Ha-Joon Chang seems to be the economist of the moment, with yet another book published by Penguin, Economics: The User’s Guide. But what is notable for me is that he has obviously, but only obviously to me, looked either at what I have written about Say’s Law or looked at someone else who has picked up on what I have written on Say’s Law. He does the usual ritual on “supply creates its own demand” but then adds:

“There can be no such thing as a recession due to a shortfall in demand.” [p 116]

You who have heard me harangue on this for many a moon may think nothing of this, but this is precisely the definition I use myself. It is apparently and pleasingly getting out and about. Because once the focus is in the right place and on the right thing, then we can have a genuine debate. Are recessions caused by a shortfall in demand? Because you would have to be demented to believe that the Global Financial Crisis was in any way caused by a fall off in demand. Same for every other recession in history up until now. But if one merely looks at the GFC, a fall in demand because of decisions to save has to be the least plausible of all possible explanations. In fact, Chang, and I think following my lead, goes on to describe the kinds of things that those classical economists used to look at for explanations, which again you would have to be demented not automatically to look at yourself. He writes:

Any recession had to be due to exogenous factors, such as a war or the failure of a major bank.

He thinks bank failures are exogenous [ie external to the operation of the economy, like being hit by a meteorite, say]! A bank failure is precisely what might be thought of as both endogenous and not in any way a Keynesian explanation, which is based around demand failure due to too much saving, not some kind of crisis on the production side. And you would like then to know what caused the bank to fail, and whether the problem was more widespread than a single bank, since during a financial crisis there is never only one bank going to the wall.

But then he goes on to add the usual Keynesian idiocies since economists just do not seem to be able to help themselves:

Since the economy was incapable of naturally generating a recession, any government attempt to counter it, say, through deliberate deficit spending, was condemned as disturbing the natural order. This meant that recessions that could have been cut short or made milder became prolonged in the days of Classical economics.

You really do have to wonder about these blockheads! We are the midst of what may already be the most prolonged of all recessions in history, and it is by no means over yet, and he complains about classical economists’ reluctance of try to fix things by public spending. Let me once more quote from my Quadrant piece from February 2009 which was titled, The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics:

Just as the causes of this downturn cannot be charted through a Keynesian demand-deficiency model, neither can the solution. The world’s economies are not suffering from a lack of demand, and the right policy response is not a demand stimulus. Increased public sector spending will only add to the market confusions that already exist.

What is potentially catastrophic would be to try to spend our way to recovery. The recession that will follow will be deep, prolonged and potentially take years to overcome.

That is classical economics forecasting almost six years ago the prolonged recession every economy in the world is in the midst of and cannot shake off. If you would like to understand more fully what classical economists actually believed, you cannot do better than this.