What’s the use of economics?

The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has – or should – the teaching of economics be modified in the light of the current economic crisis? The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for over two centuries? For macroeconomists in particular, the reaction has been to suggest that modifications of existing models to take account of ‘frictions’ or ‘imperfections’ will be enough to account for the current evolution of the world economy. The idea is that once students have understood the basics, they can be introduced to these modifications.

However, other economists such as myself feel that we have finally reached the turning point in economics where we have to radically change the way we conceive of and model the economy. The crisis is an opportune occasion to carefully investigate new approaches. Paul Seabright hit the nail on the head; economists tend to inaccurately portray their work as a steady and relentless improvement of their models whereas, actually, economists tend to chase an empirical reality that is changing just as fast as their modelling. I would go further; rather than making steady progress towards explaining economic phenomena professional economists have been locked into a narrow vision of the economy. We constantly make more and more sophisticated models within that vision until, as Bob Solow put it, “the uninitiated peasant is left wondering what planet he or she is on” (Solow 2006) …

Entomologists (those who study insects) of old with more simple models came to the conclusion that bumble bees should not be able to fly. Their reaction was to later rethink their models in light of irrefutable evidence. Yet, the economist’s instinct is to attempt to modify reality in order to fit a model that has been built on longstanding theory. Unfortunately, that very theory is itself based on shaky foundations …

Every student in economics is faced with the model of the isolated optimising individual who makes his choices within the constraints imposed by the market. Somehow, the axioms of rationality imposed on this individual are not very convincing, particularly to first time students. But the student is told that the aim of the exercise is to show that there is an equilibrium, there can be prices that will clear all markets simultaneously. And, furthermore, the student is taught that such an equilibrium has desirable welfare properties. Importantly, the student is told that since the 1970s it has been known that whilst such a system of equilibrium prices may exist, we cannot show that the economy would ever reach an equilibrium nor that such an equilibrium is unique.

The student then moves on to macroeconomics and is told that the aggregate economy or market behaves just like the average individual she has just studied. She is not told that these general models in fact poorly reflect reality. For the macroeconomist, this is a boon since he can now analyse the aggregate allocations in an economy as though they were the result of the rational choices made by one individual. The student may find this even more difficult to swallow when she is aware that peoples’ preferences, choices and forecasts are often influenced by those of the other participants in the economy. Students take a long time to accept the idea that the economy’s choices can be assimilated to those of one individual.

Alan Kirman What’s the use of economics?

Why economics needs economic history

Knowledge of economic and financial history is crucial in thinking about the economy in several ways.
Most obviously, it forces students to recognise that major discontinuities in economic performance and economic policy regimes have occurred many times in the past, and may therefore occur again in the future. These discontinuities have often coincided with economic and financial crises, which therefore cannot be assumed away as theoretically impossible. A historical training would immunise students from the complacency that characterised the “Great Moderation”. Zoom out, and that swan may not seem so black after all.

A second, related point is that economic history teaches students the importance of context …

Third, economic history is an unapologetically empirical field, exclusively dedicated to understanding the real world.
Doing economic history forces students to add to the technical rigor of their programs an extra dimension of rigor: asking whether their explanations for historical events actually fit the facts or not. Which emphatically does not mean cherry-picking selected facts that fit your thesis and ignoring all the ones that don’t: the world is a complicated place, and economists should be trained to recognise this. An exposure to economic history leads to an empirical frame of mind, and a willingness to admit that one’s particular theoretical framework may not always work in explaining the real world. These are essential mental habits for young economists wishing to apply their skills in the work environment, and, one hopes, in academia as well.

Fourth, economic history is a rich source of informal theorising about the real world, which can help motivate more formal theoretical work later on …

Fifth, even once the current economic and financial crisis has passed, the major long run challenges facing the world will still remain …
Apart from issues such as the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West, other long run issues that would benefit from being framed in a long-term perspective include global warming, the future of globalisation, and the question of how rapidly we can expect the technological frontier to advance in the decades ahead.

Sixth, economic theory itself has been emphasising – for well over 20 years now – that path dependence is ubiquitous …

Finally, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an undergraduate economics instructor, economic history is a great way of convincing undergraduates that the theory they are learning in their micro and macro classes is useful in helping them make sense of the real world.

Far from being seen as a ‘soft’ alternative to theory, economic history should be seen as an essential pedagogical complement. There is nothing as satisfying as seeing undergraduates realise that a little bit of simple theory can help them understand complicated real world phenomena. Think of  … the Domar thesis, referred to in Temin (2013), which is a great way to talk to students about what drives diminishing returns to labour. Economic history is replete with such opportunities for instructors trying to motivate their students. Economic history is replete with such opportunities for instructors trying to motivate their students.

Kevin O’Rourke

[h/t Jan Milch]

Why hasn’t the crisis discredited neoclassical economics more?

There are probably many answers to the question. I suggested before that the best way to look at it is from a sociological standpoint. The same people hold the same positions at the key ‘respectable’ universities, go to the same ‘relevant’ meetings, and award the same ‘important’ prizes. And research does build on previous research. Let alone that the economics profession, like the others, is there to protect and reproduce the status quo.

At any rate, in his new book Philip Mirowski, from Notre Dame, and a member of Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET; which has funded I should say several heterodox authors) dedicates, in part, his first chapter to the topic. He says about the INET meetings, which were supposed to display some of the changes in the profession after the crisis:

“[…] the first INET meeting at Cambridge University in 2010 bore some small promise—for instance, when protestors disrupted the IMF platitudes of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Kings great hall, or when Lord Adair Turner bravely suggested we needed a much smaller financial sector.But the sequel turned out to be a profoundly more unnerving and chilly affair, and not just due to the caliginous climate. The nightmare scenario began with a parade of figures whom one could not in good conscience admit to anyone’s definition of “New Economic Thinking”: Ken Rogoff, Larry Summers, Barry Eichengreen, Niall Ferguson and Gordon Brown … The range of economic positions proved much less varied than at the first meeting, and couldn’t help notice that the agenda seemed more pitched toward capturing the attention of journalists and bloggers [oh my, I’m included in this one], and those more interested in getting to see more star power up close than sampling complex thinking outside the box. It bespoke an unhealthy obsession with Guaranteed Legitimacy and Righteous Sound Thinking.”

I always thought naïve to think that the crisis would lead to the demise of neoclassical economics. In fact, in the US it was the Great Depression and the development of a certain type of Keynesianism (the Neoclassical Synthesis one) that led to the domination of neoclassical economics (before that the profession was more eclectic and if anything dominated, in the US, by institutionalists). But I had some hopes for INET to open dialogue with less crazy (sold out?) within the mainstream. The fact that Mirowski calls the second meeting a nightmare scenario does not bode well for the future of the profession.

Naked Keynesianism

What has Keynes got to do with New Keynesian Macroeconomics? Nothing!

Paul Krugman has a post on his blog discussing “New Keynesian” macroeconomics and the definition of neoclassical economics:

So, what is neoclassical economics? … I think we mean in practice economics based on maximization-with-equilibrium. We imagine an economy consisting of rational, self-interested players, and suppose that economic outcomes reflect a situation in which each player is doing the best he, she, or it can given the actions of all the other players …

Some economists really really believe that life is like this — and they have a significant impact on our discourse. But the rest of us are well aware that this is nothing but a metaphor; nonetheless, most of what I and many others do is sorta-kinda neoclassical because it takes the maximization-and-equilibrium world as a starting point or baseline, which is then modified — but not too much — in the direction of realism.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, very much true of Keynesian economics as practiced … New Keynesian models are intertemporal maximization modified with sticky prices and a few other deviations …

Why do things this way? Simplicity and clarity. In the real world, people are fairly rational and more or less self-interested; the qualifiers are complicated to model, so it makes sense to see what you can learn by dropping them. And dynamics are hard, whereas looking at the presumed end state of a dynamic process — an equilibrium — may tell you much of what you want to know.

Being myself sorta-kinda Keynesian I  find this analysis utterly unconvincing. Why? Let me try to explain.

Macroeconomic models may be an informative tool for research. But if practitioners of “New Keynesian” macroeconomics do not investigate and make an effort of providing a justification for the credibility of the assumptions on which they erect their building, it will not fulfill its tasks. There is a gap between its aspirations and its accomplishments, and without more supportive evidence to substantiate its claims, critics will continue to consider its ultimate argument as a mixture of rather unhelpful metaphors and metaphysics. Maintaining that economics is a science in the “true knowledge” business, I remain a skeptic of the pretences and aspirations of “New Keynesian” macroeconomics. So far, I cannot really see that it has yielded very much in terms of realistic and relevant economic knowledge.

The marginal return on its ever higher technical sophistication in no way makes up for the lack of serious under-labouring of its deeper philosophical and methodological foundations. The rather one-sided emphasis of usefulness and its concomitant instrumentalist justification cannot hide that “New Keynesians” cannot give supportive evidence for their considering it fruitful to analyze macroeconomic structures and events as the aggregated result of optimizing representative actors. After having analyzed some of its ontological and epistemological foundations, I cannot but conclude that “New Keynesian” macroeconomics on the whole has not delivered anything else than “as if” unreal and irrelevant models.

If we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our microfunded macromodels are stable in the sense that they do not change when we “export” them to our “target systems”, they do only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and are a fortiori of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real economic systems. Or as the always eminently quotable Keynes wrote in Treatise on Probability(1921):

The kind of fundamental assumption about the character of material laws, on which scientists appear commonly to act, seems to me to be [that] the system of the material universe must consist of bodies … such that each of them exercises its own separate, independent, and invariable effect, a change of the total state being compounded of a number of separate changes each of which is solely due to a separate portion of the preceding state … Yet there might well be quite different laws for wholes of different degrees of complexity, and laws of connection between complexes which could not be stated in terms of laws connecting individual parts … If different wholes were subject to different laws qua wholes and not simply on account of and in proportion to the differences of their parts, knowledge of a part could not lead, it would seem, even to presumptive or probable knowledge as to its association with other parts … These considerations do not show us a way by which we can justify induction … /427 No one supposes that a good induction can be arrived at merely by counting cases. The business of strengthening the argument chiefly consists in determining whether the alleged association is stable, when accompanying conditions are varied … /468 In my judgment, the practical usefulness of those modes of inference … on which the boasted knowledge of modern science depends, can only exist … if the universe of phenomena does in fact present those peculiar characteristics of atomism and limited variety which appears more and more clearly as the ultimate result to which material science is tending.

Science should help us penetrate to “the true process of causation lying behind current events” and disclose “the causal forces behind the apparent facts” [Keynes 1971-89 vol XVII:427]. We should look out for causal relations. But models can never be more than a starting point in that endeavour. There is always the possibility that there are other variables – of vital importance and although perhaps unobservable and non-additive not necessarily epistemologically inaccessible – that were not considered for the model.

This is a more fundamental and radical problem than the celebrated “Lucas critique” have suggested. This is not the question if deep parameters, absent on the macro-level, exist in “tastes” and “technology” on the micro-level. It goes deeper. Real world social systems are not governed by stable causal mechanisms or capacities. It is the criticism that Keynes first launched against the “atomistic fallacy” already in the 1920s:

The atomic hypothesis which has worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics. We are faced at every turn with the problems of Organic Unity, of Discreteness, of Discontinuity – the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fails us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied. Thus the results of Mathematical Psychics turn out to be derivative, not fundamental, indexes, not measurements, first approximations at the best; and fallible indexes, dubious approximations at that, with much doubt added as to what, if anything, they are indexes or approximations of.

The kinds of laws and relations that economics has established, are laws and relations about entities in models that presuppose causal mechanisms being atomistic and additive. When causal mechanisms operate in real world social target systems they only do it in ever-changing and unstable combinations where the whole is more than a mechanical sum of parts. If economic regularities obtain they do it (as a rule) only because we engineered them for that purpose. Outside man-made “nomological machines” they are rare, or even non-existant. Unfortunately that also makes most of the achievements of econometrics – as most of contemporary endeavours of economic theoretical modeling – rather useless.

Keynes basically argued that it was inadmissible to project history on the future. Consequently an economic policy cannot presuppose that what has worked before, will continue to do so in the future. That macroeconomic models could get hold of correlations between different “variables” was not enough. If they could not get at the causal structure that generated the data, they were not really “identified”. Dynamic stochastic general euilibrium (DSGE) macroeconomists – including “New Keynesians” – has drawn the conclusion that the problem with unstable relations is to construct models with clear microfoundations where forward-looking optimizing individuals and robust, deep, behavioural parameters are seen to be stable even to changes in economic policies. As yours truly has argued in a couple of post (e. g. here and here), this, however, is a dead end.

So here we are getting close to the heart of darkness in “New Keynesian” macroeconomics. Where “New Keynesian” economists think that they can rigorously deduce the aggregate effects of (representative) actors with their reductionist microfoundational methodology, they have to put a blind eye on the emergent properties that characterize all open social systems – including the economic system. The interaction between animal spirits, trust, confidence, institutions etc., cannot be deduced or reduced to a question answerable on the idividual level. Macroeconomic structures and phenomena have to be analyzed also on their own terms. And although one may easily agree with Krugman’s emphasis on simple models, the simplifications used may have to be simplifications adequate for macroeconomics and not those adequate for microeconomics.

“New Keynesian” macromodels describe imaginary worlds using a combination of formal sign systems such as mathematics and ordinary language. The descriptions made are extremely thin and to a large degree disconnected to the specific contexts of the targeted system than one (usually) wants to (partially) represent. This is not by chance. These closed formalistic-mathematical theories and models are constructed for the purpose of being able to deliver purportedly rigorous deductions that may somehow by be exportable to the target system. By analyzing a few causal factors in their “macroeconomic laboratories” they hope they can perform “thought experiments” and observe how these factors operate on their own and without impediments or confounders.

Unfortunately, this is not so. The reason for this is that economic causes never act in a socio-economic vacuum. Causes have to be set in a contextual structure to be able to operate. This structure has to take some form or other, but instead of incorporating structures that are true to the target system, the settings made in these macroeconomic models are rather based on formalistic mathematical tractability. In the models they appear as unrealistic assumptions, usually playing a decisive role in getting the deductive machinery deliver “precise” and “rigorous” results. This, of course, makes exporting to real world target systems problematic, since these models – as part of a deductivist covering-law tradition in economics – are thought to deliver general and far-reaching conclusions that are externally valid. But how can we be sure the lessons learned in these theories and models have external validity, when based on highly specific unrealistic assumptions? As a rule, the more specific and concrete the structures, the less generalizable the results. Admitting that we in principle can move from (partial) falsehoods in theories and models to truth in real world target systems does not take us very far, unless a thorough explication of the relation between theory, model and the real world target system is made. If models assume representative actors, rational expectations, market clearing and equilibrium, and we know that real people and markets cannot be expected to obey these assumptions, the warrants for supposing that conclusions or hypothesis of causally relevant mechanisms or regularities can be bridged, are obviously non-justifiable. To have a deductive warrant for things happening in a closed model is no guarantee for them being preserved when applied to an open real world target system.

In microeconomics we know that aggregation really presupposes homothetic an identical preferences, something that almost never exist in real economies. The results given by these assumptions are therefore not robust and do not capture the underlying mechanisms at work in any real economy. And models that are critically based on particular and odd assumptions – and are neither robust nor congruent to real world economies – are of questionable value.

Even if economies naturally presuppose individuals, it does not follow that we can infer or explain macroeconomic phenomena solely from knowledge of these individuals. Macroeconomics is to a large extent emergent and cannot be reduced to a simple summation of micro-phenomena. Moreover, as we have already argued, even these microfoundations aren’t immutable. The “deep parameters” of  “New Keynesian” DSGE models– “tastes” and “technology” – are not really the bedrock of constancy that they believe (pretend) them to be.

So I cannot concur with Krugman – and other sorta-kinda “New Keynesians” – when they try to reduce Keynesian economics to “intertemporal maximization modified with sticky prices and a few other deviations”. “New Keynesian” macroeconomics is a gross misnomer, since it has nothing to do with the fundamentals of Keynes’s economic thoughts. As John Quiggin so aptly writes:

If there is one thing that distinguished Keynes’ economic analysis from that of his predecessors, it was his rejection of the idea of a unique full employment equilibrium to which a market economy will automatically return when it experiences a shock. Keynes argued that an economy could shift from a full-employment equilibrium to a persistent slump as the result of the interaction between objective macroeconomic variables and the subjective ‘animal spirits’ of investors and other decision-makers. It  is this perspective that has been lost in the absorption of New Keynesian macro into the DSGE framework.

A critical realist re-thinking of Das Adam Smith Problem

Talk of a ‘natural harmony’ in human affairs, of a ‘concord’ produced by the now-celebrated ‘invisible hand’, runs like a leitmotif through Adam Smith’s work. A key question in Smith-scholarship is then: how does Smith suppose this harmony to be constituted? According to the Problem-theorists, Smith claims in Wealth of Nations (WN) that individuals motivated by self-interest, and in virtue of that motivation alone, are able to co-ordinate their activities, whereas in Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) he claims that benevolence alone is supposed to do the job. Of course, if Smith had claimed these things, he would stand guilty (of inconsistency) as charged. But these assertions play no role in Smith’s social theory; the Problem, for whatever reason(s), is a post-Smith fabrication.

Smith did claim that self-interest is endemic to human behaviour. But this kind of self-interest — and this kind of interest pervades TMS just as much as WN — is more a matter of perspective than some crude (economic) impulse to self-gratification: of course, as human actor, I have to see the act as mine and so, in some sense, as in my interest, even when I act ‘benevolently’.

As for the other kind of self-interest, or ‘self-love’. Yes, this kind of act — behaviour motivated by self-interest — dominates the discourse of WN, but not because Smith (sometime between TMS and WN) has changed his opinion on how people are motivated. It is rather that WN (unlike TMS ) is not concerned with situations in which a ‘benevolent’ disposition is to be expected: that is why benevolence is not much discussed. There is no inconsistency … it is all a matter of the ‘spheres of intimacy’.

But, in any case, Smith does not claim in WN (or in anywhere else for that matter) that people are able to co-ordinate their activities because they are motivated by self-interest; for Smith, motivation of any kind does not enable or capacitate anything at all. And Smith has not changed his opinion sometime between TMS and WN as to how people are capacitated to act, as to the competencies that they draw on, whatever the motivation. In TMS Smith offers ‘sympathy’ or ‘fellow-feeling’ as that core capacity or competence, and there is no reason in WN to suggest that he has changed his mind. Whether we act out of concern for self or for other, we are only able to act as we do because we are sympathisers.

Apropos Das Adam Smith Problem: For Smith to say that the human actor sympathises does not mean that the Smith of TMS postulates a naturally altruistic, rather than a naturally egoistic, actor — a view that he is then supposed to have reversed in the Wealth of Nations. Of course it is true (to paraphrase Smith himself) that we should not expect our dinner from the benevolence of the (commercially oriented) butcher and baker. On the other hand, it would be surprising (and worrying, for all sorts of reasons) if the dependent child did not expect his dinner from the benevolence of his kith and kin (who, for some people at least, are also commercial butchers and bakers). Smith recognises that, depending on circumstance, we are capable of both behavioural dispositions. But Smith also recognises that to say that we are capable of acting and that this acting takes different forms — of course we are and of course it does — is not to say how we are capable. Smith’s position on these matters hardly came as a bolt from the blue. Rather it is all part of a wider current of eighteenth century thought that rejects the crude Hobbesian view of self-interested behaviour. Like others in the so-called British Moralist tradition Smith wants to re-think the question as to what a viable (and prosperous) social order presupposes. The spontaneous emergence of a (relatively) liberal political economy in Britain by the early eighteenth century had called into question many of the fundamental assumptions Hobbes makes in regard to human nature. In Hobbes, individual self-interest needs to be held in check by an all-seeing, all-powerful Sovereign. Evidently, though, in the light of events, self-interest needed to be re-thought as a constructive, rather than destructive, force. The human being as sympathiser became a key element in that recon- ceptualisation. For Hume, for example, ‘no quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own’. Hume here seems to come very close to anticipating Smithian sympathy. Ultimately, however, Hume cannot get there, because for Hume to hold to a Smithian view of sympathy would render what he has to say about other things incoherent …

Fortunately Smith is not bound by Hume’s self-imposed methodological strictures: entities for Smith do not need to be conspicuous to be real. Smithian sympathy, presupposing a third-person perspective within the self, cannot be conspicuous because, by definition, it can only ever be the first person that is on view. But it can be retroductively inferred from that which is conspicuous: sympathy is real enough, according to Smith’s lights, or how else would any form of (harmonised) behaviour be possible? In the terminology of the critical realist, Smith’s talk of sympathy is not concerned with the actual, not concerned with our acts as such — whether self-interested or benevolent — nor with the significance that the moralist reads into those acts: a significance that is also actual. Rather his concern is with the real: the condition of possibility of our actings and, related to this, how we are able, on reflection, to pass ‘moral’ judgement on the actions of others. Again, we cannot see the third-person perspective, the sense of right, that we carry around inside ourselves and that enables those actualities, but we can infer the existence of this capacity from the otherwise inexplicable “concords” that it produces. What we do in fact sense as right is context-sensitive. But the key to human action (and a fortiori human interaction) for Smith is that, always and everywhere, we do expect.

David Wilson & William Dixon