Tag Archives: economics

A rant about markets

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Harvey Cox’s [amazon_link id=”0674659686″ target=”_blank” ]The Market As God[/amazon_link], published in a couple of weeks, drove me nuts. I alternated between scribbling ‘X’s and ‘?!’s in the margin, and skipping over long chunks about Christian theology, in which I have zero interest. The book is built out from the notion of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in economics. Of course, ‘orthodox’ economists would use an adjective like ‘mainstream’ to describe themselves, which I guess (self-described) heterodox economists would say is the point. These debates always seem to me more relevant (or rather less irrelevant) to macro than to the empirical applied micro-economics so many of us do; I never know which label to wear myself.

[amazon_image id=”0674659686″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Market as God[/amazon_image]

Anyway, back to the book. The conclusion sums up the message: “First, the Godlike role The Market now exercises is misplaced, and the web of values, narratives and institutions it anchors needs to be critically re-examined. Second, precisely because The Market, despite its disavowals, does operate as a surrogate religion, the kind of rethinking that is needed has been deflected and discouraged.”

Many people will agree with this. I’d guess the ever-thoughtful Branko Milanovic would – he and I had a brief debate here, here and here on ‘commodification’ (ie the status of the market) recently. There are some truly interesting ethical questions in this territory.

Not in this book, however. One of my problems with Cox’s account is the assumption that there is substantial overlap between people who worship The Market and economists, because isn’t that what economics is all about? Given that I teach a whole course exploring the subtleties of the relationship between state and market in public policy, this is personally irritating. It’s also factually incorrect: many economists work on how government/collective intervention can fruitfully bring about higher economic welfare, including by influencing markets. Sure, economists are perhaps more likely than Ms Average to believe markets operate in beneficial ways (or than Mr Average when he is a businessman running a large, dominant company), but that’s far from religious faith in markets.

Market-worship was always more of a political than an economic project, although certainly there was a tide in economics of free-market rational expectations modelling – a tide at its height in the mid to late 1980s. Even the politics seems to be changing. This book comes just as here in the UK we’ve seen the new Conservative Prime Minister pronouncing the need for an industrial policy, while the system shock of the Brexit vote/Trump propularity has alerted the political classes in both the UK and US to the fact that we’re not in libertarian free market-land any more.

There were also minor irritations in the book. For instance, it paints Adam Smith as the ‘saint’ of modern economics, “the patron of the unfettered free market.” This overlooks a raft of recent work highlighting the importance of [amazon_link id=”0143105922″ target=”_blank” ]The Theory of Moral Sentiments[/amazon_link] to any interpretation of Smith – from Emma Rothschild’s [amazon_link id=”B00BNRMO08″ target=”_blank” ]Economic Sentiments[/amazon_link], Nicholas Phillipson’s biography [amazon_link id=”B003VTZRR8″ target=”_blank” ]Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life[/amazon_link], through [amazon_link id=”B01K3PL3FC” target=”_blank” ]Roger Backhouse’s history of economics[/amazon_link] to Russ Roberts’ [amazon_link id=”0241003202″ target=”_blank” ][amazon_link id=”1469029758″ target=”_blank” ]How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life[/amazon_link][/amazon_link].

Anyway, it will be clear that The Market As God falls foul of my regular gripe that it would be great if critics of economics from outside the discipline had more of an idea of what economists actually do. It would have been far more interesting if Cox had addressed, say [amazon_link id=”0007520778″ target=”_blank” ]Al Roth[/amazon_link]’s question about repugnant markets, kidney exchanges etc. Or maybe the questions raised by behavioural economics about when humans are more or less rational than pigeons or capucin monkeys. Still, if you enjoyed Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets[amazon_link id=”B00BW8NBMS” target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Sandel, Michael on 26/04/2012 unknown edition[/amazon_link] (which also irritated me hugely), you might well like this book too.

Economic thought and its idiosyncracies

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This weekend my reading was [amazon_link id=”0231172583″ target=”_blank” ]Economic Thought: A Brief History[/amazon_link] by Heinz Kurz. It really is brief, just 183 pages, starting with the Ancient Greeks and ending with behavioural economics and RCTs. So it sets out the broadest outlines of economics, with a strong bias towards macroeconomics and thinking about economic systems. Marxism is covered – indeed, gets a whole chapter of 14 pages – but industrial organisation is absent save for a bit of Schumpeter and a bit of new institutional economics.

9780231172585

Within its self-imposed limitations of space and selectivity, the book does a decent job in outlining the key features of, say, classical thought and the marginalist turn – for example, Kurz emphasises the introduction of the emphasis on the flow of commodities produced each year in classical thinking. I learned a few new names: Hermann Heinrich Gossen, anyone? I hadn’t heard of him before, but learn here that he introduced the earliest version of marginal utility theory. I thought the discussion of utility theory is particularly good. Kurz writes:

“Compared with cardinal utility theory, ordinal utility theory – with its rejection of interpersonal comparisons – dramatically privileges the individual relative to society. In this perspective, the individual, one might say, is in principle attributed a right to veto public decisions that affetc his or her (subjective) well-being … As a consequence, economic policy seems unable to improve social situations. Since every policy alternative has some gainers and som losers, how could one ever judge the gains of the former against the losses of the latter, if interpersonal utility comparisons are prohibited?”

Very clear. There are a couple of other points where Kurz highlights interesting and deep methodological issues – another one, for instance, critiques Heckher-Ohlin-Samuelson in terms of its assumption of a single homogeneous ‘quantity of capital’. And in a short section on economic geography, there’s the point that in a constant returns to scale world assumed by so much of economics (including productivity accounting), “economic activity will be evenly distributed across a homogeneous plain, carried out by autarkic units of production and consumption.”

So, some nice insights. I did find myself wondering what audience the author had in mind as he wrote. He tries to explain some concepts – indifference curves, Keynesian aggregate demand, Hicks-Kaldor compensation and Skitovsky’s rebuttal – in a couple of pages at most. Economists reading this book wouldn’t need the explainers. Normal people reading it will find these far too condensed and impenetrable. As one of the former group, I’d have traded off the attempts at explanation of basic concepts for some more of Kurz’s critique of the ideas he is covering. Still, this would be a useful book for students just starting to get into the history of thought – one step beyond [amazon_link id=”0140290060″ target=”_blank” ]The Worldly Philosophers[/amazon_link], and a prelude to a bigger book like Saadmo’s excellent [amazon_link id=”B00HRFGZ7I” target=”_blank” ]Economics Evolving[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”067163318X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (A Touchstone book)[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”B00HRFGZ7I” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economics Evolving: A History of Economic Thought by Sandmo. Agnar ( 2010 ) Paperback[/amazon_image]

Power and economics

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My esteemed colleague Adam Ozanne has written a very interesting, short book on the strange absence of the concept of power from mainstream modern economics. The book, [amazon_link id=”1137553723″ target=”_blank” ]Power and Neoclassical Economics[/amazon_link], argues that the fact that economics ignores power in social relations has also affected other social sciences, especially political science, as they have adopted techniques and approaches used in economics.

[amazon_image id=”1137553723″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Power and Neoclassical Economics: A Return to Political Economy in the Teaching of Economics[/amazon_image]

What explains the lacuna? Adam dates it to, first, the marginalist turn in economics in the 1870s, which started the process of abstracting from the particulars of reality into formalism; and then to the ordinalism of the 1930s and Lionel Robbins’ insistence that ‘positive’ and ‘normative’ economics could be separated. The new welfare economics of the 1950s finished the job. Indeed, Arrow’s famous impossibility theorem seemed to conclude that we can’t say anything practical about social choice. As the book puts it: “It must seem strange to non-economists that economic and social choice theorists have dug themselves into such a deep hole (though a very tidy, immaculately constructed hole) that they cannot even distinguish between rich and poor, but that appears to be the case.”

However, as Adam points out, an alternative interpretation of Arrow is that the actual social ordering that emerges is a function of the exercise of power (and in a way Sen has made the same point in saying other kinds of information apart from individual utilities can enter the story). The book goes on to argue that the fact that mainstream economics has nothing to say about the distribution of income and wealth is an important part of the explanation for cynicism about the subject – both among the general public and students like our university’s active and enthusiastic Post-Crash Economic Society.

The final chapters of the book discuss how power might be incorporated into economics. It notes that there are signs of stirrings in the ‘New Political Economy’ of economists such as Tim Besley and Torsten Persson and the institutional economics of others such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Adam suggests an interesting definition of power in economics as an analogy with force in physics, a dynamic that moves the social outcome in the direction of specific groups. He reinterprets classic social welfare functions as ‘political economy functions’ in a way that means they can be used in conventional general equilibrium approaches. His approach can be incorporated into co-operative game theory, a bit of the toolkit economists should feel comfortable with.

The book concludes: “Most economists are in denial about the relevance of power to economics and their own ability to fully address, let alone answer, the For Whom question so long as they neglect power. This is reflected in the textbooks they write and the teaching they offer students, and has not changed even though the sub-prime and eurozone crises of recent years provide clear evidence of the failure of many of their models, in particular dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. ….. [T]here are grounds for believing that students and the wider public are increasingly disenchanted by what is on offer.” He continues that the normative and the positive need to be distinguished but that economists cannot and should not ignore the former.

I very much liked the book – ie. warmly agree with the general argument. Surely one of the longer-term outcomes of the crisis will be – must be – to turn economics back to political economy. I’ll be thinking more about the specific means of incorporating power in economics that the book suggests; it certainly looks promising.

My one (quite major) reservation about this book is its price (currently [amazon_link id=”1137553723″ target=”_blank” ]£34.45 on Amazon[/amazon_link]). The publicist explained to me that it’s a series intended to be read as e-books, but the Kindle price is still £30, and this for a 110 page book. Piketty’s 700-page [amazon_link id=”B00I2WNYJW” target=”_blank” ]Capital in the 21st Century[/amazon_link] is less than £20 in hardback! So come on Palgrave, do your bit for economics by reducing the price and testing the elasticity of demand. Meanwhile, everyone will have to order it from the library.

Time for more Keynes

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In a blog post yesterday Benjamin Mitra-Kahn – now chief economist at IP Australia but perhaps even better known as the author of a superb thesis on the history of defining and measuring the economy – pointed out that Keynes’s works are now out of copyright. The copyright has been held by the Royal Economic Society, which has published the Collected Writings in a handsome series ([amazon_link id=”1107673739″ target=”_blank” ]The General Theory[/amazon_link] is Volume 7) (RES members can get them online).

[amazon_image id=”1107673739″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Volume 7[/amazon_image]

However, there is no reliable, reasonably priced paperback version at the moment of Keynes’s major works. (Be warned – expert readers say the paperbacks that pop up on Amazon (pirate editions until this week) are poorly produced and full of inaccuracies.)

So as well as Benjamin Mitra-Kahn’s suggestion of putting all of the works and collected papers online – a terrific idea, practical proposals needed – it would be great if a publisher would pick up the need for a paperback classic version so we can get students reading them for themselves again.

Men’s studies

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I’ve zipped through Myra Strober’s [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link], propelled both by enjoying this memoir of a life as an academic economist and by righteous anger. (In fact, I’m posting this review 3 weeks too early on the tide of this sentiment.*)

Professor Strober embarked on her career in the late 1960s, and was therefore one of the pioneering feminists to whom my generation owes so much. The book starts with her initial experience at Berkeley, being told by the department chairman that she will never get tenure – ostensibly because she lives in Palo Alto, in reality because she has children. The shock of realising the truth on her drive home across the Bay Bridge launches her into a commitment to feminism in general and to tackling the sexism of economics and the academic world in particular.

[amazon_image id=”B01CRU4QV4″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others)[/amazon_image]

This is not an angry, polemical book at all. It’s a warm and readable memoir about family and friends as well as career and the politics of gender. Professor Strober grew up in Brooklyn in a loving family, and was the first to go to college and graduate school. She tells of the tensions of moving away from that background, and also the tensions in her marriage to an ambitious medical student and researcher – a marriage which eventually ended in divorce. Athough not at all bitter in the telling, the book is a reminder of how hard it was for a woman to combine career and children. (It still is – just think about the relatively small proportion of prominent women who have children.)

Thanks in part to the battles fought by earlier cohorts of women, the sexism we face in the workplace today is as nothing compared to those early days of the struggle for recognition. But the anger reading this book kicked in when I reflected on the continuing male dominance of economics in particular – our proportion of women being closer to computer science and mathematics than to any other social or natural science. Just as I finished reading [amazon_link id=”B01CRU4QV4″ target=”_blank” ]Sharing the Work[/amazon_link] I happened upon this reflection on getting tenure written by Ellen Meara. Nor is this a US issue – it’s as true in the UK and EU. Economics has a women problem – as Justin Wolfers and Noah Smith among others have noted – and that means economics has a problem. A subject done by men about men can’t claim to be either social or a science.

There is, I think, some recognition of the problem in the economics establishment, and some well-meaning efforts to address it. However, these efforts do not yet extend to a wide acknowledgement of some fundamental points – above all that there is something wrong with the (mainly male) insiders’ definition of what makes for ‘good’ economics.

At the end of last year I sent a survey to about 30 teachers of economics in high schools, asking what they thought were the main barriers to girls choosing to study economics at university; for although the total number of people doing economics degrees has been rising in the UK, the proportion who are female has been declining. The single most popular reply was that it was the ‘character of the subject’. I recounted this to a highly sympathetic and non-sexist male colleague. “Well,” he replied, “It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to be done about this.” That’s the problem. If the trend continues, we’re going to have to rename economics ‘men’s studies’.

I admire Professor Strober for spending her career actively doing something about it. This is a book to inspire all female economists and give all male economists pause for thought. [amazon_link id=”0262034387″ target=”_blank” ]Pre-order it [/amazon_link] now!

* It’s 22 April for the Kindle edition – the hardback will be out in mid-May.