Archive for the 'Walras’s Law' Category

Welcome to Uneasy Money, aka the Hawtreyblog

Published July 5, 2021 Uncategorized , Keynes , Little Depression , Scott Sumner , Monetarism , Say's Law , Walras's Law , R. G. Hawtrey , Frederick Lavington 37 Comments
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UPDATE: I’m re-upping my introductory blog post, which I posted ten years ago toady. It’s been a great run for me, and I hope for many of you, whose interest and responses have motivated to keep it going. So thanks to all of you who have read and responded to my posts. I’m adding a few retrospective comments and making some slight revisions along the way. In addition to new posts, I will be re-upping some of my old posts that still seem to have relevance to the current state of our world.

What the world needs now, with apologies to the great Burt Bachrach and Hal David, is, well, another blog.  But inspired by the great Ralph Hawtrey and the near great Scott Sumner, I decided — just in time for Scott’s return to active blogging — to raise another voice on behalf of a monetary policy actively seeking to promote recovery from what I call the Little Depression, instead of the monetary policy we have now:  waiting for recovery to arrive on its own.  Just like the Great Depression, our Little Depression was caused mainly by overly tight money in an environment of over-indebtedness and financial fragility, and was then allowed to deepen and become entrenched by monetary authorities unwilling to commit themselves to a monetary expansion aimed at raising prices enough to make business expansion profitable.

That was the lesson of the Great Depression.  Unfortunately that lesson, for reasons too complicated to go into now, was never properly understood, because neither Keynesians nor Monetarists had a fully coherent understanding of what happened in the Great Depression.  Although Ralph Hawtrey — called by none other than Keynes “his grandparent in the paths of errancy,” and an early, but unacknowledged, progenitor of Chicago School Monetarism — had such an understanding,  Hawtrey’s contributions were overshadowed and largely ignored, because of often irrelevant and misguided polemics between Keynesians and Monetarists and Austrians.  One of my goals for this blog is to bring to light the many insights of this perhaps most underrated — though competition for that title is pretty stiff — economist of the twentieth century.  I have discussed Hawtrey’s contributions in my book on free banking and in a paper published years ago in Encounter and available here.  Patrick Deutscher has written a biography of Hawtrey.

What deters businesses from expanding output and employment in a depression is lack of demand; they fear that if they do expand, they won’t be able to sell the added output at prices high enough to cover their costs, winding up with redundant workers and having to engage in costly layoffs.  Thus, an expectation of low demand tends to be self-fulfilling.  But so is an expectation of rising prices, because the additional output and employment induced by expectations of rising prices will generate the demand that will validate the initial increase in output and employment, creating a virtuous cycle of rising income, expenditure, output, and employment.

The insight that “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each” is hardly new.  It was not the discovery of Keynes or Keynesian economics; it is the 1922 formulation of Frederick Lavington, another great, but underrated, pre-Keynesian economist in the Cambridge tradition, who, in his modesty and self-effacement, would have been shocked and embarrassed to be credited with the slightest originality for that statement.  Indeed, Lavington’s dictum might even be understood as a restatement of Say’s Law, the bugbear of Keynes and object of his most withering scorn.  Keynesian economics skillfully repackaged the well-known and long-accepted idea that when an economy is operating with idle capacity and high unemployment, any increase in output tends to be self-reinforcing and cumulative, just as, on the way down, each reduction in output is self-reinforcing and cumulative.

But at least Keynesians get the point that, in a depression or deep recession, individual incentives may not be enough to induce a healthy expansion of output and employment. Aggregate demand can be too low for an expansion to get started on its own. Even though aggregate demand is nothing but the flip side of aggregate supply (as Say’s Law teaches), if resources are idle for whatever reason, perceived effective demand is deficient, diluting incentives to increase production so much that the potential output expansion does not materialize, because expected prices are too low for businesses to want to expand. But if businesses can be induced to expand output, more than likely, they will sell it, because (as Say’s Law teaches) supply usually does create its own demand.

[Comment after 10 years: In a comment, Rowe asked why I wrote that Say’s Law teaches that supply “usually” creates its own demand. At that time, I responded that I was just using “usually” as a weasel word. But I subsequently realized (and showed in a post last year) that the standard proofs of both Walras’s Law and Say’s Law are defective for economies with incomplete forward and state-contingent markets. We actually know less than we once thought we did!] 

Keynesians mistakenly denied that, by creating price-level expectations consistent with full employment, monetary policy could induce an expansion of output even in a depression. But at least they understood that the private economy can reach an impasse with price-level expectations too low to sustain full employment. Fiscal policy may play a role in remedying a mismatch between expectations and full employment, but fiscal policy can only be as effective as monetary policy allows it to be. Unfortunately, since the downturn of December 2007, monetary policy, except possibly during QE1 and QE2, has consistently erred on the side of uneasiness.

With some unfortunate exceptions, however, few Keynesians have actually argued against monetary easing. Rather, with some honorable exceptions, it has been conservatives who, by condemning a monetary policy designed to provide incentives conducive to business expansion, have helped to hobble a recovery led by the private sector rather than the government which  they profess to want. It is not my habit to attribute ill motives or bad faith to people whom I disagree with. One of the finest compliments ever paid to F. A. Hayek was by Joseph Schumpeter in his review of The Road to Serfdom who chided Hayek for “politeness to a fault in hardly ever attributing to his opponents anything but intellectual error.” But it is a challenge to come up with a plausible explanation for right-wing opposition to monetary easing.

[Comment after 10 years: By 2011 when this post was written, right-wing bad faith had already become too obvious to ignore, but who could then have imagined where the willingness to resort to bad faith arguments without the slightest trace of compunction would lead them and lead us.] 

In condemning monetary easing, right-wing opponents claim to be following the good old conservative tradition of supporting sound money and resisting the inflationary proclivities of Democrats and liberals. But how can claims of principled opposition to inflation be taken seriously when inflation, by every measure, is at its lowest ebb since the 1950s and early 1960s? With prices today barely higher than they were three years ago before the crash, scare talk about currency debasement and future hyperinflation reminds me of Ralph Hawtrey’s famous remark that warnings that leaving the gold standard during the Great Depression would cause runaway inflation were like crying “fire, fire” in Noah’s flood.

The groundlessness of right-wing opposition to monetary easing becomes even plainer when one recalls the attacks on Paul Volcker during the first Reagan administration. In that episode President Reagan and Volcker, previously appointed by Jimmy Carter to replace the feckless G. William Miller as Fed Chairman, agreed to make bringing double-digit inflation under control their top priority, whatever the short-term economic and political costs. Reagan, indeed, courageously endured a sharp decline in popularity before the first signs of a recovery became visible late in the summer of 1982, too late to save Reagan and the Republicans from a drubbing in the mid-term elections, despite the drop in inflation to 3-4 percent. By early 1983, with recovery was in full swing, the Fed, having abandoned its earlier attempt to impose strict Monetarist controls on monetary expansion, allowed the monetary aggregates to grow at unusually rapid rates.

However, in 1984 (a Presidential election year) after several consecutive quarters of GDP growth at annual rates above 7 percent, the Fed, fearing a resurgence of inflation, began limiting the rate of growth in the monetary aggregates. Reagan’s secretary of the Treasury, Donald Regan, as well as a variety of outside Administration supporters like Arthur Laffer, Larry Kudlow, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, began to complain bitterly that the Fed, in its preoccupation with fighting inflation, was deliberately sabotaging the recovery. The argument against the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy in 1984 was not without merit. But regardless of the wisdom of the Fed tightening in 1984 (when inflation was significantly higher than it is now), holding up the 1983-84 Reagan recovery as the model for us to follow now, while excoriating Obama and Bernanke for driving inflation all the way up to 1 percent, supposedly leading to currency debauchment and hyperinflation, is just a bit rich. What, I wonder, would Hawtrey have said about that?

In my next posting I will look a little more closely at some recent comparisons between the current non-recovery and recoveries from previous recessions, especially that of 1983-84.

A Primer on Say’s Law and Walras’s Law

Published December 20, 2020 Earl Thompson , Oskar Lange , Say's Law , Walras's Law 3 Comments

Say’s Law, often paraphrased as “supply creates its own demand,” is one of oldest “laws” in economics. It is also one of the least understood and most contentious propositions in economics. I am now in the process of revising my current draft of my paper “Say’s Law and the Classical Theory of Depressions,” which surveys and clarifies various interpretations, disputes and misunderstandings about Say’s Law. I thought that a brief update of my section discussing the relationship between Say’s Law and Walras’s Law might make for a useful blogpost. Not only does it discuss the meaning of Say’s Law and its relationship to Walras’s Law, it expands the narrow understanding of Say’s Law and corrects the mistaken view that Say’s Law does not hold in a monetary economy, because, given a demand to hold a pure medium of exchange, real goods may be supplied only to accumulate cash not to obtain real goods and services. IOW, supply may be a demand for cash not for goods. Under this interpretation, Say’s Law is valid only when the economy is in a macro or monetary equilibrium with no excess demand for money.

Here’s my discussion of that logically incorrect belief. (Let me add as a qualification that not only Say’s Law, but Walras’s Law, as I explained elsewhere in my paper, is not valid when there is not a complete set of forward and contingent markets. That’s because to prove Walras’s Law all agents must be optimizing on the same set of prices, whether actual observed prices or expected, but currently unobserved, prices. See also an earlier post about this paper in which I included the relevant excerpt from the paper.)

The argument that a demand to hold cash invalidates Say’s Law, because output may be produced for the purpose of accumulating cash rather than to buy other goods and services is an argument that had been made by nineteenth-century critics of Say’s Law. The argument did not go without response, but the nature and import of the response was not well, or widely, understood, and the criticism was widely credited. Thus, in his early writings on business-cycle theory, F. A. Hayek, making no claim to originality, maintained, matter of factly, that money involves a disconnect between aggregate supply and aggregate demand, describing money as a “loose joint” in the theory of general equilibrium, creating the central theoretical problem to be addressed by business-cycle theory. So, even Hayek in 1927 did not accept the validity of Say’s Law

Oskar Lange (“Say’s Law a Restatement and Criticism”) subsequently formalized the problem, introducing his distinction between Say’s Law and Walras’s Law. Lange defined Walras’s Law as the proposition that the sum of excess demands, corresponding to any price vector announced by a Walrasian auctioneer, must identically equal zero.[1] In a barter model, individual optimization, subject to the budget constraint corresponding to a given price vector, implies that the value of the planned purchases and planned sales by each agent must be exactly equal; if the value of the excess demands of each individual agent is zero the sum of the values of the excess demands of all individuals must also be zero. In a barter model, Walras’s Law and Say’s Law are equivalent: demand is always sufficient to absorb supply.

But in a model in which agents hold cash, which they use when transacting, they may supply real goods in order to add to their cash holdings. Because individual agents may seek to change their cash holdings, Lange argued that the equivalence between Walras’s Law and Say’s Law in a barter model does not carry over to a model in which agents hold money. Say’s Law cannot hold in such an economy unless excess demands in the markets for real goods sum to zero. But if agents all wish to add to their holdings of cash, their excess demand for cash will be offset by an excess supply of goods, which is precisely what Say’s Law denies.

It is only when an equilibrium price vector is found at which the excess demand in each market is zero that Say’s Law is satisfied. Say’s Law, according to Lange, is a property of a general equilibrium, not a necessary property of rational economic conduct, as Say and his contemporaries and followers had argued. When our model is extended from a barter to a monetary setting, Say’s Law must be restated in the generalized form of Walras’s Law. But, unlike Say’s Law, Walras’s Law does not exclude the possibility of an aggregate excess supply of all goods. Aggregate demand can be deficient, and it can result in involuntary unemployment.

At bottom, this critique of Say’s Law depends on the assumption that the quantity of money is exogenously fixed, so that individuals can increase or decrease their holdings of money only by spending either less or more than their incomes. However, as noted above, if there is a market mechanism that allows an increased demand for cash balances to elicit an increased quantity of cash balances, so that the public need not reduce expenditures to finance additions to their holdings of cash, Lange’s critique may not invalidate Say’s Law.

A competitive monetary system based on convertibility into gold or some other asset[2] has precisely this property. In particular, with money privately supplied by a set of traders (let’s call them banks), money is created when a bank accepts a money-backing asset (IOU) supplied by a customer in exchange for issuing its liability (a banknote or a deposit), which is widely acceptable as a medium of exchange. As first pointed out by Thompson (1974), Lange’s analytical oversight was to assume that in a Walrasian model with n real goods and money, there are only (n+1) goods or assets. In fact, there are really (n+2) goods or assets; there are n real goods and two monetary assets (i.e., the money issued by the bank and the money-backing asset accepted by the bank in exchange for the money that it issues). Thus, an excess demand for money need not, as Lange assumed, be associated with, or offset by, an excess supply of real commodities; it may be offset by a supply of money-backing assets supplied by those seeking to increase their cash holdings.

Properly specifying the monetary model relevant to macroeconomic analysis eliminates a misconception that afflicted monetary and macroeconomic theory for a very long time, and provides a limited rehabilitation of Say’s Law. But that rehabilitation doesn’t mean that all would be well if we got rid of central banks, abandoned all countercyclical policies and let private banks operate without restrictions. None of those difficult and complicated questions can be answered by invoking or rejecting Say’s Law.

[1] Excess supplies are recorded as negative excess demands.

[2] The classical economists generally regarded gold or silver as the appropriate underlying asset into which privately issued monies would be convertible, but the possibility of a fiat standard was not rejected on analytical principle.

Say’s (and Walras’s) Law Revisited

Published June 6, 2019 Axel Leijonfuvud , Robert Clower , Say's Law , temporary equilibrium , W. H. Hutt , Walras's Law 12 Comments

Update (6/18/2019): The current draft of my paper is now available on SSRN. Here is a link.

The annual meeting of the History of Economics Society is coming up in two weeks. It will be held at Columbia University at New York, and I will be presenting an unpublished paper of mine “Say’s Law and the Classical Theory of Depressions.” I began writing this paper about 20 years ago, but never finished it. My thinking about Say’s Law goes back to my first paper on classical monetary theory, and I have previously written blog-posts about Say’s Law (here and here). And more recently I realized that in a temporary-equilibrium framework, both Say’s Law and Walras’s Law, however understood, may be violated.

Here’s the abstract from my paper:

Say’s Law occupies a prominent, but equivocal, position in the history of economics, having been the object of repeated controversies about its meaning and significance since it was first propounded early in the nineteenth century. It has been variously defined, and arguments about its meaning and validity have not reached consensus about what was being attacked or defended. This paper proposes a unifying interpretation of Say’s Law based on the idea that the monetary sector of an economy with a competitively supplied money involves at least two distinct markets not just one. Thus, contrary to the Lange-Patinkin interpretation of Say’s Law, an excess supply or demand for money does not necessarily imply an excess supply or demand for goods in a Walrasian GE model. Beyond modifying the standard interpretation of the inconsistency between Say’s Law and a monetary economy, the paper challenges another standard interpretation of Say’s Law as being empirically refuted by the existence of lapses from full employment and economic depressions. Under the alternative interpretation, originally suggested by Clower and Leijonhufvud and by Hutt, Say’s Law provides a theory whereby disequilibrium in one market, causing the amount actually supplied to fall short of what had been planned to be supplied, reduces demand in other markets, initiating a cumulative process of shrinking demand and supply. This cumulative process of contracting supply is analogous to the Keynesian multiplier whereby a reduction in demand initiates a cumulative process of declining demand. Finally, it is shown that in a temporary-equilibrium context, Walras’s Law (and a fortiori Say’ Law) may be violated.

Here is the Introduction of my paper.

I. Introduction

Say’s Law occupies a prominent, but uncertain, position in the history of economics, having been the object of repeated controversies since the early nineteenth century. Despite a formidable secondary literature, the recurring controversies still demand a clear resolution. Say’s Law has been variously defined, and arguments about its meaning and validity have failed to achieve any clear consensus about just what is being defended or attacked. So, I propose in this paper to reconsider Say’s Law in a way that is faithful in spirit to how it was understood by its principal architects, J. B. Say, James Mill, and David Ricardo as well as their contemporary critics, and to provide a conceptual framework within which to assess the views of subsequent commentators.

In doing so, I hope to dispel perhaps the oldest and certainly the most enduring misunderstanding about Say’s Law: that it somehow was meant to assert that depressions cannot occur, or that they are necessarily self-correcting if market forces are allowed to operate freely. As I have tried to suggest with the title of this paper, Say’s Law was actually an element of Classical insights into the causes of depressions. Indeed, a version of the same idea expressed by Say’s Law implicitly underlies those modern explanations of depressions that emphasize coordination failures, though Say’s Law actually conveys an additional insight missing from most modern explanations.

The conception of Say’s Law articulated in this paper bears a strong resemblance to what Clower (1965, 1967) and Leijonhufvud (1968, 1981) called Say’s Principle. However, their artificial distinction between Say’s Law and Say’s Principle suggests a narrower conception and application of Say’s principle than, I believe, is warranted.  Moreover, their apparent endorsement of the idea that the validity of Say’s Law somehow depends in a critical way on the absence of money implied a straightforward misinterpretation of Say’s Law earlier propounded by, among other, Hayek, Lange and Patinkin in which only what became known as Walras’s Law and not Say’s Law is a logically necessary property of a general-equilibrium system. Finally, it is appropriate to note at the outset that, in most respects, the conception of Say’s Law for which I shall be arguing was anticipated in a quirky, but unjustly neglected, work by Hutt (1975) and by the important, and similarly neglected, work of Earl Thompson (1974).

In the next section, I offer a restatement of the Classical conception of Say’s Law. That conception was indeed based on the insight that, in the now familiar formulation, supply creates its own demand. But to grasp how this insight was originally understood, one must first understand the problem for which Say’s Law was proposed as a solution. The problem concerns the relationship between a depression and a general glut of all goods, but it has two aspects. First, is a depression in some sense caused by a general glut of all goods? Second, is a general glut of all goods logically conceivable in a market economy? In section three, I shall consider the Classical objections to Say’s Law and the responses offered by the Classical originators of the doctrine in reply to those objections. In section four, I discuss the modern objections offered to Say’s Law, their relation to the earlier objections, and the validity of the modern objections to the doctrine. In section five, I re-examine the Classical doctrine, relating it explicitly to a theory of depressions characterized by “inadequate aggregate demand.” I also elaborate on the subtle, but important, differences between my understanding of Say’s Law and what Clower and Leijonhufvud have called Say’s Principle. In section six, I show that when considered in the context of a temporary-equilibrium model in there is an incomplete set of forward and state-contingent markets, not even Walras’s Law, let alone Say’s Law, is logically necessary property of the model. An understanding of the conditions in which neither Walras’s Law nor Say’s Law is satisfied provides an important insight into financial crises and the systemic coordination failures that are characteristic of the deep depression to which they lead.

And here are the last two sections of the paper.

VI. Say’s Law Violated

            I have just argued that Clower, Leijonhufvud and Hutt explained in detail how the insight provided by Say’s Law into the mechanism whereby disturbances causing disequilibrium in one market or sector can be propagated and amplified into broader and deeper economy-wide disturbances and disequilibria. I now want to argue that by relaxing the strict Walrasian framework in which since Lange (1942) articulated Walras’s Law and Say’s Law, it is possible to show conditions under which neither Walras’s Law nor Say’s Law is satisfied.

            I relax the Walrasian framework by assuming that there is not a complete set of forward and state-contingent markets in which future transactions can be undertaken in the present. Because there a complete set of markets in which future prices are determined and visible to everyone, economic agents must formulate their intertemporal plans for production and consumption relying not only on observed current prices, but also on their expectations of currently unobservable future prices. As already noted, the standard proof of Walras’s Law and a fortiori of Say’s Law (or Identity) are premised on the assumption that all agents make their decisions about purchases and sales on their common knowledge of all prices.

            Thus, in the temporary-equilibrium framework, economic agents make their production and consumption decisions not on the basis of their common knowledge of future market prices common, but on their own conjectural expectations of those prices, expectations that may, or may not, be correct, and may, or may not, be aligned with the expectations of other agents. Unless the agents’ expectations of future prices are aligned, the expectations of some, or all, agents must be disappointed, and the plans to buy and sell formulated based on those expectations will have to be revised, or abandoned, once agents realize that their expectations were incorrect.

            Consider a simple two-person, two-good, two-period model in which agents make plans based on current prices observed in period 1 and their expectations of what prices will be in period 2. Given price expectations for period 2, period-1 prices are determined in a tatonnement process, so that no trading occurs until a temporary- equilibrium price vector for period 1 is found. Assume, further, that price expectations for period 2 do not change in the course of the tatonnement. Once a period-1 equilibrium price vector is found, the two budget constraints subject to which the agents make their optimal decisions, need not have the same values for expected prices in period 2, because it is not assumed that the period-2 price expectations of the two agents are aligned. Because the proof of Walras’s Law depends on agents basing their decisions to buy and sell each commodity on prices for each commodity in each period that are common to both agents, Walras’s Law cannot be proved unless the period-2 price expectations of both agents are aligned.

            The implication of the potential violation of Walras’s Law is that when actual prices turn out to be different from what they were expected to be, economic agents who previously assumed obligations that are about to come due may be unable to discharge those obligations. In standard general-equilibrium models, the tatonnement process assures that no trading takes place unless equilibrium prices have been identified. But in a temporary-equilibrium model, when decisions to purchase and sell are based not on equilibrium prices, but on actual prices that may not have been expected, the discharge of commitments is not certain.

            Of course, if Walras’s Law cannot be proved, neither can Say’s Law. Supply cannot create demand when the insolvency of economic agents obstructs mutually advantageous transactions between agents when some agents have negative net worth. The negative net worth of some agents can be transmitted to other agents holding obligations undertaken by agents whose net worth has become negative.

            Moreover, because the private supply of a medium of exchange by banks depends on the value of money-backing assets held by banks, the monetary system may cease to function in an economy in which the net worth of agents whose obligations are held banks becomes negative. Thus, the argument made in section IV.A for the validity of Say’s Law in the Identity sense breaks down once a sufficient number of agents no longer have positive net worth.

VII.      Conclusion

            My aim in this paper has been to explain and clarify a number of the different ways in which Say’s Law has been understood and misunderstood. A fair reading of the primary and secondary literature allows one to understand that many of the criticisms of Say’s Law have been not properly understood the argument that Say’s Law was either intended or could be reasonably interpreted to have said. Indeed, Say’s Law, properly understood, can actually help one understand the cumulative process of economic contraction whose existence supposedly proved its invalidity. However, I have also been able to show that there are plausible conditions in which a sufficiently serious financial breakdown, associated with financial crises in which substantial losses of net worth lead to widespread and contagious insolvency, when even Walras’s Law, and a fortiori Say’s Law, no longer hold. Understanding how Say’s Law may be violated may thus help in understanding the dynamics of financial crises and the cumulative systemic coordination failures of deep depressions.

I will soon be posting the paper on SSRN. When it’s posted I will post a link to an update to this post.

 

Roy Radner and the Equilibrium of Plans, Prices and Price Expectations

Published June 4, 2017 Arrow-Debrew-McKenzie model , expectations , general equilibrium , Hayek , incomplete markets , intertemporal budget constraint , intertemporal equilibrium , temporary equilibrium , Uncategorized , Walras's Law 9 Comments
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In this post I want to discuss Roy Radner’s treatment of an equilibrium of plans, prices, and price expectations (EPPPE) and its relationship to Hayek’s conception of intertemporal equilibrium, of which Radner’s treatment is a technically more sophisticated version. Although I seen no evidence that Radner was directly influenced by Hayek’s work, I consider Radner’s conception of EPPPE to be a version of Hayek’s conception of intertemporal equilibrium, because it captures essential properties of Hayek’s conception of intertemporal equilibrium as a situation in which agents independently formulate their own optimizing plans based on the prices that they actually observe – their common knowledge – and on the future prices that they expect to observe over the course of their planning horizons. While currently observed prices are common knowledge – not necessarily a factual description of economic reality but not an entirely unreasonable simplifying assumption – the prices that individual agents expect to observe in the future are subjective knowledge based on whatever common or private knowledge individuals may have and whatever methods they may be using to form their expectations of the prices that will be observed in the future. An intertemporal equilibrium refers to a set of decentralized plans that are both a) optimal from the standpoint of every agent’s own objectives given their common knowledge of current prices and their subjective expectations of future prices and b) mutually consistent.

If an agent has chosen an optimal plan given current and expected future prices, that plan will not be changed unless the agent acquires new information that renders the existing plan sub-optimal relative to the new information. Otherwise, there would be no reason for the agent to deviate from an optimal plan. The new information that could cause an agent to change a formerly optimal plan would either affect the preferences of the agent, the technology available to the agent, or would somehow be reflected in current prices or in expected future prices. But it seems improbable that there could be a change in preferences or technology would not also be reflected in current or expected future prices. So absent a change in current or expected future prices, there would seem to be almost no likelihood that an agent would deviate from a plan that was optimal given current prices and the future prices expected by the agent.

The mutual consistency of the optimizing plans of independent agents therefore turns out to be equivalent to the condition that all agents observe the same current prices – their common knowledge – and have exactly the same forecasts of the future prices upon which they have relied in choosing their optimal plans. Even should their forecasts of future prices turn out to be wrong, at the moment before their forecasts of future prices were changed or disproved by observation, their plans were still mutually consistent relative to the information on which their plans had been chosen. The failure of the equilibrium to be maintained could be attributed to a change in information that meant that the formerly optimal plans were no longer optimal given the newly acquired information. But until the new information became available, the mutual consistency of optimal plans at that (fleeting) moment signified an equilibrium state. Thus, the defining characteristic of an intertemporal equilibrium in which current prices are common knowledge is that all agents share the same expectations of the future prices on which their optimal plans have been based.

There are fundamental differences between the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie (ADM) equilibrium and the EPPPE. One difference worth mentioning is that, under the standard assumptions of the ADM model, the equilibrium is Pareto-optimal, and any Pareto-optimum allocation, by a suitable redistribution of initial endowments, could be achieved as a general equilibrium (two welfare theorems). These results do not generally hold for EPPPE, because, in contrast to the ADM model, it is possible for agents in EPPPE to acquire additional information over time, not only passively, but by investing resources in the production of information. Investing resources in the production of information can cause inefficiency in two ways: first, by creating non-convexities (owing to start-up costs in information gathering activities) that are inconsistent with the uniform competitive prices characteristic of the ADM equilibrium, and second, by creating incentives to devote resources to produce information whose value is derived from profits in trading with less well-informed agents. The latter source of inefficiency was discovered by Jack Hirshleifer in his classic 1971 paper, which I have written about in several previous posts (here, here, here, and here).

But the important feature of Radner’s EPPPE that I want to emphasize here — and what radically distinguishes it from the ADM equilibrium — is its fragility. Unlike the ADM equilibrium which is established once and forever at time zero of a model in which all production and consumption starts in period one, the EPPPE, even if it ever exists, is momentary, and is subject to unraveling whenever there is a change in the underlying information upon which current prices and expected future prices depend, and upon which agents, in choosing their optimal plans, rely. Time is not just, as it is in the ADM model, an appendage to the EPPPE, and, as a result, EPPPE can account for many phenomena, practices, and institutions that are left out of the ADM model.

The two differences that are most relevant in this context are the existence of stock markets in which shares of firms are traded based on expectations of the future net income streams associated with those firms, and the existence of a medium of exchange supplied by private financial intermediaries known as banks. In the ADM model in which all transactions are executed in time zero, in advance of all the actual consumption and production activities determined by those transactions, there would be no reason to hold, or to supply, a medium of exchange. The ADM equilibrium allows for agents to borrow or lend at equilibrium interest rates to optimize the time profiles of their consumption relative to their endowments and the time profiles of their earnings. Since all such transactions are consummated in time zero, and since, through some undefined process, the complete solvency and the integrity of all parties to all transactions is ascertained in time zero, the probability of a default on any loan contracted at time zero is zero. As a result, each agent faces a single intertemporal budget constraint at time zero over all periods from 1 to n. Walras’s Law therefore holds across all time periods for this intertemporal budget constraint, each agent transacting at the same prices in each period as every other agent does.

Once an equilibrium price vector is established in time zero, each agent knows that his optimal plan based on that price vector (which is the common knowledge of all agents) will be executed over time exactly as determined in time zero. There is no reason for any exchange of ownership shares in firms, the future income streams from each firm being known in advance.

The ADM equilibrium is a model of an economic process very different from Radner’s EPPPE, because in EPPPE, agents have no reason to assume that their current plans, even if they are momentarily both optimal and mutually consistent with the plans of all other agents, will remain optimal and consistent with the plans of all other agents. New information can arrive or be produced that will necessitate a revision in plans. Because even equilibrium plans are subject to revision, agents must take into account the solvency and credit worthiness of counterparties with whom they enter into transactions. The potentially imperfect credit-worthiness of at least some agents enables certain financial intermediaries (aka banks) to provide a service by offering to exchange their debt, which is widely considered to be more credit-worthy than the debt of ordinary agents, to agents seeking to borrow to finance purchases of either consumption or investment goods. Many agents seeking to borrow therefore prefer exchanging their debt for bank debt, bank debt being acceptable by other agents at face value. In addition, because the acquisition of new information is possible, there is a reason for agents to engage in speculative trades of commodities or assets. Such assets include ownership shares of firms, and agents may revise their valuations of those firms as they revise their expectations about future prices and their expectations about the revised plans of those firms in response to newly acquired information.

I will discuss the special role of banks at greater length in my next post on temporary equilibrium. But for now, I just want to underscore a key point: in the EPPE, unless all agents have the same expectations of future prices, Walras’s Law need not hold. The proof that Walras’s holds depends on the assumption that individual plans to buy and sell are based on the assumption that every agent buys or sells each commodity at the same price that every other transactor buys  or sells that commodity. But in the intertemporal context, in which only current, not future prices, are observed, plans for current and future prices are made based on expectations about future prices. If agents don’t share the same expectations about future prices, agents making plans for future purchases based on overly optimistic expectations about the prices at which they will be able to sell, may make commitments to buy in the future (or commitment to repay loans to finance purchases in the present) that they will be unable to discharge. Reneging on commitments to buy in the future or to repay obligations incurred in the present may rule out the existence of even a temporary equilibrium in the future.

Finally, let me add a word about Radner’s terminology. In his 1987 entry on “Uncertainty and General Equilibrium” for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, (Here is a link to the revised version on line), Radner writes:

A trader’s expectations concern both future environmental events and future prices. Regarding expectations about future environmental events, there is no conceptual problem. According to the Expected Utility Hypothesis, each trader is characterized by a subjective probability measure on the set of complete histories of the environment. Since, by definition, the evolution of the environment is exogenous, a trader’s conditional probability of a future event, given the information to date, is well defined.

It is not so obvious how to proceed with regard to trader’s expectations about future prices. I shall contrast two possible approaches. In the first, which I shall call the perfect foresight approach, let us assume that the behaviour of traders is such as to determine, for each complete history of the environment, a unique corresponding sequence of price system[s]. . .

Thus, the perfect foresight approach implies that, in equilibrium, traders have common price expectation functions. These price expectation functions indicate, for each date-event pair, what the equilibrium price system would be in the corresponding market at that date event pair. . . . [I]t follows that, in equilibrium the traders would have strategies (plans) such that if these strategies were carried out, the markets would be cleared at each date-event pair. Call such plans consistent. A set of common price expectations and corresponding consistent plans is called an equilibrium of plans, prices, and price expectations.

My only problem with Radner’s formulation here is that he is defining his equilibrium concept in terms of the intrinsic capacity of the traders to predict prices rather the simple fact that traders form correct expectations. For purposes of the formal definition of EPPE, it is irrelevant whether traders predictions of future prices are correct because they are endowed with the correct model of the economy or because they are all lucky and randomly have happened simultaneously to form the same expectations of future prices. Radner also formulates an alternative version of his perfect-foresight approach in which agents don’t all share the same information. In such cases, it becomes possible for traders to make inferences about the environment by observing prices differ from what they had expected.

The situation in which traders enter the market with different non-price information presents an opportunity for agents to learn about the environment from prices, since current prices reflect, in a possibly complicated manner, the non-price information signals received by the various agents. To take an extreme example, the “inside information” of a trader in a securities market may lead him to bid up the price to a level higher than it otherwise would have been. . . . [A]n astute market observer might be able to infer that an insider has obtained some favourable information, just by careful observation of the price movement.

The ability to infer non-price information from otherwise inexplicable movements in prices leads Radner to define a concept of rational expectations equilibrium.

[E]conomic agents have the opportunity to revise their individual models in the light of observations and published data. Hence, there is a feedback from the true relationship to the individual models. An equilibrium of this system, in which the individual models are identical with the true model, is called a rational expectations equilibrium. This concept of equilibrium is more subtle, of course, that the ordinary concept of equilibrium of supply and demand. In a rational expectations equilibrium, not only are prices determined so as to equate supply and demand, but individual economic agents correctly perceive the true relationship between the non-price information received by the market participants and the resulting equilibrium market prices.

Though this discussion is very interesting from several theoretical angles, as an explanation of what is entailed by an economic equilibrium, it misses the key point, which is the one that Hayek identified in his 1928 and (especially) 1937 articles mentioned in my previous posts. An equilibrium corresponds to a situation in which all agents have identical expectations of the future prices upon which they are making optimal plans given the commonly observed current prices and the expected future prices. If all agents are indeed formulating optimal plans based on the information that they have at that moment, their plans will be mutually consistent and will be executable simultaneously without revision as long as the state of their knowledge at that instant does not change. How it happened that they arrived at identical expectations — by luck chance or supernatural powers of foresight — is irrelevant to that definition of equilibrium. Radner does acknowledge that, under the perfect-foresight approach, he is endowing economic agents with a wildly unrealistic powers of imagination and computational capacity, but from his exposition, I am unable to decide whether he grasped the subtle but crucial point about the irrelevance of an assumption about the capacities of agents to the definition of EPPPE.

Although it is capable of describing a richer set of institutions and behavior than is the Arrow-Debreu model, the perfect-foresight approach is contrary to the spirit of much of competitive market theory in that it postulates that individual traders must be able to forecast, in some sense, the equilibrium prices that will prevail in the future under all alternative states of the environment. . . .[T]his approach . . . seems to require of the traders a capacity for imagination and computation far beyond what is realistic. . . .

These last considerations lead us in a different direction, which I shall call the bounded rationality approach. . . . An example of the bounded-rationality approach is the theory of temporary equilibrium.

By eschewing any claims about the rationality of the agents or their computational powers, one can simply talk about whether agents do or do not have identical expectations of future prices and what the implications of those assumptions are. When expectations do agree, there is at least a momentary equilibrium of plans, prices and price expectations. When they don’t agree, the question becomes whether even a temporary equilibrium exists and what kind of dynamic process is implied by the divergence of expectations. That it seems to me would be a fruitful way forward for macroeconomics to follow. In my next post, I will discuss some of the characteristics and implications of a temporary-equilibrium approach to macroeconomics.

 

Franklin Fisher on the Stability(?) of General Equilibrium

Published October 2, 2014 Franklin Fisher , general equilibrium , microfoundations , Walras's Law 11 Comments
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The eminent Franklin Fisher, winner of the J. B. Clark Medal in 1973, a famed econometrician and antitrust economist, who was the expert economics witness for IBM in its long battle with the U. S. Department of Justice, and was later the expert witness for the Justice Department in the antitrust case against Microsoft, currently emeritus professor professor of microeconomics at MIT, visited the FTC today to give a talk about proposals the efficient sharing of water between Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. The talk was interesting and informative, but I must admit that I was more interested in Fisher’s views on the stability of general equilibrium, the subject of a monograph he wrote for the econometric society Disequilibrium Foundations of Equilibrium Economics, a book which I have not yet read, but hope to read before very long.

However, I did find a short paper by Fisher, “The Stability of General Equilibrium – What Do We Know and Why Is It Important?” (available here) which was included in a volume General Equilibrium Analysis: A Century after Walras edited by Pacal Bridel.

Fisher’s contribution was to show that the early stability analyses of general equilibrium, despite the efforts of some of the most best economists of the mid-twentieth century, e.g, Hicks, Samuelson, Arrow and Hurwicz (all Nobel Prize winners) failed to provide a useful analysis of the question whether the general equilibrium described by Walras, whose existence was first demonstrated under very restrictive assumptions by Abraham Wald, and later under more general conditions by Arrow and Debreu, is stable or not.

Although we routinely apply comparative-statics exercises to derive what Samuelson mislabeled “meaningful theorems,” meaning refutable propositions about the directional effects of a parameter change on some observable economic variable(s), such as the effect of an excise tax on the price and quantity sold of the taxed commodity, those comparative-statics exercises are predicated on the assumption that the exercise starts from an initial position of equilibrium and that the parameter change leads, in a short period of time, to a new equilibrium. But there is no theory describing the laws of motion leading from one equilibrium to another, so the whole exercise is built on the mere assumption that a general equilibrium is sufficiently stable so that the old and the new equilibria can be usefully compared. In other words, microeconomics is predicated on macroeconomic foundations, i.e., the stability of a general equilibrium. The methodological demand for microfoundations for macroeconomics is thus a massive and transparent exercise in question begging.

In his paper on the stability of general equilibrium, Fisher observes that there are four important issues to be explored by general-equilibrium theory: existence, uniqueness, optimality, and stability. Of these he considers optimality to be the most important, as it provides a justification for a capitalistic market economy. Fisher continues:

So elegant and powerful are these results, that most economists base their conclusions upon them and work in an equilibrium framework – as they do in partial equilibrium analysis. But the justification for so doing depends on the answer to the fourth question listed above, that of stability, and a favorable answer to that is by no means assured.

It is important to understand this point which is generally ignored by economists. No matter how desirable points of competitive general equilibrium may be, that is of no consequence if they cannot be reached fairly quickly or maintained thereafter, or, as might happen when a country decides to adopt free markets, there are bad consequences on the way to equilibrium.

Milton Friedman remarked to me long ago that the study of the stability of general equilibrium is unimportant, first, because it is obvious that the economy is stable, and, second, because if it isn’t stable we are wasting our time. He should have known better. In the first place, it is not at all obvious that the actual economy is stable. Apart from the lessons of the past few years, there is the fact that prices do change all the time. Beyond this, however, is a subtler and possibly more important point. Whether or not the actual economy is stable, we largely lack a convincing theory of why that should be so. Lacking such a theory, we do not have an adequate theory of value, and there is an important lacuna in the center of microeconomic theory.

Yet economists generally behave as though this problem did not exist. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the view of the theory of Rational Expectations that any disequilibrium disappears so fast that it can be ignored. (If the 50-dollar bill were really on the sidewalk, it would be gone already.) But this simply assumes the problem away. The pursuit of profits is a major dynamic force in the competitive economy. To only look at situations where the Invisible Hand has finished its work cannot lead to a real understanding of how that work is accomplished. (p. 35)

I would also note that Fisher confirms a proposition that I have advanced a couple of times previously, namely that Walras’s Law is not generally valid except in a full general equilibrium with either a complete set of markets or correct price expectations. Outside of general equilibrium, Walras’s Law is valid only if trading is not permitted at disequilibrium prices, i.e., Walrasian tatonnement. Here’s how Fisher puts it.

In this context, it is appropriate to remark that Walras’s Law no longer holds in its original form. Instead of the sum of the money value of all excess demands over all agents being zero, it now turned out that, at any moment of time, the same sum (including the demands for shares of firms and for money) equals the difference between the total amount of dividends that households expect to receive at that time and the amount that firms expect to pay. This difference disappears in equilibrium where expectations are correct, and the classic version of Walras’s Law then holds.

Who’s Afraid of Say’s Law?

Published February 20, 2014 Axel Leijonfuvud , Earl Thompson , Hayek , Keynes , Oskar Lange , Robert Clower , Say's Law , W. H. Hutt , Walras's Law 66 Comments
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There’s been a lot of discussion about Say’s Law in the blogosphere lately, some of it finding its way into the comments section of my recent post “What Does Keynesisan Mean,” in which I made passing reference to Keynes’s misdirected tirade against Say’s Law in the General Theory. Keynes wasn’t the first economist to make a fuss over Say’s Law. It was a big deal in the nineteenth century when Say advanced what was then called the Law of the Markets, pointing out that the object of all production is, in the end, consumption, so that all productive activity ultimately constitutes a demand for other products. There were extended debates about whether Say’s Law was really true, with Say, Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill all weighing on in favor of the Law, and Malthus and the French economist J. C. L. de Sismondi arguing against it. A bit later, Karl Marx also wrote at length about Say’s Law, heaping his ample supply of scorn upon Say and his Law. Thomas Sowell’s first book, I believe drawn from the doctoral dissertation he wrote under George Stigler, was about the classical debates about Say’s Law.

The literature about Say’s Law is too vast to summarize in a blog post. Here’s my own selective take on it.

Say was trying to refute a certain kind of explanation of economic crises, and what we now would call cyclical or involuntary unemployment, an explanation attributing such unemployment to excess production for which income earners don’t have enough purchasing power in their pockets to buy. Say responded that the reason why income earners had supplied the services necessary to produce the available output was to earn enough income to purchase the output. This is the basic insight behind the famous paraphrase (I don’t know if it was Keynes’s paraphrase or someone else’s) of Say’s Law — supply creates its own demand. If it were instead stated as products or services are supplied only because the suppliers want to buy other products or services, I think that it would be more in sync than the standard formulation with Say’s intent. Another way to think about Say’s Law is as a kind of conservation law.

There were two famous objections made to Say’s Law: first, current supply might be offered in order to save for future consumption, and, second, current supply might be offered in order to add to holdings of cash. In either case, there could be current supply that is not matched by current demand for output, so that total current demand would be insufficient to generate full employment. Both these objections are associated with Keynes, but he wasn’t the first to make either of them. The savings argument goes back to the nineteenth century, and the typical response was that if there was insufficient current demand, because the desire to save had increased, the public deciding to reduce current expenditures on consumption, the shortfall in consumption demand would lead to an increase in investment demand driven by falling interest rates and rising asset prices. In the General Theory, Keynes proposed an argument about liquidity preference and a potential liquidity trap, suggesting a reason why the necessary adjustment in the rate of interest would not necessarily occur.

Keynes’s argument about a liquidity trap was and remains controversial, but the argument that the existence of money implies that Say’s Law can be violated was widely accepted. Indeed, in his early works on business-cycle theory, F. A. Hayek made the point, seemingly without embarrassment or feeling any need to justify it at length, that the existence of money implied a disconnect between overall supply and overall demand, describing money as a kind of loose joint in the economic system. This argument, apparently viewed as so trivial or commonplace by Hayek that he didn’t bother proving it or citing authority for it, was eventually formalized by the famous market-socialist economist (who, for a number of years was a tenured professor at that famous bastion of left-wing economics the University of Chicago) Oskar Lange who introduced a distinction between Walras’s Law and Say’s Law (“Say’s Law: A Restatement and Criticism”).

Walras’s Law says that the sum of all excess demands and excess supplies, evaluated at any given price vector, must identically equal zero. The existence of a budget constraint makes this true for each individual, and so, by the laws of arithmetic, it must be true for the entire economy. Essentially, this was a formalization of the logic of Say’s Law. However, Lange showed that Walras’s Law reduces to Say’s Law only in an economy without money. In an economy with money, Walras’s Law means that there could be an aggregate excess supply of all goods at some price vector, and the excess supply of goods would be matched by an equal excess demand for money. Aggregate demand would be deficient, and the result would be involuntary unemployment. Thus, according to Lange’s analysis, Say’s Law holds, as a matter of necessity, only in a barter economy. But in an economy with money, an excess supply of all real commodities was a logical possibility, which means that there could be a role for some type – the choice is yours — of stabilization policy to ensure that aggregate demand is sufficient to generate full employment. One of my regular commenters, Tom Brown, asked me recently whether I agreed with Nick Rowe’s statement: “the goal of good monetary policy is to try to make Say’s Law true.” I said that I wasn’t sure what the statement meant, thereby avoiding the need to go into a lengthy explanation about why I am not quite satisfied with that way of describing the goal of monetary policy.

There are at least two problems with Lange’s formulation of Say’s Law. The first was pointed out by Clower and Leijonhufvud in their wonderful paper (“Say’s Principle: What It Means and Doesn’t Mean” reprinted here and here) on what they called Say’s Principle in which they accepted Lange’s definition of Say’s Law, while introducing the alternative concept of Say’s Principle as the supply-side analogue of the Keynesian multiplier. The key point was to note that Lange’s analysis was based on the absence of trading at disequilibrium prices. If there is no trading at disequilibrium prices, because the Walrasian auctioneer or clearinghouse only processes information in a trial-and-error exercise aimed at discovering the equilibrium price vector, no trades being executed until the equilibrium price vector has been discovered (a discovery which, even if an equilibrium price vector exists, may not be made under any price-adjustment rule adopted by the auctioneer, rational expectations being required to “guarantee” that an equilibrium price vector is actually arrived at, sans auctioneer), then, indeed, Say’s Law need not obtain in notional disequilibrium states (corresponding to trial price vectors announced by the Walrasian auctioneer or clearinghouse). The insight of Clower and Leijonhufvud was that in a real-time economy in which trading is routinely executed at disequilibrium prices, transactors may be unable to execute the trades that they planned to execute at the prevailing prices. But when planned trades cannot be executed, trading and output contract, because the volume of trade is constrained by the lesser of the amount supplied and the amount demanded.

This is where Say’s Principle kicks in; If transactors do not succeed in supplying as much as they planned to supply at prevailing prices, then, depending on the condition of their balances sheets, and the condition of credit markets, transactors may have to curtail their demands in subsequent periods; a failure to supply as much as had been planned last period will tend reduce demand in this period. If the “distance” from equilibrium is large enough, the demand failure may even be amplified in subsequent periods, rather than damped. Thus, Clower and Leijonhufvud showed that the Keynesian multiplier was, at a deep level, really just another way of expressing the insight embodied in Say’s Law (or Say’s Principle, if you insist on distinguishing what Say meant from Lange’s reformulation of it in terms of Walrasian equilibrium).

I should add that, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, W. H. Hutt, in a remarkable little book, clarified and elaborated on the Clower-Leijonhufvud analysis, explaining how Say’s Principle was really implicit in many earlier treatments of business-cycle phenomena. The only reservation I have about Hutt’s book is that he used it to wage an unnecessary polemical battle against Keynes.

At about the same time that Clower and Leijonhufvud were expounding their enlarged view of the meaning and significance of Say’s Law, Earl Thompson showed that under “classical” conditions, i.e., a competitive supply of privately produced bank money (notes and deposits) convertible into gold, Say’s Law in Lange’s narrow sense, could also be derived in a straightforward fashion. The demonstration followed from the insight that when bank money is competitively issued, it is accomplished by an exchange of assets and liabilities between the bank and the bank’s customer. In contrast to the naïve assumption of Lange (adopted as well by his student Don Patinkin in a number of important articles and a classic treatise) that there is just one market in the monetary sector, there are really two markets in the monetary sector: a market for money supplied by banks and a market for money-backing assets. Thus, any excess demand for money would be offset not, as in the Lange schema, by an excess supply of goods, but by an excess supply of money-backing services. In other words, the public can increase their holdings of cash by giving their IOUs to banks in exchange for the IOUs of the banks, the difference being that the IOUs of the banks are money and the IOUs of customers are not money, but do provide backing for the money created by banks. The market is equilibrated by adjustments in the quantity of bank money and the interest paid on bank money, with no spillover on the real sector. With no spillover from the monetary sector onto the real sector, Say’s Law holds by necessity, just as it would in a barter economy.

A full exposition can be found in Thompson’s original article. I summarized and restated its analysis of Say’s Law in my 1978 1985 article on classical monetary theory and in my book Free Banking and Monetary Reform. Regrettably, I did not incorporate the analysis of Clower and Leijonhufvud and Hutt into my discussion of Say’s Law either in my article or in my book. But in a world of temporary equilibrium, in which future prices are not correctly foreseen by all transactors, there are no strict intertemporal budget constraints that force excess demands and excess supplies to add up to zero. In short, in such a world, things can get really messy, which is where the Clower-Leijonhufvud-Hutt analysis can be really helpful in sorting things out.

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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