LARS P. SYLL

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Ekonomiquiz

För de som gillar att testa sina ekonomikunskaper — varför inte testa det här ekonomiquizet på Malmö universitet?

Behind the model

But if we have independent reasons to believe that there is more going on in the phenomena under investigation than a mathematical model can suggest – that is, that the phenomena in question are not in fact mechanical in the required sense – then mathematical modeling will prove misleading … Moreover, as will be discussed, the empirical assessment of such models using econometric methods will not be sufficient to reveal that mismatch.

These problems cannot themselves be addressed through reforms to mathematical methods. That would simply be to produce a more refined version of the wrong tool for the job, like sharpening one’s knife when what is needed is a spoon … We as scientists must remain sensitive to information about the phenomena in which we are interested that lies outside our models’ conceptual maps. In the case of economics, what this requires is a new field dedicated to qualitative empirical methods that would play a similar role to that played by econometrics in the matter of quantitative empirical methods.

Highly recommended reading!

Using formal mathematical modelling, mainstream economists sure can guarantee that the conclusions hold given the assumptions. However, the validity we get in abstract model worlds does not warrantly transfer to real-world economies.

In their search for validity, rigour and precision, mainstream macro modellers of various ilks construct microfounded DSGE models that standardly assume rational expectations, Walrasian market clearing, unique equilibria, time invariance, linear separability and homogeneity of both inputs/outputs and technology, infinitely lived intertemporally optimizing representative household/ consumer/producer agents with homothetic and identical preferences, etc., etc. At the same time, the models standardly ignore complexity, diversity, uncertainty, coordination problems, non-market clearing prices, real aggregation problems, emergence, expectations formation, etc., etc.

Behavioural and experimental economics — not to speak of psychology — show beyond any doubt that ‘deep parameters’ — peoples’ preferences, choices and forecasts — are regularly influenced by those of other participants in the economy. And how about the homogeneity assumption? And if all actors are the same — why and with whom do they transact? And why does economics have to be exclusively teleological (concerned with intentional states of individuals)? Where are the arguments for that ontological reductionism? And what about collective intentionality and constitutive background rules?

The rigour and precision in formal logic focus have a devastatingly important trade-off: the higher the level of rigour and precision, the smaller the range of real-world applications. So the more mainstream economists insist on formal logic validity, the less they have to say about the real world.

And as Spiegler has it — to think we solve the problem by reforms to mathematical modelling is nothing but “a more refined version of the wrong tool for the job, like sharpening one’s knife when what is needed is a spoon.”

Why Krugman and Stiglitz are no real alternatives to mainstream economics

Little in the discipline has changed in the wake of the crisis. Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis … Mirowski argues that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has rendered them doubly ineffective.

First, their adoption of the battery of assumptions that accompany most neoclassical theorizing — about representative agents, treating information like any other commodity, and so on — make it nearly impossible to conclusively rebut arguments like the efficient markets hypothesis. Instead, they end up tinkering with it, introducing a nuance here or a qualification there … Stiglitz’s and Krugman’s arguments, while receiving circulation through the popular press, utterly fail to transform the discipline.

Paul Heideman

Despite all their radical rhetoric, Krugman and Stiglitz are — where it really counts — nothing but die-hard mainstream economists, just like Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas or Greg Mankiw.

The only economic analysis that Krugman and Stiglitz  — like other mainstream economists — accept is the one that takes place within the analytic-formalistic modelling strategy that makes up the core of mainstream economics. All models and theories that do not live up to the precepts of the mainstream methodological canon are pruned. You’re free to take your models — not using (mathematical) models at all is considered totally unthinkable —  and apply them to whatever you want — as long as you do it within the mainstream approach and its modelling strategy. If you do not follow this particular mathematical-deductive analytical formalism you’re not even considered doing economics. ‘If it isn’t modelled, it isn’t economics.’

That isn’t pluralism.

That’s a methodological reductionist straightjacket.

So, even though we have seen a proliferation of models, it has almost exclusively taken place as a kind of axiomatic variation within the standard ‘Urmodell’, which is always used as a self-evident benchmark.

Krugman and Stiglitz want to purvey the view that the proliferation of economic models during the last twenty-thirty years is a sign of great diversity and an abundance of new ideas.

But it’s not that simple.

Although mainstream economists like to portray mainstream economics as an open and pluralistic ‘let a hundred flowers bloom,’ in reality, it is rather ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’

Applying closed analytical-formalist-mathematical-deductivist-axiomatic models, built on atomistic-reductionist assumptions to a world assumed to consist of atomistic-isolated entities, is a sure recipe for failure when the real world is known to be an open system where complex and relational structures and agents interact. Validly deducing things in models of that kind doesn’t help us understand or explain what is taking place in the real world we live in. Validly deducing things from patently unreal assumptions — that we all know are purely fictional — makes most of the modelling exercises pursued by mainstream economists rather pointless. It’s not the stuff that real understanding and explanation in science is made of. Just telling us that the plethora of mathematical models that make up modern economics  “expand the range of the discipline’s insights” is nothing short of hand waving.

No matter how many thousands of technical working papers or models mainstream economists come up with, as long as they are just ‘wildly inconsistent’ axiomatic variations of the same old mathematical-deductive ilk, they will not take us one single inch closer to giving us relevant and usable means to further our understanding and possible explanations of real economies.

Ricardiansk ekvivalens och budgetunderskott

Få frågor inom politik och ekonomi diskuteras nu för tiden så mycket — och förstås så lite — som offentlig skuld. Många höjer sina röster och uppmanar till att minska skulden, men få förklarar varför och på vilket sätt en minskning av skulden skulle främja en bättre ekonomi eller ett rättvisare samhälle. Dessutom finns det inga gränser för alla de katastrofer som en stor offentlig skuld förväntas leda till — arbetslöshet, inflation, högre räntor, lägre produktivitetstillväxt, ökade bördor för kommande generationer osv., osv.

Människor bryr sig vanligtvis mycket om budgetunderskott och skulder inom offentlig sektor och är generellt sett oroade och negativa till det. Genom att dra paralleller till den egna hushållsekonomin betraktas skulder som en indikation på en nära förestående risk för obestånd och därmed en källa till fördömelse. Men även om ingen kan tvivla på den politiska och ekonomiska betydelsen av offentlig skuld, råder det emellertid ingen enighet bland ekonomer om huruvida skuld spelar roll, och i så fall varför och på vilket sätt. Och ännu mindre vet man vad som är den ‘optimala’ storleken på offentlig skuld.

Genom historien har offentliga skulder gått upp och ner, ofta ökat under perioder av krig eller stora förändringar inom grundläggande infrastruktur och teknologi, för att sedan minska under perioder när saker och ting har stabiliserats.

Fördelarna och nackdelarna med offentlig skuld har diskuterats så länge som fenomenet självt har funnits, men trots det har det inte varit möjligt att nå någon form av samförstånd i frågan. Man har vanligtvis inte ens kunnat enas om huruvida offentlig skuld är ett problem, och om det är det — när det är det eller hur man bäst hanterar det. Några av de mer framträdande skälen till detta bristande samförstånd är frågans komplexitet, sammanblandningen av egenintressen, ideologi, psykologiska rädslor, osäkerheten vid beräkning och uppskattning av intergenerationella effekter osv., osv.

Under merkantilismens era ansågs offentlig skuld vanligtvis vara positiv (se exempelvis Berkeley, Melon, de Pinto), en syn som senare upprepades under 1800-talet av ekonomer som Adolf Wagner, Lorenz von Stein och Carl Dietzel. Statens huvudsakliga mål var att kontrollera och fördela nationens resurser, ofta genom regleringar och kraftfulla statliga ingripanden. Som en följd av ökad offentlig skuld skulle omsättningen av pengar och kredit öka mängden kapital och bidra till nationernas välstånd. Offentlig skuld betraktades i grunden som något som flyttades från “den högra handen till den vänstra handen”. Ekonomi behövde helt enkelt en stat som var beredd att låna betydande summor pengar och finansiella värdepapper och bli skuldsatt i processen.

Det fanns också en tydlig politisk dimension i frågan, och vissa författare var medvetna om att regeringens lån och skuldsättning kunde ha en politiskt stabiliserande effekt. Investerare hade ett egenintresse av stabila regeringar (låg ränta och låg riskpremie) och var därför instinktivt lojala mot regeringen.

Inom den klassiska ekonomin — i fotspåren av David Hume — framförde särskilt Adam Smith, David Ricardo och Jean-Baptiste Say mer negativa åsikter om offentlig skuld. En god budget var en balanserad budget. Om regeringen lånade pengar för att finansiera sina verksamheter skulle det bara leda till att privata företag och investeringar trängdes ut. Staten ansågs generellt sett vara oförmögen att betala sina skulder, och den verkliga bördan skulle därför i huvudsak falla på skattebetalarna som i slutändan fick betala för regeringens oansvarighet. Argumentationens moraliska karaktär var en framträdande egenskap — “antingen måste nationen förstöra den offentliga kreditvärdigheten, eller så kommer den offentliga kreditvärdigheten att förstöra nationen” (Hume 1752).

Senare under 1900-talet skulle ekonomer som John Maynard Keynes, Abba Lerner och Alvin Hansen återigen inta en mer positiv syn på offentlig skuld. Offentlig skuld var normalt sett inget att frukta, särskilt om den finansierades inom landet självt (men även utländska lån kunde vara gynnsamma för ekonomin om de investerades på rätt sätt). Vissa medlemmar i samhället skulle äga obligationer och tjäna ränta på dem, medan andra skulle betala skatten som i slutändan finansierade räntan på skulden. Men skulden ansågs inte vara en nettobörda för samhället som helhet, eftersom skulden i princip upphävde sig själv mellan de två grupperna. Om staten kunde emittera obligationer till en låg räntesats kunde arbetslösheten minskas utan att det nödvändigtvis ledde till starkt inflationstryck. Och den intergenerationella bördan var ingen verklig börda enligt denna grupp av ekonomer, eftersom skulden genom sina effekter på investeringar och sysselsättning faktiskt skulle vara nettovinnare om den användes på lämpligt sätt. Det kunde naturligtvis finnas oönskade negativa fördelningsmässiga sidoeffekter för kommande generationer, men det ansågs mestadels vara ett mindre problem eftersom (Lerner 1948) “om våra barn eller barnbarn betalar av en del av den nationella skulden kommer dessa betalningar att göras till våra barn och barnbarn och till ingen annan.”

Central för den Keynesianskt influerade synen är den grundläggande skillnaden mellan privat och offentlig skuld. Att blanda samman dem är ett exempel på ett ”atomistiskt felslut”, vilket i grund och botten är en variation av Keynes sparparadox. Om en individ försöker spara och minska sina skulder kan det vara bra och rationellt, men om alla försöker göra det skulle resultatet bli lägre sammanlagd efterfrågan och ökad arbetslöshet.

En individ måste alltid betala sina skulder. Men en regering kan alltid betala tillbaka gamla skulder med nya genom att emittera nya obligationer. Staten är inte som en individ. Offentlig skuld är inte som privat skuld. Statsskuld är i grunden en skuld till sig själv, till sina medborgare. Räntan som betalas på skulden betalas av skattebetalarna å ena sidan, men å andra sidan går räntan på obligationerna som finansierar skulderna till dem som lånar ut pengarna.

Abba Lerners essä “Functional Finance and the Federal Debt” fastställer vägledande principer för regeringar att anta i sina ansträngningar att använda ekonomiska, särskilt finansiella, åtgärder för att upprätthålla full sysselsättning och välstånd i ekonomier som kämpar med kroniska problem med att bibehålla tillräckligt hög aggregerad efterfrågan.

På grund av denna inneboende brist tenderade moderna stater att ha strukturella och långvariga problem med att upprätthålla full sysselsättning. Enligt Lerners principer för funktionell finansiering har den privata sektorn en tendens att inte generera tillräckligt med efterfrågan på egen hand, och därför måste regeringen ta på sig ansvaret för att se till att full sysselsättning uppnås. Det främsta verktyget för att göra detta är öppna marknadsoperationer – särskilt försäljning och köp av räntebärande statsskuldväxlar.

Även om Lerner verkar ha haft uppfattningen att idéerna som ingår i funktionell finansiering i princip kan tillämpas i alla typer av ekonomier, erkände han också betydelsen av institutionella arrangemang för att forma genomförbarheten och praktisk implementering av det.

Funktionell finansiering är kritiskt beroende av att nationella stater kan beskatta sina medborgare, ha en egen valuta och obligationer. Som blev tydligt under ”den stora recessionen” har EMU inte kunnat införa dessa strukturer, eftersom, som Hayek redan konstaterade 1939, “en regering genom överenskommelse är bara möjlig om vi inte kräver att regeringen agerar inom områden där vi kan få verklig överenskommelse.” Den monetära institutionella strukturen i EMU gör det mycket osannolikt, för att inte säga omöjligt, att detta någonsin kommer att bli ett “system” där funktionell finansiering anpassas.

För funktionell finansiering var de val som regeringar gör för att finansiera de offentliga underskotten och följdskulderna viktiga, eftersom finansiering med obligationer ansågs vara mer expansivt än att använda skatter också. Enligt Lerner syftar offentlig skuld till att uppnå en räntenivå som gör att investeringar gör full sysselsättning möjlig. På kort sikt kan detta leda till underskott, men han hävdade bestämt att det inte fanns någon anledning att anta att tillämpningen av funktionell finansiering för att upprätthålla full sysselsättning innebar att regeringen alltid måste låna pengar och öka den offentliga skulden. Tillämpningen av funktionell finansiering skulle ha en tendens att balansera budgeten på lång sikt, eftersom garantin för permanent full sysselsättning kommer att göra privata investeringar mycket mer attraktiva och följaktligen kommer större privata investeringar att minska behovet av underskott.

För både Keynes och Lerner var det uppenbart att staten hade förmågan att främja full sysselsättning och en stabil prisnivå – och att den borde använda sina befogenheter för att göra det. Om det innebar att den var tvungen att ta på sig skulder och (mer eller mindre tillfälligt) underbalansera sin budget — så låt det vara så! Offentlig skuld är varken bra eller dåligt. Det är ett medel för att uppnå två övergripande makroekonomiska mål – full sysselsättning och prisstabilitet. Det som är heligt är inte att ha en balanserad budget eller minska den offentliga skulden per se, oavsett effekterna på de makroekonomiska målen. Om “sund finansiering”, åtstramning och balanserade budgetar innebär ökad arbetslöshet och destabiliserande priser måste de överges.

Mot denna resonemang har förespråkare för teorin om Ricardiansk ekvivalens hävdat att det är ovidkommande om den offentliga sektorn finansierar sina utgifter genom skatter eller genom att utfärda obligationer, eftersom obligationer förr eller senare måste betalas tillbaka genom att höja skatterna i framtiden.

Robert Barro (1974) försökte ge påståendet en fast teoretisk grund, genom att argumentera för att ersättningen av ett budgetunderskott med nuvarande skatter inte har någon inverkan på den totala efterfrågan, och att budgetunderskott och beskattning har ekvivalenta effekter på ekonomin.

Om den offentliga sektorn tar på sig extra utgifter genom underskott, förväntar sig skattebetalarna enligt hypotesen att de kommer att behöva betala högre skatter i framtiden — och ökar därför sina besparingar och minskar sin nuvarande konsumtion för att kunna göra det, vilket resulterar i att den totala efterfrågan inte skiljer sig från vad som skulle hända om skatterna höjdes idag.

Ricardiansk ekvivalens innebär i grund och botten att finansiering av offentliga utgifter genom skatter eller skulder är ekvivalent, eftersom skuldfinansiering måste återbetalas med ränta, och aktörer – utrustade med rationella förväntningar – skulle endast öka sparandet för att kunna betala de högre skatterna i framtiden, vilket leder till att totala utgifter förblir oförändrade.

Varför?

Continue Reading Ricardiansk ekvivalens och budgetunderskott…

Irrational Exuberance — Robert Shiller’s modern classic

At the beginning of the year 2000, a book titled Irrational Exuberance was published. The American economics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller warned that the extensive deregulation in the financial market that had taken place since the Thatcher-Reagan era had led to a rapid credit expansion. Banks and financial institutions saw a skyrocketing increase in lending, and the pursuit of gaining larger market shares led to neglecting creditworthiness checks and accepting poor customer relationships. Above all, the values of IT stocks were disproportionately high. It would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.

Shiller was proven right. Less than two months after the book was published, the usual happened. The bubble burst, and the financial market crisis became a reality.

Because human memory is short, new concerns reappeared after a few years. The crisis that the American economy once again found itself in had its origins in the speculative bubble that developed in the American housing market between 1997 and 2006. Despite falling interest rates and construction costs, housing prices rose by an average of 85 per cent over the ten years when the bubble was inflated.

The underlying pattern is the same in almost all financial crises. For some reason, a shift occurs (war, innovations, new rules, and more) in the economic cycle that leads to changes in banks’ and companies’ profit opportunities. Demand and prices rise, pulling more and more parts of the economy into a kind of euphoria. More and more people get involved, and soon speculative frenzy – whether it’s about tulip bulbs, properties, or mortgages – becomes a reality. Sooner or later, someone sells to cash in their profits, triggering a rush for liquidity. It’s time to jump off the carousel and convert securities and other assets into cash. A financial emergency arises and spreads. Prices begin to decline, bankruptcies increase, and the crisis accelerates, turning into panic.

To prevent the final crash, credit is tightened, and calls for a lender of last resort who can guarantee the supply of the demanded cash and restore confidence arise. If that fails, the crash becomes a reality.

Like his predecessors Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, Shiller emphasizes that bubbles are an inevitably recurring feature in an economy with essentially unregulated markets. But Shiller also argues that our contemporary reevaluation of work and wealth plays a role. Over the past decades, people’s perception of their role in the economy has undergone a decisive transformation. From viewing work as the foundation of our well-being based on a Protestant work ethic, the idea of expecting to make money through investments has spread increasingly. Today’s hero is not the hardworking industrial labourer but the smart investor for whom money is no longer a means but an end in itself. According to Shiller, this rethinking is the underlying cause of the crisis. This is where the heart of darkness lies.

That Shiller emphasizes the psychological aspects is not surprising, considering that he is a leading representative of the research field in financial economics called behavioural finance.

As a young science, economics was closely intertwined with other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. Adam Smith, for example, was one of the foremost moral philosophers of his time. Over time, many economists deliberately sought to distance themselves from other sciences. Economic science would build on its own foundations instead of relying on the shaky grounds that immature and unscientific psychology could provide.

However, in recent times, more and more economists have realized the need to base their models on more realistic psychological foundations. Behavioural economics has quickly established itself as a sustainable part of the field of economics, with significant influence, particularly in financial economics. Neglecting the deep psychological dimensions of financial markets is increasingly seen as playing ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince of Denmark.

In traditional economic wisdom, the hypothesis of efficient markets has long been central. The hypothesis essentially states that the prices established in financial markets correspond to the fundamental values of the economy because all investors are rational and eliminate the existence of prices that deviate from fundamentals.

However, behavioural finance has been able to demonstrate that the depiction of investors as rational is difficult to reconcile with facts drawn from real financial markets. Investors seem to trade based more on noise than information. They extrapolate from short-term trends, are sensitive to how problems are presented, are poor at revising their risk assessments, and often overreact to mood swings. As a result, an asset’s price and its actual value can deviate for an extended period. Irrationality is not irrelevant in financial markets.

In Irrational Exuberance, Shiller demonstrates, based on his own empirical research on the fluctuations of the financial market, that stock value fluctuations were significantly higher than what is consistent with the hypothesis of an efficient market. And when different types of actors interact with each other, we cannot always expect the market to be efficient. To understand what happens in the financial market, we need to try to gain knowledge of how real investors behave. Behavioural finance has already taken us a long way in that regard.

So, what can be done to minimize the risk of future crises? Financial market participants evidently generate costs that they themselves do not bear. When the foremost economist of our time, John Maynard Keynes, advocated for the introduction of a general financial transaction tax after the stock market crash in 1929, it was because he believed that the market should bear the costs that its instability, imbalances, and disruptions give rise to. Those who, in their pursuit of profit, are willing to take unnecessary risks and cause lasting damage to the economy, must themselves contribute to paying the bill. It should hurt. And it should hurt if the lesson is to be learned.

Shiller emphasizes, just like Keynes, that when it comes to crisis solutions, one must distinguish between the short and long term. In the short-term perspective, it is necessary to mitigate the effects of price declines in housing and other assets through various measures. There are no guarantees that it will help, but fundamentally, there are no sustainable alternatives. Doing nothing would only fuel an already somewhat paralyzing uncertainty. When the house is engulfed in flames, we cannot simply stand on the sidelines and discuss the best method to extinguish it. Fires – like financial bubbles – have a nasty ability to spread.

In the long term, it is clearly beneficial for asset prices to fall back to a level that corresponds to their real value. A decrease in the price of one’s house does not make it less habitable. However, if the wheels of the economy were to come to a halt, the consequences would be very real.

Shiller argues forcefully for a solution he calls financial democracy, which he sees as a powerful remedy. Sound financial principles should be extended to encompass larger parts of society. It’s not only financial market participants who should have access to good information and expertise. Instead of avoiding all risks – which would be devastating to a society’s vitality and creativity – we should learn to manage insurable risks in a rational way. The basic idea is that extensive institutional changes, improved financial advice, increased transparency, freely accessible financial databases, and more should reduce the long-term risk of speculative bubbles emerging.

It is doubt, not belief, that creates new knowledge. Shiller’s research has strongly shown that we cannot both have our cake and eat it too. As long as we have an economy with unregulated financial markets, we will also be prone to periodically recurring crises.

Shiller provides us with both a map and a compass, and his proposals can actively contribute, together with stricter regulation of the financial market, to reducing the risks of costly financial system crises in the long run. However, if we reflexively refuse to see the extent of the problems, we will once again be helpless when the next crisis looms.

‘Self-adjusting’ markets

Paul Krugman has repeatedly over the years argued that we should continue to use mainstream economics hobby horses like IS-LM and AS-AD models. Here’s one example:

So why do AS-AD? … We do want, somewhere along the way, to get across the notion of the self-correcting economy, the notion that in the long run, we may all be dead, but that we also have a tendency to return to full employment via price flexibility. Or to put it differently, you do want somehow to make clear the notion (which even fairly Keynesian guys like me share) that money is neutral in the long run.

I seriously doubt that Keynes would have been impressed by having his theory characterized by​ catchwords like “tendency to return to full employment” and “money is neutral in the long run.”

One of Keynes’s central tenets is that there is no strong automatic tendency for economies to move towards full employment levels.

Money doesn’t matter in mainstream macroeconomic models. That’s true. According to the ‘classical dichotomy,’ real variables — output and employment — are independent of monetary variables, and so enable mainstream economics to depict the economy as basically a barter system.

But in the real world in which we happen to live, money certainly does matter. Money is not neutral and money matters in both the short run and the long run:

The theory which I desiderate would deal … with an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions, and is, in short, one of the operative factors in the situation, so that the course of events cannot be predicted in either the long period or in the short, without a knowledge of the behaviour of money between the first state and the last. And it is this which we ought to mean when we speak of a monetary economy.

J. M. Keynes A monetary theory of production (1933)

Economic methodology — Lawson, Mäki, and Syll

We are all realists and we all — Mäki, Cartwright, and I — self-consciously present ourselves as such. The most obvious research-guiding commonality, perhaps, is that we do all look at the ontological presuppositions of economics or economists.

Where we part company, I believe, is that I want to go much further. I guess I would see their work as primarily analytical and my own as more critically constructive or dialectical. My goal is less the clarification of what economists are doing and presupposing as seeking to change the orientation of modern economics … Specifically, I have been much more prepared than the other two to criticise the ontological presuppositions of economists—at least publically. I think Mäki is probably the most guarded. I think too he is the least critical, at least of the state of modern economics …

One feature of Mäki’s work that I am not overly convinced by, but which he seems to value, is his method of theoretical isolation (Mäki 1992). If he is advocating it as a method for social scientific research, I doubt it will be found to have much relevance—for reasons I discuss in Economics and reality (Lawson 1997). But if he is just saying that the most charitable way of interpreting mainstream economists is that they are acting on this method, then fine. Sometimes, though, he seems to imply more …

I cannot get enthused by Mäki’s concern to see what can be justified in contemporary formalistic modelling endeavours. The insights, where they exist, seem so obvious, circumscribed, and tagged on anyway …

As I view things, anyway, a real difference between Mäki and me is that he is far less, or less openly, critical of the state and practices of modern economics … Mäki seems more inclined to accept mainstream economic contributions as largely successful, or anyway uncritically. I certainly do not think we can accept mainstream contributions as successful, and so I proceed somewhat differently …

So if there is a difference here it is that Mäki more often starts out from mainstream academic economic analyses accepted rather uncritically, whilst I prefer to start from those everyday practices widely regarded as successful.

Tony Lawson

Tony Lawson and Uskali Mäki are both highly influential contemporary students of economic methodology and philosophy. Yours truly has learned a lot from both of them. Although to a certain degree probably also a question of temperament, I find Lawson’s critical realist critique of mainstream economic theories and models deeper and more convincing than Mäki’s more ‘distanced’ approach. Mäki’s detached style probably reflects the fact that he is a philosopher with an interest in economics, rather than an economist. Being an economist it is easier to see the relevance of Lawson’s ambitious and far-reaching critique of mainstream economics than it is to value Mäki’s often rather arduous application of the analytic-philosophical tool-kit, typically less ambitiously aiming for mostly conceptual and terminological ‘clarifications.’

The field of economics has long been hailed as a bastion of rationality and objectivity, offering insights into the workings of present-day complex economic systems. However, questions about the foundations of economics and its prevailing methodological approach. have to be raised. My own critique challenges traditional assumptions and argues for a more pluralistic and realistic understanding of economic phenomena.

• The problem of formalism
One of my key criticisms centres around the excessive reliance on formal models and mathematical abstractions within mainstream economics. The discipline’s preoccupation with mathematical rigour often leads to a detachment from real-world complexities, rendering economic models divorced from actual human behaviour. Economists should embrace a more open-ended approach that acknowledges the limitations of formalism and places a greater emphasis on empirical observations and qualitative analysis.

• Assumptions and simplifying idealizations
Many of the assumptions and simplifying idealizations that underpin mainstream economic models — perfect rationality, market efficiency, and equilibrium — do not accurately reflect the messy realities of human decision-making and market dynamics. Economists have to have a more nuanced understanding of human behaviour that acknowledges the presence of bounded rationality, social norms, and institutional constraints. By incorporating these factors, economic models can better capture the complexities of economic systems.

• Pluralism and interdisciplinarity
Economics should embrace a more pluralistic approach, drawing insights from various disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, and ecology. By integrating diverse perspectives, economists can develop a richer understanding of economic phenomena and avoid the pitfalls of narrow and reductionist thinking. Complex problems require holistic and multidimensional approaches.

• Policy implications
Overlooking real-world complexities and relying on overly simplified models — typical of mainstream economics — can lead to seriously misguided policy prescriptions. A more context-sensitive and pragmatic approach to policy-making —  taking into account the specific institutional, cultural, and historical factors at play — is needed. This shift in policy orientation can lead to more effective interventions and address the concerns of more or less marginalized communities that are often excluded from mainstream economic discourse.

• Advancing the discipline
While mainly posing challenges to the foundations of mainstream economics and the severe real-world limitations of its methodology, my critique also provides an opportunity for the discipline to evolve and grow. By embracing a more pluralistic and realistic framework, economics can address the criticisms and broaden its analytical toolkit. This would involve reevaluating many of the standard approaches, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, and promoting critical engagement with alternative heterodox economic theories. Challenging the dominance of deductive-axiomatic formalism and advocating for a pluralistic approach, do also create space for a more realistic and nuanced understanding of economic phenomena. While my critique of mainstream economics and its underlying methodology is often — as is Mäki’s and Lawson’s — met with resistance, it is necessary if we want to be able to reimagine economics as a discipline that is more in tune with the complexities of the real world and better equipped to tackle the pressing social and economic challenges we face today.

Lönerna driver inte inflationen

Stephanie Kelton har blivit en fixstjärna för vänstern och kritiker till gängse nationalekonomisk teori. I helgen besökte hon Stockholm. Hon är kritisk till hur inflationen bekämpas: ”Räntehöjningar är ett väldigt trubbigt verktyg” …

Kelton besöker Stockholm mitt under en internationell inflationskris. Första frågan till henne under intervjun ett par timmar före hennes medverkan på konferensen blir därför hur inflationen borde bekämpas.

– ECB försöker nu ta fram statistik för att besvara frågan om hur mycket av inflationen som drivs av efterfrågan, fördröjningar i försörjningskedjor samt kriget i Ukraina och hur mycket som beror på att företag tar tillfället i akt att höja priser mer än kostnaderna och öka sin avkastning.

På samma sätt har banker och rating-firman Moody’s gjort liknande mätningar i USA, säger Stephanie Kelton.

– Man får olika svar beroende på vilka som gör analyserna. Men det alla har gemensamt är att de säger att det är väldigt lite kvar av inflationen som beror på att vi spenderade för mycket på åtgärder för att hjälpa människor under pandemin. Det är mestadels ute ur systemet – i den utsträckning det någonsin fanns där, säger Stephanie Kelton.

Finns det någon risk idag för en löne-pris-spiral, alltså att höjda löner skulle driva på inflationen?

– Det fanns aldrig några bevis alls på att en löne-pris-spiral höll på att ta tag i USA. Det fanns mycket retorik, men inga bevis på det.

Vad gäller fackföreningar som, likt de svenska, säger sig ta ansvar genom att kräva mindre löneökningar än vad som kan kompensera för inflationen, säger hon:

– Jag vet inte tillräckligt om vad som driver inflationen här, men när folk kämpar med ökade levnadsomkostnader är inte lösningen att minska deras reallöner. Jag skulle hellre försöka hitta andra sätt att hålla tillbaka inflationen.

Dagens Arena

Robert Lucas (1937-2023)

Economic theory, like anthropology, ‘works’ by studying societies which are in some relevant sense simpler or more primitive than our own, in the hope either that relations that are important but hidden in our society will be laid bare in simpler ones, or that concrete evidence can be discovered for possibilities which are open to us which are without precedent in our own history. Unlike anthropologists, however, economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a practice which frees us from limiting ourselves to societies which can be physically visited as sparing us the discomforts of long stays among savages. This method of society-invention is the source of the utopian character of economics; and of the mix of distrust and envy with which we are viewed by our fellow social scientists. The point of studying wholly fictional, rather than actual societies, is that it is relatively inexpensive to subject them to external forces of various types and observe the way they react. If, subjected to forces similar to those acting on actual societies, the artificial society reacts in a similar way, we gain confidence that there are useable connections between the invented society and the one we really care about.

Robert Lucas

Although plenty of more or less hagiographic obituaries have acknowledged Lucas ‘brilliance’ and ‘influence’, I find it more appropriate to just honestly address the reasons his whole project to reform macroeconomics was such a blatant failure.

Neither yours truly, nor anthropologists, will recognise anything in Lucas’ description of economic theory even remotely reminiscent of practices actually used in real sciences, this quote still gives a very good picture of Lucas’ methodology.

All empirical sciences use simplifying or unrealistic assumptions in their modelling activities. That is not the issue – as long as the assumptions made are not unrealistic in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons.

The implications that follow from the kind of models that people like Robert Lucas — according to Ed Prescott, ‘the master of methodology’ — are always conditional on the simplifying assumptions used — assumptions predominantly of a rather far-reaching and non-empirical character with little resemblance to features of the real world. From a descriptive point of view, there is a fortiori usually very little resemblance between the models used and the empirical world. ‘As if’ explanations building on such foundations are not really any explanations at all, since they always conditionally build on hypothesized law-like theorems and situation-specific restrictive assumptions. The empirical-descriptive inaccuracy of the models makes it more or less miraculous if they should — in any substantive way — be able to be considered explanative at all. If the assumptions that are made are known to be descriptively totally unrealistic (think of e.g. ‘rational expectations’) they are of course likewise totally worthless for making empirical inductions. Assuming — as Lucas — that people behave ‘as if’ they were rational FORTRAN programmed computers doesn’t take us far when we know that the ‘if’ is false.

The obvious shortcoming of a basically epistemic — rather than ontological — approach such as ‘successive approximations’ and ‘as if’ modelling assumptions, is that ‘similarity’, ‘analogy’ or ‘resemblance’ tout court do not guarantee that the correspondence between model and target is interesting, relevant, revealing or somehow adequate in terms of mechanisms, causal powers, capacities or tendencies. No matter how many convoluted refinements of concepts are made in the model, if the successive ‘as if’ approximations do not result in models similar to reality in the appropriate respects (such as structure, isomorphism, etc), they are nothing more than ‘substitute systems’ that do not bridge to the world but rather misses its target.

Economics building on the kind of modelling strategy that Lucas represents does not produce science.

It’s nothing but pseudo-scientific cheating.

The thrust of this realist rhetoric is the same both at the scientific and at the meta-scientific levels. It is that explanatory virtues need not be evidential virtues. It is that you should feel cheated by “The world is as if T were true”, in the same way as you should feel cheated by “The stars move as if they were fixed on a rotating sphere”. Realists do feel cheated in both cases.

Alan Musgrave

Contrary to what some überimpressed macroeconomists seem to argue, I would say the recent economic crisis and the fact that Chicago economics has had next to nothing to contribute to understanding it, shows that Lucas and his New Classical economics — in Lakatosian terms — is a degenerative research program in dire need of replacement.

Mainstream economic theory has long been in the story-telling business whereby economic theorists create make-believe analogue models of the target system – usually conceived as the real economic system. This modelling activity is considered useful and essential. Since fully-fledged experiments on a societal scale as a rule are prohibitively expensive, ethically indefensible or unmanageable, economic theorists have to substitute experimenting with something else. To understand and explain relations between different entities in the real economy the predominant strategy is to build models and make things happen in these “analogue-economy models” rather than engineering things happening in real economies.

In business cycles theory these models are constructed with the purpose of showing that changes in the supply of money “have the capacity to induce depressions or booms” [Lucas 1988:3] not just in these models, but also in real economies. To do so economists are supposed to imagine subjecting their models to some kind of “operational experiment” and “a variety of reactions”. “In general, I believe that one who claims to understand the principles of flight can reasonably be expected to be able to make a flying machine and that understanding business cycles means the ability to make them too, in roughly the same sense” [Lucas 1981:8]. To Lucas models are the laboratories of economic theories, and after having made a simulacrum-depression Lucas hopes we find it “convincing on its own terms – that what I said would happen in the [model] as a result of my manipulation would, in fact, happen” [Lucas 1988:4]. The clarity with which the effects are seen is considered “the key advantage of operating in simplified, fictional worlds” [Lucas 1988:5].

On the flip side lies the fact that “we are not really interested in understanding and preventing depressions in hypothetical [models]. We are interested in our own, vastly more complicated society” [Lucas 1988:5]. But how do we bridge the gulf between the model and the ‘target system’? According to Lucas, we have to be willing to “argue by analogy from what we know about one situation to what we would like to know about another, quite different situation” [Lucas 1988:5]. Progress lies in the pursuit of the ambition to “tell better and better stories” [Lucas 1988:5], simply because that is what economists do.

We are storytellers, operating much of the time in worlds of make believe. We do not find that the realm of imagination and ideas is an alternative to, or retreat from, practical reality. On the contrary, it is the only way we have found to think seriously about reality. In a way, there is nothing more to this method than maintaining the conviction … that imagination and ideas matter … there is no practical alternative” [Lucas 1988:6].

Lucas has applied this mode of theorizing by constructing “make-believe economic systems” to the age-old question of what causes and constitutes business cycles. According to Lucas the standard for what that means is that one “exhibits understanding of business cycles by constructing a model in the most literal sense: a fully articulated artificial economy, which behaves through time so as to imitate closely the time series behavior of actual economies” [Lucas 1981:219].

To Lucas business cycles is an inherently systemic phenomenon basically characterized by conditional co-variations of different time series. The vision is “the possibility of a unified explanation of business cycles, grounded in the general laws governing market economies, rather than in political or institutional characteristics specific to particular countries or periods” [Lucas 1981:218]. To be able to sustain this view and adopt his “equilibrium approach” he has to define the object of study in a very constrained way. Lucas asserts, e.g., that if one wants to get numerical answers “one needs an explicit, equilibrium account of the business cycles” [Lucas 1981:222]. But his arguments for why it necessarily has to be an equilibrium is not very convincing. The main restriction is that Lucas only deals with purportedly invariable regularities “common to all decentralized market economies” [Lucas 1981:218]. Adopting this definition he can treat business cycles as all alike “with respect to the qualitative behavior of the co-movements among series” [1981:218].

Postulating invariance paves the way for treating various economic entities as stationary stochastic processes (a standard assumption in most modern probabilistic econometric approaches) and the possible application of “economic equilibrium theory.” The result is that Lucas’ business cycle is a rather watered-down version of what is usually connoted when speaking of business cycles.

Based on the postulates of “self-interest” and “market clearing” Lucas has repeatedly stated that a pure equilibrium method is a necessary intelligibility condition and that disequilibria are somehow “arbitrary” and “unintelligible” [Lucas 1981:225]. Although this might (arguably) be requirements put on models, these requirements are irrelevant and totally without justification vis-à-vis the real-world target system. Why should involuntary unemployment, for example, be considered an unintelligible disequilibrium concept? Given the lack of success of these models when empirically applied, what is unintelligible, is rather to pursue in this reinterpretation of the ups and downs in business cycles and labour markets as equilibria. To Keynes, involuntary unemployment is not equatable to actors in the labour market becoming irrational non-optimizers. It is basically a reduction in the range of working options open to workers, regardless of any volitional optimality choices made on their part. Involuntary unemployment is an excess supply of labour. That unemployed in Lucas’ business cycles models only can be conceived of as having chosen leisure over work is not a substantive argument about real-world unemployment. Sometimes workers are not employed. That is a real phenomenon and not a “theoretical construct … the task of modern theoretical economics to ‘explain’” [Lucas 1981:243].

All economic theories have to somehow deal with the daunting question of uncertainty and risk. It is “absolutely crucial for understanding business cycles” [Lucas 1981:223]. To be able to practice economics at all, “we need some way … of understanding which decision problem agents are solving” [Lucas 1981:223]. Lucas – in search of a “technical model-building principle” [Lucas 1981:1] – adapts the rational expectations view, according to which agents’ subjective probabilities are identified “with observed frequencies of the events to be forecast” are coincident with “true” probabilities. This hypothesis [Lucas 1981:224]

will most likely be useful in situations in which the probabilities of interest concern a fairly well defined recurrent event, situations of ‘risk’ [where] behavior may be explainable in terms of economic theory … In cases of uncertainty, economic reasoning will be of no value … Insofar as business cycles can be viewed as repeated instances of essentially similar events, it will be reasonable to treat agents as reacting to cyclical changes as ‘risk’, or to assume their expectations are rational, that they have fairly stable arrangements for collecting and processing information, and that they utilize this information in forecasting the future in a stable way, free of systemic and easily correctable biases.

To yours truly, this seems much like putting the cart before the horse. Instead of adapting the model to the object – which from both ontological and epistemological considerations seems the natural thing to do – Lucas proceeds in the opposite way and chooses to define his object and construct a model solely to suit his own methodological and theoretical preferences. All those – interesting and important – features of business cycles that have anything to do with model-theoretical openness, and a fortiori not possible to squeeze into the closure of the model, are excluded. One might rightly ask what is left of that we in common sense meaning refer to as business cycles. Einstein’s dictum – “everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler” falls to mind. Lucas – and neoclassical economics at large – does not heed the implied apt warning.

The development of macro-econometrics has according to Lucas supplied economists with “detailed, quantitatively accurate replicas of the actual economy” thereby enabling us to treat policy recommendations “as though they had been experimentally tested” [Lucas 1981:220]. But if the goal of theory is to be able to make accurate forecasts this “ability of a model to imitate actual behavior” does not give much leverage. What is required is “invariance of the structure of the model under policy variations”. Parametric invariance in an economic model cannot be taken for granted, “but it seems reasonable to hope that neither tastes nor technology vary systematically” [Lucas 1981:220].

The model should enable us to posit contrafactual questions about what would happen if some variable was to change in a specific way. Hence the assumption of structural invariance, that purportedly enables the theoretical economist to do just that. But does it? Lucas appeals to “reasonable hope”, a rather weak justification for a modeller to apply such a far-reaching assumption. To warrant it one would expect an argumentation that this assumption – whether we conceive of it as part of a strategy of “isolation”, “idealization” or “successive approximation” – really establishes a useful relation that we can export or bridge to the target system, the “actual economy.” That argumentation is neither in Lucas nor – to my knowledge – in the succeeding neoclassical refinements of his “necessarily artificial, abstract, patently ‘unreal’” analogue economies [Lucas 1981:271]. At most, we get what Lucas himself calls “inappropriately maligned” casual empiricism in the form of “the method of keeping one’s eyes open.” That is far from sufficient to warrant any credibility in a model pretending to explain the complex and difficult recurrent phenomena we call business cycles. Providing an empirical “illustration” or a “story” to back up your model does not suffice. There are simply too many competing illustrations and stories that could be exhibited or told.

As Lucas has to admit – complaining about the less than ideal contact between theoretical economics and econometrics – even though the “stories” are (purportedly) getting better and better, “the necessary interaction between theory and fact tends not to take place” [Lucas 1981:11].

The basic assumption of this “precise and rigorous” model therefore cannot be considered anything else than an unsubstantiated conjecture as long as it is not supported by evidence from outside the theory or model. To my knowledge no in any way decisive empirical evidence has been presented. This is the more tantalizing since Lucas himself stresses that the presumption “seems a sound one to me, but it must be defended on empirical, not logical grounds” [Lucas 1981:12].

And applying a “Lucas critique” on Lucas’s own model, it is obvious that it too fails. Changing “policy rules” cannot just be presumed not to influence investment and consumption behaviour 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” [Lucas 1981:288] 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 kicks back 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” [Lucas 1981:7] they do not push science forward one single millimetre 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 external validity.

References

Lucas, Robert (1981), Studies in Business-Cycle Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

– (1986), Adaptive Behavior and Economic Theory. In Hogarth, Robin & Reder, Melvin (eds) Rational Choice (pp. 217-242). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

– (1988), What Economists Do.

Syll, Lars (2016), On the use and misuse of theories and models in economics.

Vad kan du om ekonomi?

För att få svar på det kan du ju testa ekonomiquizet i dagens Sydsvenskan!

Understanding MMT

MMT is, first and foremost, a balance sheet approach to macroeconomics. At its very core lie reserve accounting, then deposit accounting, and then sectoral balances accounting. There is very little behaviour in any of this. Equilibrium rules as all balances balance – in both flows and stocks – and there are no assumptions apart from the existence of a central bank, a Treasury, a banking system and some households and firms. MMT can only be learned by mastering its balance sheet approach. It can only be engaged by discussing the balance sheet operations it puts forward. It is here where value is added …

First of all, the main insight of MMT is that the mainstream has the sequence wrong. Whereas they assume that government expenditure is financed by taxes, MMT assumes that government spending is financed by money creation. MMT stresses that the central bank, empowered by the law and serving the state, is the monopoly issuer of currency … This logically means that the state has to spend before taxes can be paid … When taxpayers pay their taxes (or banks buy government bonds on the primary market), they first need to have state money.

Dirk Ehnts

Fiscal deficits always lead to an increase in the supply of financial assets held in the nongovernmental sector of the economy. This real-world fact, of course, constitutes a massive problem for mainstream (textbook) macroeconomic theory with its models building on ‘money multipliers’ and ‘loanable funds.’

The loanable funds theory is in many regards nothing but an approach where the ruling rate of interest in society is — pure and simple — conceived as nothing else than the price of loans or credit, determined by supply and demand — as Bertil Ohlin put it — “in the same way as the price of eggs and strawberries on a village market.”

In the traditional loanable funds theory — as presented in mainstream macroeconomics textbooks — the amount of loans and credit available for financing investment is constrained by how much saving is available. Saving is the supply of loanable funds, and investment is the demand for loanable funds and is assumed to be negatively related to the interest rate.

As argued by Ehnts, there are many problems with the standard presentation and formalization of the loanable funds theory. And more can be added to the list:

1 As already noticed by James Meade decades ago, the causal story told to explicate the accounting identities used gives the picture of “a dog called saving wagged its tail labelled investment.” In Keynes’s view — and later over and over again confirmed by empirical research — it’s not so much the interest rate at which firms can borrow that causally determines the amount of investment undertaken, but rather their internal funds, profit expectations and capacity utilization.

2 As is typical of most mainstream macroeconomic formalizations and models, there is pretty little mention of real-world​ phenomena, like e. g. real money, credit rationing and the existence of multiple interest rates, in the loanable funds theory. Loanable funds theory essentially reduces modern monetary economies to something akin to barter systems — something they definitely are not. As emphasized especially by Minsky, to understand and explain how much investment/loaning/crediting is going on in an economy, it’s much more important to focus on the working of financial markets than staring at accounting identities like S = Y – C – G. The problems we meet on modern markets today have more to do with inadequate financial institutions than with the size of loanable-funds-savings.

3 The loanable funds theory in the “New Keynesian” approach means that the interest rate is endogenized by assuming that Central Banks can (try to) adjust it in response to an eventual output gap. This, of course, is essentially nothing but an assumption of Walras’ law being valid and applicable, and that a fortiori the attainment of equilibrium is secured by the Central Banks’ interest rate adjustments. From a realist Keynes-Minsky point of view, this can’t be considered anything else than a belief resting on nothing but sheer hope. [Not to mention that more and more Central Banks actually choose not to follow Taylor-like policy rules.] The age-old belief that Central Banks control the money supply has more and more come to be questioned and replaced by an “endogenous” money view, and I think the same will happen to the view that Central Banks determine “the” rate of interest.

4 A further problem in the traditional loanable funds theory is that it assumes that saving and investment can be treated as independent entities. To Keynes, this was seriously wrong:

The classical theory of the rate of interest [the loanable funds theory] seems to suppose that, if the demand curve for capital shifts or if the curve relating the rate of interest to the amounts saved out of a given income shifts or if both these curves shift, the new rate of interest will be given by the point of intersection of the new positions of the two curves. But this is a nonsense theory. For the assumption that income is constant is inconsistent with the assumption that these two curves can shift independently of one another. If either of them shifts​, then, in general, income will change; with the result that the whole schematism based on the assumption of a given income breaks down … In truth, the classical theory has not been alive to the relevance of changes in the level of income or to the possibility of the level of income being actually a function of the rate of the investment.

There are always (at least) two parts to an economic transaction. Savers and investors have different liquidity preferences and face different choices — and their interactions usually only take place intermediated by financial institutions. This, importantly, also means that there is no “direct and immediate” automatic interest mechanism at work in modern monetary economies. What this ultimately boils done to is — iter — that what happens at the microeconomic level — both in and out of equilibrium —  is not always compatible with the macroeconomic outcome. The fallacy of composition (the “atomistic fallacy” of Keynes) has many faces — loanable funds is one of them.

5 Contrary to the loanable funds theory, finance in the world of Keynes and Minsky precedes investment and saving. Highlighting the loanable funds fallacy, Keynes wrote in “The Process of Capital Formation” (1939):

Increased investment will always be accompanied by increased saving, but it can never be preceded by it. Dishoarding and credit expansion provides not an alternative to increased saving, but a necessary preparation for it. It is the parent, not the twin, of increased saving.

What is “forgotten” in the loanable funds theory, is the insight that finance — in all its different shapes — has its own dimension, and if taken seriously, its effect on an analysis must modify the whole theoretical system and not just be added as an unsystematic appendage. Finance is fundamental to our understanding of modern economies and acting like the baker’s apprentice who, having forgotten to add yeast to the dough, throws it into the oven afterwards, simply isn’t enough.

All real economic activities nowadays depend on functioning financial machinery. But institutional arrangements, states of confidence, fundamental uncertainties, asymmetric expectations, the banking system, financial intermediation, loan granting processes, default risks, liquidity constraints, aggregate debt, cash flow fluctuations, etc., etc. — things that play decisive roles in channelling​ money/savings/credit — are more or less left in the dark in modern formalizations of the loanable funds theory.

It should be emphasized that the equality between savings and investment … will be valid under all circumstances. In particular, it will be independent of the level of the rate of interest which was customarily considered in economic theory to be the factor equilibrating the demand for and supply of new capital. In the present conception investment, once carried out, automatically provides the savings necessary to finance it. Indeed, in our simplified model, profits in a given period are the direct outcome of capitalists’ consumption and investment in that period. If investment increases by a certain amount, savings out of profits are pro tanto higher …

One important consequence of the above is that the rate of interest cannot be determined by the demand for and supply of new capital because investment ‘finances itself.’

A Baconian view on the ’empirical turn’ in economics

The axioms now in use have been derived from a meagre and narrow experience and from a
few particulars of most common occurrence…

Nor should it count for much that … he often cites experiments. For he had come to his decision beforehand, without taking proper account of experience in setting up his decisions and axioms; but after laying down the law according to his own judgement, he then brings in experience, twisted to fit in with his own ideas, and leads it about like a captive.

Although discounting empirical evidence cannot be the right way to solve economic issues, there are still several weighty reasons why we perhaps shouldn’t be too excited about the so-called ’empirical turn’ in economics.

Behavioural experiments and laboratory research face the same basic problem as theoretical models — they are built on often rather artificial conditions and have difficulties with the ‘trade-off’ between internal and external validity. The more artificial conditions, the more internal validity, but also less external validity. The more we rig experiments to avoid the ‘confounding factors’, the less the conditions are reminiscent of the real ‘target system.’ The nodal issue is how economists using different isolation strategies in different ‘nomological machines’ attempt to learn about causal relationships. One may have justified doubts on the generalizability of this research strategy since the probability is high that causal mechanisms are different in different contexts and that lack of homogeneity and invariance doesn’t give us warranted export licenses to the ‘real’ societies or economies.

If we see experiments or laboratory research as theory tests or models that ultimately aspire to say something about the real ‘target system,’ then the problem of external validity is central (and was for a long time also a key reason why behavioural economists had trouble getting their research results published).

A standard procedure in behavioural economics — think of e.g. dictator or ultimatum games — is to set up a situation where one induces people to act according to the standard microeconomic — homo oeconomicus — benchmark model. In most cases, the results show that people do not behave as one would have predicted from the benchmark model, in spite of the setup almost invariably being ‘loaded’ for that purpose. [And in those cases where the result is consistent with the benchmark model, one, of course, has to remember that this in no way proves the benchmark model to be right or ‘true,’ since there, as a rule, are multiple outcomes that are consistent with that model.]

For most heterodox economists this is just one more reason for giving up on the standard model. But not so for mainstreamers and many behaviouralists. To them, the empirical results are not reasons for giving up on their preferred hardcore axioms. So they set out to ‘save’ or ‘repair’ their model and try to ‘integrate’ the empirical results into mainstream economics. Instead of accepting that the homo oeconomicus model has zero explanatory real-world value, one puts lipstick on the pig and hopes to go on with business as usual. Why we should keep on using that model as a benchmark when everyone knows it is false is something we are never told. Instead of using behavioural economics and its results as building blocks for a progressive alternative research program, the ‘save and repair’ strategy immunizes a hopelessly false and irrelevant model.

By this, I do not mean to say that empirical methods per se are so problematic that they can never be used. On the contrary, I am basically — though not without reservations — in favour of the increased use of behavioural experiments and laboratory research within economics. Not least as an alternative to completely barren ‘bridge-less’ axiomatic-deductive theory models. My criticism is more about aspiration levels and what we believe we can achieve with our mediational epistemological tools and methods in the social sciences.

The increasing use of natural and quasi-natural experiments in economics during the last couple of decades has led several prominent economists to triumphantly declare it as a major step on a recent path toward empirics, where instead of being a deductive philosophy, economics is now increasingly becoming an inductive science.

Limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we ‘export’ them to our ‘target systems,’ we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real economic systems.

So — although it is good that much of the behavioural economics research has vastly undermined the lure of axiomatic-deductive mainstream economics, there is still a long way to go before economics has become a truly empirical science. The great challenge for future economics is not to develop methodologies and theories for well-controlled laboratories, but to develop relevant methodologies and theories for the messy world in which we happen to live.

Life among the Econ

.

So when ‘modern’ mainstream economists use their models — standardly assuming rational expectations, Walrasian market clearing, unique equilibria, time invariance, linear separability and homogeneity of both inputs/outputs and technology, infinitely lived intertemporally optimizing representative agents with homothetic and identical preferences, etc. — and standardly ignoring complexity, diversity, uncertainty, coordination problems, non-market clearing prices, real aggregation problems, emergence, expectations formation, etc. — we are supposed to believe that this somehow helps them ‘to avoid motivated reasoning that validates what you want to hear.’

Yours truly and people like Asad Zaman are, to say the least, far from convinced. Rather than being helpful for understanding real-world economic issues, mainstream economics is more of an ill-advised plaidoyer for voluntarily taking on a methodological straight-jacket of unsubstantiated and known to be harmfully false assumptions. Models and theories building on that kind of reasoning are nothing but a pointless waste of time.