LARS P. SYLL

Economic growth and the male organ — does size matter?

Economic growth has since long interested economists. Not least, the question of which factors are behind high growth rates has been in focus. The factors usually pointed at are mainly economic, social and political variables. In an interesting study from the University of  Helsinki, Tatu Westling has expanded the potential causal variables to also include biological and sexual variables. In  the report Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter (2011), he has — based on the “cross-country” data of Mankiw et al (1992), Summers and Heston (1988), Polity IV Project data of political regime types and a new data set on average penis size in 76 non-oil producing countries (www.everyoneweb.com/worldpenissize) — been able to show that the level and growth of GDP per capita between 1960 and 1985 varies with penis size. Replicating Westling’s study — I have used my favourite program Gretl — we obtain the following two charts:

The Solow-based model estimates show that the maximum GDP is achieved with the penis of about 13.5 cm and that the male reproductive organ (OLS without control variables) are negatively correlated with — and able to explain 20% of the variation in — GDP growth.

Even with reservation for problems such as endogeneity and confounders one can not but agree with Westling’s final assessment that “the ‘male organ hypothesis’ is worth pursuing in future research” and that it “clearly seems that the ‘private sector’ deserves more credit for economic development than is typically acknowledged.” Or? …

Wren-Lewis on economic methodology

Simon Wren-Lewis has a post up today discussing why the New Classical Counterrevolution (NCCR) was successful in replacing older theories, despite the fact that the New Classical models weren’t able to explain what happened to output and inflation in the 1970s and 1980s:

The new theoretical ideas New Classical economists brought to the table were impressive, particularly to those just schooled in graduate micro. Rational expectations is the clearest example …

However, once the basics of New Keynesian theory had been established, it was quite possible to incorporate concepts like rational expectations or Ricardian Eqivalence into a traditional structural econometric model (SEM) …

The real problem with any attempt at synthesis is that a SEM is always going to be vulnerable to the key criticism in Lucas and Sargent, 1979: without a completely consistent microfounded theoretical base, there was the near certainty of inconsistency brought about by inappropriate identification restrictions …

So why does this matter? … If mainstream academic macroeconomists were seduced by anything, it was a methodology – a way of doing the subject which appeared closer to what at least some of their microeconomic colleagues were doing at the time, and which was very different to the methodology of macroeconomics before the NCCR. The old methodology was eclectic and messy, juggling the competing claims of data and theory. The new methodology was rigorous!

Wren-Lewis seems to be überimpressed by the “rigour” brought to macroeconomics by the New Classical counterrevolution and its rational expectations, microfoundations and ‘Lucas Critique’.

I fail to see why.

Contrary to what Wren-Lewis seems to argue, I would say the recent economic crisis and the fact that New Classical economics has had next to nothing to contribute in understanding it, shows that New Classical economics is a degenerative research program in dire need of replacement.

The predominant strategy in mainstream macroeconomics today is to build models and make things happen in these “analogue-economy models.” But although macro-econometrics may have supplied economists with rigorous replicas of real economies, if the goal of theory is to be able to make accurate forecasts or explain what happens in real economies, this ability to — ad nauseam — construct toy models, does not give much leverage.

“Rigorous” and “precise” New Classical models cannot be considered anything else than unsubstantiated conjectures as long as they aren’t supported by evidence from outside the theory or model. To my knowledge no in any way decisive empirical evidence has been presented.

And — applying a “Lucas critique” on New Classical models, it is obvious that they too fail. Changing “policy rules” cannot just be presumed not to influence investment and consumption behavior and a fortiori technology, thereby contradicting the invariance assumption. Technology and tastes cannot live up to the status of an economy’s deep and structurally stable Holy Grail. They too are part and parcel of an ever-changing and open economy. Lucas hope of being able to model the economy as “a FORTRAN program” and “gain some confidence that the component parts of the program are in some sense reliable prior to running it” therefore seems – from an ontological point of view – totally misdirected. The failure in the attempt to anchor the analysis in the alleged stable deep parameters “tastes” and “technology” shows that if you neglect ontological considerations pertaining to the target system, ultimately reality gets its revenge when at last questions of bridging and exportation of model exercises are laid on the table.

No matter how precise and rigorous the analysis is, and no matter how hard one tries to cast the argument in modern mathematical form, they do not push economic science forwards one millimeter if they do not stand the acid test of relevance to the target. No matter how clear, precise, rigorous or certain the inferences delivered inside these models are, they do not per se say anything about real world economies.

RBC and the Lucas-Rapping theory of unemployment

Lucas and Rapping (1969) claim that cyclical increases in unemployment occur when workers quit their jobs because wages or salaries fall below expectations …

According to this explanation, when wages are unusually low, people become unemployed in order to enjoy free time, substituting leisure for income at a time when they lose the least income …

According to the theory, quits into unemployment increase during recessions, whereas historically quits decrease sharply and roughly half of unremployed workers become jobless because they are laid off … During the recession I studied, people were even afraid to change jobs because new ones might prove unstable and lead to unemployment …

If wages and salaries hardly ever fall, the intertemporal substitution theory is widely applicable only if the unemployed prefer jobless leisure to continued employment at their old pay. However, the attitude and circumstances of the unemployed are not consistent with their having made this choice …

In real business cycle theory, unemployment is interpreted as leisure optimally selected by workers, as in the Lucas-Rapping model. It has proved difficult to construct business cycle models consistent with this assumption and with real wage fluctuations as small as they are in reality, relative to fluctuations in employment.

Truman F. Bewley

This is, of course, only what you would expect of New Classical Chicago economists.

But sadly enough this extraterrestial view of unemployment is actually shared by so called New Keynesians, whose microfounded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models cannot even incorporate such a basic fact of reality as involuntary unemployment!

Of course, working with microfunded representative agent models, this should come as no surprise. If one representative agent is employed, all representative agents are. The kind of unemployment that occurs is voluntary, since it is only adjustments of the hours of work that these optimizing agents make to maximize their utility.

In the basic DSGE models used by most ‘New Keynesians’, the labour market is always cleared – responding to a changing interest rate, expected life time incomes, or real wages, the representative agent maximizes the utility function by varying her labour supply, money holding and consumption over time. Most importantly – if the real wage somehow deviates from its “equilibrium value,” the representative agent adjust her labour supply, so that when the real wage is higher than its “equilibrium value,” labour supply is increased, and when the real wage is below its “equilibrium value,” labour supply is decreased.

In this model world, unemployment is always an optimal choice to changes in the labour market conditions. Hence, unemployment is totally voluntary. To be unemployed is something one optimally chooses to be.

The final court of appeal for macroeconomic models is the real world.

If substantive questions about the real world are being posed, it is the formalistic-mathematical representations utilized to analyze them that have to match reality, not the other way around.

To Keynes this was self-evident. But obviously not so to New Classical and ‘New Keynesian’ economists.

The vain glory of the ‘New Keynesian’ club

Paul Krugman’s economic analysis is always stimulating and insightful, but there is one issue on which I think he persistently falls short. That issue is his account of New Keynesianism’s theoretical originality and intellectual impact … The model of nominal wage rigidity and the Phillips curve that I described comes from my 1990 dissertation, was published in March 1994, and has been followed by substantial further published research. That research also introduces ideas which are not part of the New Keynesian model and are needed to explain the Phillips curve in a higher inflation environment.

Similar precedence issues hold for scholarship on debt-driven business cycles, financial instability, the problem of debt-deflation in recessions and depressions, and the endogenous credit-driven nature of the money supply. These are all topics my colleagues and I, working in the Post- and old Keynesian traditions, have been writing about for years – No, decades!

Since 2008, some New Keynesians have discovered these same topics and have developed very similar analyses. That represents progress which is good news for economics. However, almost nowhere will you find citation of this prior work, except for token citation of a few absolutely seminal contributors (like Tobin and Minsky) …

By citing the seminal critical thinkers, mainstream economists lay claim to the intellectual lineage. And by overlooking more recent work, they capture the ideas of their critics.

This practice has enormous consequences. At the personal level, there is the matter of vain glory. At the sociological level, it suffocates debate and pluralism in economics. It is as if the critics have produced nothing so there is no need for debate, and nor are the critics deserving of a place in the academy …

For almost thirty years, New Keynesians have dismissed other Keynesians and not bothered to stay acquainted with their research. But now that the economic crisis has forced awareness, the right thing is to acknowledge and incorporate that research. The failure to do so is another element in the discontent of critics, which Krugman dismisses as just “Frustrations of the Heterodox.”

Thomas Palley

Added July 29: Krugman answers here.

James Heckman — the ultimate take down of teflon-coated defenders of rational expectations

James Heckman, winner of the “Nobel Prize” in economics (2000), did an inteview with John Cassidy in 2010. It’s an interesting read (Cassidy’s words in italics):

What about the rational-expectations hypothesis, the other big theory associated with modern Chicago? How does that stack up now?

I could tell you a story about my friend and colleague Milton Friedman. In the nineteen-seventies, we were sitting in the Ph.D. oral examination of a Chicago economist who has gone on to make his mark in the world. His thesis was on rational expectations. After he’d left, Friedman turned to me and said, “Look, I think it is a good idea, but these guys have taken it way too far.”

It became a kind of tautology that had enormously powerful policy implications, in theory. But the fact is, it didn’t have any empirical content. When Tom Sargent, Lard Hansen, and others tried to test it using cross equation restrictions, and so on, the data rejected the theories. There were a certain section of people that really got carried away. It became quite stifling.

What about Robert Lucas? He came up with a lot of these theories. Does he bear responsibility?

Well, Lucas is a very subtle person, and he is mainly concerned with theory. He doesn’t make a lot of empirical statements. I don’t think Bob got carried away, but some of his disciples did. It often happens. The further down the food chain you go, the more the zealots take over.

What about you? When rational expectations was sweeping economics, what was your reaction to it? I know you are primarily a micro guy, but what did you think?

What struck me was that we knew Keynesian theory was still alive in the banks and on Wall Street. Economists in those areas relied on Keynesian models to make short-run forecasts. It seemed strange to me that they would continue to do this if it had been theoretically proven that these models didn’t work.

What about the efficient-markets hypothesis? Did Chicago economists go too far in promoting that theory, too?

Some did. But there is a lot of diversity here. You can go office to office and get a different view.

[Heckman brought up the memoir of the late Fischer Black, one of the founders of the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, in which he says that financial markets tend to wander around, and don’t stick closely to economics fundamentals.]

[Black] was very close to the markets, and he had a feel for them, and he was very skeptical. And he was a Chicago economist. But there was an element of dogma in support of the efficient-market hypothesis. People like Raghu [Rajan] and Ned Gramlich [a former governor of the Federal Reserve, who died in 2007] were warning something was wrong, and they were ignored. There was sort of a culture of efficient markets—on Wall Street, in Washington, and in parts of academia, including Chicago.

What was the reaction here when the crisis struck?

Everybody was blindsided by the magnitude of what happened. But it wasn’t just here. The whole profession was blindsided. I don’t think Joe Stiglitz was forecasting a collapse in the mortgage market and large-scale banking collapses.

So, today, what survives of the Chicago School? What is left?

I think the tradition of incorporating theory into your economic thinking and confronting it with data—that is still very much alive. It might be in the study of wage inequality, or labor supply responses to taxes, or whatever. And the idea that people respond rationally to incentives is also still central. Nothing has invalidated that—on the contrary.

So, I think the underlying ideas of the Chicago School are still very powerful. The basis of the rocket is still intact. It is what I see as the booster stage—the rational-expectation hypothesis and the vulgar versions of the efficient-markets hypothesis that have run into trouble. They have taken a beating—no doubt about that. I think that what happened is that people got too far away from the data, and confronting ideas with data. That part of the Chicago tradition was neglected, and it was a strong part of the tradition.

When Bob Lucas was writing that the Great Depression was people taking extended vacations—refusing to take available jobs at low wages—there was another Chicago economist, Albert Rees, who was writing in the Chicago Journal saying, No, wait a minute. There is a lot of evidence that this is not true.

Milton Friedman—he was a macro theorist, but he was less driven by theory and by the desire to construct a single overarching theory than by attempting to answer empirical questions. Again, if you read his empirical books they are full of empirical data. That side of his legacy was neglected, I think.

When Friedman died, a couple of years ago, we had a symposium for the alumni devoted to the Friedman legacy. I was talking about the permanent income hypothesis; Lucas was talking about rational expectations. We have some bright alums. One woman got up and said, “Look at the evidence on 401k plans and how people misuse them, or don’t use them. Are you really saying that people look ahead and plan ahead rationally?” And Lucas said, “Yes, that’s what the theory of rational expectations says, and that’s part of Friedman’s legacy.” I said, “No, it isn’t. He was much more empirically minded than that.” People took one part of his legacy and forgot the rest. They moved too far away from the data.

Yes indeed, they certainly “moved too far away from the data.”

In one of the more well-known and highly respected evaluation reviews made, Michael Lovell (1986) concluded:

it seems to me that the weight of empirical evidence is sufficiently strong to compel us to suspend belief in the hypothesis of rational expectations, pending the accumulation of additional empirical evidence.

And this is how Nikolay Gertchev summarizes studies on the empirical correctness of the hypothesis:

More recently, it even has been argued that the very conclusions of dynamic models assuming rational expectations are contrary to reality: “the dynamic implications of many of the specifications that assume rational expectations and optimizing behavior are often seriously at odds with the data” (Estrella and Fuhrer 2002, p. 1013). It is hence clear that if taken as an empirical behavioral assumption, the RE hypothesis is plainly false; if considered only as a theoretical tool, it is unfounded and selfcontradictory.

For even more on the issue, permit me to self-indulgently recommend reading my article Rational expectations — a fallacious foundation for macroeconomics in a non-ergodic world in real-world economics review no. 62.