LARS P. SYLL

NAIRU — closer to religion than science

Once we see how weak the foundations for the natural rate of unemployment are, other arguments for pursuing rates of unemployment economists once thought impossible become more clear. Wages can increase at the expense of corporate profits without causing inflation …

The harder we push on improving output and employment, the more we learn how much we can achieve on those two fronts. That hopeful idea is the polar opposite of a natural, unalterable rate of unemployment. And it’s an idea and attitude that we need to embrace if we’re to have a shot at fully recovering from the wreckage of the Great Recession.

Mike Konczal / Vox

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it has not existed for the last 50 years. But still today ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists use it — and its cousin the Phillips curve — as a fundamental building block in their models. Why? Because without it ‘New Keynesians’ have to give up their — again and again empirically falsified — neoclassical view of the long-run neutrality of money and the simplistic idea of inflation as an excess-demand phenomenon.

The NAIRU approach is not only of theoretical interest. Far from it.

The real damage done is that policymakers that take decisions based on NAIRU models systematically tend to implement austerity measures and kill off economic expansion. Peddling this flawed illusion only gives rise to unnecessary and costly stagnation and unemployment.

Defenders of the [NAIRU theory] might choose to respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the natural rate of unemployment is time varying. But I am unaware of any theory which provides us, in advance, with an explanation of how the natural rate of unemployment varies over time. In the absence of such a theory the [NAIRU theory] has no predictive content. A theory like this, which cannot be falsified by any set of observations, is closer to religion than science.

Roger Farmer

NAIRU — a harmful fairy tale

NAIRU — a non-existent unicorn

In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not only wages and prices (keeping the rest of the system unchanged) but also demand, technology, workers’ motivation, and work intensity; as a result, productivity growth and ultimately equilibrium unemployment will change. There is in other words, nothing natural or inescapable about equilibrium unemployment, as is Friedman’s presumption, following Wicksell; rather, the NAIRU is a social construct, fluctuating in response to fiscal and monetary policies and labor market interventions. Its ephemeral (rather than structural) nature may explain why the best economists working on the NAIRU have persistently failed to agree on how high the NAIRU actually is and how to estimate it.

Servaas Storm & C. W. M. Naastepad

Many politicians and economists subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

Although this may sound convincing, it’s totally wrong!

One of the main problems with NAIRU is that it essentially is a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust. But if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equilibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will — as highlighted by Storm and Naastepad — see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by referring to NAIRU.

The existence of long-run equilibrium is a very handy modeling assumption to use. But that does not make it easily applicable to real-world economies. Why? Because it is basically a timeless concept utterly incompatible with real historical events. In the real world, it is the second law of thermodynamics and historical — not logical — time that rules.

This importantly means that long-run equilibrium is an awfully bad guide for macroeconomic policies. In a world full of genuine uncertainty, multiple equilibria, asymmetric information, and market failures, the long-run equilibrium is simply a non-existent unicorn.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policies on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

NAIRU is a useless concept, and the sooner we bury it, the better.

Debunking NAIRU

In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not only wages and prices (keeping the rest of the system unchanged) but also demand, technology, workers’ motivation, and work intensity; as a result, productivity growth and ultimately equilibrium unemployment will change. There is in other words, nothing natural or inescapable about equilibrium unemployment, as is Friedman’s presumption, following Wicksell; rather, the NAIRU is a social construct, fluctuating in response to fiscal and monetary policies and labor market interventions. Its ephemeral (rather than structural) nature may explain why the best economists working on the NAIRU have persistently failed to agree on how high the NAIRU actually is and how to estimate it.

Servaas Storm & C. W. M. Naastepad

Many politicians and economists subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

Although this may sound convincing, it’s totally wrong!

One of the main problems with NAIRU is that it essentially is a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust. But if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equilibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will — as highlighted by Storm and Naastepad — see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by referring to NAIRU.

The existence of long-run equilibrium is a very handy modelling assumption to use. But that does not make it easily applicable to real-world economies. Why? Because it is basically a timeless concept utterly incompatible with real historical events. In the real world, it is the second law of thermodynamics and historical — not logical — time that rules.

This importantly means that long-run equilibrium is an awfully bad guide for macroeconomic policies. In a world full of genuine uncertainty, multiple equilibria, asymmetric information and market failures, the long run equilibrium is simply a non-existent unicorn.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policies on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

NAIRU is a useless concept, and the sooner we bury it, the better.

Far fuori il mito del NAIRU

Anche se è diventata una credenza diffusa, la presunta relazione tra la disoccupazione e l’aumento o la riduzione dei tassi d’inflazione si stava sgretolando, in particolar modo negli anni ’90 del Novecento. Nel 2000 la disoccupazione era scesa al di sotto del 4% senza che l’inflazione decollasse. Dall’inizio della Grande Recessione, il divario tra la teoria e la realtà non ha fatto altro che ampliarsi…

Una volta che ci si rende conto di quanto sono fragili le fondamenta del tasso naturale di disoccupazione, si chiariscono altri ragionamenti su come perseguire tassi di disoccupazione che un tempo gli economisti ritenevano impossibili. I salari possono aumentare a scapito dei profitti societari senza provocare inflazione. In effetti, sin dal 2014 stiamo assistendo a un aumento della quota [di produzione] dell’economia che va ai lavoratori.

Meglio ancora, una disoccupazione inferiore non aiuta solo i lavoratori: può spronare una crescita complessiva. Come sostiene l’economista J.W. Mason, man mano che ci avviciniamo alla piena occupazione emergono incentivi per aumentare gli investimenti nella produttività che riduce il quantitativo di lavoro necessario, dato che le aziende cercano di tenere sotto controllo il costo del lavoro quando i lavoratori chiedono di più. Quest’aumento della produttività stimola ancora più crescita.

Più forte spingiamo per migliorare la produzione e l’occupazione, più impariamo quanto possiamo ottenere su quei due fronti. Quell’idea fiduciosa è agli antipodi di un tasso di disoccupazione naturale e inalterabile. Ed è un’idea, una mentalità, che abbiamo bisogno di abbracciare se vogliamo avere una possibilità di riprenderci completamente dalla devastazione della Grande Recessione.

Mike Konczal/Vox

Il NAIRU non regge semplicemente perché non è esistito negli ultimi cinquant’anni. Ma ancora oggi i macroeconomisti “neo-Keynesiani” lo usano nei loro modelli – così come la curva di Phillips, sua cugina – come un mattone fondamentale. Perché? Perché senza di esso i “neo-Keynesiani” dovrebbero rinunciare alla loro visione neoclassica della neutralità della moneta sul lungo periodo – ripetutamente smentita per via empirica – e all’idea semplicistica dell’inflazione come un fenomeno dovuto all’eccesso di domanda.

L’approccio NAIRU non è di interesse meramente teorico. Assolutamente no.

Il vero danno compiuto è che i policymaker che prendono decisioni sulla base dei modelli [che presuppongono il] NAIRU implementano sistematicamente misure di austerità e sterminano l’espansione economica. Spacciare quest’illusione errata dà solo luogo a stagnazione e disoccupazione non necessarie e onerose.

Lars Syll/ReteMMT

Busting the NAIRU myth

Even as it became conventional wisdom, the supposed relationship between unemployment and increasing or decreasing rates of inflation was breaking down — notably in the 1990s. Unemployment got below 4 percent in 2000 without inflation taking off. Since the onset of Great Recession, the gap between theory and reality has only grown …

Once we see how weak the foundations for the natural rate of unemployment are, other arguments for pursuing rates of unemployment economists once thought impossible become more clear. Wages can increase at the expense of corporate profits without causing inflation. Indeed, since 2014 we are seeing an increase in the share of the economy that goes to labor.

Even better, lower unemployment doesn’t just help workers: It can spur overall growth. As the economist J.W. Mason argues, as we approach full employment incentives emerge for greater investment in labor-saving productivity, as companies seek to keep labor costs in check as workers demand more. This productivity increase stimulates yet more growth.

The harder we push on improving output and employment, the more we learn how much we can achieve on those two fronts. That hopeful idea is the polar opposite of a natural, unalterable rate of unemployment. And it’s an idea and attitude that we need to embrace if we’re to have a shot at fully recovering from the wreckage of the Great Recession.

Mike Konczal/Vox

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it has not existed for the last 50 years. But still today ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomists use it — and its cousin the Phillips curve — as a fundamental building block in their models. Why? Because without it ‘New Keynesians’ have to give up their — again and again empirically falsified — neoclassical view of the long-run neutrality of money and the simplistic idea of inflation as an excess-demand phenomenon.

The NAIRU approach is not only of theoretical interest. Far from it.

The real damage done is that policymakers that take decisions based on NAIRU models systematically implement austerity measures and kill off economic expansion. Peddling this flawed illusion only gives rise to unnecessary and costly stagnation and unemployment.

Defenders of the [NAIRU theory] might choose to respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the natural rate of unemployment is time varying. But I am unaware of any theory which provides us, in advance, with an explanation of how the natural rate of unemployment varies over time. In the absence of such a theory the [NAIRU theory] has no predictive content. A theory like this, which cannot be falsified by any set of observations, is closer to religion than science.

Roger Farmer

Debunking the NAIRU hoax

In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not only wages and prices (keeping the rest of the system unchanged) but also demand, technology, workers’ motivation, and work intensity; as a result, productivity growth and ultimately equilibrium unemployment will change. There is in other words, nothing natural or inescapable about equilibrium unemployment, as is Friedman’s presumption, following Wicksell; rather, the NAIRU is a social construct, fluctuating in response to fiscal and monetary policies and labor market interventions. Its ephemeral (rather than structural) nature may explain why the best economists working on the NAIRU have persistently failed to agree on how high the NAIRU actually is and how to estimate it.

Servaas Storm & C. W. M. Naastepad

Many politicians and economists subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail​ since governments and central banks can not push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

Although this may sound convincing, it’s totally wrong!

One of the​ main problems with NAIRU is that it essentially is​ a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust. But if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equilibrium​m will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will — as highlighted by Storm and Naastepad — see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy​ has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by referring​ to NAIRU.

The existence of long-run equilibrium is a very handy modelling​ assumption to use. But that does not make it easily applicable to real-world economies. Why? Because it is basically a timeless concept utterly incompatible with real historical events. In the real worl​d, it is the second law of thermodynamics and historical — not logical — time that rules.

This importantly means that long-run equilibrium is an awfully bad guide for macroeconomic policies. In a world full of genuine uncertainty, multiple equilibria, asymmetric information and market failures, the long run equilibrium is simply a non-existent unicorn.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policies on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

NAIRU is a useless concept, and the sooner we bury it, the better​.

More NAIRU bashing

As yours truly argued in a post the other day, NAIRU does not hold water simply because it hasn’t existed for the last 50 years. But still  today ‘New Keynesian’ (a monstrous misnomer) macroeconomists use it — and its cousin the Phillips curve — as a fundamental building block in their models. Why? Because without it ‘New Keynesians’ have to give up their (again and again empirically falsified) neoclassical view of the long-run neutrality of money and the simplistic idea of inflation as an excess-demand phenomenon.

The NAIRU approach is not only of theoretical interest. Far from it.

The real damage done is that policymakers that take decisions based on NAIRU models systematically implement austerity measures and kill off economic expansion. The unnecessary and costly unemployment that this self-inflicted and flawed illusion eventuates, is something its New Classical and ‘New Keynesian’ advocates should always be kept accountable for!

According to the  [NAIRU theory], unemployment differs from its natural rate only if expected inflation differs from actual inflation. If expectations are rational, we should see as many quarters when inflation is above expected inflation as quarters when it is below expected inflation. That suggests the following test of the [NAIRU theory]..

Because a decade contains 40 quarters, the probability that average expected inflation over a decade will be different from naverage actual inflation should be small. If the [NAIRU theory] and rational expectations are both true simultaneously, a plot of decade averages of inflation against unemployment should reveal a vertical line at the natural rate of unemployment … This prediction fails dramatically.

There is no tendency for the points to lie around a vertical line and, if anything, the long-run Phillips is upward sloping, and closer to being horizontal than vertical. Since it is unlikely that expectations are systematically biased over decades, I conclude that the  [NAIRU theory] is false.

Defenders of the [NAIRU theory] might choose to respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the natural rate of unemployment is time varying. But I am unaware of any theory which provides us, in advance, with an explanation of how the natural rate of unemployment varies over time. In the absence of such a theory the [NAIRU theory] has no predictive content. A theory like this, which cannot be falsified by any set of observations, is closer to religion than science.

Roger Farmer

For more NAIRU critique see Merijn Knibbe’s post on the rwer blog today.

Debunking the NAIRU myth

In our extended NAIRU model, labor productivity growth is included in the wage bargaining process … The logical consequence of this broadening of the theoretical canvas has been that the NAIRU becomes endogenous itself and ceases to be an attractor — Milton Friedman’s natural, stable and timeless equilibrium point from which the system cannot permanently deviate. In our model, a deviation from the initial equilibrium affects not only wages and prices (keeping the rest of the system unchanged) but also demand, technology, workers’ motivation, and work intensity; as a result, productivity growth and ultimately equilibrium unemployment will change. There is in other words, nothing natural or inescapable about equilibrium unemployment, as is Friedman’s presumption, following Wicksell; rather, the NAIRU is a social construct, fluctuating in response to fiscal and monetary policies and labor market interventions. Its ephemeral (rather than structural) nature may explain why the best economists working on the NAIRU have persistently failed to agree on how high the NAIRU actually is and how to estimate it.

Servaas Storm & C. W. M. Naastepad

Many politicians and economists subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail, since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

Although this may sound convincing, it’s totally wrong!

One of  the main problems with NAIRU is that it essentially  is a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust. But if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equlibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will — as highlighted by Storm and Naastepad — see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand  policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by refering to NAIRU.

The existence of long-run equilibrium is a very handy modeling assumption to use. But that does not make it easily applicable to real-world economies. Why? Because it is basically a timeless concept utterly incompatible with real historical events. In the real world it is the second law of thermodynamics and historical — not logical — time that rules.

This importantly means that long-run equilibrium is an awfully bad guide for macroeconomic policies. In a world full of genuine uncertainty, multiple equilibria, asymmetric information and market failures, the long run equilibrium is simply a non-existent unicorn.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policies on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

NAIRU is a useless concept, and the sooner we bury it, the better.

NAIRU — a false hypothesis

The natural rate hypothesis (NRH) is the idea that unemployment has an inherent tendency to return to some special “natural rate” that is a property of the available technology for finding jobs. It is a fact of nature, a bit like the gravitational constant in celestial mechanics. The theory of the NRH natural rate hypothesis has been taught to every economist in every top economics department for the past thirty years. As part of the package, economists learn that the natural rate cannot be influenced by fiscal or monetary policy …

Even today, the NRH is a central component of New Keynesian economics and, with very few exceptions, central bankers, politicians, and economic talking heads use the theory of the natural rate of unemployment to explain their views on the appropriate stance of monetary policy. I believe that the NRH is false, and this fact has important consequences. If central bankers are working with a false theory, they are likely to make bad decisions that affect all of our lives.

Farmer has always — as did e. g. Wicksell and Keynes — made a point of the fact that equilibrium and optimality are not the same thing. That also implies that the economy being in equilibrium does not have to be inconsistent with high and persistent unemployment rates. Farmer uses a search theoretical approach to underpin this view. Although yours truly do not share his faiblesse for the Mortensen-Pissarides-Diamond modeling of Keynesian ideas re labour markets and unemployment, it is interesting to take part of his argumentation for his view in his book.

NAIRU — a long-run equilibrium slippery eel

The concept of equilibrium, of course, is an indispensable tool of analysis … But to use the equilibrium concept one has to keep it in place, and its place is strictly in the preliminary stages of an analytical argument, not in the framing of hypotheses to be tested against the facts, for we know perfectly well that we shall not find facts in a state of equilibrium. Yet many writers seem to conceive the long-period as a date somewhere in the future that we shall get to some day …

Long-run equilibrium is a slippery eel. Marshall evidently intended to mean by the long period a horizon which is always at a certain distance in the future, and this is a useful metaphor; but he slips into discussing a position of equilibrium which is shifted by the very process of approaching it and he got himself into a thorough tangle by drawing three-dimensional positions on a plane diagram.

No one would deny that to speak of a tendency towards equilibrium that itself shifts the position towards which it is tending is a contradiction in terms. And yet it still persists. It is for this reason that we must attribute its survival to some kind of psychological appeal that transcends reason.

 

The existence of long-run equilibrium is a very handy modeling assumption to use. But that does not make it easily applicable to real-world economies. Why? Because it is basically a timeless concept utterly incompatible with real historical events. In the real world it is the second law of thermodynamics and historical — not logical — time that rules.

Is long-run equilibrium really a good guide to macroeconomic policy? Friedman’s NAIRUvian long run and the more strictly classical natural rate, based on rational expectations, are certainly beguiling. But are they relevant? Information may be asymmetric. Competition may be monopolistic. Nonlinearities and even chaos are possible. Equilibria may be multiple or continuous. In such cases, the long-run equilibrium may be undetermined or incalculable or beyond achievement. To put it another way, the future may be inherently unpredictable. Here, the political scientists with their concept of “rational ignorance” may have something to teach economists.

James K. Galbraith

NAIRU religion

Having concluded seven years as chief economist at IMF, Olivier Blanchard is now considering rewriting his undergraduate macroeconomics textbook:

How should we teach macroeconomics to undergraduates after the crisis? Here are some of my conclusions …

Turning to the supply side, the contraption known as the aggregate demand–aggregate supply model should be eliminated. It is clunky and, for good reasons, undergraduates find it difficult to understand … These difficulties are avoided if one simply uses a Phillips Curve (PC) relation to characterize the supply side. Potential output, or equivalently, the natural rate of unemployment, is determined by the interaction between wage setting and price setting. Output above potential, or unemployment below the natural rate, puts upward pressure on inflation. The nature of the pressure depends on the formation of expectations, an issue central to current developments. If people expect inflation to be the same as in the recent past, pressure takes the form of an increase in the inflation rate. If people expect inflation to be roughly constant as seems to be the case today, then pressure takes the form of higher—rather than increasing—inflation. What happens to the economy, whether it returns to its historical trend, then depends on how the central bank adjusts the policy rate in response to this inflation pressure.

Hmm …

One of the main problems with NAIRU — what Blanchard is referring to as ‘the natural rate of unemployment’ — is that if it is essentially seen as a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust, then if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equlibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by refering to NAIRU.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist, and to base economic policy — or textbook models — on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

According to the  [NAIRU theory], unemployment differs from its natural rate only if expected inflation differs from actual inflation. If expectations are rational, we should see as many quarters when inflation is above expected inflation as quarters when it is below expected inflation. That suggests the following test of the [NAIRU theory]..

Because a decade contains 40 quarters, the probability that average expected inflation over a decade will be different from naverage actual inflation should be small. If the [NAIRU theory] and rational expectations are both true simultaneously, a plot of decade averages of inflation against unemployment should reveal a vertical line at the natural rate of unemployment … This prediction fails dramatically.

There is no tendency for the points to lie around a vertical line and, if anything, the long-run Phillips is upward sloping, and closer to being horizontal than vertical. Since it is unlikely that expectations are systematically biased over decades, I conclude that the  [NAIRU theory] is false.

Defenders of the [NAIRU theory] might choose to respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the natural rate of unemployment is time varying. But I am unaware of any theory which provides us, in advance, with an explanation of how the natural rate of unemployment varies over time. In the absence of such a theory the [NAIRU theory] has no predictive content. A theory like this, which cannot be falsified by any set of observations, is closer to religion than science.

Roger Farmer

NAIRU — a harmful fairy tale

The NAIRU story has always had a very clear policy implication — attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail, since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

Althouigh a lot of mainstream economists and politicians have a touching faith in the NAIRU fairy tale, it doesn’t hold water when scrutinized.

One of the main problems with NAIRU is that it is essentially a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust. If that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equlibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by refering to NAIRU.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policy on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

The conventional wisdom, codified in the theory of the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) … holds that in the longer run, an economy’s potential growth depends on – what Milton Friedman called – the “natural rate of unemployment”: the structural unemployment rate at which inflation is constant …

We argue in our book Macroeconomics Beyond the NAIRU that the NAIRU doctrine is wrong because it is a partial, not a general, theory. Specifically, wages are treated as mere costs to producers. In NAIRU, higher real-wage claims necessarily reduce firms’ profitability and hence, if firms want to protect profits (needed for investment and growth), higher wages must lead to higher prices and ultimately run-away inflation. The only way to stop this process is to have an increase in “natural unemployment”, which curbs workers’ wage claims.

What is missing from this NAIRU thinking is that wages provide macroeconomic benefits in terms of higher labor productivity growth and more rapid technological progress …

NAIRU wisdom holds that a rise in the (real) interest rate will only affect inflation, not structural unemployment. We argue instead that higher interest rates slow down technological progress – directly by depressing demand growth and indirectly by creating additional unemployment and depressing wage growth.

As a result, productivity growth will fall, and the NAIRU must increase. In other words, macroeconomic policy has permanent effects on structural unemployment and growth – the NAIRU as a constant “natural” rate of unemployment does not exist.

This means we cannot absolve central bankers from charges that their anti-inflation policies contribute to higher unemployment. They have already done so. Our estimates suggest that overly restrictive macro policies in the OECD countries have actually and unnecessarily thrown millions of workers into unemployment by a policy-induced decline in productivity and output growth. This self-inflicted damage must rest on the conscience of the economics profession.

Servaas Storm & C. W. M. Naastepad

NAIRU — en pinsam fläck på den ekonomiska professionens rykte

Det empiriska stödet för NAIRU-ansatsen är svagt, icke-robust och motsägelsefullt. Baker et al. (2005, s. 208) gör en noggrann granskning av flera prominenta studier som publicerats i välrenommerade internationella tidskrifter. De använder i flera fall originaldatamaterial för att reproducera de publicerade resultaten och finner att dessa är chockerande icke-robusta. Författarna konstaterar att det finns en ”avgrund mellan den självsäkerhet med vilken argumenten för avreglering av arbets-marknaderna har förts fram och beläggen för att det är hos de reglerande institutionerna som felet finns”. ILO-ekonomerna Baccaro och Rei (2005, 2007) testar flera varianter av NAIRU-modeller och drar slutsatsen att deras statistiska analys ger ”mycket litet stöd för uppfattningen att det är möjligt att sänka arbetslösheten genom att helt enkelt göra sig av med institutionella rigiditeter”. Vidare, en meta-regressionsanalys av 24 publicerade NAIRU-studier drar slutsatsen att NAIRU (definierad som en unik och stabil utbudsbestämd jämviktsarbetslöshet) helt saknar statistisk grund och måste betraktas som empiriskt falsifierad (Stanley 2005). OECD har å sin sida reviderat sina NAIRU-estimat uppåt som ett svar på reces- sionen 2008/09, trots att det, teoretiskt betraktat, inte fanns några bra skäl till varför NAIRU skulle ha ökat. Det är således en rimlig slutsats att dra att dessa försök att estimera NAIRU (såsom en funktion av arbetsmarknadsregleringar) har blivit med Galbraiths ord ”en pinsam fläck på [den ekonomiska] professionens rykte” …

De dominerande skolorna i nationalekonomin accepterar inte vetenskaplig praxis, vilken vore att betrakta NAIRU-modellen som empiriskt falsifierad (och följaktligen förkasta den). Istället fortsätter de att dogmatiskt stå fast vid föreställningen att det är omöjligt att skapa full sysselsättning – och att det bästa vi kan åstadkomma är att pressa ned NAIRU genom att bryta ned välfärdsstaten och försämra löntagarnas sociala skyddsnät.

NAIRU — more religion than science

In an interesting comment on a recent attempt at measuring NAIRU in the U.S., Matias Vernengo notes that NAIRU is basically measured as an average of actual unemployment and that a fortiori NAIRU

is NOT an attractor around which the actual unemployment level fluctuates. It is an average of the actual rate, which is essentially another way of writing the same data. It is the actual unemployment rate that determines the natural one, and if unemployment rates were reduced sufficiently with expansionary policies, the natural (being an average) would also come down. Economics is NOT a serious science.

NAIRU has been the subject of much heated discussion and debate lately. Many politicians — and economists — subscribe to the NAIRU story and its policy implication that attempts to promote full employment is doomed to fail, since governments and central banks can’t push unemployment below the critical NAIRU threshold without causing harmful runaway inflation.

One of the main problems with NAIRU is that if it essentially seen as a timeless long-run equilibrium attractor to which actual unemployment (allegedly) has to adjust, then if that equilibrium is itself changing — and in ways that depend on the process of getting to the equilibrium — well, then we can’t really be sure what that equlibrium will be without contextualizing unemployment in real historical time. And when we do, we will see how seriously wrong we go if we omit demand from the analysis. Demand policy has long-run effects and matters also for structural unemployment — and governments and central banks can’t just look the other way and legitimize their passivity re unemployment by refering to NAIRU.

NAIRU does not hold water simply because it does not exist — and to base economic policy on such a weak theoretical and empirical construct is nothing short of writing out a prescription for self-inflicted economic havoc.

When the NRH [the Natural Rate Hypothesis, or as it is often called today, the NAIRU theory] was first proposed, Friedman assumed that expectations are adaptive. The combination of adaptive expectations and the NRH led to a theory where variations in the unemployment rate are caused, primarily, by incorrect expectations. In this theory, households and firms forecast price inflation and their forecast determines which Phillips curve prevails in the period. Expected price inflation feeds into wages, and, through mark-ups, into realised inflation.

According to the NRH, unemployment differs from its natural rate only if expected inflation differs from actual inflation. If expectations are rational, we should see as many quarters when inflation is above expected inflation as quarters when it is below expected inflation. That suggests the following test
of the NRH.

Because a decade contains 40 quarters, the probability that average expected inflation over a decade will be different from naverage actual inflation should be small. If the NRH and rational expectations are both true simultaneously, a plot of decade averages of inflation against unemployment should
reveal a vertical line at the natural rate of unemployment … This prediction fails dramatically.

There is no tendency for the points to lie around a vertical line and, if anything, the long-run Phillips curve revealed by this chart is upward sloping, and closer to being horizontal than vertical. Since it is unlikely that expectations are systematically biased over decades, I conclude that the NRH is false.

Defenders of the Natural Rate Hypothesis might choose to respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the natural rate of unemployment is time varying. But I am unaware of any theory which provides us, in advance, with an explanation of how the natural rate of unemployment varies over time. In the absence of such a theory the NRH has no predictive content. A theory like this, which cannot be falsified by any set of observations, is closer to religion than science.

Roger Farmer