Keynes on Paradigm Change

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John Maynard Keynes wrote about paradigm change long before Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In a 1926 essay, The End of Laissez-Faire Keynes discusses the lingering doctrines of Laissez-Faire economics well into the period economists were for the most part persuaded by the examples of Alfred Marshall, and the proponents of the marginal utility school that the main ideas of laissez-faire were wrong. Keynes was a brilliant writer, witty and insightful, but he was also a fine scholar. This isn’t a long essay, and it is certainly worth reading, for the giraffe analysis if nothing else. I am going to pick out a few points that show why Keynes thought old and strange ideas cannot be rooted out of economics. Here’s the laissez-faire he is talking about:

Finally, in the works of Bastiat we reach the most extravagant and rhapsodical expression of the political economist’s religion. In his Harmonies Économiques, [he writes]

I undertake [he says] to demonstrate the Harmony of those laws of Providence which govern human society. What makes these laws harmonious and not discordant is, that all principles, all motives, all springs of action, all interests, co-operate towards a grand final result … And that result is, the indefinite approximation of all classes towards a level, which is always rising; in other words, the equalisation of individuals in the general amelioration.

That sure sounds like any Republican or corporatist Democrat, any TV economist or any person who plays economist on TV, and it’s just a shade riper than the average commenter on an article in which Bernie Sanders is identified as a Social Democrat.

Keynes identifies several social and political issues which led to this florid statement. There was struggle against monarchy, which led Locke and others to fetishize private property and the freedom to do as one will with that property. There was a philosophical basis in the Social Contract ideas and the theories of the Utilitarians. There was Darwin and his scientific colleagues who seemed to argue for the necessity of competition for evolution. There was the “corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government”, coupled with the successes of the early industrialists. There was the support of the economists of that time, a new group, but once seemingly versed in science, saying that government interference with private property would be bad.

He explains that although economists of the day generally supported laissez-faire, it wasn’t they who preached the gospel as laid out by Bastiat. Instead, it was the “popularisers and the vulgarisers”, who pushed the doctrine into the public mind, and it was the philosophers, not the economists, whose views it fit best. He quotes the popularisers, including the fabulous Mrs. Marcet, and I can’t resist:

CAROLINE. The more I learn upon this subject, the more I feel convinced that the interests of nations, as well as those of individuals, so far from being opposed to each other, are in the most perfect unison.

MRS B. Liberal and enlarged views will always lead to similar conclusions, and teach us to cherish sentiments of universal benevolence towards each other; hence the superiority of science over mere practical knowledge.

The economists turned away from this stuff immediately, Keynes says, treating it as a useful idea but hardly one with evidentiary or theoretical support. But the idea remains fixed in the public mind. To be clear, Keynes agrees that government should be limited, but he firmly believes that limits on the use of private property of various kinds and a sensible government are both crucial to controlling the practice of capitalism. The idea that the government could do nothing useful, which underlies laissez-faire as taught by the likes of Mrs. Marcet, is foreign to Keynes, as he shows in Part IV of the essay.

In Part III, Keynes dismantles this analysis. Here’s a taste:

This assumption, however, of conditions where unhindered natural selection leads to progress, is only one of the two provisional assumptions which, taken as literal truth, have become the twin buttresses of laissez-faire. The other one is the efficacy, and indeed the necessity, of the opportunity for unlimited private money-making as an incentive to maximum effort. Profit accrues, under laissez-faire, to the individual who, whether by skill or good fortune, is found with his productive resources in the right place at the right time. A system which allows the skilful or fortunate individual to reap the whole fruits of this conjuncture evidently offers an immense incentive to the practice of the art of being in the right place at the right time. Thus one of the most powerful of human motives, namely the love of money, is harnessed to the task of distributing economic resources in the way best calculated to increase wealth.

Shades of Thomas Piketty. Keynes’ primary target is professors of economics who teach the the simplest and most reductive assumptions as the norm, with all of the messy complications of reality excised. “They regard the simplified hypothesis as health, and the further complications as disease.” He says that the alternatives, Marxian socialism and protectionism, are terrible themselves. Third, there’s this:

Finally, individualism and laissez-faire could not, in spite of their deep roots in the political and moral philosophies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, have secured their lasting hold over the conduct of public affairs, if it had not been for their conformity with the needs and wishes of the business world of the day.

And in conclusion to that analysis, he writes in Part IV:

Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has been founded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

Keynes believed that a capitalist economy could be made to work better through government actions as the situation demanded. “Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.” I would have written that we should have a satisfactory way of life, made as efficient as possible, but maybe that’s what Keynes meant.

Given these forces, it’s hard to see the basis for Keynes’ hope that the principles of laissez-faire might be eradicated, and, of course, they weren’t. They govern the economic thinking of the Republicans and the corporatist Democrats even today, as the vote on the TPP indicates. They are people who ignorantly repeat the tropes of laissez-faire without reading their original proponents: “… we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands.“

That’s certainly true, more so today than ever. It points to the central reason why stupid economic ideas cannot be vanquished:

To suggest social action for the public good to the City of London is like discussing the Origin of Species with a bishop sixty years ago. The first reaction is not intellectual, but moral. An orthodoxy is in question, and the more persuasive the arguments the graver the offence.

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A Possible Paradigm of Neoliberal Economics

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In this post I ask what the paradigm of economics might be, and if there is one. I did not address the question of the exact nature of the paradigm as discussed by Kuhn, leaving it at the broadest possible level: the theories, instruments, methods, prejudices and so on common to a community of scholars working in a fairly specific area of human knowledge. The general question of the nature of the paradigm is the subject of a number of papers, most concluding that the concept is too unclear to support careful analysis. That’s the position taken by George Stigler in a remarkable paper, Does Economics Have a Useful Past? 1 Hist. of Pol. Econ. 225 (1969). Stigler dismisses Kuhn because he can’t find an example of a paradigm that completely defeats a prior paradigm.

To be concrete, the marginal utility revolution of the 1870s replaced the individual economic agent as a sociological or historical datum by the utility-maximizing individual. The essential elements of the classical theory were affected in no respect. (A possible, but uncertain, aftereffect in twenty years was the development of the marginal productivity theory.) Until Kuhn gives us criteria of a revolution (or a paradigm) which have direct empirical content, it will not be possible to submit his fascinating hypotheses to test.

I assume Stigler means that Kuhn’s ideas aren’t applicable to economics. Certainly the book is full of examples from physics and chemistry of theories that completely replace older theories, leaving the old to as nothing more than objects of interest. Let me propose one such idea for economics. It is a certainty of economics that taxes exist for the purpose of raising revenue for the government. That was probably true before the advent of fiat money. When nations left the gold standard, it became untrue, as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Beardsley Ruml, wrote in 1946 in a paper titled Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete. This idea is as revolutionary as the Copernican Revolution. It forms the basis of Modern Money Theory, and both the idea and the elaboration into a coherent theory are fiercely ignored or fiercely fought by the dominant economists. As it happens, this idea is leaking into public discussion despite their best efforts.

I have little else to add to this discussion about the nature of paradigms. I’ll follow Stigler in accepting that there are communities of scholars engaged in the same general areas of study, and in these communities, there is a mutual agreement on theories, instruments, methods, measurements, and even prejudices, and these guide the thinkers in their day to day efforts. Stigler considers this a good picture of economics, and for my purposes, it serves to connect Kuhn’s ideas to economics.

The neoclassical school dominates economic discourse and is widely taught as authoritative at every level in the US. N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard professor and author of the leading economics textbook, wrote this in a New York Times column in May 2009:

Despite the enormity of recent events [meaning the Great Crash], the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.

Let’s try to tease out the paradigmatic points of the neoliberal school. Mankiw’s best-selling economics textbook contains these 10 principles of economics:

  1. People face tradeoffs
  2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it
  3. Rational people think at the margin
  4. People respond to incentives
  5. Trade can make everyone better off
  6. Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity
  7. Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes
  8. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services
  9. Prices rise when the government prints too much money
  10. Society faces a short-run tradeoff between Inflation and unemployment

The primary method of this school is mathematical modeling, which adds at least two covert assumptions, that collective and individual human behavior is continuous enough so that it’s reasonable to use college calculus, and that aggregate behavior is nothing but the sum of individual behaviors which exist independently of each other at all times. The theory is premised on the idea that the motivation of all people is efficiency, and that economic efficiency is the most prized value in a society, with all other goals held as secondary. The models are used to give normative policy advice.

This school of thought, to follow Stigler, replaced Keynesianism. P. 228. Why? Stigler suggests that a school of thought cannot survive the life of its leader. That seems very odd, because many of the ideas of the neoliberals are taken from the past. As Stigler says:

The young theorist, working with an increasingly formal, abstract, and systematic corpus of knowledge, will seldom find it necessary to consult even a late-nineteenth-century economist. He will assume, just as the mathematician or chemist assumes, that all that is useful and valid in earlier work is present — in purer and more elegant form — in the modern theory. P. 217-8

I won’t belabor the obvious point that every element of the neoliberal school is contested. Instead, I continue to focus on this question. The canonical explanation of the rise of neoliberalism is that Keynesianism failed in the 1970s, and was replaced by neoliberal economics which offered a better solution to the problem that Keynesianism stumbled over. That explanation leaves a bunch of questions. Not the least is exactly why the events of the 1970s were somehow a failure of economic theory. The solution offered by neoliberalism was the traditional conservative solution: hammer the workers and coddle the capitalists. Why is that a better solution? Remember, Keynes believed that the goal of economic recovery was to give people useful work to do [see paragraph 5], not to help the rich. And why isn’t neoliberalism facing extinction in the wake of its disastrous failure? Both Kuhn and Keynes have something to offer on this question, and I’ll take that up next.

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Paradigm Change in Science and Economics

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In this post, I discussed normal science, a term used by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe the day to day work of scientists, focusing on the example of my brother’s work on transmission of pain in the body. In normal science, Kuhn explains, people expect the puzzles they choose to work on will have solutions that can be worked out using the paradigm, and if the first try doesn’t get the solution, scientists just keep plugging away, sharpening their instruments, their theories, their rules of engagement and trying to eliminate prejudices until they get a solution. And mostly, they do. That’s a good description of my brother’s work.

If not, generally they assume they failed, not that the answer doesn’t have a solution inside the paradigm’s limits. They put that problem to the side, and work on a related problem or maybe just move on to something different. Frequently the problem disappears as more and better techniques are created, measurements become better, theories evolve and prejudices are conquered. But if unsolved puzzles accumulate, there is growing pressure on the paradigm, and growing unease among the scientists working in the area. Kuhn gives examples:

The state of Ptolemaic astronomy was a scandal before Copernicus’ announcement. Galileo’s contributions to the study of motion depended closely upon difficulties discovered in Aristotle’s theory by scholastic critics. Newton’s new theory of light and color originated in the discovery that none of the existing pre-paradigm theories would account for the length of the spectrum, and the wave theory that replaced Newton’s was announced in the midst of growing concern about anomalies in the relation of diffraction and polarization effects to Newton’s theory. P. 67, fn omitted.

This is the crisis state. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a change in the paradigm. Kuhn analogizes the situation to political revolutions:

Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. P. 92

Another necessary condition for a paradigm shift is the existence of a new paradigm. Scientists cannot work without a paradigm, so until a new one obtains a concensus, they struggle on under the old one. New paradigms are suggested and tested, but Kuhn points out that there isn’t any way to prove that one is better than the other, because proofs only exist inside paradigms. The new paradigm has to satisfy the relevant scientific community that it will solve the old problems, and open the way to new problems. But this is a matter of persuasion, not of scientific proof, because the standards of proof are connected to a paradigm; they do not exist in some Platonic state above it all.

One final point. Kuhn says that in scientific revolutions, the new paradigm completely replaces the old one, and he gives plenty of examples.

There’s more to be said about the process of paradigm change, but this will suffice for this post. In the wake of Kuhn’s work, several papers were published trying to identify paradigm shifts on the order of the Copernican Revolution in the history of economics. One such is The “Structure of Revolutions” in Economic Thought, a 1971 article by Martin Bronfenbrenner. He thinks the history of economics is more like the Hegelian dialectic, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, than the catastrophic destruction of the previous paradigm.

Bronfenbrenner identifies three revolutions in economics as

1. The classical school, based on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and David Hume’s Political Discourses.
2. The marginal utility revolution, dating to about 1870, led by John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo.
3. The Keynesian revolution, about 1936.

He adds the response of the Chicago school as a possible fourth, and time has proved his suggestion correct.

It should be obvious that none of these revolutions destroyed the older view. Instead, they sit side-by-side, if uneasily and with some overlap. Bronfenbrenner doesn’t see a problem with the survival of the natural law as a partial explanation of 20st Century capitalism, and assumes that the future will include some of those ideas as well. This is clear from his approval of Paul Samuelson’s textbook. I point out the problems with that view in several posts here and at Naked Capitalism, including this one.

Like others, Bronfenbrenner points out that Kuhn’s definition of the term “paradigm” is loose at best. For purposes of this post, it’s sufficient to regard it as the entire set of theories, understandings, prejudices, instruments, and interpretations of the measurements of instruments that guide the scientist in the course of normal science. It is, however, important to note that neither Bronfenbrenner nor any of the other writers I’ve seen so far try to explain the sense in which the Classical School, the Marginal Utility School, the Keynesians or the Chicago School, or, for that matter, any of the other schools, constitute a paradigm in a way similar to the way General Relativity acts as a paradigm for physicists and astronomers.

That offers two more or less neutral explanations of why economists aren’t all freaked out by the failure of their theories demonstrated by the Great Crash. First, they may well assume that events like the Great Crash are just anomalies that future work will solve. That would explain the response of Gary Becker, “You need a theory to beat a theory.” Link here. Becker couldn’t imagine an alternative theory, so he just continued to work inside his old one, as if his Chicago School were a paradigm.

Second, Bronfenbrenner is right that old economic theories never die. They cannot die. Instead, in his view, they will be assumed into the heaven of some synthesis, hopefully with the favorite views of each economist on top.

As a road map for the rest of this series, what does all this say about the claims of authority of economists?

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Paradigms in Economics

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I am fascinated by the fact that economists do not seem fazed by the failure of their almost unanimous policy recommendations of deregulation and tax cuts, as I discuss here and here. Almost in unison, they chanted for decades that reducing taxes and regulation would spur growth for the benefit of all of us. The Great Crash didn’t faze them, as these posts show. So why not?

One plausible explanation is that these people are acting in bad faith in the sense Sartre uses this term. They are free to change their minds about their theories, but they are not willing act on, or even to face, that freedom because it might cost them something. This explanation seems to be behind several of Paul Krugman’s recent columns and blog posts, asking how people can have a claim to expertise when they give the same advice no matter the circumstances, and when the evidence and even the structure of their explanations contradict their advice. I think there are plenty of intellectually dishonest economists, but surely there are plenty of intellectually honest economists too.

After my previous posts a correspondent suggested I take a look at Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the wake of Kuhn’s book, a number of scholars attempted to apply the theory to economics. I think it’s helpful to look at the failures of economics through this lens.

Kuhn starts by describing what he calls normal science: the day to day practice of scientists. Their work is based on an infrastructure consisting of theories of various strengths, instruments, and techniques that together make up a paradigm. This paradigm organizes their thinking so that they have an idea of what they are doing when they do physical and thought experiments. Kuhn says that normal science uses the paradigm to solve puzzles. The puzzles themselves are set up by the paradigm, and the scientist expects to be able to solve them using the rules and equipment of the paradigm.

Here’s an example. One of my brothers was a scientist with a deep interest in the transmission of pain through the nervous system to the brain, and in analgesics, pain-killers. In the 80s, he began to wonder about the pain-killing effect of marijuana. Here’s a reasonably comprehensible paper he co-wrote in 2001, discussing the state of work on cannabinoids.

In the paper he talks about single-cell studies. We talked about this a couple of times while he was doing this work. He told me that his lab had worked out a technique for inserting a tiny filament into a brain cell of an anesthetized rat and counting how many times and how often it fired, and some other things about it. He explained how he thought that happened, and what it meant physically. He described the instruments he used in general terms, and some of the interesting ways he was using computer chips to monitor the results. I asked why. I thought it might be useful, he said.

For him, neurotransmission of pain was a huge puzzle. He wormed away at it most of his adult life. Each little step he took seemed likely to advance a detailed understanding of the puzzle, or create an instrument that might help him and his colleagues take another step. A giant puzzle. A game. The same things were going on in other labs, as the footnotes show. One of the researchers he cites wondered if the body generates substances like cannabinoids. That guy found an endocannabinoid, a naturally occurring cannabinoid, which he named anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for internal bliss. Not only a puzzle, but an opportunity for cool puns.

Kuhn’s examples are older, and from physics and chemistry, but they exhibit the same pattern. In both cases, normal science depends on a collegial understanding of the instruments, the things being measured and a shared general understanding of the way the thing being studied works.

Kuhn offers three foci of normal science: learning about the facts that the paradigm suggests are most revealing about the nature of things; facts that can be used to check the paradigm; and empirical work to articulate the paradigm in the greatest possible detail, clearing up ambiguities and reaching for further problems suggested by the paradigm.

How does economics fit into this picture? What is the paradigm? What are the problems economists are trying to solve? What is “normal economics”?

Here’s one explanation from David Andolfatto of the St. Louis Fed:

But seriously, the delivery of precise time-dated forecasts of events is a mug’s game. If this is your goal, then you probably can’t beat theory-free statistical forecasting techniques. But this is not what economics is about. The goal, instead, is to develop theories that can be used to organize our thinking about various aspects of the way an economy functions. Most of these theories are “partial” in nature, designed to address a specific set of phenomena (there is no “grand unifying theory” so many theories coexist). These theories can also be used to make conditional forecasts: IF a set of circumstances hold, THEN a number of events are likely to follow. The models based on these theories can be used as laboratories to test and measure the effect, and desirability, of alternative hypothetical policy interventions (something not possible with purely statistical forecasting models).

In previous posts I note that recommendations arising from models that do not and cannot predict crashes is worse than useless, it’s downright dangerous. Another kind of problem is that there are big disagreements about the models: whether the assumptions are correct, what they actually model, how they do it, why and whether they work and under what circumstances. Further, there are a number of schools of economics each with its own models and its own set of assumptions, overt and covert. In fact, it isn’t quite clear what the economics paradigm is, or are. These and other issues are for another day.

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Big Data: An Alternate Reason for Hacks Past and Future?

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[Fracking sites, location unknown (Simon Fraser University via Flickr)]

[Fracking sites, location unknown (Simon Fraser University via Flickr)]

On Monday, MIT’s Technology Review published an interesting read: Big Data Will Keep the Shale Boom Rolling.

Big Data. Industry players are relying on large sets of data collected across the field to make decisions. They’re not looking at daily price points alone in the market place, or at monthly and quarterly business performance. They’re evaluating comprehensive amounts of data over time, and some in real time as it is collected and distributed.

Which leads to an Aha! moment. The fastest entrant to market with the most complete and reliable data has a competitive advantage. But what if the fastest to market snatches others’ production data, faster than the data’s producer can use it when marketing their product?

One might ask who would hack fossil fuel companies’ data. The most obvious, logical answers are:

— anti-fossil fuel hackers cutting into production;
— retaliatory nation-state agents conducting cyber warfare;
— criminals looking for cash; and
— more benign scrip kiddies defacing property for fun.

But what if the hackers are none of the above? What if the hackers are other competitors (who by coincidence may be state-owned businesses) seeking information about the market ahead?

What would that look like? We’re talking really big money, impacting entire nation-state economies by breach-culled data. The kind of money that can buy governments’ silence and cooperation. Would it look as obvious as Nation A breaking the digital lock on Company B’s oil production? Or would it look far more subtle, far more deniable? Read more →

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Will Economists Replace Lawyers as First Against the Wall?

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The field [economics] is filled with anxious introspection, prompted by economists’ feeling that they are powerful but unloved, and by robust empirical evidence that they are different.
The Superiority of Economists, by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yan Algan.

In this post at Naked Capitalism, I explain that one big reason normal people don’t love economists is that they refuse to take any blame for causing the Great Crash. As a group, economists insisted that it would be great to tear down the New Deal financial regulatory system, without ever considering the potential costs of a crash. It wasn’t just that their models didn’t predict the Great Crash, it’s that their models won’t ever predict crashes. Until someone got around to tweaking them, their models did not even predict the damage a crash might cause. They had no way to evaluate the costs of crashes, but they ignored those costs, mostly on ideological grounds. They insisted to policy makers, legislators, regulators and politicians, and not least, their wealthy supporters, that things would be great if we just got rid of regulation. They were proven absolutely wrong. Then they insisted that more of the same garbage was the right solution, and their supporters agreed. And so it came to pass that we got a lousy recovery that only benefited their patrons. But that’s hardly the only reason people don’t love economists.

You’d expect some self-criticism from even the most narcissistic economists in the wake of their utter failure, but that didn’t happen. Here’s an interview of Gary Becker of the University of Chicago in December 2010 by economist Catherine Herfeld who begins by asking him whether the economics profession is in crisis. No, says Becker. Economists might begin to consider some mildly different problems, maybe, but no. Models can’t be expected to predict crashes, he says, and people respond to incentives. Economists already knew those things, so the Great Crash has no lessons for them.

Almost all economists agree with Becker’s two points. Their models and their methodology are not a problem, and do not require major changes. One crucial assumption of economists is that consumers are rational actors. When Herfeld presses Becker on the issue of the validity of that assumption and the risks that assumption entails, Becker explains so what? What’s your theory? “You need a theory to beat a theory,” he says. Policy advice based on Becker’s theories has been tried out. That advice sucks. We’d have been better off doing nothing than crashing the economy as an empirical test of his assumptions and the theories based on them. So, no. You don’t need a theory to beat a theory. Adults change their minds when their ideas fail. That’s another reason people despise these guys.

But that kind of intellectual arrogance is typical of economists, as we learn from The Superiority of Economists, by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yan Algan. The authors show that as a group economists are known for their absolute confidence in their ability to understand the economy and prescribe for us lesser mortals. They also show that economists are an insular group, not much interested in the work done in other fields of study. Here’s a demonstration of that. Herfeld asks Gary Becker this question:

[R}ationality is a concept that originated in philosophy and its various economic formulations and uses have been discussed extensively in the philosophical literature on the methodology of economics, such as by Alexander Rosenberg, Philip Mirowski, D. Wade Hands, and Mark Blaug. Were you ever interested in that literature? Or where did you get inspiration from when thinking about improving how rationality is conceived of in economics?

[Becker] Primarily, I get inspiration from my own discipline, economics. For example, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on racial discrimination. …

Becker can’t see any reason to learn what scholars in other fields think of rationality, or, apparently, racial discrimination, or anything else, for that matter, because, you know, he was a student of Milton Friedman, and he read Popper and Carnap. The rest of this answer and the next few show how Becker conceives of the intellectual life. It is exactly what Fourcade et al. describe, insular, hierarchical and to me at least, undeservedly arrogant. They describe the influence of economists in a lengthy section including this:

The upshot of economists’ confident attitude toward their own interventions in the world is that economics, unlike sociology or political science, has become a powerful transformative force. Economists do not simply depict a reality out there, they also make it happen by disseminating their advice and tools. In sociological terms, they “perform” reality. Aspects of economic theories and techniques become embedded in real-life economic processes, and become part of the equipment that economic actors and ordinary citizens use in their day-to-day economic interactions. In some cases, the practical use of economic technologies may actually align people’s behavior with its depiction by economic models. By changing the nature of economic processes from within, economics then has the power to make economic theories truer. Cites omitted.

So, there’s a third reason to loathe economists. They think human nature can and should change to match their models and their value systems, which are based on economic efficiency and unfettered markets. I don’t agree. Among other things, as I discuss in detail here, markets deal only with short run decisions, not with the long-term consequences of those decisions, which can easily lead to disastrous results. Just ask yourself how markets will allocate precious ground water in California, and ask how many almonds and how much cheap oil today are worth the end of the water supply that grows much of our food.

Here’s the fourth reason. Of course people respond to incentives, though that’s just one of a large number of influences on decisions. The question is who comes up with the incentives. Becker points out that people who took out subprime loans were responding to incentives, as if those borrowers caused the Great Crash. Who set those incentives up? Was it the poor people who got clobbered by those loans? Of course not. It was the lenders who were freed from all restraints by economists and their enablers among the rich and the politicians. Those economists who provided the policy justifications had no conception of the risks they were encouraging others to take while they pocketed their consulting fees. And after the crash, they, and specifically Becker, defended themselves by blaming the victim.

No wonder normal people don’t care for these people.

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Software Is Not Capital if You’re Not a Software Company

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PikettyCapital_coverThe Economist trumpets Thomas Piketty’s Capital and his theory, r > g, has had its first serious rebuttal, glowing like a proud parent over graduate student Matthew Rognlie’s work.

Note this bit:

Mr Rognlie mounts three main criticisms of these arguments. First, he argues that the rate of return from capital probably declines over the long run, rather than remaining high as Mr Piketty suggests, due to the law of diminishing marginal returns. Modern forms of capital, such as software, depreciate faster in value than equipment did in the past: a giant metal press might have a working life of decades while a new piece of database-management software will be obsolete in a few years at most. This means that although gross returns from wealth may well be rising, they may not necessarily be growing in net terms, since a large share of the gains that flow to owners of capital must be reinvested.

Emphasis mine.

Most commercial software used by corporations, including the example of database-management software, is licensed. Users are licensees, not owners.

Software doesn’t necessarily obsolesce, either. I’ve worked for businesses using software that was as much as twenty years old. Small businesses, in particular, can continue to run well on old accounting software, provided they don’t need highly granular reporting.

What does become obsolete is the hardware. If software no longer runs on an older system, or if it is no longer serviced by the licensor (ex: Windows XP), the licensee has simply reached the limit of the license.

This includes upgrades by software manufacturers for reasons of security improvements: if users don’t upgrade for improved security, they’re outside the limits of the license.

The only entities that might be able to claim software is capital are software companies. This might not even be the case if capital is limited to the licenses they’ve granted and claimed as assets — any accountant, tax attorney or IP attorney want to respond to this?

The confusion about software’s nature probably lies in our accounting and tax systems, which may treat software as an amortizable intangible asset. (Feel free to correct me in comments as I am not an accountant, nor a tax preparer, nor a tax attorney.)

But most commercial software remains a licensed product.

Companies are also moving toward “software as a service” (SaaS), provided a license to access software on software providers’ systems. Microsoft’s Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.com are examples of SaaS. There are even further reductions in companies’ need for investment in hardware when subscribing to “infrastructure as a service” and “platform as a service,” like IBM, Amazon, and other technology companies offer.

These are contracted services — definitely not rapidly depreciating capital assets.

What exactly does Rognlie mean by “modern forms of capital” when his understanding of software is flawed?

I haven’t looked deeply at the rest of the arguments Rognlie offered as a rebuttal to Piketty’s theory. This bit checked me short, giving me concerns about his remaining points addressing returns on wealth, and on distribution of net capital income.

[UPDATE: Do read Ed Walker’s comment about this piece in The Economist.]

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Did John Brennan Confirm NSA’s Role in Tracking Finance?

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In his talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, John Brennan was asked about terrorists’ use of offshore bank and shell companies (just after 50:00)

I must say that the US Department of the Treasury as well as other institutions of the US government have been very very effective and successful working, again, with international partners to try to uncover and uproot this, but it’s not just for terrorism purposes, it’s for organized crime, narco, um, cartels and others.

It would be thoroughly unsurprising if NSA were spying on monetary flows. After all, their dominance of international telecom cables mean they dominate the infrastructure tracking that flow. Plus there’s that whole SWIFT thing.

But it’s nice to know from John Brennan that those “other institutions” have so thoroughly uncovered and uprooted that kind of intelligence, while presumably ignoring the crimes of Jamie Dimon.

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UK More Interested in Asian Investment than Its Special Relationship

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At Salon today, I did another post on how ridiculous it is that the US just sanctioned Venezuela. As part of it, I discuss again how China and Russia are setting up new financial tools to contest our financial hegemony.

Worse, at a time when America’s dominant position in the world’s financial system is newly contested, such a claim may not only intensify Latin American opposition to U.S. intrusions, but also ignite Russian and Chinese efforts to establish alternatives to U.S. default financial tools.

For years, the U.S. has used its dominant position in the global financial system to use sanctions to punish people it doesn’t like — without much evidence those sanctions help to change the underlying behavior. The Venezuelan sanctions reflect a new degree of pettiness, given Venezuela’s own fragility in the face of depressed oil prices. And because of a confluence of issues — including the obviously bogus rationalization for these sanctions — these sanctions may backfire on several levels, both in U.S. efforts to undermine Maduro’s rule, but also in U.S. efforts to pretend its sanctions represent anything but an easy way to selectively enforce obedience to its demands.

Along those lines, the UK just ignored our concerns and joined the Chinese-financed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

The UK is the first big Western economy to apply for membership of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

The AIIB will fund Asian energy, transport and infrastructure projects.

However, the US has raised questions over the bank’s commitment to international standards on governance.

In a statement, UK Chancellor George Osborne said the UK had “actively promoted closer political and economic engagement with the Asia-Pacific region” and that joining the AIIB at the founding stage would create “an unrivalled opportunity for the UK and Asia to invest and grow together”.

The hope is that investment in the bank will give British companies an opportunity to invest in the world’s fastest growing markets.

But the US sees the Chinese effort as a ploy to dilute US control of the banking system, and has persuaded regional allies such as Australia, South Korea and Japan to stay out of the bank.

In response to the move, US National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell said: “We believe any new multilateral institution should incorporate the high standards of the World Bank and the regional development banks.”

I actually think providing legitimacy for the bank will be good for Asian countries, as it will force US-backed institutions to be more responsive.

But at the same time, it will undercut whatever power the US continues to exercise through its financial hegemony.

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Piketty Gets A Laugh At Mankiw’s Expense

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I’m not a fan of the former Bush economics adviser and Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw, so I was delighted to see Thomas Piketty make a joke about him at the recent meeting of the American Economics Association. Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies was there, attending one of the panels on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. One of those panels, packed with right-wing economists, was set up by Mankiw, who used it as a stage to attack Piketty. He and his fellow ideologues decided unanimously that the best thing to do is to impose a consumption tax, presumably as part of a package to lower taxes on the top earners and to keep capital gains taxes low and corporate taxes at their lowest level in decades.

Mankiw, at another point in his presentation, had still more embarrassing comments to make. Piketty, he intoned, must “hate the rich.” Piketty’s financial success with his best-selling book, Mankiw added, just might lead to self-loathing.

This is what passes for right wing humor in the economist class, though Collins reports that the obviously prepared bon mots “fell flat”. Then someone asked Piketty what he thought about the consumption tax idea. Collins reports his reply:

“We know something about billionaire consumption,” Piketty observed, “but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics.”

Sweet. A correspondent tells me that one of his friends was there and that this jibe brought the house down. Too bad more people don’t laugh at Mankiw and other toadies for the rich.

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