justified.

Perhaps the best argument for taking partial-equilibrium analysis seriously is that the analysis identifies certain deep structural tendencies that, at least under “normal” conditions of moderate macroeconomic stability (i.e., moderate unemployment and reasonable price stability), will usually be observable despite the disturbing influences that are subsumed under the ceteris-paribus proviso. That assumption — an assumption of relative ignorance about the nature of the disturbances that are assumed to be constant — posits that those disturbances are more or less random, and as likely to cause errors in one direction as another. Consequently, the predictions of partial-equilibrium analysis can be assumed to be statistically, though not invariably, correct.

Of course, the more interconnected a given market is with other markets in the economy, and the greater its size relative to the total economy, the less confidence we can have that the implications of partial-equilibrium analysis will be corroborated by empirical investigation.

Despite its frequent unsuitability, economists and commentators are often willing to deploy partial-equilibrium analysis in offering policy advice even when the necessary ceteris-paribus proviso of partial-equilibrium analysis cannot be plausibly upheld. For example, two of the leading theories of the determination of the rate of interest are the loanable-funds doctrine and the Keynesian liquidity-preference theory. Both these theories of the rate of interest suppose that the rate of interest is determined in a single market — either for loanable funds or for cash balances — and that the rate of interest adjusts to equilibrate one or the other of those two markets. But the rate of interest is an economy-wide price whose determination is an intertemporal-general-equilibrium phenomenon that cannot be reduced, as the loanable-funds and liquidity preference theories try to do, to the analysis of a single market.

Similarly partial-equilibrium analysis of the supply of, and the demand for, labor has been used of late to predict changes in wages from immigration and to advocate for changes in immigration policy, while, in an earlier era, it was used to recommend wage reductions as a remedy for persistently high aggregate unemployment. In the General Theory, Keynes correctly criticized those using a naïve version of the partial-equilibrium method to recommend curing high unemployment by cutting wage rates, correctly observing that the conditions for full employment required the satisfaction of certain macroeconomic conditions for equilibrium that would not necessarily be satisfied by cutting wages.

However, in the very same volume, Keynes argued that the rate of interest is determined exclusively by the relationship between the quantity of money and the demand to hold money, ignoring that the rate of interest is an intertemporal relationship between current and expected future prices, an insight earlier explained by Irving Fisher that Keynes himself had expertly deployed in his Tract on Monetary Reform and elsewhere (Chapter 17) in the General Theory itself.

Evidently, the allure of supply-demand analysis can sometimes be too powerful for well-trained economists to resist even when they actually know better themselves that it ought to be resisted.

A further point also requires attention: the conditions necessary for partial-equilibrium analysis to be valid are never really satisfied; firms don’t know the costs that determine the optimal rate of production when they actually must settle on a plan of how much to produce, how much raw materials to buy, and how much labor and other factors of production to employ. Marshall, the originator of partial-equilibrium analysis, analogized supply and demand to the blades of a scissor acting jointly to achieve a intended result.

But Marshall erred in thinking that supply (i.e., cost) is an independent determinant of price, because the equality of costs and prices is a characteristic of general equilibrium. It can be applied to partial-equilibrium analysis only under the ceteris-paribus proviso that situates partial-equilibrium analysis in a pre-existing general equilibrium of the entire economy. It is only in general-equilibrium state, that the cost incurred by a firm in producing its output represents the value of the foregone output that could have been produced had the firm’s output been reduced. Only if the analyzed market is so small that changes in how much firms in that market produce do not affect the prices of the inputs used in to produce that output can definite marginal-cost curves be drawn or algebraically specified.

Unless general equilibrium obtains, prices need not equal costs, as measured by the quantities and prices of inputs used by firms to produce any product. Partial equilibrium analysis is possible only if carried out in the context of general equilibrium. Cost cannot be an independent determinant of prices, because cost is itself determined simultaneously along with all other prices.

But even aside from the reasons why partial-equilibrium analysis presumes that all prices, but the price in the single market being analyzed, are general-equilibrium prices, there’s another, even more problematic, assumption underlying partial-equilibrium analysis: that producers actually know the prices that they will pay for the inputs and resources to be used in producing their outputs. The cost curves of the standard economic analysis of the firm from which the supply curves of partial-equilibrium analysis are derived, presume that the prices of all inputs and factors of production correspond to those that are consistent with general equilibrium. But general-equilibrium prices are never known by anyone except the hypothetical agents in a general-equilibrium model with complete markets, or by agents endowed with perfect foresight (aka rational expectations in the strict sense of that misunderstood term).

At bottom, Marshallian partial-equilibrium analysis is comparative statics: a comparison of two alternative (hypothetical) equilibria distinguished by some difference in the parameters characterizing the two equilibria. By comparing the equilibria corresponding to the different parameter values, the analyst can infer the effect (at least directionally) of a parameter change.

But comparative-statics analysis is subject to a serious limitation: comparing two alternative hypothetical equilibria is very different from making empirical predictions about the effects of an actual parameter change in real time.

Comparing two alternative equilibria corresponding to different values of a parameter may be suggestive of what could happen after a policy decision to change that parameter, but there are many reasons why the change implied by the comparative-statics exercise might not match or even approximate the actual change.

First, the initial state was almost certainly not an equilibrium state, so systemic changes will be difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle from the effect of parameter change implied by the comparative-statics exercise.

Second, even if the initial state was an equilibrium, the transition to a new equilibrium is never instantaneous. The transitional period therefore leads to changes that in turn induce further systemic changes that cause the new equilibrium toward which the system gravitates to differ from the final equilibrium of the comparative-statics exercise.

Third, each successive change in the final equilibrium toward which the system is gravitating leads to further changes that in turn keep changing the final equilibrium. There is no reason why the successive changes lead to convergence on any final equilibrium end state. Nor is there any theoretical proof that the adjustment path leading from one equilibrium to another ever reaches an equilibrium end state. The gap between the comparative-statics exercise and the theory of adjustment in real time remains unbridged and may, even in principle, be unbridgeable.

Finally, without a complete system of forward and state-contingent markets, equilibrium requires not just that current prices converge to equilibrium prices; it requires that expectations of all agents about future prices converge to equilibrium expectations of future prices. Unless, agents’ expectations of future prices converge to their equilibrium values, an equilibrium many not even exist, let alone be approached or attained.

So the Marshallian assumption that producers know their costs of production and make production and pricing decisions based on that knowledge is both factually wrong and logically untenable. Nor do producers know what the demand curves for their products really looks like, except in the extreme case in which suppliers take market prices to be parametrically determined. But even then, they make decisions not on known prices, but on expected prices. Their expectations are constantly being tested against market information about actual prices, information that causes decision makers to affirm or revise their expectations in light of the constant flow of new information about prices and market conditions.

I don’t reject partial-equilibrium analysis, but I do call attention to its limitations, and to its unsuitability as a supposedly essential foundation for macroeconomic analysis, especially inasmuch as microeconomic analysis, AKA partial-equilibrium analysis, is utterly dependent on the uneasy macrofoundation of general-equilibrium theory. The intuition of Marshallian partial equilibrium cannot fil the gap, long ago noted by Kenneth Arrow, in the neoclassical theory of equilibrium price adjustment.

An Austrian Tragedy

Published May 24, 2020 Alfred Marshall , Carl Menger , E. v. Bohm-Bawerk , expectations , general equilibrium , Great Depression , Hayek , Irving Fisher , IS-LM , Israel Kirzner , Joseph Schumpeter , Keynes , Leon Walras , Ludwig Lachmann , Ludwig von Mises , macroeconomics , neoclassical synthesis , New Classical macroeconomics , New Keynesians , Old Keynesians , Oskar Morgensterm , rational expectations , rational expectations equilibrium , representative agent , Walrasian equilibrium 32 Comments
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It was hardly predictable that the New York Review of Books would take notice of Marginal Revolutionaries by Janek Wasserman, marking the susquicentenial of the publication of Carl Menger’s Grundsätze (Principles of Economics) which, along with Jevons’s Principles of Political Economy and Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics ushered in the marginal revolution upon which all of modern economics, for better or for worse, is based. The differences among the three founding fathers of modern economic theory were not insubstantial, and the Jevonian version was largely superseded by the work of his younger contemporary Alfred Marshall, so that modern neoclassical economics is built on the work of only one of the original founders, Leon Walras, Jevons’s work having left little impression on the future course of economics.

Menger’s work, however, though largely, but not totally, eclipsed by that of Marshall and Walras, did leave a more enduring imprint and a more complicated legacy than Jevons’s — not only for economics, but for political theory and philosophy, more generally. Judging from Edward Chancellor’s largely favorable review of Wasserman’s volume, one might even hope that a start might be made in reassessing that legacy, a process that could provide an opportunity for mutually beneficial interaction between long-estranged schools of thought — one dominant and one marginal — that are struggling to overcome various conceptual, analytical and philosophical problems for which no obvious solutions seem available.

In view of the failure of modern economists to anticipate the Great Recession of 2008, the worst financial shock since the 1930s, it was perhaps inevitable that the Austrian School, a once favored branch of economics that had made a specialty of booms and busts, would enjoy a revival of public interest.

The theme of Austrians as outsiders runs through Janek Wasserman’s The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas, a general history of the Austrian School from its beginnings to the present day. The title refers both to the later marginalization of the Austrian economists and to the original insight of its founding father, Carl Menger, who introduced the notion of marginal utility—namely, that economic value does not derive from the cost of inputs such as raw material or labor, as David Ricardo and later Karl Marx suggested, but from the utility an individual derives from consuming an additional amount of any good or service. Water, for instance, may be indispensable to humans, but when it is abundant, the marginal value of an extra glass of the stuff is close to zero. Diamonds are less useful than water, but a great deal rarer, and hence command a high market price. If diamonds were as common as dewdrops, however, they would be worthless.

Menger was not the first economist to ponder . . . the “paradox of value” (why useless things are worth more than essentials)—the Italian Ferdinando Galiani had gotten there more than a century earlier. His central idea of marginal utility was simultaneously developed in England by W. S. Jevons and on the Continent by Léon Walras. Menger’s originality lay in applying his theory to the entire production process, showing how the value of capital goods like factory equipment derived from the marginal value of the goods they produced. As a result, Austrian economics developed a keen interest in the allocation of capital. Furthermore, Menger and his disciples emphasized that value was inherently subjective, since it depends on what consumers are willing to pay for something; this imbued the Austrian school from the outset with a fiercely individualistic and anti-statist aspect.

Menger’s unique contribution is indeed worthy of special emphasis. He was more explicit than Jevons or Walras, and certainly more than Marshall, in explaining that the value of factors of production is derived entirely from the value of the incremental output that could be attributed (or imputed) to their services. This insight implies that cost is not an independent determinant of value, as Marshall, despite accepting the principle of marginal utility, continued to insist – famously referring to demand and supply as the two blades of the analytical scissors that determine value. The cost of production therefore turns out to be nothing but the value the output foregone when factors are used to produce one output instead of the next most highly valued alternative. Cost therefore does not determine, but is determined by, equilibrium price, which means that, in practice, costs are always subjective and conjectural. (I have made this point in an earlier post in a different context.) I will have more to say below about the importance of Menger’s specific contribution and its lasting imprint on the Austrian school.

Menger’s Principles of Economics, published in 1871, established the study of economics in Vienna—before then, no economic journals were published in Austria, and courses in economics were taught in law schools. . . .

The Austrian School was also bound together through family and social ties: [his two leading disciples, [Eugen von] Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser [were brothers-in-law]. [Wieser was] a close friend of the statistician Franz von Juraschek, Friedrich Hayek’s maternal grandfather. Young Austrian economists bonded on Alpine excursions and met in Böhm-Bawerk’s famous seminars (also attended by the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin and the German Marxist Rudolf Hilferding). Ludwig von Mises continued this tradition, holding private seminars in Vienna in the 1920s and later in New York. As Wasserman notes, the Austrian School was “a social network first and last.”

After World War I, the Habsburg Empire was dismantled by the victorious Allies. The Austrian bureaucracy shrank, and university placements became scarce. Menger, the last surviving member of the first generation of Austrian economists, died in 1921. The economic school he founded, with its emphasis on individualism and free markets, might have disappeared under the socialism of “Red Vienna.” Instead, a new generation of brilliant young economists emerged: Schumpeter, Hayek, and Mises—all of whom published best-selling works in English and remain familiar names today—along with a number of less well known but influential economists, including Oskar Morgenstern, Fritz Machlup, Alexander Gerschenkron, and Gottfried Haberler.

Two factual corrections are in order. Menger outlived Böhm-Bawerk, but not his other chief disciple von Wieser, who died in 1926, not long after supervising Hayek’s doctoral dissertation, later published in 1927, and, in 1933, translated into English and published as Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. Moreover, a 16-year gap separated Mises and Schumpeter, who were exact contemporaries, from Hayek (born in 1899) who was a few years older than Gerschenkron, Haberler, Machlup and Morgenstern.

All the surviving members or associates of the Austrian school wound up either in the US or Britain after World War II, and Hayek, who had taken a position in London in 1931, moved to the US in 1950, taking a position in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago after having been refused a position in the economics department. Through the intervention of wealthy sponsors, Mises obtained an academic appointment of sorts at the NYU economics department, where he succeeded in training two noteworthy disciples who wrote dissertations under his tutelage, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. (Kirzner wrote his dissertation under Mises at NYU, but Rothbard did his graduate work at Colulmbia.) Schumpeter, Haberler and Gerschenkron eventually took positions at Harvard, while Machlup (with some stops along the way) and Morgenstern made their way to Princeton. However, Hayek’s interests shifted from pure economic theory to deep philosophical questions. While Machlup and Haberler continued to work on economic theory, the Austrian influence on their work after World War II was barely recognizable. Morgenstern and Schumpeter made major contributions to economics, but did not hide their alienation from the doctrines of the Austrian School.

So there was little reason to expect that the Austrian School would survive its dispersal when the Nazis marched unopposed into Vienna in 1938. That it did survive is in no small measure due to its ideological usefulness to anti-socialist supporters who provided financial support to Hayek, enabling his appointment to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Mises’s appointment at NYU, and other forms of research support to Hayek, Mises and other like-minded scholars, as well as funding the Mont Pelerin Society, an early venture in globalist networking, started by Hayek in 1947. Such support does not discredit the research to which it gave rise. That the survival of the Austrian School would probably not have been possible without the support of wealthy benefactors who anticipated that the Austrians would advance their political and economic interests does not invalidate the research thereby enabled. (In the interest of transparency, I acknowledge that I received support from such sources for two books that I wrote.)

Because Austrian School survivors other than Mises and Hayek either adapted themselves to mainstream thinking without renouncing their earlier beliefs (Haberler and Machlup) or took an entirely different direction (Morgenstern), and because the economic mainstream shifted in two directions that were most uncongenial to the Austrians: Walrasian general-equilibrium theory and Keynesian macroeconomics, the Austrian remnant, initially centered on Mises at NYU, adopted a sharply adversarial attitude toward mainstream economic doctrines.

Despite its minute numbers, the lonely remnant became a house divided against itself, Mises’s two outstanding NYU disciples, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, holding radically different conceptions of how to carry on the Austrian tradition. An extroverted radical activist, Rothbard was not content just to lead a school of economic thought, he aspired to become the leader of a fantastical anarchistic revolutionary movement to replace all established governments under a reign of private-enterprise anarcho-capitalism. Rothbard’s political radicalism, which, despite his Jewish ancestry, even included dabbling in Holocaust denialism, so alienated his mentor, that Mises terminated all contact with Rothbard for many years before his death. Kirzner, self-effacing, personally conservative, with no political or personal agenda other than the advancement of his own and his students’ scholarship, published hundreds of articles and several books filling 10 thick volumes of his collected works published by the Liberty Fund, while establishing a robust Austrian program at NYU, training many excellent scholars who found positions in respected academic and research institutions. Similar Austrian programs, established under the guidance of Kirzner’s students, were started at other institutions, most notably at George Mason University.

One of the founders of the Cato Institute, which for nearly half a century has been the leading avowedly libertarian think tank in the US, Rothbard was eventually ousted by Cato, and proceeded to set up a rival think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, at Auburn University, which has turned into a focal point for extreme libertarians and white nationalists to congregate, get acquainted, and strategize together.

Isolation and marginalization tend to cause a subspecies either to degenerate toward extinction, to somehow blend in with the members of the larger species, thereby losing its distinctive characteristics, or to accentuate its unique traits, enabling it to find some niche within which to survive as a distinct sub-species. Insofar as they have engaged in economic analysis rather than in various forms of political agitation and propaganda, the Rothbardian Austrians have focused on anarcho-capitalist theory and the uniquely perverse evils of fractional-reserve banking.

Rejecting the political extremism of the Rothbardians, Kirznerian Austrians differentiate themselves by analyzing what they call market processes and emphasizing the limitations on the knowledge and information possessed by actual decision-makers. They attribute this misplaced focus on equilibrium to the extravagantly unrealistic and patently false assumptions of mainstream models on the knowledge possessed by economic agents, which effectively make equilibrium the inevitable — and trivial — conclusion entailed by those extreme assumptions. In their view, the focus of mainstream models on equilibrium states with unrealistic assumptions results from a preoccupation with mathematical formalism in which mathematical tractability rather than sound economics dictates the choice of modeling assumptions.

Skepticism of the extreme assumptions about the informational endowments of agents covers a range of now routine assumptions in mainstream models, e.g., the ability of agents to form precise mathematical estimates of the probability distributions of future states of the world, implying that agents never confront decisions about which they are genuinely uncertain. Austrians also object to the routine assumption that all the information needed to determine the solution of a model is the common knowledge of the agents in the model, so that an existing equilibrium cannot be disrupted unless new information randomly and unpredictably arrives. Each agent in the model having been endowed with the capacity of a semi-omniscient central planner, solving the model for its equilibrium state becomes a trivial exercise in which the optimal choices of a single agent are taken as representative of the choices made by all of the model’s other, semi-omnicient, agents.

Although shreds of subjectivism — i.e., agents make choices based own preference orderings — are shared by all neoclassical economists, Austrian criticisms of mainstream neoclassical models are aimed at what Austrians consider to be their insufficient subjectivism. It is this fierce commitment to a robust conception of subjectivism, in which an equilibrium state of shared expectations by economic agents must be explained, not just assumed, that Chancellor properly identifies as a distinguishing feature of the Austrian School.

Menger’s original idea of marginal utility was posited on the subjective preferences of consumers. This subjectivist position was retained by subsequent generations of the school. It inspired a tradition of radical individualism, which in time made the Austrians the favorite economists of American libertarians. Subjectivism was at the heart of the Austrians’ polemical rejection of Marxism. Not only did they dismiss Marx’s labor theory of value, they argued that socialism couldn’t possibly work since it would lack the means to allocate resources efficiently.

The problem with central planning, according to Hayek, is that so much of the knowledge that people act upon is specific knowledge that individuals acquire in the course of their daily activities and life experience, knowledge that is often difficult to articulate – mere intuition and guesswork, yet more reliable than not when acted upon by people whose livelihoods depend on being able to do the right thing at the right time – much less communicate to a central planner.

Chancellor attributes Austrian mistrust of statistical aggregates or indices, like GDP and price levels, to Austrian subjectivism, which regards such magnitudes as abstractions irrelevant to the decisions of private decision-makers, except perhaps in forming expectations about the actions of government policy makers. (Of course, this exception potentially provides full subjectivist license and legitimacy for macroeconomic theorizing despite Austrian misgivings.) Observed statistical correlations between aggregate variables identified by macroeconomists are dismissed as irrelevant unless grounded in, and implied by, the purposeful choices of economic agents.

But such scruples about the use of macroeconomic aggregates and inferring causal relationships from observed correlations are hardly unique to the Austrian school. One of the most important contributions of the 20th century to the methodology of economics was an article by T. C. Koopmans, “Measurement Without Theory,” which argued that measured correlations between macroeconomic variables provide a reliable basis for business-cycle research and policy advice only if the correlations can be explained in terms of deeper theoretical or structural relationships. The Nobel Prize Committee, in awarding the 1975 Prize to Koopmans, specifically mentioned this paper in describing Koopmans’s contributions. Austrians may be more fastidious than their mainstream counterparts in rejecting macroeconomic relationships not based on microeconomic principles, but they aren’t the only ones mistrustful of mere correlations.

Chancellor cites mistrust about the use of statistical aggregates and price indices as a factor in Hayek’s disastrous policy advice warning against anti-deflationary or reflationary measures during the Great Depression.

Their distrust of price indexes brought Austrian economists into conflict with mainstream economic opinion during the 1920s. At the time, there was a general consensus among leading economists, ranging from Irving Fisher at Yale to Keynes at Cambridge, that monetary policy should aim at delivering a stable price level, and in particular seek to prevent any decline in prices (deflation). Hayek, who earlier in the decade had spent time at New York University studying monetary policy and in 1927 became the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, argued that the policy of price stabilization was misguided. It was only natural, Hayek wrote, that improvements in productivity should lead to lower prices and that any resistance to this movement (sometimes described as “good deflation”) would have damaging economic consequences.

The argument that deflation stemming from economic expansion and increasing productivity is normal and desirable isn’t what led Hayek and the Austrians astray in the Great Depression; it was their failure to realize the deflation that triggered the Great Depression was a monetary phenomenon caused by a malfunctioning international gold standard. Moreover, Hayek’s own business-cycle theory explicitly stated that a neutral (stable) monetary policy ought to aim at keeping the flow of total spending and income constant in nominal terms while his policy advice of welcoming deflation meant a rapidly falling rate of total spending. Hayek’s policy advice was an inexcusable error of judgment, which, to his credit, he did acknowledge after the fact, though many, perhaps most, Austrians have refused to follow him even that far.

Considered from the vantage point of almost a century, the collapse of the Austrian School seems to have been inevitable. Hayek’s long-shot bid to establish his business-cycle theory as the dominant explanation of the Great Depression was doomed from the start by the inadequacies of the very specific version of his basic model and his disregard of the obvious implication of that model: prevent total spending from contracting. The promising young students and colleagues who had briefly gathered round him upon his arrival in England, mostly attached themselves to other mentors, leaving Hayek with only one or two immediate disciples to carry on his research program. The collapse of his research program, which he himself abandoned after completing his final work in economic theory, marked a research hiatus of almost a quarter century, with the notable exception of publications by his student, Ludwig Lachmann who, having decamped in far-away South Africa, labored in relative obscurity for most of his career.

The early clash between Keynes and Hayek, so important in the eyes of Chancellor and others, is actually overrated. Chancellor, quoting Lachmann and Nicholas Wapshott, describes it as a clash of two irreconcilable views of the economic world, and the clash that defined modern economics. In later years, Lachmann actually sought to effect a kind of reconciliation between their views. It was not a conflict of visions that undid Hayek in 1931-32, it was his misapplication of a narrowly constructed model to a problem for which it was irrelevant.

Although the marginalization of the Austrian School, after its misguided policy advice in the Great Depression and its dispersal during and after World War II, is hardly surprising, the unwillingness of mainstream economists to sort out what was useful and relevant in the teachings of the Austrian School from what is not was unfortunate not only for the Austrians. Modern economics was itself impoverished by its disregard for the complexity and interconnectedness of economic phenomena. It’s precisely the Austrian attentiveness to the complexity of economic activity — the necessity for complementary goods and factors of production to be deployed over time to satisfy individual wants – that is missing from standard economic models.

That Austrian attentiveness, pioneered by Menger himself, to the complementarity of inputs applied over the course of time undoubtedly informed Hayek’s seminal contribution to economic thought: his articulation of the idea of intertemporal equilibrium that comprehends the interdependence of the plans of independent agents and the need for them to all fit together over the course of time for equilibrium to obtain. Hayek’s articulation represented a conceptual advance over earlier versions of equilibrium analysis stemming from Walras and Pareto, and even from Irving Fisher who did pay explicit attention to intertemporal equilibrium. But in Fisher’s articulation, intertemporal consistency was described in terms of aggregate production and income, leaving unexplained the mechanisms whereby the individual plans to produce and consume particular goods over time are reconciled. Hayek’s granular exposition enabled him to attend to, and articulate, necessary but previously unspecified relationships between the current prices and expected future prices.

Moreover, neither mainstream nor Austrian economists have ever explained how prices are adjust in non-equilibrium settings. The focus of mainstream analysis has always been the determination of equilibrium prices, with the implicit understanding that “market forces” move the price toward its equilibrium value. The explanatory gap has been filled by the mainstream New Classical School which simply posits the existence of an equilibrium price vector, and, to replace an empirically untenable tâtonnement process for determining prices, posits an equally untenable rational-expectations postulate to assert that market economies typically perform as if they are in, or near the neighborhood of, equilibrium, so that apparent fluctuations in real output are viewed as optimal adjustments to unexplained random productivity shocks.

Alternatively, in New Keynesian mainstream versions, constraints on price changes prevent immediate adjustments to rationally expected equilibrium prices, leading instead to persistent reductions in output and employment following demand or supply shocks. (I note parenthetically that the assumption of rational expectations is not, as often suggested, an assumption distinct from market-clearing, because the rational expectation of all agents of a market-clearing price vector necessarily implies that the markets clear unless one posits a constraint, e.g., a binding price floor or ceiling, that prevents all mutually beneficial trades from being executed.)

Similarly, the Austrian school offers no explanation of how unconstrained price adjustments by market participants is a sufficient basis for a systemic tendency toward equilibrium. Without such an explanation, their belief that market economies have strong self-correcting properties is unfounded, because, as Hayek demonstrated in his 1937 paper, “Economics and Knowledge,” price adjustments in current markets don’t, by themselves, ensure a systemic tendency toward equilibrium values that coordinate the plans of independent economic agents unless agents’ expectations of future prices are sufficiently coincident. To take only one passage of many discussing the difficulty of explaining or accounting for a process that leads individuals toward a state of equilibrium, I offer the following as an example:

All that this condition amounts to, then, is that there must be some discernible regularity in the world which makes it possible to predict events correctly. But, while this is clearly not sufficient to prove that people will learn to foresee events correctly, the same is true to a hardly less degree even about constancy of data in an absolute sense. For any one individual, constancy of the data does in no way mean constancy of all the facts independent of himself, since, of course, only the tastes and not the actions of the other people can in this sense be assumed to be constant. As all those other people will change their decisions as they gain experience about the external facts and about other people’s actions, there is no reason why these processes of successive changes should ever come to an end. These difficulties are well known, and I mention them here only to remind you how little we actually know about the conditions under which an equilibrium will ever be reached.

In this theoretical muddle, Keynesian economics and the neoclassical synthesis were abandoned, because the key proposition of Keynesian economics was supposedly the tendency of a modern economy toward an equilibrium with involuntary unemployment while the neoclassical synthesis rejected that proposition, so that the supposed synthesis was no more than an agreement to disagree. That divided house could not stand. The inability of Keynesian economists such as Hicks, Modigliani, Samuelson and Patinkin to find a satisfactory (at least in terms of a preferred Walrasian general-equilibrium model) rationalization for Keynes’s conclusion that an economy would likely become stuck in an equilibrium with involuntary unemployment led to the breakdown of the neoclassical synthesis and the displacement of Keynesianism as the dominant macroeconomic paradigm.

But perhaps the way out of the muddle is to abandon the idea that a systemic tendency toward equilibrium is a property of an economic system, and, instead, to recognize that equilibrium is, as Hayek suggested, a contingent, not a necessary, property of a complex economy. Ludwig Lachmann, cited by Chancellor for his remark that the early theoretical clash between Hayek and Keynes was a conflict of visions, eventually realized that in an important sense both Hayek and Keynes shared a similar subjectivist conception of the crucial role of individual expectations of the future in explaining the stability or instability of market economies. And despite the efforts of New Classical economists to establish rational expectations as an axiomatic equilibrating property of market economies, that notion rests on nothing more than arbitrary methodological fiat.

Chancellor concludes by suggesting that Wasserman’s characterization of the Austrians as marginalized is not entirely accurate inasmuch as “the Austrians’ view of the economy as a complex, evolving system continues to inspire new research.” Indeed, if economics is ever to find a way out of its current state of confusion, following Lachmann in his quest for a synthesis of sorts between Keynes and Hayek might just be a good place to start from.

What’s Wrong with DSGE Models Is Not Representative Agency

Published September 16, 2019 Alan Kirman , Alfred Marshall , DSGE models , F. Y. Edgeworth , Irving Fisher , Jack Hirshleifer , James Hartley , Keynes , Lionel Robbins , Robert Solow , Thomas Humphrey , V. V. Chari 6 Comments
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The basic DSGE macroeconomic model taught to students is based on a representative agent. Many critics of modern macroeconomics and DSGE models have therefore latched on to the representative agent as the key – and disqualifying — feature in DSGE models, and by extension, with modern macroeconomics. Criticism of representative-agent models is certainly appropriate, because, as Alan Kirman admirably explained some 25 years ago, the simplification inherent in a macoreconomic model based on a representative agent, renders the model entirely inappropriate and unsuitable for most of the problems that a macroeconomic model might be expected to address, like explaining why economies might suffer from aggregate fluctuations in output and employment and the price level.

While altogether fitting and proper, criticism of the representative agent model in macroeconomics had an unfortunate unintended consequence, which was to focus attention on representative agency rather than on the deeper problem with DSGE models, problems that cannot be solved by just throwing the Representative Agent under the bus.

Before explaining why representative agency is not the root problem with DSGE models, let’s take a moment or two to talk about where the idea of representative agency comes from. The idea can be traced back to F. Y. Edgeworth who, in his exposition of the ideas of W. S. Jevons – one of the three marginal revolutionaries of the 1870s – introduced two “representative particulars” to illustrate how trade could maximize the utility of each particular subject to the benchmark utility of the counterparty. That analysis of two different representative particulars, reflected in what is now called the Edgeworth Box, remains one of the outstanding achievements and pedagogical tools of economics. (See a superb account of the historical development of the Box and the many contributions to economic theory that it facilitated by Thomas Humphrey). But Edgeworth’s analysis and its derivatives always focused on the incentives of two representative agents rather than a single isolated representative agent.

Only a few years later, Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics, offered an analysis of how the equilibrium price for the product of a competitive industry is determined by the demand for (derived from the marginal utility accruing to consumers from increments of the product) and the supply of that product (derived from the cost of production). The concepts of the marginal cost of an individual firm as a function of quantity produced and the supply of an individual firm as a function of price not yet having been formulated, Marshall, in a kind of hand-waving exercise, introduced a hypothetical representative firm as a stand-in for the entire industry.

The completely ad hoc and artificial concept of a representative firm was not well-received by Marshall’s contemporaries, and the young Lionel Robbins, starting his long career at the London School of Economics, subjected the idea to withering criticism in a 1928 article. Even without Robbins’s criticism, the development of the basic theory of a profit-maximizing firm quickly led to the disappearance of Marshall’s concept from subsequent economics textbooks. James Hartley wrote about the short and unhappy life of Marshall’s Representative Firm in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

One might have thought that the inauspicious career of Marshall’s Representative Firm would have discouraged modern macroeconomists from resurrecting the Representative Firm in the barely disguised form of a Representative Agent in their DSGE models, but the convenience and relative simplicity of solving a DSGE model for a single agent was too enticing to be resisted.

Therein lies the difference between the theory of the firm and a macroeconomic theory. The gain in convenience from adopting the Representative Firm was radically reduced by Marshall’s Cambridge students and successors who, without the representative firm, provided a more rigorous, more satisfying and more flexible exposition of the industry supply curve and the corresponding partial-equilibrium analysis than Marshall had with it. Providing no advantages of realism, logical coherence, analytical versatility or heuristic intuition, the Representative Firm was unceremoniously expelled from the polite company of economists.

However, as a heuristic device for portraying certain properties of an equilibrium state — whose existence is assumed not derived — even a single representative individual or agent proved to be a serviceable device with which to display the defining first-order conditions, the simultaneous equality of marginal rates of substitution in consumption and production with the marginal rate of substitution at market prices. Unlike the Edgeworth Box populated by two representative agents whose different endowments or preference maps result in mutually beneficial trade, the representative agent, even if afforded the opportunity to trade, can find no gain from engaging in it.

An excellent example of this heuristic was provided by Jack Hirshleifer in his 1970 textbook Investment, Interest, and Capital, wherein he adapted the basic Fisherian model of intertemporal consumption, production and exchange opportunities, representing the canonical Fisherian exposition in a single basic diagram. But the representative agent necessarily represents a state of no trade, because, for a single isolated agent, production and consumption must coincide, and the equilibrium price vector must have the property that the representative agent chooses not to trade at that price vector. I reproduce Hirshleifer’s diagram (Figure 4-6) in the attached chart.

Here is how Hirshleifer explained what was going on.

Figure 4-6 illustrates a technique that will be used often from now on: the representative-individual device. If one makes the assumption that all individuals have identical tastes and are identically situated with respect to endowments and productive opportunities, it follows that the individual optimum must be a microcosm of the social equilibrium. In this model the productive and consumptive solutions coincide, as in the Robinson Crusoe case. Nevertheless, market opportunities exist, as indicated by the market line M’M’ through the tangency point P* = C*. But the price reflected in the slope of M’M’ is a sustaining price, such that each individual prefers to hold the combination attained by productive transformations rather than engage in market transactions. The representative-individual device is helpful in suggesting how the equilibrium will respond to changes in exogenous data—the proviso being that such changes od not modify the distribution of wealth among individuals.

While not spelling out the limitations of the representative-individual device, Hirshleifer makes it clear that the representative-agent device is being used as an expository technique to describe, not as an analytical tool to determine, intertemporal equilibrium. The existence of intertemporal equilibrium does not depend on the assumptions necessary to allow a representative individual to serve as a stand-in for all other agents. The representative-individual is portrayed only to provide the student with a special case serving as a visual aid with which to gain an intuitive grasp of the necessary conditions characterizing an intertemporal equilibrium in production and consumption.

But the role of the representative agent in the DSGE model is very different from the representative individual in Hirshleifer’s exposition of the canonical Fisherian theory. In Hirshleifer’s exposition, the representative individual is just a special case and a visual aid with no independent analytical importance. In contrast to Hirshleifer’s deployment of the representative-individual, representative-agent in the DSGE model is used as an assumption whereby an analytical solution to the DSGE model can be derived, allowing the modeler to generate quantitative results to be compared with existing time-series data, to generate forecasts of future economic conditions, and to evaluate the effects of alternative policy rules.

The prominent and dubious role of the representative agent in DSGE models provided a convenient target for critics of DSGE models to direct their criticisms. In Congressional testimony, Robert Solow famously attacked DSGE models and used their reliance on the representative-agents to make them seem, well, simply ridiculous.

Most economists are willing to believe that most individual “agents” – consumers investors, borrowers, lenders, workers, employers – make their decisions so as to do the best that they can for themselves, given their possibilities and their information. Clearly they do not always behave in this rational way, and systematic deviations are well worth studying. But this is not a bad first approximation in many cases. The DSGE school populates its simplified economy – remember that all economics is about simplified economies just as biology is about simplified cells – with exactly one single combination worker-owner-consumer-everything-else who plans ahead carefully and lives forever. One important consequence of this “representative agent” assumption is that there are no conflicts of interest, no incompatible expectations, no deceptions.

This all-purpose decision-maker essentially runs the economy according to its own preferences. Not directly, of course: the economy has to operate through generally well-behaved markets and prices. Under pressure from skeptics and from the need to deal with actual data, DSGE modellers have worked hard to allow for various market frictions and imperfections like rigid prices and wages, asymmetries of information, time lags, and so on. This is all to the good. But the basic story always treats the whole economy as if it were like a person, trying consciously and rationally to do the best it can on behalf of the representative agent, given its circumstances. This cannot be an adequate description of a national economy, which is pretty conspicuously not pursuing a consistent goal. A thoughtful person, faced with the thought that economic policy was being pursued on this basis, might reasonably wonder what planet he or she is on.

An obvious example is that the DSGE story has no real room for unemployment of the kind we see most of the time, and especially now: unemployment that is pure waste. There are competent workers, willing to work at the prevailing wage or even a bit less, but the potential job is stymied by a market failure. The economy is unable to organize a win-win situation that is apparently there for the taking. This sort of outcome is incompatible with the notion that the economy is in rational pursuit of an intelligible goal. The only way that DSGE and related models can cope with unemployment is to make it somehow voluntary, a choice of current leisure or a desire to retain some kind of flexibility for the future or something like that. But this is exactly the sort of explanation that does not pass the smell test.

While Solow’s criticism of the representative agent was correct, he left himself open to an effective rejoinder by defenders of DSGE models who could point out that the representative agent was adopted by DSGE modelers not because it was an essential feature of the DSGE model but because it enabled DSGE modelers to simplify the task of analytically solving for an equilibrium solution. With enough time and computing power, however, DSGE modelers were able to write down models with a few heterogeneous agents (themselves representative of particular kinds of agents in the model) and then crank out an equilibrium solution for those models.

Unfortunately for Solow, V. V. Chari also testified at the same hearing, and he responded directly to Solow, denying that DSGE models necessarily entail the assumption of a representative agent and identifying numerous examples even in 2010 of DSGE models with heterogeneous agents.

What progress have we made in modern macro? State of the art models in, say, 1982, had a representative agent, no role for unemployment, no role for Financial factors, no sticky prices or sticky wages, no role for crises and no role for government. What do modern macroeconomic models look like? The models have all kinds of heterogeneity in behavior and decisions. This heterogeneity arises because people’s objectives dier, they differ by age, by information, by the history of their past experiences. Please look at the seminal work by Rao Aiyagari, Per Krusell and Tony Smith, Tim Kehoe and David Levine, Victor Rios Rull, Nobu Kiyotaki and John Moore. All of them . . . prominent macroeconomists at leading departments . . . much of their work is explicitly about models without representative agents. Any claim that modern macro is dominated by representative-agent models is wrong.

So on the narrow question of whether DSGE models are necessarily members of the representative-agent family, Solow was debunked by Chari. But debunking the claim that DSGE models must be representative-agent models doesn’t mean that DSGE models have the basic property that some of us at least seek in a macro-model: the capacity to explain how and why an economy may deviate from a potential full-employment time path.

Chari actually addressed the charge that DSGE models cannot explain lapses from full employment (to use Pigou’s rather anodyne terminology for depressions). Here is Chari’s response:

In terms of unemployment, the baseline model used in the analysis of labor markets in modern macroeconomics is the Mortensen-Pissarides model. The main point of this model is to focus on the dynamics of unemployment. It is specifically a model in which labor markets are beset with frictions.

Chari’s response was thus to treat lapses from full employment as “frictions.” To treat unemployment as the result of one or more frictions is to take a very narrow view of the potential causes of unemployment. The argument that Keynes made in the General Theory was that unemployment is a systemic failure of a market economy, which lacks an error-correction mechanism that is capable of returning the economy to a full-employment state, at least not within a reasonable period of time.

The basic approach of DSGE is to treat the solution of the model as an optimal solution of a problem. In the representative-agent version of a DSGE model, the optimal solution is optimal solution for a single agent, so optimality is already baked into the model. With heterogeneous agents, the solution of the model is a set of mutually consistent optimal plans, and optimality is baked into that heterogenous-agent DSGE model as well. Sophisticated heterogeneous-agent models can incorporate various frictions and constraints that cause the solution to deviate from a hypothetical frictionless, unconstrained first-best optimum.

The policy message emerging from this modeling approach is that unemployment is attributable to frictions and other distortions that don’t permit a first-best optimum that would be achieved automatically in their absence from being reached. The possibility that the optimal plans of individuals might be incompatible resulting in a systemic breakdown — that there could be a failure to coordinate — does not even come up for discussion.

One needn’t accept Keynes’s own theoretical explanation of unemployment to find the attribution of cyclical unemployment to frictions deeply problematic. But, as I have asserted in many previous posts (e.g., here and here) a modeling approach that excludes a priori any systemic explanation of cyclical unemployment, attributing instead all cyclical unemployment to frictions or inefficient constraints on market pricing, cannot be regarded as anything but an exercise in question begging.

 

Irving Fisher Demolishes the Loanable-Funds Theory of Interest

Published August 7, 2019 Irving Fisher , Keynes , liquidity preference , loanable-funds theory 3 Comments

In some recent posts (here, here and here) I have discussed the inappropriate application of partial-equilibrium analysis (aka supply-demand analysis) when the conditions under which the ceteris paribus assumption underlying partial-equilibrium analysis are not satisfied. The two examples of inappropriate application of partial equilibrium analysis I have mentioned were: 1) drawing a supply curve of labor and demand curve for labor to explain aggregate unemployment in the economy, and 2) drawing a supply curve of loanable funds and a demand curve for loanable funds to explain the rate of interest. In neither case can one assume that a change in the wage of labor or in the rate of interest can occur without at the same time causing the demand curve and the supply curve to shift from their original position to a new one. Because of the feedback effects from a change in the wage or a change in the rate of interest inevitably cause the demand and supply curves to shift, the standard supply-and-demand analysis breaks down in the face of such feedback effects.

I pointed out that while Keynes correctly observed that demand-and-supply analysis of the labor market was inappropriate, it is puzzling that it did not occur to him that demand-and-supply analysis could not be used to explain the rate of interest.

Keynes explained the rate of interest as a measure of the liquidity premium commanded by holders of money for parting with liquidity when lending money to a borrower. That view is sometimes contrasted with Fisher’s explanation of the rate interest as a measure of the productivity of capital in shifting output from the present to the future and the time preference of individuals for consuming in the present rather waiting to consume in the future. Sometimes the Fisherian theory of the rate of interest is juxtaposed with the Keynesian theory by contrasting the liquidity preference theory with a loanable-funds theory. But that contrast between liquidity preference and loanable funds misrepresents Fisher’s view, because a loanable funds theory is also an inappropriate misapplication of partial-equilibrium analysis when general-equilibrium anlaysis is required.

I recently came upon a passage from Fisher’s classic 1907 treatise, The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena, which explicitly rejects supply-demand analysis of the market for loanable funds as a useful way of explaining the rate of interest. Here is how Fisher made that fundamental point.

If a modern business man is asked what determines the rate of interest, he may usually be expected to answer, “the supply and demand of loanable money.” But “supply and demand” is a phrase which has been too often into service to cover up difficult problems. Even economists have been prone to employ it to describe economic causation which they could not unravel. It was once wittily remarked of the early writers on economic problems, “Catch a parrot and teach him to say ‘supply and demand,’ and you have an excellent economist.” Prices, wages, rent, interest, and profits were thought to be fully “explained” by this glib phrase. It is true that every ratio of exchange is due to the resultant of causes operating on the buyer and seller, and we may classify these as “demand” and supply.” But this fact does not relieve us of the necessity of examining specifically the two sets of causes, including utility in its effect on demand, and cost in its effect on supply. Consequently, when we say that the rate of interest is due to the supply and demand of “capital” or of “money” or of “loans,” we are very far from having an adequate explanation. It is true that when merchants seek to discount bills at a bank in large numbers and for large amounts, the rate of interest will tend to be low. But we must inquire for what purposes and from what causes merchants thus apply to a bank for the discount of loans and others supply the bank with the funds to be loaned. The real problem is: What causes make the demand for loans and what causes make the supply? This question is not answered by the summary “supply and demand” theory. The explanation is not simply that those who have little capital demand them. In fact, the contrary is often the case. The depositors in savings banks are the lenders, and they are usually poor, whereas those to whom the savings bank in turn lends the funds are relatively rich. (pp. 6-7)

What Do Stock Prices Tell Us about the Economy?

Published March 6, 2018 Adam Winkler , corporate income tax , Efficient Market Hypothesis , Irving Fisher 15 Comments
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Stock prices (as measured by the S&P 500) in 2017 rose by over 20%, an impressive amount, and what is most impressive about it is perhaps that this rise prices came after eight previous years of steady increases.

Here are the annual year-on-year and cumulative changes in the S&P500 since 2009.

2009              21.1%              21.1%*

2010              12.0%              33.1%*

2011              -0.0%               33.1%*

2012              12.2%               45.3%*

2013              25.9%               71.2%*

2014              10.8%               82.0%*

2015              -0.7%                81.3%*

2016             9.1%                   90.4%*            (4.5%)**          (85.9%)***

2017             17.7%                 108.1%*          (22.3%)****

2018 (YTD)    2.0%                  110.1%*           (24.3%)****

* cumulative increase since the end of 2008

** increase from end of 2015 to November 8, 2016

*** cumulative increase from end of 2008 to November 8, 2016

**** cumulative increase since November 8, 2016

So, from the end of 2008 until the start of 2017, approximately coinciding with Obama’s two terms as President, the S&P 500 rose in every year except 2011 and 2015, when the index was essentially unchanged, and rose by more than 10% in five of the eight years (twice by more than 20%), with stock prices nearly doubling during the Obama Presidency.

But what does the doubling of stock prices under Obama really tell us about the well-being of the American economy, and, even more importantly, about the well-being of the American public during those years? Is there any correlation between the performance of the stock market and the well-being of actual people? Does the doubling of stock prices under Obama mean that most Americans were better off at the end of his Presidency than they were at the start of it?

My answer to these questions is a definite — though not very resounding — yes, because we know that the US economy at the end of 2008 was in the middle of the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression. Output was contracting, employment was falling, and the financial system was on the verge of collapse, with stock prices down almost 50% from where they had been at the end of August, and nearly 60% from the previous all-time high reached in 2007. In 2016, after seven years of slow but steady growth, employment and output had recovered and surpassed their previous peaks, though only by small amounts. But the recovery, although disappointingly slow, was real.

That improvement was reflected, albeit with a lag, in changes in median household and median personal income between 2008 and 2016.

2009                    -0.7%                   -0.7%

2010                    -2.6%                    -3.3%

2011                     -1.6%                    -4.9%

2012                    -0.1%                    -5.0%

2013                      3.5%                    -1.5%

2014                    -1.5%                     -3.0%

2015                     5.1%                       2.0%

2016                      3.1%                      5.1%

But it’s also striking how weak the correlation was between rapidly rising stock prices and rising median incomes in the Obama years. Given a tepid real recovery from the Little Depression, what accounts for the associated roaring recovery in stock prices? Well, for one thing, much of the improvement in the stock market was simply recovering losses in stock valuations during the downturn. Stock prices having fallen further than incomes in the Little Depression, it’s not surprising that the recovery in stocks was steeper than the recovery in incomes. It took four years for the S&P 500 to reach its pre-Depression peak, so, normalized to their pre-Depression peaks, the correlation between stock prices and median incomes is not as weak as it seems when comparing year-on-year percentage changes.

But considering the improvement in stock prices under Obama in historical context also makes the improvement in stock prices under Obama seem less remarkable than it does when viewed without taking the previous downturn into account. Stock prices simply returned (more or less) to the path that, one might have expected them to follow by extrapolating their past performance. Nevertheless, even if we take into account that, during the Little Depression, stocks prices fell more sharply than real incomes, stocks have clearly outperformed the real economy during the recovery, real output and income having failed to return to the growth path that it had been tracking before the 2008 downturn.

Why have stocks outperformed the real economy? The answer to that question is a straightforward application of the basic theory of asset valuation, according to which the value of real assets – machines, buildings, land — and financial assets — stocks and bonds — reflects the discounted expected future income streams associated with those assets. In particular, stock prices represent the discounted present value of the expected future cash flows (dividends or stock buy-backs) from firms to their shareholders. So, if the economy has “recovered” (more or less) from the 2008-09 downturn, the expected future cash flows from firms have presumably – and on average — surpassed the cash flows that had been expected before the downturn.

But the weakness in the recovery suggests that the increase in expected cash flows can’t fully account for the increase in stock prices. Why did stock prices rise by more than the likely increase in expected cash flows? The basic theory of asset valuation tells us that the remainder of the increase in stock prices can be attributed to the decline of real interest rates since the 2008 downturn to historically low levels.

Of course, to say that the increase in stock prices is attributable to the decline in real interest rates just raises a different question: what accounts for the decline in real interest rates? The answer, derived from Irving Fisher, is basically that if perceived opportunities for future investment and growth are diminished, the willingness of people to trade future for present income also tends to diminish. What the rate of interest represents in the Fisherian framework is the rate at which people are willing to trade future for present income – i.e., the premium (discount) that is placed on present (future) income.

The Fisherian view is totally at odds with the view that the real interest rate is – or can be — controlled by the monetary authority. According to the latter view, the reason that real interest rates since the 2008 downturn have been at historically low levels is that the Federal Reserve has forced interest rates down to those levels by flooding the economy with huge quantities of printed money. There is a certain sense in which that view has a small element of truth: had the Fed adopted a different set of policy goals concerning inflation and nominal GDP, real interest rates might have risen to more “normal” levels. But given the overall policy framework within which it was operating, the Fed had only minimal control over the real rate of interest.

The essential idea is that in the Fisherian view the real rate of interest is not a single price determined in a single market; it is a distillation of the entire intertemporal structure of price relationships simultaneously determined in the myriad of individual markets in which transactions for present and future delivery are continuously being agreed upon. To imagine that the Fed, or any monetary authority, could control or even modestly influence this almost incomprehensibly complicated structure of price relationships according to its wishes is simply delusional.

If the decline in real interest rates after the 2008 downturn reflected generally reduced optimism about future economic growth, then the increase in stock prices actually reflected declining optimism by most people about their future well-being compared to their pre-downturn expectations. That loss of optimism might have been, at least in part, self-fulfilling insofar as it discouraged potentially worthwhile – i.e., profitable — investments that would have been undertaken had expectations been more optimistic.

Nevertheless, the near doubling of stock prices during the Obama administration did coincide with a not insignificant improvement in the well-being of most Americans. Most Americans were substantially better off at the end of 2016, after about seven years of slow but steady economic growth, than they were at the end of 2008 when total output and employment were contracting at the fastest rate since the Great Depression. But to use the increase in stock prices as a quantitative measure of the improvement in their well-being would be misleading.

I would also mention as an aside that a favorite faux-populist talking point of Obama and Fed critics used to be that rising stock prices during the Obama years revealed the bias of the elitist Fed Governors appointed by Obama in favor of the wealthy owners of corporate stock, and their callous disregard of the small savers who leave their retirement funds in bank savings accounts earning minimal interest and of workers whose wage increases barely kept up with inflation. But this refrain of critics – and I am thinking especially of the Wall Street Journal editorial page – who excoriated the Obama administration and the Fed for trying to raise stock prices by keeping interest rates at abnormally low levels now unblushingly celebrate record-high stock prices as proof that tax cuts mostly benefiting corporations and their stockholders signal the start of a new golden age of accelerating growth.

So the next question to consider is what can we infer about the well-being of Americans and the American economy from the increase in stock prices since November 8, 2016? For purposes of this mental exercise, let me stipulate that the rise in stock prices since the moment when it became clear who had been elected President by the voters on November 8, 2016 was attributable to the policies that the new administration was expected to adopt.

Because interest rates have risen along with stock prices since November 8, 2016, increased stock prices must reflect investors’ growing optimism about the future cash flows to be distributed by corporations to shareholders. So, our question can be restated as follows: which policies — actual or expected — of the new administration could account for the growing optimism of investors since the election? Here are five policy categories to consider: (1) regulation, (2) taxes, (3) international trade, (4) foreign affairs, (5) macroeconomic and monetary policies.

The negative reaction of stock prices to the announcement last week that tariffs will be imposed on steel and aluminum imports suggests that hopes for protectionist trade policies were not the main cause of rising investor optimism since November 2016. And presumably investor hopes for rising corporate cash flows to shareholders were not buoyed up by increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula and various belligerent statements by Administration officials about possible military responses to North Korean provocations.

Macroeconomic and monetary policies being primarily the responsibility of the Federal Reserve, the most important macroeconomic decision made by the new Administration to date was appointing Jay Powell to succeed Janet Yellen as Fed Chair. But this appointment was seen as a decision to keep Fed monetary policy more or less unchanged from what it was under Yellen, so one could hardly ascribe increased investor optimism to a decision not to change the macroeconomic and monetary policies that had been in place for at least the previous four years.

That leaves us with anticipated or actual changes in regulatory and tax policies as reasons for increased optimism about future cash flows from corporations to their shareholders. The two relevant questions to ask about anticipated or actual changes in regulatory and tax policies are: (1) could such changes have raised investor optimism, thereby raising stock prices, and (2), if so, would rising stock prices reflect enhanced well-being on the part of the American economy and the American people?

Briefly, the main idea for regulatory reform that the Administration wants to pursue is to require that whenever an agency adopts a new regulation, it should simultaneously eliminate two old ones. Supposedly such a requirement – sometimes called a regulatory budget – is to limit the total amount of regulation that the government can impose on the economy, the theory being that new regulations would not be adopted unless they were likely to be really effective.

But agencies are already required to show that regulations pass some cost-benefit test before imposing new regulations. So it’s not clear that the economy would be better off if new regulations, which can now be adopted only if they are expected to generate benefits exceeding the costs associated with their adoption, cannot be adopted unless two other regulations are eliminated. Presumably, underlying the new regulatory approach is a theory of bureaucratic behavior positing that the benefits of new regulations are systematically overestimated and their costs systematically underestimated by bureaucrats.

I’m not going to argue the merits of the underlying theory, but obviously it is possible that the new regulatory approach would result in increased profits for businesses that will have fewer regulatory burdens imposed upon them, thereby increasing the value of ownership shares in those firms. So, it’s possible that the new regulatory approach adopted by the Administration is causing stock prices to rise, presumably by more than they would have risen under the old simple cost-benefit regulatory approach that was followed by the Obama Administration.

But even if the new regulatory approach has caused stock prices to rise, it’s not clear that increasing stock valuations represent a net increase in the well-being of the American economy and the American people. If regulations that are costly to the economy in general are eliminated, the benefits of fewer regulations would accrue not just to the businesses whose profits rise as a result; eliminating inefficient regulations would also benefit the rest of the economy by freeing up resources to produce goods and services whose value to consumers would the benefits foregone when regulations were eliminated. But it’s also possible, that regulations are providing benefits greater than the costs of implementing and enforcing them.

If eliminating regulations leads to increased pollution or sickness or consumer fraud, and the value of those foregone benefits exceeds the costs of those regulations, it will not be corporations and their shareholders that suffer; it will be the general public that will bear the burden of their elimination. While corporations increase the cash flows paid to shareholders, members of the public will suffer more-than-offsetting reductions in well-being by being exposed to increased pollution, suffering increased illness and injury, or suffering added fraud and other consumer harms.

Since 1970, when the federal government took serious measures to limit air and water pollution, air and water quality have improved greatly in most of the US. Those improvements, for the most part, have probably not been reflected in stock prices, because environmental improvements, mostly affecting common-property resources, can’t be easily capitalized, though, some of those improvements have likely been reflected in increasing land values in cities and neighborhoods where air and water quality have improved. Foregoing pollution-reducing regulations might actually have led to increased stock prices for many corporations burdened by those regulations, but the US as a whole, and its inhabitants, would not have been better off without those regulations than they are with them.

So, rising stock prices are not necessarily a good indicator of whether the new regulatory approach of the Administration is benefiting or harming the American economy and the American public. Market valuations convey a lot of important information, but there is also a lot of important information that is not conveyed in stock prices.

As for taxes, it is straightforward that reducing corporate-tax liability increases funds available to be paid directly to shareholders as dividends and share buy-backs, or indirectly through investments expected to increase cash flows to shareholders in the more distant future. Does an increase in stock prices caused by a reduction in corporate-tax liability imply any enhancement in the well-being of the American economy and the American people

The answer, as a first approximation, is no. A reduction in corporate tax liability implies a reduction in the tax liability of shareholders, and that reduction is immediately capitalized into the value of shares. Increased stock prices simply reflect the expected reduction in shareholder tax liability.

Of course, reducing the tax burden on shareholders may improve economic performance, causing an increase in corporate cash flows to shareholders exceeding the reduction in shareholder tax liabilities. But it is unlikely that the difference between the increase in cash flows to shareholders and the reduction in shareholder tax liabilities would be more than a few percent of the total reduction in corporate tax liability, so that any increase in economic performance resulting from a reduction in corporate tax liability would account for only a small fraction of the increase in stock prices.

The good thing about the corporate-income tax is that it is so easy to collect, and that it is so hard to tell who really bears the tax burden: shareholders, workers or consumers. That’s why governments like taxing corporations. But the really bad thing about the corporate-income tax is that it is so hard to tell who really bears the burden of the corporate tax, shareholders, workers or consumers.

Because it is so hard to tell who bears the burden of the tax, people just think that “corporations” pay the tax, but “corporations” aren’t people, and they don’t really pay taxes, they are just the conduit for a lot of unidentified people to pay unknown amounts of tax. As Adam Winkler has just explained in this article and in an important new book, It is a travesty that the Supreme Court was hoodwinked in the latter part of the nineteenth century into accepting the notion that corporations are Constitutional persons with essentially the same rights as actual persons – indeed, with far greater rights than human beings belonging to disfavored racial or ethnic categories.

As I wrote years ago in one of my early posts on this blog, there are some very good arguments for abolishing the corporate income tax altogether, as Hyman Minsky argued. Forcing corporations to distribute their profits to shareholders would diminish the incentives for corporate empire building, thereby making venture capital more available to start-ups and small businesses. Such a reform might turn out to be an important democratizing and decentralizing change in the way that modern capitalism operates. But even if that were so, it would not mean that the effects of a reduction in the corporate tax rate could be properly measured by looking that resulting change in corporate stock prices.

Before closing this excessively long post, I will just remark that although I have been using the basic theory of asset pricing that underlies the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), adopting that theory of asset pricing does not imply that I accept the EMH. What separates me from the EMH is the assumption that there is a single unique equilibrium toward which the economy is tending at any moment in time, and that the expectations of market participants are unbiased and efficient estimates of the equilibrium price vector toward which the price system is moving. I reject all of those assumptions about the existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium price vector. If there is no equilibrium price vector toward which the economy is tending, the idea that expectations are governed by some objective equilibrium which is already there to be discovered is erroneous; expectations create their own reality and equilibrium is itself determined by expectations. When the existence of equilibrium depends on expectations, it becomes impossible to assign any meaning to the term “efficient market.”

In the General Theory Keynes First Trashed and then Restated the Fisher Equation

Published September 5, 2017 Fisher effect , Irving Fisher , Keynes 18 Comments

I am sorry to have gone on a rather extended hiatus from posting, but I have been struggling to come up with a new draft of a working paper (“The Fisher Effect under Deflationary Expectations“) I wrote with the encouragement of Scott Sumner in 2010 and posted on SSRN in 2011 not too long before I started blogging. Aside from a generous mention of the paper by Scott on his blog, Paul Krugman picked up on it and wrote about it on his blog as well. Because the empirical work was too cursory, I have been trying to update the results and upgrade the techniques. In working on a new draft of my paper, I also hit upon a simple proof of a point that I believe I discovered several years ago: that in the General Theory Keynes criticized Fisher’s distinction between the real and nominal rates of interest even though he used exactly analogous reasoning in his famous theorem on covered interest parity in the forward exchange market and in his discussion of liquidity preference in chapter 17 of the General Theory. So I included a section making that point in the new draft of my paper, which I am reproducing here. Eventually, I hope to write a paper exploring more deeply Keynes’s apparently contradictory thinking on the Fisher equation. Herewith is an excerpt from my paper.

One of the puzzles of Keynes’s General Theory is his criticism of the Fisher equation.

This is the truth which lies behind Professor Irving Fisher’ss theory of what he originally called “Appreciation and Interest” – the  distinction between the money rate of interest and the real rate of interest where the latter is equal to the former after correction for changes in the value of money. It is difficult to make sense of this theory as stated, because it is not clear whether the change in the value of money is or is not assumed to be foreseen. There is no escape from the dilemma that, if it is not foreseen, there will be no effect on current affairs; whilst, if it is foreseen, the prices of existing goods will be forthwith so adjusted that the advantages of holding money and of holding goods are again equalized, and it will be too late for holders of money to gain or to suffer a change in the rate of interest which will offset the prospective change during the period of the loan in the value of money lent. . . .

The mistake lies in supposing that it is the rate of interest on which prospective changes in the value of money will directly react, instead of the marginal efficiency of a given stock of capital. The prices of existing assets will always adjust themselves to changes in expectation concerning the prospective value of money. The significance of such changes in expectation lies in their effect on the readiness to produce new assets through their reaction on the marginal efficiency of capital. The stimulating effect of the expectation of higher prices is due, not to its raising the rate of interest (that would be a paradoxical way of stimulating output – in so far as the rate of interest rises, the stimulating effect is to that extent offset), but to its raising the marginal efficiency of a given stock of capital. (pp. 142-43)

As if the problem of understanding that criticism were not enough, the problem is further compounded by the fact that one of Keynes’s most important pre-General Theory contributions, his theorem about covered interest parity in his Tract on Monetary Reform seems like a straightforward application of the Fisher equation. According to his covered-interest-parity theorem, in equilibrium, the difference between interest rates quoted in terms of two different currencies will be just enough to equalize borrowing costs in either currency given the anticipated change in the exchange rate between the two currencies over reflected in the market for forward exchange as far into the future as the duration of the loan.

The most fundamental cause is to be found in the interest rates obtainable on “short” money – that is to say, on money lent or deposited for short periods of time in the money markets of the two centres under comparison. If by lending dollars in New York for one month the lender could earn interest at the rate of 5-1/2 per cent per annum, whereas by lending sterling in London for one month he could only earn interest at the rate of 4 per cent, then the preference observed above for holding funds in New York rather than in London is wholly explained. That is to say, forward quotations for the purchase of the currency of the dearer money market tend to be cheaper than the spot quotations by a percentage per month equal to the excess of the interest which can be earned in a month in the dearer market over what can be earned in the cheaper. (p. 125)

And as if that self-contradiction not enough, Keynes’s own exposition of the idea of liquidity preference in chapter 17 of the General Theory extends the basic idea of the Fisher equation that expected rates of return from holding different assets must be accounted for in a way that equalizes the expected return from holding any asset. At least formally, it can be shown that the own-interest-rate analysis in chapter 17 of the General Theory explaining how the liquidity premium affects the relative yields of money and alternative assets can be translated into a form that is equivalent to the Fisher equation.

In explaining the factors affecting the expected yields from alternative assets now being held into the future, Keynes lists three classes of return from holding assets: (1) the expected physical real yield (q) (i.e., the ex ante real rate of interest or Fisher’s real rate) from holding an asset, including either or both a flow of physical services or real output or real appreciation; (2) the expected service flow from holding an easily marketable assets generates liquidity services or a liquidity premium (l); and (3) wastage in the asset or a carrying cost (c). Keynes specifies the following equilibrium condition for asset holding: if assets are held into the future, the expected overall return from holding every asset including all service flows, carrying costs, and expected appreciation or depreciation, must be equalized.

[T]he total return expected from the ownership of an asset over a period is equal to its yield minus its carrying cost plus its liquidity premium, i.e., to q – c + l. That is to say, q – c + l is the own rate of interest of any commodity, where q, c, and l are measured in terms of itself as the standard. (Keynes 1936, p. 226)

Thus, every asset that is held, including money, must generate a return including the liquidity premium l, after subtracting of the carrying cost c. Thus, a standard real asset with zero carrying cost will be expected to generate a return equal to q (= r). For money to be held, at the margin, it must also generate a return equal to q net of its carrying cost, c. In other words, q = l – c.

But in equilibrium, the nominal rate of interest must equal the liquidity premium, because if the liquidity premium (at the margin) generated by money exceeds the nominal interest rate, holders of debt instruments returning the nominal rate will convert those instruments into cash, thereby deriving liquidity services in excess of the foregone interest from the debt instruments. Similarly, the carrying cost of holding money is the expected depreciation in the value of money incurred by holding money, which corresponds to expected inflation. Thus, substituting the nominal interest rate for the liquidity premium, and expected inflation for the carrying cost of money, we can rewrite the Keynes equilibrium condition for money to be held in equilibrium as q = r = i – pe. But this equation is identical to the Fisher equation: i = r + pe.

Keynes’s version of the Fisher equation makes it obvious that the disequilibrium dynamics that are associated with changes in expected inflation can be triggered not only by decreased inflation expectations but by an increase in the liquidity premium generated by money, and especially if expected inflation falls and the liquidity premium rises simultaneously, as was likely the case during the 2008 financial crisis.

I will not offer a detailed explanation here of the basis on which Keynes criticized the Fisher equation in the General Theory despite having applied the same idea in the Tract on Monetary Reform and restating the same underlying idea some 80 pages later in the General Theory itself. But the basic point is simply this: the seeming contradiction can be rationalized by distinguishing between the Fisher equation as a proposition about a static equilibrium relationship and the Fisher equation as a proposition about the actual adjustment process occasioned by a parametric expectational change. While Keynes clearly did accept the Fisher equation in an equilibrium setting, he did not believe the real interest rate to be uniquely determined by real forces and so he didn’t accept its the invariance of the real interest rate with respect to changes in expected inflation in the Fisher equation. Nevertheless it is stunning that Keynes could have committed such a blatant, if only superficial, self-contradiction without remarking upon it.

The Trump Rally

Published December 18, 2016 David Beckworth , Irving Fisher , loanable-funds theory 7 Comments
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David Beckworth has a recent post about the Trump stock-market rally. Just before the election I had a post in which I pointed out that the stock market seemed to be dreading the prospect of a Trump victory, based on the strong positive correlation between movements in the dollar value of the Mexican peso and the S&P 500, though, in response to a comment by one of my readers, I did partially walk back my argument. As the initial returns and exit polls briefly seemed to be pointing toward a Clinton victory, the correlation between the peso and the S&P 500 (futures) seemed to be very strong and getting stronger, and after the returns started to point increasingly toward a Trump victory, the strong correlation between the peso and the S&P 500 remained all too evident, showing a massive decline in both the peso and the S&P 500. But what seemed like a Trump panic was suddenly broken, when Mrs. Clinton phoned Trump to concede and Trump appeared to claim victory with a relatively restrained and conciliatory statement that calmed the worst fears about a messy transition and the potential for serious political instability. The survival of a Republican majority in the Senate was perhaps viewed as a further positive sign and strengthened hopes for business-friendly changes in the US corporate and personal taxes. The earlier losses in S&P 500 futures were reversed even without any recovery in the peso.

So what explains the turnaround in the reaction of the stock market to Trump’s victory? Here’s David Beckworth:

I have a new piece in The Hill where I argue markets are increasingly seeing the Trump shock as an inflection point for the U.S. economy:

It seems the U.S. economy is finally poised for robust economic growth, something that has been missing for the past eight years. Such strong economic growth is expected to cause the demand for credit to increase and the supply of savings to decline

Though this is not the main point, I will just register my disagreement with David’s version of how interest rates are determined, which essentially restates the “loanable-funds” theory of interest determination, which is often described as the orthodox alternative to the Keynesian liquidity preference theory of interest rates. I disagree that it is the alternative to the Keynesian theory. I think that is a very basic misconception perpetrated by macroeconomists with either a regrettable memory lapse or an insufficient understanding of, the Fisherian theory of interest rates. In the Fisherian theory interest rates are implicit in the intertemporal structure of all prices, they are therefore not determined in any single market, as asserted by the loanable-funds theory, any more than the price level is determined in any single market. The way to think about interest-rate determination is to ask the following question: at what structure of interest rates would holders of long-lived assets be content to continue holding the existing stock of assets? Current savings and current demand for credit are an epiphenomenon of interest-rate determination, not a determinant of interest rates — with the caveat that every factor that influences the intertemporal structure of prices is one of the myriad determinants of interest rates.

Together, these forces are naturally pushing interest rates higher. The Fed’s interest rate hike today is simply piggybacking on this new reality.

If “these forces” is interpreted in the way I have suggested in my above comment on David’s previous sentence, then I would agree with this sentence.

Here are some charts that document this upbeat economic outlook as seen from the treasury market. The first one shows the treasury market’s implicit inflation forecast (or “breakeven inflation”) and real interest rate at the 10-year horizon. These come from TIPs and have their flaws, but they provide a good first approximation to knowing what the bond market is thinking. In this case, both the real interest rate and expected inflation rate are rising. This implies the market expects both higher real economic growth and higher inflation. The two may be related–the higher expected inflation may be a reflection of higher expected nominal demand growth causing real growth. The higher real growth expectations are also probably being fueled by Trump’s supply-side reforms.

beckworth_interest_rates

I agree that the rise in real interest rates may reflect improved prospects for economic growth, and that the rising TIPS spread may reflect expectations of at least a small rise in inflation towards the Fed’s largely rhetorical 2-percent target. And I concur that a higher inflation rate could be one of the causes of improving implicit forecasts of economic growth. However, I am not so sure that expectations of rising inflation and supply-side reforms are the only explanations for rising real interest rates.

What “reforms” is Trump promising? I’m not sure actually, but here is a list of possibilities: 1) reducing and simplifying corporate tax rates, 2) reducing and simplifying personal tax rates, 3) deregulation, 4) tougher enforcement of immigration laws, 5) deportation of an undetermined number of illegal immigrants, 6) aggressively protectionist international trade policies.

I think that there is a broad consensus in favor of reducing corporate tax rates. Not only is the 35% marginal rate on corporate profits very high compared to the top corporate set by other countries, the interest deduction is a perverse incentive favoring debt rather than equity financing. As I pointed out in a post five years ago, Hyman Minsky, one of the favorite economists of the left, was an outspoken opponent of corporate income taxation in general, precisely because it encourages debt rather than equity financing. I think that the Obama administration would have been happy to propose reducing the corporate tax rate as part of a broader budget deal, but no broader deal with the Republican majority in Congress was possible, and a simple reduction of the corporate tax rate would have been difficult for Obama to sell to his own political base without offering them something that could be described as reducing inequality. So cutting the top corporate tax rate would almost certainly be a good thing (but subject to qualification by the arguments in the next paragraph), and expectations of a reduction in the top corporate rate would tend to raise stock prices, though the effect on stock prices would be moderated by increased issues of new corporate stock.

Reducing and simplifying corporate and personal tax rates seems like a good thing, but there’s at least one problem. Not all earnings of taxable income is socially productive. Lots of earned income is generated by completely, or partially, unproductive activities associated with private gains that exceed social gains. I have written in the past about how unproductive many types of information gathering and knowledge production is (e.g., here, here, here, and here). Much of this activity enables the person who acquires knowledge or information to gain an information advantage over people with whom he transacts, so the private return to the acquisition of such knowledge is greater than the social gain, because the gain to one party to the trade comes not from an increase in output but by way of a transfer from the other less-informed party to the transaction.

The same is true — to a somewhat lesser extent, but the basic tendency is the same – of activity aimed at the discovery of knew knowledge over which an intellectual property right can be exercised for a substantial length of time. The ability to extract monopoly rents over newly discovered knowledge is likely to confer a private gain on the discoverer greater than the social gain accruing from the discovery, because the first discoverer to acquire exclusive rights can extract the full value of the discovery even though the marginal benefit accruing to the discovery is only the value of the new knowledge over the elapsed time between the moment of the discovery and the moment when the discovery would have been made, perhaps soon afterwards, by someone else. In general, there is a whole range of income accruing to a variety of winner-takes-all activities in which the private gain to the winner greatly exceeds the social gain. A low marginal rate of income taxation increases the incentive to engage in such socially wasteful winner-takes-all activities.

Deregulation can be a good thing when it undermines monopolistic price-fixing and legally imposed entry barriers entrenching incumbent suppliers. A lot of regulation has historically been of this type. But although it is convenient for libertarian ideologues to claim that monopoly enhancement or entrenchment characterizes all government regulation, I doubt that most current regulations are for this purpose. A lot of regulation is aimed at preventing dishonest or misleading business practices or environmental pollution or damage to third-parties. So as an empirical matter, I don’t think we can say whether a reduction in regulation will have a net positive or a net negative effect on society. Nevertheless, regulation probably does reduce the overall earnings of corporations, so that a reduction in regulation will tend to raise stock prices. If it becomes easier for corporations to emit harmful pollution into the atmosphere and into our rivers, lakes and oceans, the reductions in private costs enjoyed by the corporations will be capitalized into their stock prices while the increase in social costs will be borne in a variety of ways by all individuals in the country or the world. Insofar as stock prices have risen since Trump’s election because of expectations of a roll back in regulation, it is not clear to me at least whether that reflects an increase in net social welfare or a capitalization of the value of enhanced rights to engage in socially harmful conduct.

The possible effects of changes in immigration laws, in the enforcement of immigration laws and in trade policies seem to me far too murky at this point even to speculate upon. I would just observe that insofar as the stock market has capitalized the effects of Trump’s supposed supply-side reforms, those reforms would have tended to reduce, not increase, inflation expectations. So it does not seem likely to me that whatever increase in stock prices we have seen so far reflects a pure supply-side effect.

I am more inclined to believe that the recent increases in stock prices and inflation expectations reflect expectations that Trump will fulfill his commitments to conduct irresponsible fiscal policies generating increased budget deficits, which the Republican majorities in Congress will now meekly accept and dutifully applaud, and that Trump will be able either to cajole or intimidate enough officials at the Federal Reserve to accommodate those policies or will appoint enough willing accomplices to the Fed to overcome the opposition of the current FOMC.

Keynes on the Theory of the Rate of Interest

Published December 18, 2015 Fisher effect , Irving Fisher , Keynes , liquidity preference 16 Comments
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I have been writing recently about Keynes and his theory of the rate of interest (here, here, here, and here). Perhaps unjustly – but perhaps not — I attribute to him a theory in which the rate of interest is determined exclusively by monetary forces: the interaction of the liquidity preference of the public with the policy of the monetary authorities. In other words, the rate of interest, at least as an approximation, can be modeled in terms of a single market for holding money, the demand to hold money reflecting the liquidity preference of the public and the stock of money being directly controlled by the monetary authority. Because liquidity preference is a function of the rate of interest, the rate of interest adjusts until the stock of money made available by the monetary authority is held willingly by the public.

I have been struggling with Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of interest, which evidently led him to deny the Fisher effect, thus denying that there is a margin of substitution between holding money and holding real assets, because he explicitly recognizes in Chapter 17 of the General Theory that there is a margin of substitution between money and real assets, the expected net returns from holding all assets (including expected appreciation and the net service flows generated by the assets) being equal in equilibrium. And it was that logic which led Keynes to one of his most important pre-General Theory contributions — the covered-interest-arbitrage theorem in chapter 3 of his Tract on Monetary Reform. The equality of expected returns on all assets was the key to Irving Fisher’s 1896 derivation of the Fisher Effect in Appreciation and Interest, restated in 1907 in The Rate of Interest, and in 1930 in The Theory of Interest.

Fisher never asserted that there is complete adjustment of nominal interest rates to expected inflation, actually providing empirical evidence that the adjustment of nominal rates to inflation was only partial, but he did show that in equilibrium a difference in the expected rate of appreciation between alternative assets must correspond to differences in the rates of interest on loans contracted in terms of the two assets. Now there is a difference between the static relationship between the interest rates for two loans contracted in terms of two different assets and a dynamic adjustment in time to a change in the expected rate of appreciation or depreciation of a given asset. The dynamic adjustment does not necessarily coincide with the static relationship.

It is also interesting, as I pointed out in a recent post, that when criticizing the orthodox theory of the rate of interest in the General Theory, Keynes focused not on Fisher, but on his teacher Alfred Marshall as the authoritative representative of the orthodox theory of interest, criticizing Fisher only for the Fisher effect. Keynes reserved is comprehensive criticism for Marshall, attributing to Marshall the notion that rate of interest adjusts to equalize savings and investment. Keynes acknowledged that he could not find textual support in Marshall’s writings for this idea, merely citing his own prior belief that the rate of interest performs that function, consequently attributing a similar belief to Marshall. But even if Marshall did mistakenly believe that the rate of interest adjusts to equalize savings and investment, it does not follow that the orthodox theory of interest is wrong; it just means that Marshall had a defective understanding of the theory. Just because most physicists in the 18th century believed in the phlogiston theory of fire does not prove that classical physics was wrong; it only means that classical physicists had an imperfect understanding of the theory. And if Keynes wanted to establish the content of the most authoritative version of the orthodox theory of interest, he should have been citing Fisher not Marshall.

That is why I wanted to have a look at a not very well known paper by Keynes called “The Theory of the Rate of Interest,” written for a 1937 festschrift in honor of Irving Fisher, The Lessons of Monetary Experience. Keynes began the paper with the following footnote attached to the title acknowledging Fisher as the outstanding authority on the orthodox theory of interest.

I have thought it suitable to offer a short note on this subject in honor of Irving Fisher, since his earliest [presumably Appreciation and Interest, Fisher’s doctoral dissertation] and latest [presumably The Theory of Interest] have been concerned with it, and since during the whole of the thirty years that I have been studying economics he has been the outstanding authority on this problem. (p. 145)

The paper is mostly devoted to spelling out and discussing six propositions that Keynes believes distill the essentials of the orthodox theory of interest. The first four of these propositions Keynes regards as unassailable, but the last two, he maintains, reflect very special, empirically false, assumptions. He therefore replaces them with two substitute propositions, whose implications differ radically from those of orthodox theory. Here are the first four propositions.

1 Interest on money means precisely what the books on arithmetic say it means. . . . [I]t is simply the premium obtainable on current cash over deferred cash, so that it measures the marginal preference . . . for holding cash in hand over cash for deferred delivery. No one would pay this premium unless the possession of cash served some purpose, i.e., has some efficiency. Thus, we can conveniently say that interest on money measures the marginal efficiency of money in terms of itself as a unit.

2 Money is not peculiar in having a marginal efficiency measured in terms of itself. . . . [N]ormally capital assets of all kinds have a positive marginal efficiency measured in terms of themselves. If we know the relation between the present and expected prices of an asset in terms of money we can convert the measure of its marginal efficiency into a measure of its marginal efficiency in terms of money by means of a formula which I have given in my General Theory, p. 227.

3 The effort to obtain the best advantage from the possession of wealth will set up a tendency for capital assets to exchange in equilibrium, at values proportional to their marginal efficiencies in terms of a common unit. . . . [I]f r is the money rate of interest . . . and y is the marginal efficiency of a capital asset A in terms of money, then A will exchange in terms of money at a price such as to make y = r.

4 If the demand price of our capital asset A . . . is not less than its replacement cost, new investment in A will take place, the scale of such investment depending on the capacity available for the production of A, i.e., on its elasticity of supply, and on the rate at which y, its marginal efficiency, declines as the amount of new investment in A increases. At a scale of new investment at which the marginal cost of producing A is equal to its demand price as above, we have a position of equilibrium. Thus the price system resulting from the relationships between the marginal efficiencies of different capital assets including money, measured in terms of a common unit, determines the aggregate rate of investment. (p. 145-46)

Keynes sums up the import of his first four propositions as follows:

These proposition are not . . . inconsistent with the orthodox theory . . . or open to doubt. They establish that relative prices . . . and the scale of output move until the marginal efficiencies of all kinds of assets are equal when measured in a common unit and . . . that the marginal efficiency of capital is equal to the rate of interest. But they tell us nothing as to the forces which determine what this common level of marginal efficiency will tend to be. It is when we proceed to this further discussion that my argument diverges from the orthodox argument.

Here is how Keynes describes the divergence between the orthodox theory and his theory:

[T]he orthodox theory maintains that the forces which determine the common value of the marginal efficiency of various assets are independent of money, which has . . . no autonomous influence, and that prices move until the marginal efficiency of money, i.e., the rate of interest, falls into line with the common value of the marginal efficiency of other assets as determined by other forces. My theory . . . maintains that this is a special case and that over a wide range of possible cases almost the opposite is true, namely, that the marginal efficiency of money is determined by forces partly appropriate to itself, and that prices move until the marginal efficiency of other assets fall into line with the rate of interest. (p. 147)

I find Keynes’s description of the difference between the orthodox theory and his own both insightful and problematic. Keynes notes correctly that the orthodox theory, abstracting from all monetary influences, treats the rate of interest as a rate of intertemporal exchange, applicable to exchange between any asset today and any asset in the future, adjusted for differences in rates of appreciation, and in net service flows, across assets. So Keynes was right: the orthodox theory is a special case, corresponding to the special assumptions required for full intertemporal equilibrium. And Keynes was right to emphasize the limitations of the orthodox theory.

But while drawing a sharp contrast between his theory and the orthodox theory (“over a wide range of possible cases almost the opposite is true”), Keynes, to qualify his disagreement, deploys the italicized (by me) weasel words, but without explaining how his seemingly flat rejection of the orthodox theory requires qualification. It is certainly reasonable to say “that the marginal efficiency of capital is determined by forces partly appropriate to itself.” But I don’t see how it follows from that premise “that prices move until the marginal efficiency of other assets fall into line with the rate of interest.” Equilibrium is reached when marginal efficiencies (adjusted for differences in expected rates of appreciation and in net services flows) of all assets are equal, but rejecting the orthodox notion that the marginal efficiency of money adjusts to the common marginal efficiency of all other assets does not establish that the causality is reversed: that the marginal efficiencies of all non-money assets must adjust to whatever the marginal efficiency of money happens to be. The reverse causality also seems like a special case; the general case, it would seem, would be one in which causality could operate, depending on circumstances, in either direction or both directions. An argument about the direction of causality would have been appropriate, but none is made. Keynes just moves on to propositions 5 and 6.

5 The marginal efficiency of money in terms of itself has the peculiarity that it is independent of its quantity. . . . This is a consequence of the Quantity Theory of Money . . . Thus, unless we import considerations from outside, the money rate of interest is indeterminate, for the demand schedule for money is a function solely of its supply [sic, presumably Keynes meant to say “quantity”]. Nevertheless, a determinate value for r can be derived from the condition that the value of an asset A, of which the marginal efficiency in terms of money is y, must be such that y = r. For provided that we know the scale of investment, we know y and the value of A, and hence we can deduce r. In other words, the rate of interest depends on the marginal efficiency of capital assets other than money. This must, however, be supplemented by another proposition; for it requires that we should already know the scale of investment. (p. 147-48)

I pause here, because I am confused. Keynes alludes to the proposition that the neutrality of money implies that any nominal interest rate is compatible with any real interest rate provided that the rate of inflation is correctly anticipated, though without articulating the proposition correctly. Despite getting off to a shaky start with a sloppy allusion to the Fisher effect, Keynes is right in observing that the neutrality of money and the independence of the real rate of interest from monetary factors are extreme assumptions. Given that monetary neutrality is consistent with any nominal interest rate, Keynes then tries to show how the orthodox theory pins down the nominal interest rate. And his attempt does not seem successful; he asserts that the money rate of interest can be deduced from the marginal efficiency of some capital asset A in terms of money. But that marginal efficiency cannot be deduced without knowledge, or an expectation, of the future value of the asset. Instead of couching his analysis in terms of the current and (expected) future values of the asset, i.e., instead of following Fisher’s 1896 own-rate analysis, Keynes brings up the scale of investment in A: “This must . . . be supplemented by another proposition; for it requires that we should already know the scale of investment.” Aside from not knowing what “this” and “it” are referring to, I don’t understand how the scale of investment is relevant to a determination of the marginal efficiency of the capital asset in question.

Now for Keynes’s final proposition:

6 The scale of investment will not reach its equilibrium level until the point is reached at which the elasticity of supply of output as a whole has fallen to zero. (p. 148)

The puzzle only deepens here because proposition 5 is referring to the scale of investment in a particular asset A while proposition 6 seems to be referring to the scale of investment in the aggregate. It is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for an equilibrium scale of investment in a particular capital asset to obtain that the elasticity of supply of output as a whole be zero. So the connection between propositions 5 and 6 seems tenuous and superficial. Does Keynes mean to say that, according to orthodox theory, the equality of advantage to asset holders between different kinds of assets cannot be achieved unless the elasticity of supply for output as a whole is zero? Keynes then offers a synthetic restatement of orthodox theory.

The equilibrium rate of aggregate investment, corresponding to the level of output for a further increase in which the elasticity of supply is zero, depends on the readiness of the public to save. But this in turn depends on the rate of interest. Thus for each level of the rate of interest we have a given quantity of saving. This quantity of saving determines the scale of investment. The scale of investment settles the marginal efficiency of capital, to which the rate of interest must be equal. Our system is therefore determinate. To each possible value of the rate of interest there corresponds a given volume of saving; and to each possible value of the marginal efficiency of capital there corresponds a given volume of investment. Now the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency of capital must be equal. Thus the position of equilibrium is given by that common value of the rate of interest and of the marginal efficiency of capital at which saving determined by the former is equal to the investment determined by the latter. (Id.)

This restatement of orthodox theory is remarkably disconnected from the six propositions that Keynes has just identified as the bedrock of the orthodox theory of interest. The word “saving” or “save” is not even mentioned in any of Keynes’s six propositions, so the notion that the orthodox theory asserts that the rate of interest adjusts to equalize saving and investment is inconsistent with his own rendering of the orthodox theory. The rhetorical point that Keynes seems to be making in the form of a strictly analytical discussion is that the orthodox theory held that the equilibrium of an economic system occurs at the rate of interest that equalizes savings and investment at a level of output and income consistent with full employment. Where Keynes was misguided was in characterizing the mechanism by which this equilibrium is reached as an adjustment in the nominal rate of interest. A full equilibrium is achieved by way of a vector of prices (and expected prices) consistent with equilibrium, the rate of interest being implicit in the intertemporal structure of a price vector. Keynes was working with a simplistic misconception of what the rate of interest actually represents and how it affects economic activity.

In place of propositions 5 and 6, which Keynes dismisses as special factual assumptions, he proposes two alternative propositions:

5* The marginal efficiency of money in terms of itself is . . . a function of its quantity (though not of its quantity alone), just as in the case of capital assets.

6* Aggregate investment may reach its equilibrium rate under proposition (4) above, before the elasticity of supply of output as a whole has fallen to zero. (Id.)

So in substituting 5* for 5, all Keynes did was discard a proposition that few if any economists — certainly not Fisher — upholding the orthodox theory ever would have accepted as a factual assertion. The two paragraphs that Keynes devotes to refuting proposition 5 can be safely ignored at almost zero cost. Turning to proposition 6, Keynes restates it as follows:

A zero elasticity of supply for output as a whole means that an increase of demand in terms of money will lead to no change in output; that is to say, prices will rise in the same proportion as the money demand [i.e., nominal aggregate demand, not the demand to hold money] rises. Inflation will have no effect on output or employment, but only on prices. (pp. 149-50)

So, propositions 5 and 6 turn out to be equivalent assertions that money is neutral. Having devoted two separate propositions to identify the orthodox theory of interest with the idea that money is neutral, Keynes spells out the lessons he draws from his reconstruction of the orthodox theory of the rate of interest.

If I am right, the orthodox theory is wholly inapplicable to such problems as those of unemployment and the trade cycle, or, indeed, to any of the day-to-day problems of ordinary life. Nevertheless it is often in fact applied to such problems. . . .

It leads to considerable difficulties to regard the marginal efficiency of money as wholly different in character from the marginal efficiency of other assets. Equilibrium requires . . . that the prices of different kinds of assets measured in the same unit move until their marginal efficiencies measured in that unit are equal. But if the marginal efficiency of money in terms of itself is always equal to the marginal efficiency of other assets, irrespective of the price of the latter, the whole price system in terms of money becomes indeterminate. (150-52)

Keynes is attacking a strawman here, because, even given the extreme assumptions about the neutrality of money that hardly anyone – and certainly not Fisher – accepted as factual, the equality between the marginal efficiency of money and the marginal efficiency of other assets is an equilibrium condition, not an identity, so the charge of indeterminacy is mistaken, as Keynes himself unwittingly acknowledges thereafter.

It is the elements of elasticity (a) in the desire to hold inactive balances and (b) in the supply of output as a whole, which permits a reasonable measure of stability in prices. If these elasticities are zero there is a necessity for the whole body of prices and wages to respond immediately to every change in the quantity of money. (p. 152)

So Keynes is acknowledging that the whole price system in terms of money in not indeterminate, just excessively volatile. But let’s hear him out.

This assumes a state of affairs very different from that in which we live. For the two elasticities named above are highly characteristic of the real world; and the assumption that both of them are zero assumes away three-quarters of the problems in which we are interested. (Id.)

Undoubtedly true, but neither Fisher nor most other economists who accepted the orthodox theory of the rate of interest believed either that money is always neutral or that we live in a world of perpetually full employment. Nor did Keynes show that the theoretical resources of orthodox theory were insufficient to analyze situations of less than full employment. The most obvious example of such an analysis, of course, is one in which a restrictive monetary policy, by creating an excess demand for money, raises the liquidity premium, causing the marginal efficiency of money to exceed the marginal efficiency of other assets, in which case asset prices must fall to restore the equality between the marginal efficiencies of assets and of money.

In principle, the adjustment might be relatively smooth, but if the fall of asset prices triggers bankruptcies or other forms of financial distress, and if the increase in interest rates affects spending flows, the fall in asset prices and in spending flows may become cumulative causing a general downward spiral in income and output. Such an analysis is entirely compatible with orthodox theory even if the orthodox theory, in its emphasis on equilibrium, seems very far removed from the messy dynamic adjustment associated with a sudden increase in liquidity preference.

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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