Posts Tagged 'Alfred Marshall'

Krugman on Mr. Keynes and the Moderns

Published July 28, 2021 A. C. Pigou , D. H. Robertson , Frederick Lavington , gold standard , Gustav Cassel , Keynes , Paul Krugman , R. G. Hawtrey , Robert Barro , Scott Sumner , sticky prices , Uncategorized 10 Comments
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UPDATE: Re-upping this slightly revised post from July 11, 2011

Paul Krugman recently gave a lecture “Mr. Keynes and the Moderns” (a play on the title of the most influential article ever written about The General Theory, “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” by another Nobel laureate J. R. Hicks) at a conference in Cambridge, England commemorating the publication of Keynes’s General Theory 75 years ago. Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe, among others, have already commented on his lecture. Coincidentally, in my previous posting, I discussed the views of Sumner and Krugman on the zero-interest lower bound, a topic that figures heavily in Krugman’s discussion of Keynes and his relevance for our current difficulties. (I note in passing that Krugman credits Brad Delong for applying the term “Little Depression” to those difficulties, a term that I thought I had invented, but, oh well, I am happy to share the credit with Brad).

In my earlier posting, I mentioned that Keynes’s, slightly older, colleague A. C. Pigou responded to the zero-interest lower bound in his review of The General Theory. In a way, the response enhanced Pigou’s reputation, attaching his name to one of the most famous “effects” in the history of economics, but it made no dent in the Keynesian Revolution. I also referred to “the layers upon layers of interesting personal and historical dynamics lying beneath the surface of Pigou’s review of Keynes.” One large element of those dynamics was that Keynes chose to make, not Hayek or Robbins, not French devotees of the gold standard, not American laissez-faire ideologues, but Pigou, a left-of-center social reformer, who in the early 1930s had co-authored with Keynes a famous letter advocating increased public-works spending to combat unemployment, the main target of his immense rhetorical powers and polemical invective.  The first paragraph of Pigou’s review reveals just how deeply Keynes’s onslaught had wounded Pigou.

When in 1919, he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Mr. Keynes did a good day’s work for the world, in helping it back towards sanity. But he did a bad day’s work for himself as an economist. For he discovered then, and his sub-conscious mind has not been able to forget since, that the best way to win attention for one’s own ideas is to present them in a matrix of sarcastic comment upon other people. This method has long been a routine one among political pamphleteers. It is less appropriate, and fortunately less common, in scientific discussion.  Einstein actually did for Physics what Mr. Keynes believes himself to have done for Economics. He developed a far-reaching generalization, under which Newton’s results can be subsumed as a special case. But he did not, in announcing his discovery, insinuate, through carefully barbed sentences, that Newton and those who had hitherto followed his lead were a gang of incompetent bunglers. The example is illustrious: but Mr. Keynes has not followed it. The general tone de haut en bas and the patronage extended to his old master Marshall are particularly to be regretted. It is not by this manner of writing that his desire to convince his fellow economists is best promoted.

Krugman acknowledges Keynes’s shady scholarship (“I know that there’s dispute about whether Keynes was fair in characterizing the classical economists in this way”), only to absolve him of blame. He then uses Keynes’s example to attack “modern economists” who deny that a failure of aggregate demand can cause of mass unemployment, offering up John Cochrane and Niall Ferguson as examples, even though Ferguson is a historian not an economist.

Krugman also addresses Robert Barro’s assertion that Keynes’s explanation for high unemployment was that wages and prices were stuck at levels too high to allow full employment, a problem easily solvable, in Barro’s view, by monetary expansion. Although plainly annoyed by Barro’s attempt to trivialize Keynes’s contribution, Krugman never addresses the point squarely, preferring instead to justify Keynes’s frustration with those (conveniently nameless) “classical economists.”

Keynes’s critique of the classical economists was that they had failed to grasp how everything changes when you allow for the fact that output may be demand-constrained.

Not so, as I pointed out in my first post. Frederick Lavington, an even more orthodox disciple than Pigou of Marshall, had no trouble understanding that “the inactivity of all is the cause of the inactivity of each.” It was Keynes who failed to see that the failure of demand was equally a failure of supply.

They mistook accounting identities for causal relationships, believing in particular that because spending must equal income, supply creates its own demand and desired savings are automatically invested.

Supply does create its own demand when economic agents succeed in executing their plans to supply; it is when, owing to their incorrect and inconsistent expectations about future prices, economic agents fail to execute their plans to supply, that both supply and demand start to contract. Lavington understood that; Pigou understood that. Keynes understood it, too, but believing that his new way of understanding how contractions are caused was superior to that of his predecessors, he felt justified in misrepresenting their views, and attributing to them a caricature of Say’s Law that they would never have taken seriously.

And to praise Keynes for understanding the difference between accounting identities and causal relationships that befuddled his predecessors is almost perverse, as Keynes’s notorious confusion about whether the equality of savings and investment is an equilibrium condition or an accounting identity was pointed out by Dennis Robertson, Ralph Hawtrey and Gottfried Haberler within a year after The General Theory was published. To quote Robertson:

(Mr. Keynes’s critics) have merely maintained that he has so framed his definition that Amount Saved and Amount Invested are identical; that it therefore makes no sense even to inquire what the force is which “ensures equality” between them; and that since the identity holds whether money income is constant or changing, and, if it is changing, whether real income is changing proportionately, or not at all, this way of putting things does not seem to be a very suitable instrument for the analysis of economic change.

It just so happens that in 1925, Keynes, in one of his greatest pieces of sustained, and almost crushing sarcasm, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, offered an explanation of high unemployment exactly the same as that attributed to Keynes by Barro. Churchill’s decision to restore the convertibility of sterling to gold at the prewar parity meant that a further deflation of at least 10 percent in wages and prices would be necessary to restore equilibrium.  Keynes felt that the human cost of that deflation would be intolerable, and held Churchill responsible for it.

Of course Keynes in 1925 was not yet the Keynes of The General Theory. But what historical facts of the 10 years following Britain’s restoration of the gold standard in 1925 at the prewar parity cannot be explained with the theoretical resources available in 1925? The deflation that began in England in 1925 had been predicted by Keynes. The even worse deflation that began in 1929 had been predicted by Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel soon after World War I ended, if a way could not be found to limit the demand for gold by countries, rejoining the gold standard in aftermath of the war. The United States, holding 40 percent of the world’s monetary gold reserves, might have accommodated that demand by allowing some of its reserves to be exported. But obsession with breaking a supposed stock-market bubble in 1928-29 led the Fed to tighten its policy even as the international demand for gold was increasing rapidly, as Germany, France and many other countries went back on the gold standard, producing the international credit crisis and deflation of 1929-31. Recovery came not from Keynesian policies, but from abandoning the gold standard, thereby eliminating the deflationary pressure implicit in a rapidly rising demand for gold with a more or less fixed total supply.

Keynesian stories about liquidity traps and Monetarist stories about bank failures are epiphenomena obscuring rather than illuminating the true picture of what was happening.  The story of the Little Depression is similar in many ways, except the source of monetary tightness was not the gold standard, but a monetary regime that focused attention on rising price inflation in 2008 when the appropriate indicator, wage inflation, had already started to decline.

Once Upon a Time When Keynes Endorsed the Fisher Effect

Published November 30, 2015 Fisher effect , Irving Fisher , Keynes 16 Comments
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One of the great puzzles of the General Theory is Keynes’s rejection of the Fisher Effect on pp. 141-42. What is even more difficult to understand than Keynes’s criticism of the Fisher Effect, which I hope to parse in a future post, is that in his Tract on Monetary Reform Keynes had himself reproduced the Fisher Effect, though without crediting the idea to Fisher. Interestingly enough, when he turned against the Fisher Effect in the General Theory, dismissing it almost contemptuously, he explicitly attributed the idea to Fisher.

But here are a couple of quotations from the Tract in which Keynes exactly follows the Fisherian analysis. There are probably other places in which he does so as well, but these two examples seemed the most explicit. Keynes actually cites Fisher several times in the Tract, but those citations are to Fisher’s purely monetary work, in particular The Purchasing Power of Money (1911) which Keynes had reviewed in the Economic Journal. Of course, the distinction between the real and money rates of interest that Fisher made famous was not discovered by Fisher. Marshall had mentioned it and the idea was discussed at length by Henry Thornton, and possibly by other classical economists as well, so Keynes was not necessarily committing a scholarly offense by not mentioning Fisher. Nevertheless, it was Fisher who derived the relationship as a formal theorem, and the idea was already widely associated with him. And, of course, when Keynes criticized the idea, he explicitly attributed the idea to Fisher.

Economists draw an instructive distinction between what are termed the “money” rate of interest and the “real” rate of interest. If a sum of money worth 100 in terms of commodities at the time when the loan is made is lent for a year at 5 per cent interest, and is worth only 90 in terms of commodities at the end of the year, the lender receives back, including interest, what is worth only 94.5. This is expressed by saying that while the money rate of interest was 5 per cent, the real rate of interest had actually been negative and equal to minus 5.5 per cent. . . .

Thus, when prices are rising, the business man who borrows money is able to repay the lender with what, in terms of real value, not only represents no interest, but is even less than the capital originally advanced; that is the borrower reaps a corresponding benefit. It is true that , in so far as a rise in prices is foreseen, attempts to get advantage from this by increased borrowing force the money rates of interest to move upwards. It is for this reason, amongst others, that a high bank rate should be associated with a period of rising prices, and a low bank rate with a period of faling prices. The apparent abnormality of the money rate of interest at such times is merely the other side of the attempt of the real rate of interest to steady itself. Nevertheless in a period of rapidly changing prices, the money rate of interest seldom adjusts itself adequately or fast enough to prevent the real rate from becoming abnormal. For it is not the fact of a given rise of prices, but the expectation of a rise compounded of the various possible price movements and the estimated probability of each, which affects money rates. (pp. 20-22)

Like Fisher, Keynes, allowed for the possibility that inflation will not be fully anticipated so that the rise in the nominal rate will not fully compensate for the effect of inflation, suggesting that it is generally unlikely that inflation will be fully anticipated so that, in practice, inflation tends to reduce the real rate of interest. So Keynes seems fully on board with Fisher in the Tract.

Then there is Keynes’s celebrated theorem of covered interest arbitrage, perhaps his most important and enduring contribution to economics before writing the General Theory. He demonstrates the theorem in chapter 3 of the Tract.

If dollars one month forward are quoted cheaper than spot dollars to a London buyer in terms of sterling, this indicates a preference by the market, on balance, in favour of holding funds in New York during the month in question rather than in London – a preference the degree of which is measured by the discount on forward dollars. For if spot dollars are worth $4.40 to the pound and dollars one month forward $4.405 to the pound, then the owner of $4.40 can, by selling the dollars spot and buying them back one month forward, find himself at the end of the month with $4.405, merely by being during the month the owner of £1 in London instead of $4.40 in New York. That he should require and can obtain half a cent, which, earned in one month, is equal to about 1.5 per cent per annum, to induce him to do the transaction, shows, and is, under conditions of competition, a measure of, the market’s preference for holding funds during the month in question in New York rather than in London. . . .

The difference between the spot and forward rates is, therefore, precisely and exactly the measure of the preference of the money and exchange market for holding funds in one international centre rather than in another, the exchange risk apart, that is to say under conditions in which the exchange risk is covered. What is it that determines these preferences?

1. 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 consideration. If by lending dollars in New York for one month the lender could earn interest at the rate of 5.5 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 London is wholly explained. That is to say, the forward quotations for the purchase of the currency of the dearer money market tend to be cheaper than 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. (pp. 123-34)

Compare Keynes’s discussion in the Tract to Fisher’s discussion in Appreciation and Interest, written over a quarter of a century before the Tract.

Suppose gold is to appreciate relatively to wheat a certain known amount in one year. What will be the relation between the rates of interest in the two standards? Let wheat fall in gold price (or gold rise in wheat price) so that the quantity of gold which would buy one bushel of wheat at the beginning of the year will buy 1 + a bushels at the end, a being therefore the rate of appreciation of gold in terms of wheat. Let the rate of interest in gold be i, and in wheat be j, and let the principal of the loan be D dollars or its equivalent B bushels. Our alternative contracts are then:

For D dollars borrowed D + Di or D(1 + i) dollars are due in one yr.

For B bushels     “       B + Bj or B(1 + j) bushels  ”   “    “   “   “

and our problem is to find the relation between i and j, which will make the D(1 + i) dollars equal the B(1 + j) bushels.

At first, D dollars equals B bushels.

At the end of the year D dollars equals B(1 + a) bushels

Hence at the end of one year D(1 + i) dollars equals B(1 + a) (1 + i) bushels

Since D(1 + i) dollars is the number of dollars necessary to liquidate the debt, its equivalent B(1 + a) (1 + i) bushels is the number of bushels necessary to liquidate it. But we have already designated this number of bushels by B(1 + j). Our result, therefore, is:

At the end of 1 year D(1 + i) dollars equals B(1 + j) equals B(1 + a) (1 + i) bushels

which, after B is canceled, discloses the formula:

1 + j = (1 + a) (1 + i)

Or,

j = i + a + ia

Or, in words: The rate of interest in the (relatively) depreciating standard is equal to the sum of three terms, viz., the rate of interest in the appreciating standard, the rate of appreciation itself and the product of these two elements. (pp. 8-9)

So, it’s clear that Keynes’s theorem of covered interest arbitrage in the Tract is a straightforward application of Fisher’s analysis in Appreciation and Interest. Now it is quite possible that Keynes was unaware of Fisher’s analysis in Appreciation and Interest, though it was reproduced in Fisher’s better known 1907 classic The Rate of Interest, so that Keynes’s covered-interest-arbitrage theorem may have been subjectively original, even though it had been anticipated in its essentials a quarter of a century earlier by Fisher. Nevertheless, Keynes’s failure to acknowledge, when he criticized the Fisher effect in the General Theory, how profoundly indebted he had been, in his own celebrated work on the foreign-exchange markets, to the Fisherian analysis was a serious lapse in scholarship, if not in scholarly ethics.

Keynes on the Theory of Interest

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

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

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

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

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

Here is how Keynes described his liquidity-preference theory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Stigler

Published August 25, 2015 E. v. Bohm-Bawerk , J. S. Mill , Paul Romer , W. S. Jevons 12 Comments
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I recently discussed Paul Romer’s criticism of Robert Lucas for shifting from the Feynman integrity that, in Romer’s view, characterized Lucas’s early work, to the Stigler conviction that Romer believes has characterized Lucas’s later work. I wanted to make a criticism of Lucas different from Romer’s, so I only suggested in passing that that the Stigler conviction criticized by Romer didn’t seem that terrible to me, and I compared Stigler conviction to Galileo’s defense of Copernican heliocentrism. Now, having reread the essay, “The Nature and Role of Originality in Scientific Progress,” from which Romer quoted, I find, as I suspected, that Romer has inaccurately conveyed the message that Stigler meant to convey in his essay.

In accusing Lucas of forsaking the path of Feynman integrity and chosing instead the path of Stigler conviction, making it seem as if Stigler had provided justification for pursuing an ideological agenda, as Romer believes Lucas and other freshwater economists have done, Romer provides no information about the context of Stigler’s essay. Much of Stigler’s early writing in economics was about the history of economics, and Stigler’s paper on originality is one of those; in fact, it was subsequently republished as the lead essay in Stigler’s 1965 volume Essays in the History of Economics. What concerns Stigler in the essay are a few closely related questions: 1) what characteristic of originality makes it highly valued in science in general and in economics in particular? 2) Given that originality is so highly valued, how do economists earn a reputation for originality? 3) Is the quest for originality actually conducive to scientific progress?

Here is Stigler’s answer to the first question provided at the end of the introductory section under the heading “The Meaning of Originality.”

Scientific originality in its important role should be measured against the knowledge of a man’s contemporaries. If he opens their eyes to new ideas or to new perspectives on old ideas, he is an original economist in the scientifically important sense. . . . Smith, Ricardo, Jevons, Walras, Marshall, Keynes – they all changed the beliefs of economists and thus changed economics.

It is conceivable for an economist to be ignored by contemporaries and yet exert considerable influence on later generations, but this is a most improbable event. He must have been extraordinarily out of tune with (in advance of?) his times, and rarely do first-class minds throw themselves away on the visionary. Perhaps Cournot is an example of a man whose work skipped a half a century, but normally such men become famous only by reflecting the later fame of the rediscovered doctrines.

Originality then in its scientifically important role, is a matter of subtle unaccustomedness – neither excessive radicalism nor statement of the previous unformulated consensus.

The extended passage quoted by Romer appears a few paragraphs later in the second section of the paper under the heading “The Techniques of Persuasion.” Having already established that scientific originality must be both somehow surprising yet also capable of being understood by other economists, Stigler wants to know how an original economist can get the attention of his peers for his new idea. Doing so is not easy, because

New ideas are even harder to sell than new products. Inertia and the many unharmonious voices of those who would change our ways combine against the balanced and temperate statement of the merits of one’s ” original ” views. One must put on the best face possible, and much is possible. Wares must be shouted — the human mind is not a divining rod that quivers over truth.

It is this analogy between the selling of new ideas and selling of new products that leads Stigler in his drollery to suggest that with two highly unusual exceptions – Smith and Marshall – all economists have had to resort to “the techniques of the huckster.”

What are those techniques? And who used them? Although Stigler asserted that all but two famous economists used such techniques, he mentioned only two by name, and helpfully provided the specific evidence of their resort to huckster-like self-promotional techniques. Whom did Stigler single out for attention? William Stanley Jevons and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk.

So what was the hucksterism committed by Jevons? Get ready to be shocked:

Writing a Theory of Political Economy, he devoted the first 197 pages of a book of 267 pages to his ideas on utility!

OMG! Shocking; just shocking. How could he have stooped so low as that? But Bohm-Bawerk was even worse.

Not content with writing two volumes, and dozens of articles, in presenting and defending his capital theory, he added a third volume (to the third edition of his Positive Theorie des Kapitals) devoted exclusively to refuting, at least to his own satisfaction, every criticism that had arisen during the preceding decades.

What a sordid character that loathsome Austrian aristocrat must have been! Publishing a third volume devoted entirely to responding to criticisms of the first two. The idea!

Well, actually, they weren’t as bad as you might have thought. Let’s read Stigler’s next paragraph.

Although the new economic theories are introduced by the technique of the huckster, I should add that they are not the work of mere hucksters. The sincerity of Jevons, for example, is printed on every page. Indeed I do not believe that any important economist has ever deliberately contrived ideas in which he did not believe in order to achieve prominence: men of the requisite intellectual power and morality can get bigger prizes elsewhere. Instead, the successful inventor is a one-sided man. He is utterly persuaded of the significance and correctness of his ideas and he subordinates all other truths because they seem to him less important than the general acceptance of his truth. He is more a warrior against ignorance than a scholar among ideas.

I believe that Romer misunderstood what Stigler mean to say here. Romer seems to interpret this passage to mean that if a theorist is utterly convinced that he is right, he somehow can be justified in “subordinat[ing] all other truths” in cutting corners, avoiding contrary arguments or suppressing contradictory evidence that might undercut his theory – the sorts of practices ruled out by Feynman integrity, which is precisely what Romer was accusing Lucas of having done in a paper on growth theory. But to me it is clear from the context that what Stigler meant by “subordinating all other truths” was not any lack of Feynman integrity, but the single-minded focus on a specific contribution to the exclusion of all others. That was why Stigler drew attention to the exorbitant share of Jevons’s book entitled Principles of Political Economy devoted to the theory of marginal utility or the publication by Bohm-Bawerk of an entire volume devoted to responding to criticisms of his two earlier volumes on the theory of capital and interest. He neither implied nor meant to suggest that either Jevons or Bohm-Bawerk committed any breach of scientific propriety, much less Feynman integrity.

If there were any doubt about the correctness of this interpretation of what Stigler meant, it would be dispelled by the third section of Stigler’s paper under the heading: “The Case of Mill.”

John Stuart Mill is a striking example with which to illustrate the foregoing remarks. He is now considered a mediocre economist of unusual literary power; a fluent, flabby echo of Ricardo. This judgement is well-nigh universal: I do not believe that Mill has had a fervent admirer in the twentieth century. I attribute this low reputation to the fact that Mill had the perspective and balance, but not the full powers, of Smith and Marshall. He avoided all the tactics of easy success. He wrote with extraordinary balance, and his own ideas-considering their importance-received unbelievably little emphasis. The bland prose moved sedately over a corpus of knowledge organized with due regard to structure and significance, and hardly at all with regard to parentage. . . .

Yet however one judges Mill, it cannot be denied that he was original. In terms of identifiable theories, he was one of the most original economists in the history of the science.

Stigler went on to list and document the following original contributions of Mill in the area of value theory, ignoring Mill’s contributions to trade theory, “because I cannot be confident of the priorities.”

1 Non-competing Groups

2 Joint Products

3 Alternative Costs

4 The Economics of the Firm

5 Supply and Demand

6 Say’s Law

Stigler concludes his discussion with this assessment of Mill

This is a very respectable list of contributions. But it is also a peculiar list: any one of the contributions could be made independently of all the others. Mill was not trying to build a new system but only to add improvements here and there to the Ricardian system. The fairest of economists, as Schumpeter has properly characterized Mill, unselfishly dedicated his abilities to the advancement of the science. And, yet, Mill’s magisterial quality and conciliatory tone may have served less well than sharp and opinionated controversy in inciting his contemporaries to make advances.

Finally, just to confirm the lack of ideological motivation in Stigler’s discussion, let me quote Stigler’s characteristically ironic and playful conclusion.

These reflections on the nature and role of originality, however, have no utilitarian purpose, or even a propagandistic purpose. If I have a prejudice, it is that we commonly exaggerate the merits of originality in economics–that we are unjust in conferring immortality upon the authors of absurd theories while we forget the fine, if not particularly original, work of others. But I do not propose that we do something about it.

Keynes and Hawtrey

Published March 4, 2013 Hawtrey , Keynes 9 Comments
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For the next few weeks, I am going to be writing a lot about the austere-looking gentleman whose visage adorns, and whose ideas inspire, this blog: the great, but underestimated, Ralph Hawtrey. I was asked last summer to write an entry on Ralph Hawtrey for the forthcoming Elgar Companion to Keynes, and, with the due date for my contribution fast approaching, I have decided to conscript readers of this blog as commentators and research assistants, as I try to pull together my scattered thoughts about the close, productive, and complicated relationship between these two luminaries of English economics in its heyday, during the first half of the last century. Obviously, more is known about the life of Keynes, by far the more famous of the two, than about Hawtrey’s, and my focus for this assignment is not so much Hawtrey in his own right, but Hawtrey as an important, but perhaps not quite central, figure in Keynes’s life, and in his career as an economist. But it is actually quite remarkable how similar were their backgrounds and how their lives and careers for a long time seemed to proceed on nearly parallel tracks.

Both Keynes and Hawtrey were born into families in the upper echelons of the English intelligentsia and educational systems. Keynes’s father, John Neville Keynes, was a Cambridge don, who lectured on Moral Science and wrote a well-regarded book on the methodology of economics, The Scope and Method of Political Economy. Hawtrey’s grandfather was Assistant Master of the Lower School at Eton, and a second cousin of a Headmaster, and later Provost, of Eton. The grandfather subsequently established a preparatory school, St. Michael’s, where Hawtrey’s father became assistant master. Before going to Cambridge, Hawtrey and Keynes both attended Eton. Born in 1879, four years before Keynes, Hawtrey graduated from Cambridge in 1901, the year of Keynes’s arrival. Both studied mathematics, not economics, at Cambridge. While Keynes, through his father, knew Marshall well, it does not appear that Hawtrey had any contact with Marshall while at Cambridge or thereafter. In any event, both Hawtrey and Keynes were largely autodidacts in economics. Besides concentrating on mathematics, both Hawtrey and Keynes studied philosophy under G. E. Moore, and were greatly influenced by his teachings. Moore’s influence on Hawtrey is perhaps most clearly visible in Hawtrey’s 1925 book, The Economic Problem, his only book on general economics, a book that bears the stamp of Moore’s ethical teachings. Moore’s teachings were also a major influence on the Bloomsbury group of which Keynes was a famous member, and to which Hawtrey was also connected, though not as closely as Keynes. Like most male members of the Bloomsbury group, Hawtrey was a Cambridge Apostle, serving as Keynes’s sponsor when Keynes was elected an Apostle in 1903. Keynes’s 1925 marriage to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova led to his estrangement from the Bloomsbury group. After Hawtrey married the Hungarian concert pianist Emilia d’Aranyi (a great-niece of the famed Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim) in 1915 she was described by Virginia Woolf in a letter to Duncan Grant as “a practically barbaric Pole . . . with ungoverned passions and the brain of a yellow cockatoo,” though she noted the Hawtreys affectionate manner towards each other.

Upon graduation, Hawtrey decided to enter the British civil service, and, in preparing for the entrance exam, began to study economics. Starting at the Admiralty in 1903, Hawtrey took a position in the Treasury in 1904 as a Clerk. Retaining his interest in mathematics, Hawtrey corresponded with his Cambridge friend Bertrand Russell about various proofs that Russell was puzzling over, proofs eventually published in the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead. In 1910 Hawtrey became the Principal Private Secretary of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, assisting in the preparation of the 1910 Budget, and becoming a First Class Clerk in 1911. In 1919 he was appointed Director of Financial Enquiries Branch of the Treasury. While at the Treasury, Hawtrey undertook intensive studies into economics and the theory of money and business cycles, publishing his first book, Good and Bad Trade, in 1913, in which he presented a complete and purely monetary theory of the business cycle.

Keynes also started in the civil service, becoming clerk in the India Office in 1906, but, growing bored with his work, he returned to Cambridge in 1908 to write his Treatise on Probability (not published till 1921). In 1909, Keynes became a lecturer in economics, and, in 1911, was appointed editor of the Economic Journal. In 1913, Keynes published first book Indian Currency and Finance, which led to his appointment to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance. After World War I started, Keynes rejoined the Civil Service and worked in the Treasury, but at a much higher level of responsibility than Hawtrey. And in 1919 Keynes was appointed the official representative of the Treasury to the Versailles Peace Conference, which led directly to the 1919 publication of Keynes first great work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his excoriation of the Treaty of Versailles,which established his reputation as an economist and made him a public figure of immense influence.

During the war, Hawtrey worked in relative obscurity at the Treasury, publishing a few articles in the Economic Journal. But in 1919, Hawtrey, too, published his second book, Currency and Credit, which quickly became one of the most influential books on monetary economics in the world, becoming over the following decade the standard text in monetary economics in Great Britain and in much of the English-speaking world. As Director of the Financial Services Branch, Hawtrey could work more or less independently on whatever he wanted to while responding to the queries about monetary and financial policy put to him by higher-ups in the Treasury, or writing memos on whatever topics he thought his superiors needed to hear about. In this period, Hawtrey achieved his greatest influence on policy, writing several influential papers on the reconstruction of the international monetary system after World War I. He was instrumental in organizing the Genoa International Monetary Conference and writing its recommendations for restoring the international gold standard in the form of what became known as a gold exchange standard, an idea that Keynes had proposed in his Indian Currency and Finance. The goal was to stabilize the purchasing power of gold rather than allow it to rise prewar level, which would have entailed a massive deflation.

In his Tract on Monetary Reform, published in 1923, Keynes mildly criticized Hawtrey and the Genoa resolutions for seeking to stabilize the international price level by way of the gold standard, which Keynes believed would put Britain at the mercy of the US and the newly created Federal Reserve System, which then held approximately 40% of the world’s monetary reserves of gold. Under those circumstances, Keynes felt it was better for Britain not to rejoin the gold standard, and certainly not at the prewar parity, but rather follow a policy aimed at stabilizing the internal British price level, while letting the dollar-sterling exchange rate take care of itself. This was the background for the more serious dispute between Keynes and Hawtrey in 1925 over the British decision to rejoin the gold standard at the prewar dollar parity of $4.86 per pound. While Keynes was totally opposed to restoring the gold standard at the prewar dollar-sterling parity, Hawtrey favored the move, because he was confident that the Federal Reserve would follow an accommodative policy allowing Britain to avoid significant deflationary pressure even with the pound back at prewar parity. The performance of the British economy after Britain returned to the gold standard was probably not as good as Hawtrey had hoped, but neither was it as bad as Keynes had feared. Unemployment, though high by historical standards, gradually declined to less than 10% by 1929, and British output and income growth was quite respectable.

However, in 1928-29 when the Fed drastically tightened its policy in response to supposedly excessive stock-market speculation, Keynes’s fears that Britain would be vulnerable to the effects of policies taken by the Federal Reserve proved only too accurate. Of course, Hawtrey was sharply critical of the Fed tightening, especially given the insane policy of the Bank of France, starting in 1928, to convert its foreign exchange reserves into gold. Precisely the danger about which Hawtrey had been warning since 1919 was coming to pass, the combined result of the policies of the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve. Despite their disagreements about a number of details about how to implement policy, it does not seem that Keynes and Hawtrey had any fundamental disagreements about monetary theory or about the big picture of what was happening at the outset of the Great Depression.

In the next installment, I’ll have something to say about the Keynes-Hawtrey relationship as it evolved while Keynes was writing the Treatise on Money and later the General Theory; Hawtrey was deeply involved in the process of writing and revising both works, reading and commenting on early drafts of both works, though, especially in the latter case, not without causing severe strains in the relationship. And as an added treat, I may also have a bit to say in a future post about Hawtrey and Hayek.

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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