Matt Nolan

Arnold Kling: Economics>Macro

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Arnold Kling is right that Macroeconomics is only a subset of economics – and as a result a failure in macroeconomics does not damn the whole economic method.

However, I think he might be giving macroeconomists a bit of a free ride here.  Think of it this way – microeconomics has evolved to generalise hypotheses and make them testable.  Microeconomists have also been careful to posit counter-factuals to their cases and discover necessary and sufficient conditions for their results.  The strength of microeconomics has lead to a burgeoning industry in “Freakonomics” style books.

Macroeconomic theory has followed micro, attempting to solve general economic situations from “individual rationality” and even applying some game theory.  However, as soon as the business hit the fan – they dumped their attempts at a framework and rushed back to arbitrary debates on the size of the “multiplier”.

Recent debates have illustrated that macroeconomists are really just “play economists” – stating that they believe in scarcity, and want to study the allocation of resources, but don’t want to put in the hard yards that microeconomists have.  Where is the general equilibrium theory?  Where is the study of multiple, heterogeneous, agents interacting in a dynamic system with poor information and imperfect institutional arrangements.  Do macroeconomists actually have a general framework (based on methodological individualism) that they agree on – like microeconomists do.

Some people posit that the separation between micro and macro is like the difference between general relativity and quantum physics – these people would have us believe that there is only one step left between reconciling these divergent disciplines and having a “general theory”.  However, doesn’t that give macro a little more credit than it deserves?

Note:  This post is supposed to be contentious – I would like to hear how macroeconomists would go about answering the claims I’ve made in this post 🙂

Matt Nolan

Labour skills and sticky wages: Is the problem worse now?

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The mass unemployment in the 1930’s has sometimes been put down to “stick wages”. Fundamentally, the value of labour fell but the price didn’t – leading firms to cut back on employment at a faster rate than would have been socially optimal.

Since then, wage stickiness appears to have eased to some degree: Unions are less powerful than they were, and employees have a greater level of understanding about why firms may have to cut nominal wages – leading to less of a psychological impact (Note: These statements are just conjecture – if you don’t agree with them feel free to state in the comments, we could really do another post on it 🙂 ).

However, does that mean that the underlying issue of labour market adjustment has abated? The short answer is no.

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Matt Nolan

The issue of debt and government

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There has been a bunch of web ink spilt on a recent article by John Cochrane (both pro and anti, we do discuss a little here) – I plan to spill a little bit more, but on a slightly different issue.

In the article he suggests that current people won’t loan to individuals but they will loan to the government – he suggests that the government could loan the money out to individual firms and household in order to get the economy rolling again.

This reminded me of Ricardian equivalence.  In Ricardian equivalence households expect any cut in taxes, without a cut in spending, to lead to higher future taxes – so they increase savings.  In this case, if government started putting money into risky projects, wouldn’t it increase the rate of return that the investors would need in order to invest in Treasuries?  If this is the case, then the existence of the type of “roundabout” lending that Cochrane discussed does not really exist – although I’m not sure how comfortable I am about spreading risk around like that 😛

Then I remembered that, if the government loses money on loans it will just increase taxes on everyone – so if people think that buying Treasuries leads to risk being “spread around” from risky ventures they will be more willing to.  I wouldn’t say this is a good thing – but if this is why money is flooding into Treasuries at the moment it does give government “scope” to lend some of it out …

Matt Nolan

Remember history when thinking of Keynesian economics

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Over at Think Markets Mario Rizzo follows the advice of Paul Krugman and discusses what Keynes has actually said about infrastructure spending (ht Greg Mankiw):

Organized public works, at home and abroad, may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organisation (and above all cannot be reversed or undone at a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle

So infrastructural investment is good when we are in some sort of reinforcing hole where effective demand is deficient and “will not” go back to our primary equilibrium. However, Keynes appears to be deriding infrastructural investment as a way to smooth the “economic cycle”.

I see this quote as justification for the idea that, if we have multiple pareto ranked equilibrium and a large shock government can help – but if we have a temporary shock to demand infrastructural investment is not the way (furthermore it says nothing about structural shocks, which is part of the current story). I don’t actually think this conclusion leads to an ability to dismiss either the view of Krugman, or the views of Mankiw – given that they ultimately have different beliefs on what is the proper description of the current events we are facing …

Matt Nolan

Obama disagrees with me

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No doubt people here know that I am concerned about any stimulus package that comes out without realising that “potential output” has taken a knock. I believe that people out there that are nervous about the stimulus package have the same concern in mind.

However, it appears that Obama does not feel the same way 🙁

Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished

Well, if he believes that the economy’s capacity is undiminished, and he believes the CBO’s potential output estimates, and he ALSO believes the economy then won’t recover then he can justify some stimulus. However, if the capacity of the economy really is undiminished he should make it clear WHY the economy won’t recover and then focus any government intervention into solving this specific problem.

Of course, I do think capacity has been diminished – at least a little. If this is solely the cause (which I’m not necessarily saying) there is little that the government can do – other than helping to reduce the cost of market adjustment …

Matt Nolan

A structure for our value judgments

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Earlier I mentioned that Paul Walker and myself had different ideas surrounding the need for a stimulus in the US. Fundamentally I think he is completely against while I see scope for some stimulus.

Over at Brad Delong’s blog he mentions a description of the stimulus by Kevin Murphy.

The structure he describes is below:

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