Tag Archives: markets

Calculating the economy

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One of the books I’ve read on this trip to the AEA/ASSA meetings in San Diego is The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michael Rosworski. This is a very entertaining projection of the socialist calculation debate onto modern capitalism.

41JGcj2r26L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_The starting point is the Simon/Coase realisation that big firms are internally planned economies – if it works for Walmart, why wouldn’t it work at larger scale? The authors’ hypothesis is that economic planning might work better now that we have so much more powerful computers and better data.

I’d recommend the book as an introduction to the socialist calculation debate for those unfamiliar with it (ideal for students). It cites some of my favourite books including Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty and Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries. Some chilling lines – about Stalin’s purges, for instance: “Anyone with any expertise was placed under suspicion.” It’s a great read.

Am I persuaded? Not entirely. Technology clearly will change organisational configurations, but it has just as much been decentralisation of firms and extended supply chains as it has been giant Walmart-type firms. I’m also sceptical that the data available is actually the information needed to plan an economy, or that it’s easy to access and join up. Still, it’s the right question, and a reminder that the boundary between market, state and other forms of organistaion is not set in stone but needs constant negotiation – in fact, I know a great book about this about to be published: Markets, State and People.

0FBA95F6-E1DB-4017-A90A-89A2D3C43EB7As seen at ASSA2020 in San Diego

 

 

Morals and markets

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I’ve now finished Elizabeth Anderson’s Value in Ethics and Economics, with mixed reactions. The part I really liked is her critique of utilitarianism/consequentialism. She advocates a ‘pluralist-expressive’ approach to value.

Consequentialism “promises to provide a single, simple, precise and determinate procedure of justification that employs objective calculation to overcome disputes about what to do.” Deliberation – be it rational or not – aims to deliver an optimum result on a single dimension. This is inevitably reductionist because all goods need to be made commensurate. This approach has the merit of making decisions easy to explain, and an inherent pragmatism because after all choices are always inevitable.

Anderson’s ‘expressive-pluralist’ alternative requires choices to be guided by norms which refer to ideals or evaluative concepts such as ‘respect’, ‘friendship’, ‘charity’. “Because their constitutive concepts are essentially contestable, the expressive theory cannot provide a procedure for respolving conflicting interpretations.” Confusingly, Anderson also describes this as pragmatic; I think she means realistic. This is, of course, what we do. “No compelling theoretical or practical reasons demand the global maximization of value. Evidence form our actual practice and failures to construct plausible global measures of value suggests there is no single measure of value valid for all contexts.”

The realism here is attractive, the reductionism of the former is not. And yet in public policy contexts where people’s conflicting values have to be considered, consequentialism has great force. This is more than pragmatic, I think. It serves in its own right as a form of evaluative concept to try to build consent for decisions. Having said that, of course one has to wear the pluralist spectacles too.

The weaker part of the book is the second half, applying the philosophy to an analysis of markets and cost benefit analysis. Like many critics of ‘markets’ she treats markets as an abstraction characterised by anonymity and concerned ‘merely’ with ‘use value’, absolutely failing to recognise that they are social institutions taking many forms and embedding social relations. Some economists are equally abstract, many are not. None I know would disagree with the statement that “the market does not provide a sufficient domain for the expression of all our valuations but must leave room for other social spheres to operate on non-market principles.” And while there are certainly major  limitations with cost benefit analysis, some of which I’ve written about here and here, there is a choice when it comes to issues like valuing life (QALYs) or intrinsic environmental or heritage value: either try to do this in a common metric (money), or implicitly value them at zero.

Still, it’s an interesting book. And I’ve just been recommended her Private Government by my esteemed co-author Leonard Nakamura.

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Inventing the property market

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Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain is an interesting history of exactly what the subtitle says: the institutions and practices that created the forerunner of today’s anonymous, professionalised property market out of the thickets of traditional social relations that still characterised property ownership at the end of the 18th century. It’s a very nice study of the development of an economic institution: the creation of physical marketplaces, the standardisation and publication of information flows, the development of relevant professions such as auctioneer, estate agent, surveyor, even the invention of suitable filing systems and procedures for enabling viewings of properties. This had to bring together the building of suitable premises for auction rooms or the purchase of estate agency offices, legal and governance practices, social norms, the creation of professional development pathways, and much more.

This all sounds a bit niche, perhaps, but I’m a sucker for the detail of markets as economic and social institutions (& never tire of recommending John McMillan’s Reinventing the Bazaar). This is a very nice study, and, importantly, ends with a chapter on the ‘Limits of Marketability’, looking at the battles to preserve open land and the struggle that led to the formation of the National Trust in 1970. The nascent property industry painted property markets as democratizing: “At present the land is held by the few but the day is coming when it will belong to the many,” said the Estates Chronicle in 1898. But land held by all is important too. To be read alongside Brett Christophers’ The New Enclosure (reviewed here).

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The invisible privatization

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Brett Christophers’ new book The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Land in Neoliberal Britain is eye-opening. Or perhaps jaw dropping. Its subject is the privatization of publicly-owned land in Britain since the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher. Christophers, a professor of economic geography at the University of Uppsala is a consistently interesting thinker. For instance, he was one of the first people to focus on the absurd way the contribution of the financial sector to total GDP is measured, in his Banking Across Boundaries. This new book demands attention for a remarkably little-debated aspect of the Thatcher revolution, the sale of around half of the land owned by th public sector when she was first elected.

The figures are startling in two ways. One is scale: around half of all land owned in the public sector in 1979 has been sold to private owners – including the land under council houses but much more from MoD and NHS land to school playing fields and parkland. The sum is probably more than £400bn. The other reason to be startled lies in that ‘probably’: there is scant data on what has been sold, to whom, at what price, and what remains. No figures, no debate.

One of the themes that stood out for me is the fact that the process has been a Whitehall (Treasury and Cabinet Office, assisted by the National Audit Office, whose idea of value in value for money excludes public value and public goods) assault on the wealth and power of local authorities. Christophers estimates that around 30% of the 1979 land holdings by central government and national bodies has been sold but 60% of the original holdings of local government. This means allotments, school playing fields, leisure centres, local museums, playcentres, town halls, bowling greens and so on – all formerly part of the fabric of community life. This evisceration of local assets ties in with the extraordinary burden of ‘austerity’ on local government. Surely a large number of local authorities are close to not being able to function, and so unable to deliver the services that are among those closest to people’s lives.

The book assesses the process as wholly ideological, generating none of the private sector efficiency benefits it was supposed to unleash. And, as it points out, the public sector should not be expected to behave like the private sector anyway. Why should its land be expected to generate the same financial return it could get in private hands? The public sector should be using public land to provide public goods.

The move to accrual accounting is pinpointed as a potential turning point: “Different accounting systems represent different ways of seeing: something visible under one system may not be visible under another, something accorded significant value under one system may be valued much less highly under another.” Accrual accounting makes it more likely that the value of public land will be recognised, and so bargain basement sell-offs less likely. For instance, many councils were valuing parks at £1 each. On the other hand, recognising their true worth – say £100m – makes them an even more tempting target for the Treasury to require to be sold.

As the book concludes, there is no evidence the privatization of land has delivered any significant benefits, but equally almost no serious study of the process at all. The lack of data no doubt explains why, so we owe Christophers thanks for assembling all the evidence he has managed to find.

My one quibble is the use of the term ‘neoliberal’. I think it obscures more than it enlightens, not least because those who deploy it often seem to believe all of economics is neoliberal – I still remember being gobsmacked by Wendy Brown’s bracketing of Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Lucas as essentially the same in their ideology. What’s more, the virtue-signalling to many social scientists in universities is likely to put off some other readers who would otherwise be sympathetic to the book’s argument. Michael Sandel managed to explore ‘neoliberalism’ in his bestseller What Money Can’t Buy without ever using the word, and was all the more influential for it.

Having said this, the book doesn’t massively overuse the adjective, and is well worth reading for the light it does shine – perhaps even on why Britain voted for Brexit, looking for somebody to blame for this huge but virtually unnoticed depletion of public wealth.

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Too big, full stop

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No sooner has summer ended than it’s almost Christmas – how has this happened? In between meetings and paper-writing, I have managed to read a few things. Two thrillers on journeys to and from a family visit last week, John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies and one of the outstanding Mick Herron Jackson Lamb series, Spook Street – highly recommended if new to you.

On more serious matters, I’m half way through the handsome new Stripe Press edition of Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine. And I’ve finally read Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness. This is a very interesting, and commendably concise, history of US anti-trust legislation and enforcement. The argument in a nutshell is that anti-trust was born out of a power relations confrontation between the original trusts – Rockerfeller, Carnegie etc – and the US government: Theodore Roosevelt determined on trust-busting to establish the primacy of government power. To some extent this tradition continued after the second world war with landmark cases against AT&T and IBM. But, Wu continues, the Chicago school and especially Robert Bork defanged US anti-trust enforcement by embedding so thoroughly an economic test based on a consumer welfare standard as measured only by consumer prices. Today, with digital giants so often charging zero or low prices, this is less appropriate than ever. The time has come to reaffirm that the government, not rent-extracting monopolies, runs the country.

This is an interesting and persuasive account. It is also a specifically American one. Although the underlying economic analysis concerned crosses the Atlantic, there has never been such a narrow interpretation either of consumer welfare or of how to measure it in Europe. The test in UK law is a ‘substantial lessening of competition’ with reasonably wide discretion for the competition authority, and the guidance sets out other dimensions of welfare such as quality, range, innovation – although of course price is the easiest to measure. We have had prominent cases looking at monopsony power, such as the inquiry into supermarkets. Nor has there ever been on this side a routine acceptance that the benefits of vertical integration or horizontal merger can be assumed to be passed on to consumers – in my cases we always asked about the incentive as well as the scope for efficiencies to be passed on. And, as Wu notes at the end of the book, the UK’s market inquiry tool can be very powerful.

Having said all this – and cautioning against translating Wu’s account and other influential authors such as Lina Khan – to non-US contexts, this does not mean the question of monopoly power is not a pressing one here too. The UK has an inquiry into digital competition under way (chaired by Professor Jason Furman – I’m a member). In other markets from insurance/banking to pharma there are very powerful and profitable firms sustaining their position over long periods and scant sign that new entry is possible. As I’ve written in a forthcoming paper, the competition authorities need tools to assess dynamic, Schumpeterian competition as well as their everyday static toolkit.

Behind the technicalities, there is also the issue of political power highlighted by Wu’s book. Most economists would be hesitant to re-politicise competition policy after the dire experiences of big companies using their lobbying power to protect themselves before the present regime came into force. Two former DGs of the UK’s Office of Fair Trading, John Fingleton (here) and John Vickers, have rightly pointed to the vast expansion of arbitrary ministerial say-so over mergers in proposed UK legislation. This is a route sure to make consumers worse off.

At the same time, there are valid political questions. Some companies in a number of sectors have become simply too powerful. Paul Tucker’s recent book Unelected Power highlights these, arguing for a tilt in the balance away from technical economic analysis toward political choice. I’m not persuaded that the problem stems from the use of economics in competition policy, such that dethroning economic analysis would fix the pwer imbalance. However, there do seem to be some unresolved tensions between the economic standards for assessing competition in a market, the legal interpretations, and the politics.

Much food for thought in a short book. The Curse of Bigness is a great stocking filler for the economists and lawyers in your life.

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