Category Archives: Law of Markets

Cultural economics and the history of economic thought

Posted on by
Reply

I have submitted a paper to a conference on cultural economics and have been asked to explain how a paper on the history of economic thought belongs in a conference on cultural economics. Since the premise of the letter to me was, in the words of the conference organiser, “the more the merrier”, the query was entirely friendly. This is my reply:

I am all for the more the merrier and I must tell you that attending the conference does seem a very copasetic way to spend a few days in Montreal at the start of summer. So I will begin by saying that I have approval to attend your conference since I am already attending the HES conference in the previous week and my confreres will be there already. Nevertheless, I would very much like to help chisel out a bit more territory for cultural economics which is what I am hoping to do with my paper.

The notion that lies behind it came to me in this review of my Defending the History of Economic Thought written by my friend AW whom I am sure you know very well. There he wrote (using the initials IH for Intellectual History):

“More fruitfully, Kates reminds us that HET can be ‘a conversation with economists of the past on contemporary questions.’ Now we are talking IH, the opportunity cost of which needs to be justified. In my opinion, the value of IH to the apprentice economist depends on what kind of economist we are training. There is a large demand, in both the private and public sectors, for skilled technicians in essentially subordinate positions. IH is of no more professional importance to them than Shakespeare or Mozart. But if we are training high-status economists – the Krugmans and Stiglitzes of this world, who play a large part in public affairs and in elite universities – then we must encourage a wide and humane culture: literary, philosophical, historical, artistic and scientific. IH certainly belongs in the mix here. The great Paul Samuelson was a better economist (of this kind) for his ‘conversations’ – often quite disputatious – with Quesnay, Hume, Adam Smith, Thünen and Marx. At his Nobel Prize banquet he listed among the conditions for academic success in economics, fourthly: ‘you must read the works of the great masters.’”

In my book, I did not entirely neglect this side of the issue but I cannot say that I explored it thoroughly either. And while I completely agree with AW in relation to its necessity amongst the elite of the profession, I am not sure that I would wish to stop there since when someone is an undergraduate, or even a graduate student, it is impossible to know who is going to be at the elite of the profession 20-30 years hence. So that is why my abstract is written as it is:

“There is a growing recognition that economists need to study the history of their subject not just because it helps to understand how economies work, but also because it is part of the transmission of cultural traditions. It is not just that knowing the works of the great economists of the past, such as Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, is valuable for their economic insights, but may be even more valuable for the traditions they represent. This paper looks at the importance of the history of economic thought in terms of the cultural transmission such studies represent. From that premise, it goes on to suggest how the history of economics should be taught so that both the economics of earlier times is understood as well as providing deeper insights into the cultures of both their own times and, by way of contrast, our own.”

Nor should you think that this is a late conversion. As part of the course I teach which is based on the book I wrote, there is a major section on the history of economic thought whose importance I explain not just in relation to helping them understand the theory we teach but also this, which is quoted from my Free Market Economics (Kates 2011: 181):

“It is also important, as a matter of general cultural awareness, to know the great economists of the past who have had an influence on the way in which we think about economic matters. For good or ill, these people have influenced our lives more than any other people in the social sciences because it is based on their theories that our economic structures are organised. This is true irrespective of the kind of economic system one happens to live within.”

I am always struck by how little any of my students know about the historical and intellectual traditions of their own culture. All of the following make at least walk-on appearances although most are treated at length: Adam Smith, J.-B. Say, T.R. Malthus, David Ricardo, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Stanley Jevons, Karl Menger, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshall, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and J.M. Keynes. On more minor members of the economics tradition, I throw in Robert Torrens, Walter Bagehot, Henry Clay, Fred Taylor, Gottfried Haberler, Paul Samuelson, Gary Becker and William Baumol. It will not, of course, surprise you that even in my class of graduate students, the only one that any of them have ever heard of is Marx. To encourage someone to speak up, I always say (as a joke but they can’t be 100% sure) that I will give an automatic “A” to anyone who can tell me a single historical fact about John Stuart Mill. I have had only one taker in the last five years. Their cultural knowledge is pitiful. My course is a tiny experiment in trying to do better. And I might note that as I begin this three hour class on the history of economics, I always say to them that for some this will be the longest three hours of their lives but for others it will be amongst the best experiences they will have in a classroom during their entire university career. And at the break, around half don’t come back but the half that remain feel they have learned something worthwhile which gives them some sense of what they have missed out on had they actually had a genuinely liberal education.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting as a subject for a paper. I have already written up some of what I intend to give but will leave it in your hands whether space can be found for me to present at the conference. I do, in any case, look forward to being there in June.

With kindest best wishes

Government ‘investment’ does not equal growth

Posted on by
Reply

Judy Sloan’s column from The Australian today goes under the heading, Public spending won’t fuel the growth engine. I mention this on the same day as I have received word that my paper on Mill’s Fourth Proposition on Capital has been accepted for publication.

First Mill. In 1848, John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy included his four propositions on capital which not only never challenged in his lifetime, the fourth, that demand for commodities is not demand for labour, was described by Leslie Stephen in 1876 as the “best test of a sound economist”. It was the pons asinorum of classical economics, the divide that separated those who could understand economics from those who could not. But what is remarkable is that since that date in 1876, not only has there not been another economist to have embraced this statement in full, but it has been challenged by some of the greatest names in the history of economics – Marshall, Pigou, Hayek are just some amongst a quite extraordinary array of economists from every side of the economics divide who have tried to explain what Mill meant. To my astonishment, I am literally the first person since 1876 who has argued in print that what Mill wrote is literally true. It is the best test of a sound economist.

And what the proposition meant, as the words plainly state, is that buying non-value-adding goods and services – and here the issue is public spending in particular – will not lead to increased employment because it does not lead to economic growth. A Keynesian stimulus is therefore doomed to fail, evidence for which has been accumulating at an astronomical rate since 2009.

Judy in her column has brought forward evidence from a paper published in the UK whose subtitle is, “Government ‘investment’ does not equal growth” and written by an economist by name of Brian Sturgess. Here is Judy’s conclusion:

If the government is intent on spending even greater proportions of GDP on infrastructure — which was already ramped up under the Labor government — it must ensure that only projects for which the benefits far exceed the costs are approved. Spending money on infrastructure is no silver bullet to achieving economic growth and better living standards. Let’s just hope the audit commission has taken on board some of Sturgess’s conclusions.

Yes, let us hope our government has taken on these conclusions which once went under the collective name Say’s Law.

Where are the critics of Keynes?

Posted on by
Reply

I put the following post up at the History of Economics list the other day because it exactly reflects a problem I am having.

I am doing some work on Keynesian economics in the period following the Global Financial Crisis. It just may be that I do not know where to look but I am having trouble finding articles of any kind criticising Keynesian models and the theory behind public sector spending and the stimulus. Can anyone help?

And as an additional query, although Mises, Hayek and Friedman are seen as “anti-Keynesian” whatever that may mean, again there seems to be a dearth of articles by them critical of Keynesian theory as it relates to public sector spending and the stimulus. So again, can anyone help?

Responses both online and offline would be greatly appreciated.

There are other economic traditions, from Austrian to Marxist, but each keeps to itself without bothering to actually criticise explicitly what they think is wrong with Keynesian analysis. And for many of the traditions, public spending in recessions is the least of their aims in changing the nature of policy based on the theories proposed. And while there have been a number of useful suggestions that have been sent to me offline as well as discussed online, there is no great cache of anti-Keynesian material anywhere that anyone has been able to unearth.

It would be one thing if the stimulus had been a no-questions-asked success, or even a mid-level so-so success, but instead it has been the most abject failure with every economy struggling to untrack from the debt and deficits the stimulus has caused. So where are the critics?

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

Posted on by
Reply

The following article on the greatest economist of the millennium was published on January 4, 2000 as one of the last of my regular columns in the Canberra Times. It was a follow up to the article on the ten most influential economists of the century that had been published two weeks before.

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

To choose the greatest economist of the past thousand years to some extent invites the question whether the study of economics has even existed over that span of time.

Economic questions have certainly been matters of the deepest consideration for as long as humans have had commercial relations. Hammurabi’s Code, the first recorded attempt at a written system of law, sought to fix prices. Aristotle’s arguments against the charging of interest remained an obstacle to economic development for more than fifteen hundred years.

But the actual attempt to isolate an economic system from within the on-going blur of events, and then make judgements about what ought to be done, is probably no older than the sixteenth century. It was not until then that the first pamphleteers attempted to understand the structure of the economies in which they lived and to persuade governments about the policies they ought to adopt. These were the ancestors of the economists of today.

Who then was the greatest economist of the millennium? In my view it was John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose great work, his Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, was first published in 1848. There were to be seven editions during Mill’s life and it was used as a text, with few concerns about its antiquity, well into the twentieth century.

The year of publication of Mill’s Principles is one of the most significant in world history. It was the year of European revolution and in that year and for that reason Karl Marx (who is definitely not the runner up) published his Communist Manifesto. The contrasting visions of Marx and Mill were to reverberate down the succeeding years in a battle for the allegiance of the whole of the human race, a battle which has not ended even to this day.

To Marx the unit of analysis was the economic class to which one belonged. To Mill, what mattered was the individual.

The world of Marx was a world of class conflict in which the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, exploited those who laboured but earned barely enough to keep alive.

The world as seen by Mill was strangely similar to the one inhabited by Marx, but with a recognition that an economic system based on personal liberty was one in which even those ground down by the burdens of poverty could have their material wellbeing vastly improved and their political freedoms at the same time preserved.

In one of the most remarkable passages ever written, listen to Mill’s judgement on whether the world as he knew it, if it could not be made to change, was preferable to a system in which all property was communally held.

If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour … if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.

The twentieth century has been a war of ideologies in which the rights of the individual have been crushed time and again by the dictates of the state. Both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships ruthlessly suppressed human rights in the name of a higher truth.

The cold war was fought over little more than the structure of the economic system. Massive damage was inflicted on large swaths of the world’s political landscape due to the attempts made to turn collectivist economic theories into a living reality.

Indeed, much of what is now called the third world continues to live in desperate poverty because of the introduction of central direction into their economies, an approach to solving the economic problem which has never yet worked in practice and whose continuation will guarantee poverty for so long as such attempts persist.

There is, of course, much we have learned since his time that makes Mill an imperfect guide to the operation of the economic system, although there are many worse being written even now. His theory of value, to which he believed nothing need ever be added, is the most famous instance of Mill having been superseded by the subsequent work of a later generation of economists.

Yet at the start of the new millennium, we live in the world bequeathed to us by Mill. The politics of On Liberty united with the basic propositions of his economics of limited government, free contract and individual initiative provide the blueprint for a future filled with hope and the promise of a lasting prosperity.

The most influential economists of the twentieth century

Posted on by
Reply

The following article on the ten most important economists of the twentieth century was published in the Canberra Times on December 21, 1999 just as the century was coming to an end. Economics being ultimately about influencing the political decision making process, the criterion used to frame the list was based on their influence over policy. It was no more than a personal statement but oddly or not, it was the only such list published at the time. So here they are, my list of the Ten Most Influential Economists of the Twentieth Century. And if you find this of interest, you might then have a look at my note on the greatest economist of the milennium.

Who were the century’s most important economists? The following presents my own selection of the ten economists of the past hundred years who have had the greatest influence on policy.

1. John Maynard Keynes is far and away this century’s most influential economist, but in saying this it should not be thought I believe that influence as having been for the good. Until the publication of his General Theory in 1936 it was well understood that public spending dragged an economy down rather than propping it up. It will be well into the next century before his destructive influence will have finally disappeared.

2. Friedrich von Hayek is the economist of choice for those nations who have lived under communism these past fifty years. His name today is virtually unknown in the West, but within those economies trying to resurrect free markets, his is the guidance most frequently sought. His Road to Serfdom is beloved by anyone who treasures political freedom.

3. Ludwig von Mises took the fight up to the socialist dogmas of the early twentieth century and showed on paper that no economy could ever solve the problem of allocating resources without a price mechanism, free markets and private property. Who doesn’t know it now? He knew it eighty years ago.

4. Milton Friedman has been the single most important advocate of free markets in the late twentieth century. He was also instrumental in turning the attention of governments away from Keynesian policies, which had created massive worldwide inflation, towards the need for monetary disciplines and a balanced budget. Much of what sounds like the mantra of the economics profession today Friedman had advocated almost on his own in the early years of the post-War period.

5. Arthur Pigou is in many ways my favourite. A conscientious objector during World War I, he nevertheless spent his summers as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. He also wrote the Economics of Welfare which provided the basic framework in which to consider how best to deal with harmful side effects (“externalities”) to the production process. Most of the solutions to greenhouse problems developed by economists today are based on his original work.

6. Paul Samuelson makes the list twice over. His Foundations of Economic Analysis changed the study of economics from a subject based on words into a discipline where without mathematical ability one is entirely lost. But even had he not written his Foundations, his first year text, simply titled Economics, is easily the most influential of our time, having educated three generations in Keynesian sophistries whose baneful effects are indelibly imprinted on the profession.

7. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote popular works on economics which had a massive influence in their time. His basic line was that wage and price controls are an absolute necessity if an economy is to be run at full employment with low inflation. More countries than one ended up adopting such controls whose only effects were to prolong inflation and lower employment. His books still make entertaining reading; just don’t follow the advice.

8. John Hicks was a prolific writer on a wide variety of subjects but his lasting claim to fame is based on a 1937 article, “Mr Keynes and the Classics”, in which he developed an apparatus taught to every aspiring economist. These IS-LM curves show how playing around with aggregate demand can supposedly affect the level of economic activity. It is still how almost every economist is taught to think.

9. Bill Phillips invented the Phillips curve, a device for relating the growth in prices to the growth in unemployment. Debates over policy stemming from this original model have been legion. To this day the Phillips curve sits at the core of discussions over the proper conduct of monetary and interest rate policies.

10. Robert Lucas is famed for developing the theory of “rational expectations” which explains how anticipation of the effects of government policy can prevent that policy from doing what it was intended to do. It is one of the standard ways used to explain why Keynesian policies never work in practice.

It has been a long century and these have been the economists whose names have mattered. Aside from ethnic and religious conflict, no controversies are as intense as those over how economies work. Wars and revolutions have been fought over nothing other than the architecture of the economic system. Passionate differences over economic matters are never ending.

Economists attempt to provide satisfying answers to the age old questions of how to organise production, who should receive how much of what is produced, and what should be the basis of this division.

A century from now the names will be different, but what may be said with certainty is this: the issues will be much the same as those we are dealing with today.

Keynes and the coming Chinese recession

Posted on by
Reply

I realise I haven’t been haranguing you about the menace of Keynesian economics for a while so thought I’d remind you of its enduring horrors as there is unanimous agreement that Australia has to get its fiscal house in order. The origins of that disorder are, of course, in the Keynesian policies put in place during the GFC. Just hearing about Kevin Rudd’s 48-hour decision process for the pink batt adventure is a reminder of just how useless, in terms of productivity and real growth, almost all government spending is. A perfect paradigm example. Past the first ten percent, government spending is unproductive whatever other benefits there may or may not be.

As for a recantation from the economics community, not so much as a word. You do have to wonder if they are ever going to get it right. And if they don’t get it right, how policy is ever going to get it right. The latest episode of wrongheaded analysis shows up on the ABC with this story not about Australia but about China. Apparently the problem with the Chinese economy is debt:

In recent times, the boom has been sustained by an explosion in lending by banks and so-called “shadow banks”. If the current scale of lending proves to be unsustainable, could that end the boom and result in China becoming the next country to succumb to the impact of unproductive debt? [my bolding]

Ah, “unproductive debt”! What, pray tell, is that? It is, in fact, exactly what every pre-Keynesian classical economist warned against. It’s spending on non-value-adding forms of production, the usual object of government spending in virtually every one of its forms. There it is, the problem right before their eyes but invisible all the same. Whether one thinks of it in money terms, so that debt is taken on for forms of production which ultimately do not earn sufficient revenue to repay what is owed, or it is thought of it as using up productive resources in ways which do not replace the capital that has gone into that particular form of production, one way or the other the economy is going backwards and not ahead. Keynesian economics is poison but who’s to know? This is what the Chinese did:

The program clearly lays out how the Chinese leadership responded to the prospect of a global financial crisis and possibility of a world-wide depression. The response focused on a spending and investment program carried out on a scale never seen before in human history. Over the past five years, a new skyscraper has been built every five days in China – along with 30 new airports and 26,000 miles of motorways.

Well there was certainly an enormous quantum of resources used up which, incidentally, also happens in highly productive investments. In this case, however, there are the office building, there are the roads, there are the airports, but none of them will generate the revenue to repay their costs. A Keynesian program to the back teeth with predictable results, or at least predictable if you start with Say’s Law. Starting from Keynes it is all a mystery with no explanation. And where do they think it will end up:

Interviewing key players including former American Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority Lord Adair Turner and Charlene Chu, a leading Chinese banking analyst, reporter Robert Peston reveals how China’s extraordinary spending has left the country with levels of debt that many believe can only result in an economic crash with untold consequences for the world – particularly resource-driven economies like Australia.

If you thought the last five years were bad, apparently the next five will be even worse. Meantime, ending the reign of Keynes and return to classical economic theory would be a start in even understanding what’s going on never mind actually getting our economies untracked.

First use of aggregate demand and aggregate supply

Posted on by
Reply

Robin Neill put the following question up on the Societies for the History of Economics (SHOE) list last night:

Colleagues:

Who and when was the terms “aggregate demand” and “aggregate supply” first used?

I have now written both to the list and to Robin. Here is what I wrote to Robin:

Dear Robin

You have put the cat amongst the pigeons with your question, if only they knew. Using superhuman restraint, I did not point out that the use of aggregate demand was forbidden amongst economists precisely because they had all absorbed Say’s Law. If you understand that demand is constituted by supply, then so far as aggregates go, there is no aggregate demand separate from aggregate supply, and anyways, it is the structure of production, i.e. the structure of supply, that matters and not the aggregate. Not that the classics ignored such aggregates. John Stuart Mill was pretty straightforward, but on behalf of the classical view, to wit, “[aggregate] demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. Again a complete contradiction of modern macro. I don’t know if you’ve seen either, but I discuss AD in both my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution and my Free Market Economics. The 2nd ed of FME will be coming out in a few months so if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d wait for that. But in short form, I have argued in every place I can that the introduction of AD was Keynes’s big contribution which has ruined economic theory, macroecvonomics and the theory of the cycle ever since.

And this is what I wrote to SHOE:

The question really is who can take us back before Keynes? So here, from The General Theory page 25:

“Let Z be the aggregate supply price of the output from employing N men, the relationship between Z and N being written Z = φ(N), which can be called the Aggregate Supply Function. Similarly, let D be the proceeds which entrepreneurs expect to receive from the employment of N men, the relationship between D and N being written D = f(N), which can be called the Aggregate Demand Function.”

And then there is this from page 32:

“The idea that we can safely neglect the aggregate demand function is fundamental to the Ricardian economics, which underlie what we have been taught for more than a century. Malthus, indeed, had vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective demand to be deficient; but vainly. For, since Malthus was unable to explain clearly (apart from an appeal to the facts of common observation) how and why effective demand could be deficient or excessive, he failed to furnish an alternative construction; and Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain. Not only was his theory accepted by the city, by statesmen and by the academic world. But controversy ceased; the other point of view completely disappeared; it ceased to be discussed. The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature. You will not find it mentioned even once in the whole works of Marshall, Edgeworth and Professor Pigou, from whose hands the classical theory has received its most mature embodiment. It could only live on furtively, below the surface, in the underworlds of Karl Marx, Silvio Gesell or Major Douglas.”

I have seen the phrase aggregate demand used before that but in a kind of aimless way. But I am interested in its use prior to 1936 as well.

The examples others have come up have been just as I described, random uses in an aimless way. But now we use AD as the basis for stimulating our economies and are then astonished that the real world does not follow textbook theory. The real world actually does follow textbook theory, but of course you have to use the right textbook.

Why focus on Say’s Law?

Posted on by
Reply

This was not written to me but I was copied in on the reply that was sent to Michael:

Michael

You asked about the article in the latest Quadrant by Steve Kates on “The Dangerous Return of Keynesian Economics – Five Years On”. On the use of “Keynesian” stimulatory policies, I think he is right to draw attention to their failures and the idea that budgetary action to stimulate demand works. This is apparent from recent and past experience, such as the failed Roosevelt policies in the 1930s cf to the Premiers plan of budgetary cuts, which helped get Australia out of the recession much more quickly than the US (I think I have written to you about this before). However, don’t forget that Keynes himself said at the time not to risk budget deficits and that he also changed his advice to Roosevelt ie Keynes did not in practice necessarily stick to his textbook (published I think in 1936, half way through the recession). It is amazing that Australia’s experience in the 1930’s is still said to reflect Keynesian “stimulatory” action: Rudd ran that line when he became PM and used it to justify his stimulatory policies during the GFC.

I prefer not to get involved in the Say’s law argument like Kates does [my bolding]. It is simpler, I think, to focus on what is the likely response of the private sector to budgetary stimulus action. As suggested, recent experience supports the view that it is not likely to result in any sustained increase in spending (ie there may be a temporary surge but not a lasting one). Treasury had to publish a correction to the budget papers about the claimed success. [But why didn’t it work?]

What about “stimulation” through monetary policy? The recent experience in the US and some other countries again suggests this doesn’t work. It may be claimed that it has worked in the sense that Bernanke may have prevented the US from going into recession. But what would have happened to interest rates if there had been no abnormal increase in the supply of money and the market had been allowed to determine interest rates without central bank intervention? My guess is that they would still have fallen to similar low levels because the private sector would not have been invited to finance additional spending by borrowing, just as it wasn’t under the Bernanke policy.

I have also written to you about what caused the GFC. I won’t venture further on that here other than to say that central banks allowed the supply of credit to increase at far too rapid a rate.

In his article Kates also includes a graph on the US unemployment rate calculated by including in it labour force drop outs since 2009 and showing that (on this basis) the rate has not fallen at all from the 11% reached in 2010. Kates uses this as one indication that the stimulatory policy in the US hasn’t worked. With press releases and letters I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to get across a similar message here and that the unemployment rate is not on its own an effective measure of the state of the labour market and the regulations thereof ie including drop outs our unemployment rate in Australia is much higher than the published one.

So my reply.

I much appreciate Des’ comments but if I might, would like to add my own perspective. And what is most important here is why I do dwell on Say’s Law which I do not just because it is the most accurate way of thinking about macroeconomic issues which I will come to in a moment. But why Say’s Law.

First, Say’s Law was Keynes’s own issue. The General Theory is written as a book-length refutation of Say’s Law which Keynes is at pains to show. The key passage in the General Theory so far as explaining Keynes’s intentions are found on page 32:

The idea that we can safely neglect the aggregate demand function is fundamental to the Ricardian economics, which underlie what we have been taught for more than a century. Malthus, indeed, had vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective demand to be deficient; but vainly. For, since Malthus was unable to explain clearly (apart from an appeal to the facts of common observation) how and why effective demand could be deficient or excessive, he failed to furnish an alternative construction; and Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain. Not only was his theory accepted by the city, by statesmen and by the academic world. But controversy ceased; the other point of view completely disappeared; it ceased to be discussed. The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature. You will not find it mentioned even once in the whole works of Marshall, Edgeworth and Professor Pigou, from whose hands the classical theory has received its most mature embodiment. It could only live on furtively, below the surface, in the underworlds of Karl Marx, Silvio Gesell or Major Douglas. [My bolding again]

The one innovation of The General Theory that remains embedded in all macroeconomics today is aggregate demand. The existence of aggregate demand as an independent force in economics was absolutely denied by pre-Keynesian economists. The denial was summarised in the propositions “demand is constituted by supply” and “overproduction is impossible” which were the specific meanings associated with Say’s Law, along with there is no such thing as a general glut. Demand deficiency, so far as classical economic theory is concerned, is never a realistic explanation for recession and therefore demand stimulation is never a solution for recessions when they come.

If you use aggregate demand in any context to explain anything about the state of the economy, in my view you have sold the pass. You can never recover since you have accepted Keynes’s basic premise to argue against Keynesian theory. And once you have done this, you really have no firm foundation that will allow you to turn back the Keynesian tide. In fact, if you think of aggregate demand as actually independent from aggregate supply, and therefore a force for raising the level of economic activity and employment, there is no reason not to apply a stimulus of some kind during recessions. It is only if you understand that such a stimulus cannot possibly work that you would oppose a stimulus as a set of actions that will certainty harm our economic prospects whatever brief relief it might do over the initial one or two quarters.

But there are other reasons for bringing Say’s Law into it. Because when I do, I am invoking the conclusions reached by all of the great economists of the past: David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, Henry Clay and Allyn Young. This takes me across a period from 1820 through to 1928 and thus encompasses economists from the first days of economic theory through until almost the very day of publication of The General Theory. No economist of any stature denied the validity of Say’s Law until it was swept away by Keynes. Please see my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution if you would like to go through the entire sordid story how Say’s Law disappeared from economic discourse.

But the theory is what’s important, and for this you would need to go to my Free Market Economics. Very hard to summarise but the two elements that make this kind of economic theory different are firstly the essential role of the entrepreneur and secondly the embedding of value adding into the very core of economic thinking.

The order in which everything occurs within an economy is that entrepreneurs come to conclusions about what they might produce and sell at a profit, then go through the many stages of setting up their businesses which requires a tremendous amount of outlay before they earn a single cent of positive return, and then, when the goods or services are brought to market, buyers may or may not choose to buy enough to repay all of the previous costs. Demand, to be strictly technical about it, is the relationship between price and quantity demanded for an existing product that is already on the market. All production, however, is future orientated and while past sales may provide some clues about what might sell in the future, it is hardly the most important consideration in the minds of entrepreneurs in trying to decide what they will do next. Governments wasting a tonne of money on pink batts and school halls is great in the short term for pink batt and school hall producers but distorts your economy away from productive activities, raises input costs across the economy and provides no clear direction about the nature of demand say eighteen months ahead. And because such activities were non-value-adding, the effect on employment at the going wage was certain to be negative as time went by.

As for Say’s Law here’s a brief outline.

1) If you pay some people to dig a hole and then pay other people to fill them in again nothing of value has been created so no matter how much money you pay them thinking only of this group there is nothing for them to buy.

2) Every form of economic activity uses up resources. All economic activity draws down on the available productivity of the economy. Keynesian economic theory thinks of the drawing down as in and of itself stimulatory. No classical economist would have been so stupid. Drawing down on resources – even in some activity that will eventually provide you with a positive return – makes you worse off. You have used up resources and are less wealthy than you had previously been.

3) The need for economic activity to be value adding is essential. Production is value subtracting. It uses up resources. When whatever is being produced finally becomes available, it is either just consumed or it becomes part of the productive apparatus of the economy. It is those additions to the productive parts of the economy that are the essential for growth and prosperity. Only if the value of what these newly produced capital assets is greater than the value of the resources that have been used up can the activity be counted as value adding. And only if the net effect of such investment has left behind an economy capable of producing more than it previous could do can one say that the economy has grown.

4) Only value adding activities create growth and employment over anything other than the short term. Timing is everything, but the flow of new productive assets coming on stream (and it may take years of value subtracting investment for any particular project to become productive) is the only thing that can make an economy more productive, raise living standards, add to employment at the going real wage and then, thereafter, increase the real wage.

5) Why Say’s Law? Amongst the many lessons that Say’s Law provides, and this is from the classics, is that “demand is constituted by supply”. Because of the low state of economic theory today, I now make it explicit what classical economists had meant, “demand is constituted by value adding supply”. Unless what is produced is value adding – that is, it adds more to output than the resources that have been used up in their production – then it cannot add to employment at the going real wage.

6) No stimulus program in the world was value adding and was ever likely to be. Virtually no government activity, other than some roads and a few infrastructure projects, is value adding. All draw down on resources but do not provide a net addition either in the short term or in the long. NBN is such a prime example, as is the Desal plant in Victoria. We are not better off for spending the money and using up the resources because there is no return above the costs. That the construction workers went out and bought goods and services with the money they were paid do not make those projects in any way beneficial to the economy. They are pure waste.

7) Private sector activity often misfires on an individual basis which is what bankruptcy is about. But a properly structured free enterprise economy, where financial institutions lend to the most promising projects for which funds (ie resources) are sought, provides you with the only structure that will provide an overall net rate of growth and an accumulation of capital assets across an economy that will build prosperity.

8) You want to understand what’s wrong with Keynesian economics, it offends against Say’s Law which makes it absolutely clear that only value adding activity adds to growth – demand is constituted by supply.

A query on Say’s Law

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a very pleasing letter I have received from someone who read my article in Quadrant on the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Dangerous Return of Keynesian Economics.

Dear Dr Kates

I read your article in the March Quadrant. It was a great source of information and I have used it to refute a couple of Keynesians on facebook discussions I am involved in. I have a few queries.

1. I have been thinking about Mill’s idea “demand for commodities is not demand for labour.” Initially I balked at it, but after a bit of pondering I think I may have it. I want to run my interpretation past you to make sure I’m correct. Here it its: ‘Just because someone wants a product or a service, doesn’t mean they will pay any price to get it. There is a limit to the amount of human labour, measured through paid wages – is worth. If you understand this, you’ll understand why demand for labour cannot be increased by increasing the demand for goods and services.’ Have I got that right? Was Mill talking about the concept of the law of diminishing returns?

2. What I want to be able to do in my little debates is make claims like:

*Keynesian economics doesn’t promote growth, it stifles it.

*Where Keynesian economics have been applied its been shown to not have worked.

*The economic consequences of Keynesian policies are disastrous.

Where can I find evidence to support those claims. A hyperlink to websites/studies would be particularly valuable.

Thanks in advance. Please keep writing these articles for Quadrant. They are great for laymen like me. If I may make one small, respectful suggestion when you make claims and affirmations about the negative consequences of Keynesian stimulus, please give some basic evidence or backing so that I can use this in discussions.

Kindest regards

So I have replied

Dear Matthew

The thing that is still astonishing is that there are any Keynesians left for you to argue with but I guess they’re still out there living in silent resentment about how little appreciated they are. I have, of course, written an entire book on this stuff – Free Market Economics – which is not all that expensive – paperback around $40 through the Elgar website. Alas, your approach to understanding Mill will not get you to what I think you need to understand if you are to have a solid foundation in dealing with Keynesian arguments. The order in which events happen in an economy is not people wanting things and then they are supplied. It is the way we teach micro, with demand first and then supply, but that is not the order in which events occur in reality.

The order in which everything occurs is that entrepreneurs come to conclusions about what they might produce and sell at a profit, then go through the many stages of setting up their businesses which requires a tremendous amount of outlay before they earn a single cent of positive return, and then, when the goods or services are brought to market, buyers may or may not choose to buy enough to repay all of the previous costs. Demand, to be strictly technical about it, is the relationship between price and quantity demanded for an existing product that is already on the market. All production, however, is future orientated and while past sales may provide some clues about what might sell in the future, it is hardly the most important consideration in the minds of entrepreneurs in trying to decide what they will do next. Wasting a tonne of money on pink batts and school halls is great in the short term for pink batt and school hall producers but distorts your economy away from productive activities, raises input costs across the economy and provides no clear direction about the nature of demand say eighteen months ahead.

As for Say’s Law here’s a brief outline.

1) If you pay some people to dig a hole and then pay other people to fill them in again nothing of value has been created so no matter how much money you pay them thinking only of this group there is nothing for them to buy.

2) Every form of economic activity uses up resources. They thus draw down on the available productivity of the economy. Keynesian economic theory thinks of the drawing down as in and of itself stimulatory. No classical economist would have been so stupid. Drawing down on resources – even in some activity that will eventually provide you with a positive return – makes you worse off.

3) The need for economic activity to be value adding is essential. Production is value subtracting. It uses up resources. When whatever has been produced becomes available, it is either just consumed or it becomes part of the productive apparatus of the economy. It is those additions to the productive parts of the economy that are the essential for growth and prosperity. Only if the value of what these newly produced capital assets is greater than the value of the resources that have been used up can the activity be counted as value adding.

4) Only value adding activities create growth and employment over anything other than the short term. Timing is everything, but the flow of new productive assets coming on stream (and it may take years of value subtracting investment for any particular project to become productive) is the only thing that can make an economy more productive, raise living standards, add to employment at the going real wage and then, thereafter, increase the real wage.

5) Why Say’s Law? Amongst the many lessons that Say’s Law provides, and this is from the classics, is that “demand is constituted by supply”. Because of the low state of economic theory today, I now make it explicit what classical economists had meant, “demand is constituted by value adding supply”. Unless what is produced is value adding – that is, it adds more to output than the resources that have been used up in their production – then it cannot add to employment at the going real wage.

6) No stimulus program in the world was value adding. Virtually no government activity, other than some roads and a few infrastructure projects, is value adding. All draw down on resources but do not provide a net addition either in the short term or in the long. NBN is such a prime example, as is the Desal plant in Victoria. We are not better off for spending the money and using up the resources because there is no return. That the construction workers went out and bought goods and services with the money they were paid do not make those projects in any way beneficial to the economy. They are pure waste.

7) Private sector activity often misfires on an individual basis which is what bankruptcy is about. But a properly structured free enterprise economy, where financial institutions lend to the most promising projects for which funds (ie resources) are sought, provides you with the only structure that will provide an overall net rate of growth and an accumulation of capital assets across an economy that will build prosperity.

8) You want to understand what’s wrong with Keynesian economics, it offends against Say’s Law which makes it absolutely clear that only value adding activity adds to growth – demand is constituted by supply. If you keep all that in mind, I can’t see how you could go wrong.

Kind regards

Classical economic theory and the modern world

Posted on by
Reply

A post in two sections.

Section I

The March issue of Quadrant has an article of mine which has just been put up online. In the magazine itself the title is, The Dangerous Return of Keynesian Economics – Five Years On. What it is five years on from is an article of mine that found its way into the March 2009 issue which dealt with that very dangerous return of Keynesian economics in the form of the worldwide stimulus that economies across the world were beginning to apply. The original title was The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics for which this was the single most important passage:

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 this outcome was absolutely assured in my own mind is, of course, not the same as it being absolute assured in reality. And indeed, it is not too much to say that 99% of the economic opinion of the world went quite the other way. The best example of this attitude may be seen in this comment made to me by Senator Doug Cameron during my appearance before the Senate Economic References Committee in September 2009.

Why have the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, why have they got it so wrong and yet you in your ivory tower at RMIT have got it so right?

This is, of course, a question I ask myself but also one for which I have an answer. The odd part is that no one else asks this question although it is the question that ought to go to the heart of the matter. Which takes me to the second part of this post.

Section II

The economics I use I did not invent but am near enough unique in applying it to economic questions in the modern world. This is the economic theories of the cycle as developed by classical economists which was the theory accepted universally across the profession prior to the coming of the Keynesian Revolution in 1936. So to see things as I see things about the nature of this theory, let me take you to the opening part of a form I have just sent to my publisher on how to advertise the second edition of my Free Market Economics. It was a book whose first edition I wrote at white heat over the twelve weeks of the first semester in 2009, from March to May, to explain in more detail why the stimulus would with certainty fail, as fail it did.

1. Please describe the book in non-technical layman’s terms (in no more than 150 words). Include brief details of the book’s main objectives and conclusions.

Have you ever wondered why no public sector stimulus has ever worked? You are holding in your hands a book that is unique in our times. It is a text on economic principles based on the economics before Keynesian theory became dominant in macroeconomics and equilibrium analysis became standard in micro. It looks at economics from the perspective of an entrepreneur making decisions in a world where the future is unknown, innovation occurs at virtually every moment, and the future is being created before it can be understood.

Of particular significance, this book assumes Keynesian theory is flawed and policies built around attempting to increase aggregate demand by increasing non-value-adding public spending can never succeed but will only make conditions worse. The theories discussed are the theories that dominated economic discourse prior to the Keynesian Revolution and are thus grounded in the economics of some of the greatest economists who have ever lived.

It is, of course, possible that I might have been right for the wrong reasons, but it might also be the case that I was right for the right reasons. I go on about Say’s Law, John Stuart Mill and classical theory, but you know, when have they ever let me down? The world, so far as the evidence shows, works exactly like their theory says it does. And it’s not even that I picked this downturn as a one-off instance, but I also picked the upturn that followed the massive cuts to public spending after the Costello budget in 1996. Who else did that then? What theory is there other than the classical theory of the cycle that could even explain it let alone predict it? And there is no other text anywhere in the world written more recently than the 1920s that can tell you what that theory is other than mine.

You could, of course, buy the first edition right now or you can wait until the much improved second edition is published in July or August.