The New Paradigm that emerged in economic s after WWII

October 14, 2017 Leave a comment

from Robert Locke

As an historian, I am somewhat appalled at the inability of economists, including those on this blog to get the history of their own discipline straight.  The obsession has been with neoclassical economic’s attempt to turn economics into a physico-mathematical discipline as Walras phrased it, and the economists usually discuss this attempt within the historical context of their discipline pre-1945, with references, to  Walras, Marshall, Keynes, and others.

It  became clear to me over thirty years ago, that the neoclassical  effort to turn economics into a prescriptive science had failed before WWII.  I based this on good authority, when I read the following in the foreword to John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s now classic book published at Princeton UP in 1944, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior:

“The concepts of economics are fuzzy but even in those parts of economics where the descriptive problems have been handled more satisfactorily, mathematical tools have seldom been used appropriately. Mathematical economics has not achieved very much.”

If the mathematics of preWWII neoclassical economics had not achieved very much as a prescriptive science, then why study their work?  That is what Neumann and Morgenstern were asking.  The mathematics in Game theory, e.g., matrix theory and probability theory were not part of the mathematical toolkit of neoclassical economists prior to WWII.  Read more…

The International Monetary Fund’s world economic outlook in theory and practice

October 13, 2017 2 comments

from Mark Weisbrot

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its biannual “World Economic Outlook” (WEO) today, presenting a 300-page overview of the world economy and where it might be going. The Fund is one of the most powerful and influential financial institutions in the world. Despite the fact that this flagship publication, and the Fund’s hundreds of PhD economists, missed the two biggest asset bubbles in US and world history (the stock market bubble in the late 1990s and the housing bubble that triggered the Great Recession), the WEO is taken very seriously and contains much valuable data and analysis.

The fall WEO is relatively upbeat for the world economy in the short run but is more worried about downside risks in the medium term. It lists a number of concerns that anyone who cares about social or economic justice, or progress, would be concerned with, such as:

the recent surprisingly slow growth of nominal wages, which reinforces a longer trend of stagnant median wages, rising income inequality, and job polarization such that middle-skill but well-paying jobs have become increasingly scarce.

And the Fund argues that “governments should also consider correcting distortions that may have reduced workers’ bargaining power excessively” and “promote an environment conducive to sustainable real wage growth” as well as  Read more…

Keynes — the first behavioural economist

October 13, 2017 Leave a comment

from Lars Syll

To-day, in many parts of the world, it is the serious embarrassment of the banks which is the cause of our gravest concern …

[The banks] stand between the real borrower and the real lender. They have given their guarantee to the real lender; and this guarantee is only good if the money value of the asset belonging to the real borrower is worth the money which has been advanced on it.

It is for this reason that a decline in money values so severe as that which we are now experiencing threatens the solidity of the whole financial structure. Banks and bankers are by nature blind. They have not seen what was coming. Some of them … employ so-called “economists” who tell us even to-day that our troubles are due to the fact that the prices of some commodities and some services have not yet fallen enough, regardless of what should be the obvious fact that their cure, if it could be realised, would be a menace to the solvency of their institution. A “sound” banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.   Read more…

Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair: The art of marrying rich and falling upward

October 12, 2017 1 comment

from Dean Baker

Since the dawn of time men have married into prominent families as a way to improve their career prospects, but as Jared Kushner can attest, the returns to marrying well have never been greater. We may see further proof of this proposition if Donald Trump selects Kevin Warsh to replace Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve Board.

Like Kushner, Warsh’s secret to success seems to rest largely on the family he married into. Warsh’s father-in-law is the billionaire Ronald Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune and a major Republican Party donor. 

If Warsh were picked his background would provide a sharp contrast to that of Janet Yellen. Yellen developed a reputation as a highly respected academic economist, having taught at both Berkeley and Harvard, and published dozens of articles in top journals. She went to Washington to become a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors under President Clinton and then served as the chair of his Council of Economic Advisers. She then served as president of the San Francisco Fed district bank, before being appointed as vice-chair by President Obama. She was elevated to chair in 2013 after Ben Bernanke completed his second term.

She not only has held top positions, but she has had a good track record in her performance in these positions. Notably, she began to be concerned about the fallout from the collapse of the housing bubble in early 2007.  Read more…

Nobel economics: the behaviorism of economic decisions and its secret

October 12, 2017 9 comments

from David Ruccio

Lots of folks have been asking me about the significance of the so-called Nobel Prize in economics that was awarded yesterday to Richard Thaler.

They’re interested because they’ve read or heard about the large catalog of exceptions to the usual neoclassical rule of rational decision-making that has been compiled by Thaler and other behavioral economists.

One of my favorites is the “ultimatum game,” in which a player proposes an allocation of an endowment (say $5) and the second player can accept or reject the proposal. If the proposal is accepted, both players get paid according to the proposal; if the proposal is rejected, both players get nothing. What Thaler and his coauthors found is that most of the second players would reject proposals that would give them less than 25 percent of the endowment—even though, rationally, they’d be better off with even one penny in the initial offer. In other words, many individuals are willing to pay a cost (i.e., get nothing) in order to punish individuals who make an “unfair” proposal to them. Such a notion of fairness is anathema to the kind of self-interested, rational decision-making that is central to neoclassical economic theory.  Read more…

Microeconomics: an Islamic approach

October 11, 2017 3 comments

from Asad Zaman

At the heart of modern economic theory is the micro-economic model of homo economicus, who is cold, calculating and callous. This picture of humans as heartless rational robots is what leads to “Poisoning the Well: How Economic Theory damages our moral imagination” (Julie Nelson). I have provided a thorough critique of neoclassical utility theory in my paper:  The Empirical Evidence Against Neoclassical Utility Theory: A Review of the Literature,” International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2012, pp. 366-414. However, as Thomas Kuhn noted, paradigms cannot be changed by critiques; they can only be changed by providing an alternative paradigm. Thus to oppose neoclassical utility theory, we need an alternative model for human behavior. For western theorists, a natural alternative is the secular humanist model, which allows for a wide range of cognitive and emotive functions not captured in economics. For my purposes, Islam provide a more relevant model of human beings as having spiritual, emotional and rational dimensions. This model speaks directly to my audience.

It is also true that, regardless of how we try, it is impossible to do economics without notions of morality, justice, equity and fair-play. Currently economics pretends to be positive, which means that it sneaks in very questionable (indeed, poisonous) value judgments (like that of Gauthier) into the framework, without explicit discussion. I have explained how the apparently objective concept of scarcity is actually built upon hidden foundations of three major value judgments about exogeneity of tastes, sacredness of property rights, and the idea that (unobservable) human welfare directly corresponds to  (observable) human choice behavior:; see  the normative foundations of scarcity.real-world economics review, issue no. 61. 22. Again to oppose neoclassical micro, we must introduce an alternative ethical and moral framework. Here again it suits my purpose and my audience to use an Islamic framework for this purpose.

Below, I provide a link to a summary of the first lecture I gave, in a unique course on Microeconomics.  read more

Nudges, individual behavior and neoliberalism

October 11, 2017 Leave a comment

from Maria Alejandra Madi

The concept of nudge became popular after the publication of the 2008 book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness, written by Cass Sunstein and the most recent Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler.  According to the authors, nudge refers to “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008).

In a previous paper, Thaler and Sunstien (2003) highlighted the paternalistic intention and the libertarian tone that overwhelm the concept. As a result, while policymakers shape contexts of individual choice towards optimal policy goals, individuals are free to choose.

Currently, nudges are used to foster social policy goals, such as the so called consumer protection. The aim of the nudge approach is both to test non-coercive alternatives to traditional regulation and to enhance cooperation between the public and the private sector.  Indeed, after 2008, a Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) was created in the UK and in many others countries – like Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, U.S. and Qatar. Since 2010, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in the UK has been exploring and testing policy options by means of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Taking into account the American experience, the Obama’s administration stimulated the introduction of nudges in new regulations to generate welfare with cost effectiveness.

Considering this background, the relevant question is: which are the reasons that explain the increasing acceptance of the nudge approach to public policy?      read more

Nobel Committee making a colossal fool of itself

October 10, 2017 2 comments

from Lars Syll

In its ‘scientific background’ description on the 2017 ‘Nobel prize’ in economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences writes (emphasis added):

dumstrut-317x330In order to build useful models, economists make simplifying assumptions. A common and fruitful simplification is to assume that agents are perfectly rational. This simplification has enabled economists to build powerful models to analyze a multitude of different economic issues and markets.

 

badluck

What absolute nonsense! Writing this and at the same time giving the prize to an economist that has devoted his whole career to show how utterly wrong this modelling strategy is, is truly an amazing case of having bad luck when thinking …

Richard Thaler gets the 2017 ‘Nobel prize’

October 10, 2017 13 comments

from Lars Syll

150511_tbq_thaler_portraitToday The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it  has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2017 to Richard Thaler.

A good choice for once!

To yours truly Thaler’s main contribution has been to show that one of the main building blocks of modern mainstream economics — expected utility theory — is fundamentally wrong.

If a friend of yours offered you a gamble on the toss of a coin where you could lose €100 or win €200, would you accept it? Probably not. But if you were offered to make one hundred such bets, you would probably be willing to accept it, since most of us see that the aggregated gamble of one hundred 50–50 lose €100/gain €200 bets has an expected return of €5000 (and making our probabilistic calculations we find out that there is only a 0.04% risk of losing any money).

Unfortunately – at least if you want to adhere to the standard neoclassical expected utility maximization theory – you are then considered irrational! A mainstream neoclassical utility maximizer that rejects the single gamble should also reject the aggregate offer.

In Matthew Rabin’s and Richard Thaler’s modern classic Risk Aversion it is forcefully and convincingly shown that expected utility theory does not explain actual behaviour and choices.  Read more…

Modern macro-economics and the sad truth about decoupling

October 9, 2017 1 comment

Decoupling is the idea that when societies get richer, additional units of GDP will require less physical resources and will produce less carbon dioxide. This seems true when we look at national rich country production data. But it is not true when we look at rich country consumption data – as we outsourced energy and material intensive parts of producing our consumption goods to developing countries. We really have to blame our consumption pattern… Look here for an article of Mir and Storm (2016) about this; importantly they used a new comprehensive international database to derive these results. Schandle et al (2017) derive a somewhat comparable result from another new database (and look here for the present shortage of sand):

The international industrial ecology (IE) research community and United Nations (UN) Environment have, for the first time, agreed on an authoritative and comprehensive data set for globalmaterial extraction and trade covering 40 years of global economic activity and natural resource use… Only if economic growth and human development can become substantially decoupled from accelerating material use, waste, and emissions can the tensions inherent in the Sustainable Development Goals be resolved and inclusive human development be achieved. … The global results show a massive increase in materials extraction from 22 billion tonnes (Bt) in 1970 to 70 Bt in 2010, and an acceleration in material extraction since 2000

Read more…

Inequality and immiseration (4 graphs)

October 9, 2017 3 comments

from David Ruccio

It’s clear that, for decades now, American workers have been falling further and further behind. And there’s simply no justification for this sorry state of affairs—nothing that can rationalize or excuse the growing gap between the majority of people who work for a living and the tiny group at the top.

But that doesn’t stop mainstream economists from trying.

fredgraph

Look, they say, American workers are clearly better off than they were before. Both real weekly earnings (the blue line in the chart) and the median household income (the red line) are higher than they were thirty years ago.   Read more…

Yes, economics has a problem with women

October 8, 2017 2 comments

from Julie Nelson

Yes, economics has a problem with women. In the news recently we’ve heard about the study of the Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) on-line forum. Student researcher Alice H. Wu found that posts about women were far more likely to contain words about their personal and physical issues (including “hot,” “lesbian,” “cute,” and “raped” ) than posts about men, which tended to focus more on academic and professional topics. As a woman who has been in the profession for over three decades, however, this is hardly news.

Dismissive treat of women, and of issues that impact women more than men, comes not only from the sorts of immature cowards who vent anonymously on EJMR, but even from men who probably don’t think of themselves as sexist. And because going along with professional fashion may be necessary for advancement, women economists also sometimes play along with the dominant view.

Consider a few other cases I’ve noticed during my thirty years in the profession:   Read more…

Geography as an Example

October 7, 2017 2 comments

from Peter Radford

Let me be very quick:

Geography is not taught [if it is taught at all] as if there are no rivers, mountains, plains, valleys, coasts, seas, or oceans. Cities, towns, villages and the networks that connect them exist in even the most elementary geography lesson. Geographers don’t begin their lessons by ignoring reality. They dive right in and use the real world as the backdrop for teaching the processes and forces that result in what we actually see.

So why does economics not start this way?

Why does economics begin with the unreal and then make a sequence of adjustments to get closer to reality? Perhaps it’s because geographers cannot hide reality from their students: its all around us everyday. But economists are dealing with something more abstract, so they can get away with beginning with fantasy.

We can argue back and forth over how close economics ever gets to reality, but few would argue that economics 101 is far too simple a view and is far too riddled with unworldly assumptions to be of much value as a description of real economies.  Read more…

Why game theory will be nothing but a footnote in the history of social science

October 6, 2017 15 comments

from Lars Syll

Nash equilibrium has since it was introduced back in the 50’s come to be the standard solution concept used by game theorists. The justification for its use has mainly built on dubious and contentious assumptions like ‘common knowledge’ and individuals exclusively identified as instrumentally rational. And as if that wasn’t enough, one actually, to ‘save’ the Holy Equilibrium Grail, has had to further make the ridiculously unreal assumption that those individuals have ‘consistently aligned beliefs’ — effectively treating different individuals as incarnations of the microfoundationalist ‘representative agent.’

In the beginning — in the 50’s and 60’s — hopes were high that game theory would enhance our possibilities of understanding/explaining the behaviour of interacting actors in non-parametric settings. And this is where we ended up! A sad story, indeed, showing the limits of methodological individualism and instrumental rationality.

Why not give up on the Nash concept altogether? Why not give up the vain dream of trying to understand social interaction by reducing it to something that can be analyzed within a grotesquely unreal model of instrumentally interacting identical robot imitations?  Read more…

Promises, promises (3 graphs)

October 6, 2017 5 comments

from David Ruccio

They keep promising, ever since the recovery from the Great Recession started more than eight years ago, that workers’ wages will finally begin to increase. But they’re not.

Sure, profits continue to rise. And so is the stock market. But not wages. And mainstream economists can’t come up with an adequate explanation of why that’s the case.

U3-wages

We’ve all heard or read the story. According to mainstream economists, as the unemployment rate falls (the blue line in the chart above), a labor shortage will be created and workers’ wages (the red line) will begin to rise.   Read more…

Las Vegas

October 5, 2017 7 comments

from Peter Radford

So we go through it all again.

We go through the constant call for payers. The incessant search for reasons; the outpouring of emotion; the interviews; the graphics; the enumeration of mayhem; the grief of families; the interviews with experts; and the silence of the voices lost.

There are never, however, efforts to deal with the problem.

America is obsessed with guns. It adores them It worships them. It is sick with guns.

Blame it on the foolishness of the second amendment. Or, more pointedly, blame it on the truly stupid interpretation of that foolish amendment.

And blame it on a nation that clings stubbornly to the illusion that a few men a couple of hundred years ago would endorse the twisted version of their vision that the second amendment has become. They surely would not. They would move on, just as America today refuses to move on. The need for a well-armed militia is hardly relevant in today’s world. It is an artifact of history. Our contemporary problem is not the need for a militia, it is our need to rein in the gun lobbyists and the gun makers who peddle death.

Economics has a concept called “revealed preference”. Like it or not we can apply it to yesterday’s sickening violence. Because preferences are inscrutable to analysts — they are hidden within the minds of consumers — economists are forced to rely on what people actually purchase in order to define them. The assumption being that consumers reveal their preferences in their purchasing behavior. That there may be a million other causes for why people act as they do, but economists zero in own what they can measure. The immeasurable is ignored.  Read more…

Rational expectations — the triumph of ideology over science

October 5, 2017 5 comments

from Lars Syll

Research shows not only that individuals sometimes act differently than standard economic theories predict, but that they do so regularly, systematically, and in ways that can be understood and interpreted through alternative hypotheses, competing with those utilised by orthodox economists.

Senate Banking Subcommittee On Financial Institutions Hearing With StiglitzTo most market participants — and, indeed, ordinary observers — this does not seem like big news … In fact, this irrationality is no news to the economics profession either. John Maynard Keynes long ago described the stock market as based not on rational individuals struggling to uncover market fundamentals, but as a beauty contest in which the winner is the one who guesses best what the judges will say …

Adam Smith’s invisible hand — the idea that free markets lead to efficiency as if guided by unseen forces — is invisible, at least in part, because it is not there …

For more than 20 years, economists were enthralled by so-called “rational expectations” models which assumed that all participants have the same (if not perfect) information and act perfectly rationally, that markets are perfectly efficient, that unemployment never exists (except when caused by greedy unions or government minimum wages), and where there is never any credit rationing.

That such models prevailed, especially in America’s graduate schools, despite evidence to the contrary, bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science. Unfortunately, students of these graduate programmes now act as policymakers in many countries, and are trying to implement programmes based on the ideas that have come to be called market fundamentalism … Good science recognises its limitations, but the prophets of rational expectations have usually shown no such modesty.

Joseph Stiglitz

Read more…

Mo’ better inequality blues

October 4, 2017 2 comments

from David Ruccio

Income shares

The latest Federal Reserve Board’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (pdf) is out and the news is not good—at least for the majority of Americans. They’re falling further and further behind those at the top.

Sure, on the surface, the results for the latest period of recovery from the Second Great Depression appear to be positive. Between 2013 and 2016, real gross domestic product in the United States grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, the civilian unemployment rate fell from 7.5 percent to 5 percent, and the annual rate of inflation averaged only 0.8 percent.   Read more…

The Workplace — a few charts

October 4, 2017 6 comments

from Peter Radford

I have tried to use diagrams to explain the vast impact that the never ending search for higher shareholder value has had on the American workplace. Here is my attempt to show what the old workplace looked like in terms of the benefits to a worker …

Read more…

The Republicans’ tax plan will impede growth

October 3, 2017 1 comment

from Dean Baker

Surprising no one, the Republicans outlined a tax plan that could mean huge tax cuts for the very rich with little or no tax reductions for the bulk of lower and middle income taxpayers. However in spite of their claimed “pro-growth” agenda, the plan included several provisions that will likely be a boon to the tax shelter industry and therefore an impediment to growth.

The giveaways in the tax plan include the elimination of the estate tax, a great benefit to the tiny portion of the population that will have more than $10 million to pass on to their children. The plan also calls for the elimination of the alternative minimum tax (AMT). This is a provision that only affects high end taxpayers. It ensures that they pay a minimal level of tax even if they have managed to effectively used loopholes to limit their tax liability. Donald Trump was subject to AMT in the one tax return which was disclosed in part.

And the tax plan lowers the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. For a Wall Street trader type earning $2 million a year, this can mean savings of more than $50,000 a year.

We can’t know yet what the rest of us will get since they haven’t bothered to figure out where the bracket cutoffs will be. We do know is it not likely to be much.

The Republicans have touted their plan to double the standard deduction for a single individual from $6,350 to $12,700. While that sounds really generous, they are also eliminating the personal exemption of $4,050. This means that under their plan, the first $12,700 of income would be untaxed, compared to $10,400 now.  Read more…