RBC theory — willfully silly obscurantism

2 Aug, 2015 at 21:30 | Posted in Economics | 10 Comments

Lucas and his school … went even further down the equilibrium rabbit hole, notably with real business cycle theory. And here is where the kind of willful obscurantism Romer is after became the norm. I wrote last year about the remarkable failure of RBC theorists ever to offer an intuitive explanation of how their models work, which I at least hinted was willful:

“But the RBC theorists never seem to go there; it’s right into calibration and statistical moments, with never a break for intuition. And because they never do the simple version, they don’t realize (or at any rate don’t admit to themselves) how fundamentally silly the whole thing sounds, how much it’s at odds with lived experience.”

Paul Krugman

Yours truly, of course, totally agrees with Paul on Lucas’ rabbit hole freshwater school.

And so does Truman F. Bewley:

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.

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

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that sadly enough this extraterrestial view of unemployment is actually shared by so called New Keynesians — a school of which Krugman considers himself a member — 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.