LARS P. SYLL

Anwar Shaikh on alternatives to mainstream economics

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Does economics — really — explain everything?

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Fred Lee on ‘non-knowledge’ mainstream economics

The methodological underpinning of neoclassical microeconomics is open to criticisms. The methodological approach of neoclassical economics is based on a pre-vision of supply and demand and/or a Walrasian general equilibrium all combined with scarcity and constrained maximization. Accepting this vision as a matter of faith, neoclassical economists construct axiomatic-based arguments via a deductivist methodology (with or without the use of mathematics) to articulate this pre-vision. There is no attempt to establish that the pre-vision has any connection to or is grounded in the actual capitalist economy it purports to explain. Hence the method of constructing theory is not tied to or informed by the real world, which means that the axioms qua assumptions used are not chosen because of their realism or some other way grounded in reality but solely because they contribute to articulating the pre-vision. Therefore with a methodology unconcerned with the real world, the theories derived therefrom​ are theoretically vacuous and hence not really explanations. They are in fact non-knowledge. Consequently,​ the methodology of neoclassical economics is not just wrong, it is also misleading in that it cannot inherently provide any understanding of how the real works or even predict outcomes in the real world.

Fred Lee

Fred was together with Nai Pew Ong, Bob Pollin and Axel Leijonhufvud one of those who made a visit to University of California such a great experience for a young economics scholarship holder back at​ the beginning of the 1980s. Yours truly especially remember our long and intense discussions on Sraffa and Neo-Ricardianism. It is now more than seven years since Fred passed away. I truly miss this open-minded and good-hearted heterodox economist.

Models and the need to validate assumptions

Piketty argues that the higher income share of wealth-owners is due to an increase in the capital-output ratio resulting from a high rate of capital accumulation. The evidence suggests just the contrary. The capital-output ratio, as conventionally measured has either fallen or been constant in recent decades. The apparent increase in the capital-output ratio identified by Piketty is a valuation effect reflecting a disproportionate increase in the market value of certain real assets. A more plausible explanation for the increased income share of wealth-owners is an unduly low rate of investment in real capital.

Bob Rowthorn

Say we have a diehard neoclassical model (assuming the production function is homogeneous of degree one and unlimited substitutability) such as the standard Cobb-Douglas production function (with A a given productivity parameter, and k  the ratio of capital stock to labor, K/L) y = Ak^α , with a constant investment λ out of output y and a constant depreciation rate δ of the “capital per worker” k, where the rate of accumulation of k, Δk = λy– δk, equals Δk = λAk^α– δk. In steady state (*) we have λAk*^α = δk*, giving λ/δ = k*/y* and k* = (λA/δ)^1/(1-α). Putting this value of k* into the production function, gives us the steady state output per worker level y* = Ak*^α= A^1/(1-α)(λ/δ))^α/(1-α). Assuming we have an exogenous Harrod-neutral technological progress that increases y with a growth rate g (assuming a zero labour growth rate and with y and k a fortiori now being refined as y/A and k/A respectively, giving the production function as y = k^α) we get dk/dt = λy – (g + δ)k, which in the Cobb-Douglas case gives dk/dt = λk^α– (g + δ)k, with steady state value k* = (λ/(g + δ))^1/(1-α) and capital-output ratio k*/y* = k*/k*^α = λ/(g + δ). If using Piketty’s preferred model with output and capital given net of depreciation, we have to change the final expression into k*/y* = k*/k*^α = λ/(g + λδ). Now what Piketty predicts is that g will fall and that this will increase the capital-output ratio. Let’s say we have δ = 0.03, λ = 0.1 and g = 0.03 initially. This gives a capital-output ratio of around 3. If g falls to 0.01 it rises to around 7.7. We reach analogous results if we use a basic CES production function with an elasticity of substitution σ > 1. With σ = 1.5, the capital share rises from 0.2 to 0.36 if the wealth-income ratio goes from 2.5 to 5, which according to Piketty is what actually has happened in rich countries during the last forty years.

Being able to show that you can get these results using one or another of the available standard neoclassical growth models is of course — from a realist point of view — of limited value. As usual — the really interesting thing is how in accord with reality are the assumptions you make and the numerical values you put into the model specification.

Professor Piketty chose a theoretical framework that simultaneously allowed him to produce catchy numerical predictions, in tune with his empirical findings, while soaring like an eagle above the ‘messy’ debates of political economists shunned by their own profession’s mainstream and condemned diligently to inquire, in pristine isolation, into capitalism’s radical indeterminacy. The fact that, to do this, he had to adopt axioms that are both grossly unrealistic and logically incoherent must have seemed to him a small price to pay.

Yanis Varoufakis

Mainstream economics in denial

We’d gathered at Downing College, Cambridge, to discuss the economic crisis, although the quotidian misery of that topic seemed a world away from the honeyed quads and endowment plush of this place.

Equally incongruous were the speakers. The Cambridge economist Victoria Bateman looked as if saturated fat wouldn’t melt in her mouth, yet demolished her colleagues. They’d been stupidly cocky before the crash – remember the 2003 boast from Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved”? – and had learned no lessons since. Yet they remained the seers of choice for prime ministers and presidents. She ended: “If you want to hang anyone for the crisis, hang me – and my fellow economists.”

What followed was angry agreement. On the night before the latest growth figures, no one in this 100-strong hall used the word “recovery” unless it was to be sarcastic. Instead, audience members – middle-aged, smartly dressed and doubtless sizably mortgaged – took it in turn to attack bankers, politicians and, yes, economists. They’d created the mess everyone else was paying for, yet they’d suffered no retribution …

Yet look around at most of the major economics degree courses and neoclassical economics – that theory that treats humans as walking calculators, all-knowing and always out for themselves, and markets as inevitably returning to stability – remains in charge. Why? In a word: denial. The high priests of economics refuse to recognise the world has changed.

In his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the US economist Philip Mirowski recounts how a colleague at his university was asked by students in spring 2009 to talk about the crisis. The world was apparently collapsing around them, and what better forum to discuss this in than a macroeconomics class. The response? “The students were curtly informed that it wasn’t on the syllabus, and there was nothing about it in the assigned textbook, and the instructor therefore did not wish to diverge from the set lesson plan. And he didn’t.”

Aditya Chakrabortty/The Guardian