Tag Archives: classical economic theory

Warren Harding and classical economic theory

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It’s not that I care one way or the other about which American president was the worst, although Joe Biden really does test the waters, not that the American media and its academic accomplices will ever mention it, but this is about Warren Harding who was and is my favourite since he took the US from recession into the best period of growth and prosperity in its history. This is from an article titled, How Liberals Unfairly Maligned Warren G. Harding. And why it matters even now is because the left who still controls everyone’s access to information still thinks the FDR approach works when it does not, but the Harding approach does and showed its genius in real life.

His program of laissez faire conservatism revived the American economy from the “forgotten depression,” leading to the most prosperous decade in US history, an era with average annual growth rates of 7 percent. He slashed taxes, regulations, and government spending, and created the Budget Bureau, which gave the federal government a comprehensive budget for the first time. The country ran a budget surplus every year and one-third of the national debt was paid off. Statistics also reveal that every class of citizen benefited throughout the “Roaring Twenties.”

Where will you find out about any of these policies in any textbook written this side of 1920. Well there is this: Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy.

My missing reply to Roy Grieve

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Getting an anti-Keynesian article published is very difficult. The following is an interesting parable of our times. There are lots of additional details left out here, but this captures the essence of the story. This short note will be published in the forthcoming issue of the History of Economics Review along with the article by Roy Grieve which I had been asked to reply to.

A Note on My Missing Reply to Roy Grieve
Steve Kates

It is quite a shame the article I had written in reply to Roy Grieve’s will not be published along with his. When his paper was submitted in 2018, I was asked by the editor to write a reply which I quite happily did. Thereafter, I heard nothing for two years until I was told what I had written was not suitable, would not be published, and was offered a truncated version of my paper that I could include instead.

The problem with my paper I was told was that I did not address the core issue Roy had raised which was the wages fund. Since Roy was replying to a paper I had written, the probability that I might have a better idea of what the issues are ought to be seen as extremely high. The editor nevertheless continues to believe the central issue is the wages fund. Since the paper Roy was replying to is titled, ‘Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition on Capital: A Paradox Explained’ (Kates 2015), that ought to be recognized as the issue we were debating. In my reply to the editor, I made it clear the wages fund had nothing to do with Mill’s argument, nor did I wish to contribute further. Mill’s proposition by the way, if true, completely undermines Keynesian economics and modern macro. In Mill’s words, ‘demand for commodities is not demand for labour’ – increases in aggregate demand do not lead to increases in employment.

Roy understood that leaving out my paper diminished the impact that having his paper and my reply together would have had. He therefore wrote to the editor to suggest I add something on the wages fund. And I agreed. I wrote to the editor and said that I was prepared to write an article along these lines:

1. The wages fund has nothing of significance to do with Mill’s Fourth Proposition on Capital.
2. The ‘wages fund’, if understood properly, makes perfect sense.
3. The wages fund, if understood properly, is even an integral part of modern economic theory.
4. Much of the difficulty in understanding the classical view on the wages fund is due to the shifts in terminology since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The final point is the theme of my latest book, Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy (Kates 2020a), where all this is discussed more generally. In the end, I have been offered these 600 words. You cannot therefore see within the pages of the journal either my response to Roy or my explanation of the wages fund in modern terms.

Let me therefore add this. I admire Roy’s paper which does something almost never seen. He explains my argument in defending Mill, not only understanding exactly what I had written but also understanding Mill’s argument to near perfection. He nevertheless argues in his paper Mill’s Fourth Proposition depended on the wages fund, so that when Mill abandoned the wages fund in 1869, he had pulled the rug out from under his own Fourth Proposition. If you read my reply to Roy, you will see that I do not agree.

You can read my original reply to Roy at SSRN (Kates 2020b). My explanation of why the wages fund is even to this day embodied within modern economic theory will have to remain a mystery.

Steve Kates
steve.kates@gmail.com
Submitted 11 June 2020

References

Kates, S. 2015. ‘Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition on Capital: A Paradox Explained.’ Journal of the History of Economic Thought 37 (1): 39–56.

Kates, S. 2020a. Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Kates, S. 2020b. ‘The Single Most Important Issue in Economics Today: A Reply to Roy Grieve on Mill’s Fourth Proposition on Capital’. SSRN.

Thomas Sowell turns ninety

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Happy 90th birthday (June 30) to Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest living economists, which begins:

One of my two all-time most favorite economists — Thomas Sowell — turns 90 tomorrow, he was born on June 30, 1930. Here is Thomas Sowell’s webpage and here is his Wikipedia entry. Milton Friedman (my other all-time favorite economist) once said, “The word ‘genius’ is thrown around so much that it’s becoming meaningless, but nevertheless I think Tom Sowell is close to being one.”

In my opinion, there is no economist alive today who has done more to eloquently, articulately, and persuasively advance the principles of economic freedom, limited government, individual liberty, and a free society than Thomas Sowell. In terms of both his quantity of work (49 books and several thousand newspaper columns) and the consistently excellent and crystal-clear quality of his writing, I don’t think any living free-market economist even comes close to matching Sowell’s prolific record of writing about economics.

And while no one else unfortunately understands how he was able to become the economist he became, let me point out that his PhD was on Say’s Law and two of his earliest books were on Say’s Law and Classical Economic Theory. Nor was that just an early part of his career, but he came back to Classical Theory again in 2006.

Sowell, Thomas (1972), Say’s Law: A Historical Analysis, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-04166-7.

——— (1974). Classical Economics Reconsidered. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691003580.

——— (2006). On Classical Economics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12606-8.

And on this, let me add to what Currency Lad has already written on it’s always our money, via Adam Creighton. Money is a metaphor – probably actually a synecdoche – for the word resources. If you use the word “money” you can be deceived by government spending since a government can always print more of the stuff. Resources, actual labour and capital, are much harder to come by. Here is the point made by Adam Smith in 1776:

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct. The whole, or almost the whole public revenue, is in most countries employed in maintaining unproductive hands.

That, by the way, is from the chapter “On the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour”. There is more sense in that chapter than in the whole of a modern economics text. It is Thomas Sowell amongst a very few others who is keeping that tradition alive.

If you are looking for a modern discussion of classical economic theory, and amongst other things a discussion of productive and unproductive labour, might I recommend my own Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy which has just been published.

Comments, thoughts and suggestions welcome

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You may have noticed my lack of regard for modern economic theory which the following might help you understand more clearly. This is the draft of the cover text for the book I have just completed and sent off to the publisher. Comments, thoughts and suggestions would be welcome. My disdain for Keynesian economics I have discussed on many occasions. My attitude to “marginal” analysis I mention far less often which is why certain passages below are highlighted in bold.

‘Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy’

The book starts with two premises: First, that economic theory reached its deepest level of understanding in the writings of John Stuart Mill and the classical economists of his time, and then, secondly, the author of this book has understood Mill and has accurately explained what the classical school of the late nineteenth century wrote. From these premises, this then follows.

If you are to have any hope of understanding how an economy works, and how modern economic theory became the dead end it has become, you will need to read this book.

The classical economists, and John Stuart Mill in particular, lived through the Industrial Revolution, saw its astonishing economic transformation before their eyes, and explained, so others could understand for themselves, how their prosperity had been created through the emergence of the market economy.

Mill, the greatest utilitarian philosopher of his age, refused to use utility as part of his theory of value. Mill explicitly and emphatically denied any role for aggregate demand in the creation of employment. In reaching these conclusions, there was no disagreement among the entire mainstream economics community of his time.

First through the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s, and then through the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s, the entire edifice of classical theory has been obliterated. From a classical perspective, modern economic theory is Mercantilist trash nonsense. If you are interested in how economic theory became the wasteland it has become, and wish to understand the classical theory no one any longer has the slightest clue about, this is the book you must read.

If you are interested in understanding all this more completely, you will have to read the entire book when it is finally published sometime this year.

How to describe my next book

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This was the outline of my next book that has been proposed to me by the publisher.

‘Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy’

Exposing the zenith of analytical power and depth of understanding that economic theory reached in the middle of the nineteenth century, this book discusses the importance of John Stuart Mill and his contemporaries. Steven Kates explains what took place in the ensuing Marginal and Keynesian Revolutions that hindered economists’ understanding of how economies truly operate.

Chapters explore the false mythology that has obscured the arguments of classical economists, providing a route into the theory they developed. Kates offers a theoretical understanding of the operation of an economy within classical economic theory by classical economists, providing a new perspective for viewing modern economic theory from the outside. This provocative book also not only explains the meaning of Say’s Law in an accessible way, but also the origins of the Keynesian revolution and Keynes’ pathway in writing The General Theory.

A crucial read for economic policy-makers seeking to better understand the key policies needed to generate economic recovery, this book will also be of keen interest to economics and economic history scholars. It offers an alternative theory to modern macroeconomics for those studying economic theory and policy.

OK, but not what I think is needed. This is what’s needed.

‘Classical Economic Theory and the Modern Economy’

The book starts with two premises: First, that economic theory reached its deepest level of understanding in the writings of John Stuart Mill and the classical economists of his time, and then, secondly, the author of this book has understood Mill and has accurately explained what the classical school of the late nineteenth century wrote. From these premises, this then follows.

If you are to have any hope of understanding how an economy works, and how modern economic theory became the dead end it has become, you will need to read this book.

The classical economists, and John Stuart Mill in particular, lived through the Industrial Revolution, saw its astonishing economic transformation before their eyes, and explained, so others could understand for themselves, how their prosperity had been created through the emergence of the market economy.

Mill, the greatest utilitarian philosopher of his age, refused to use utility as part of his theory of value. Mill explicitly and emphatically denied any role for aggregate demand in the creation of employment. In reaching these conclusions, there was no disagreement among the entire mainstream economics community of his time.

First through the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s, and then through the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s, the entire edifice of classical theory has been obliterated. From a classical perspective, modern economic theory is Mercantilist trash. If you are interested in how economic theory became the wasteland it has become, and wish to understand the classical theory no one any longer has the slightest clue about, this is the book you must read.

If that’s your interest, then you should certainly read this book.

Economics is stale and worthless

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This is the abstract for a paper on “The Focus of Academic Economics: Before and After the Crisis”.* As is quite obvious from watching Treasuries and central banks around the world, no one learned a thing. In fact, no one even tried to investigate. Economics as now taught is stale and worthless.

Has the global financial crisis of 2007ff had a visible impact on the economics profession? To answer this question we employ a bibliometric approach and compare the content and orientation of economic literature before and after the crisis with reference to two different samples: A large-scale sample consisting of more than 440,000 articles published between 1956 and 2016 and a smaller sample of 400 top-cited papers before and after the crisis. Our results suggest that unlike the Great Depression of the 1930s the current financial crisis did not lead to any major theoretical or methodological changes in contemporary economics, although the topic of financial instability received increased attention after the crisis.

Moreover, given the dating of the papers examined, no one has learned a thing from the absence of a recovery anywhere in the world in the decade following the GFC. Of course, what they learned after the Great Depression was Keynesian economics, which was a universally-understood fallacy among the entire mainstream of economic theory before 1936, accepted only by Marxists and economic cranks, but I repeat myself.

I might mention that I have just been sent the book description being used by my publisher for my next book which is on classical economics and how to understand it.

Economic theory reached its highest level of analytical power and depth of understanding in the middle of the nineteenth century among John Stuart Mill and his contemporaries. This book explains what took place in the ensuing Marginal Revolution and Keynesian Revolution that left economists less able to understand how economies operate. It explores the false mythology that has obscured the arguments of classical economists, providing a pathway into the theory they developed.

On this, let me again quote Senator Cameron from when I appeared before the Economic References Committee in 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?

Best question ever. My book will provide the answer.

* Ernest Aigner (Vienna University of Economics and Business); Matthias Aistleitner (Johannes Kepler University); Florentin Glotzl (Vienna University of Economics and Business); Jakob Kapeller (Johannes Kepler University). “The Focus of Academic Economics: Before and After the Crisis.”

Classical economics explained by someone who thinks classical economic theory was the most accurate economic theory ever devised

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I have finally submitted the manuscript for my Summary and Translation of Classical Economic Theory into a format that can be read by a modern economist. This is part of the note that went with the submission.

I think and hope I have now completed everything I need to do to submit my manuscript. I have adjusted the title, but am still looking for something that really says in compact form what I mean, which is that if you want to understand how an economy works, you will have to return to the economic theories of the classical economists. That is what the book is about, plus also being about how to understand a classical text since one must first work through how economic terminology has changed since classical times. If you read the word “saving” as a Keynesian does, you will not only not understand a classical text, you will also not be able to make sense of how an economy works.

The embedded notion that is almost explicit in the text is that only by understanding classical economic theory can one understand how an economy works, which also says, and the text discusses, that you cannot understand the operation of an economy using mainstream theory, any version of socialist economic theory, New Classical economics, Austrian economics or, for that matter, the economic theories of the early classical economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

It is only with the publication of John Stuart Mill’s Principles in 1848, and then from within his last edition published during his lifetime in 1871, can one discover the actual operation of an economy. What that theory is no one any longer knows, other than a few specialists who number fewer than 100 across the world. And then, amongst those, there is oddly only a single one who believes that Mill’s text is the lost ideal of economic theory. I perfectly well understand how ridiculous it is to believe any such thing, but I do. The classicals laid it all out before the arrival of the Marginal Revolution which turned economics from the supply side to the demand side. But what has completely collapsed economic theory as a sound means to make sense of an economy was the advent of the Keynesian Revolution in the decade after the publication of The General Theory in 1936, where not only was everything overturned, but a new set of technical terms was introduced whose use makes a classical text all but incomprehensible to a modern economist. You will need my text to understand classical economic theory. You cannot do it on your own since you won’t know either the meaning of the terms or the presuppositions that underpinned the theory.

Our economies have managed, but only just, to maintain the role of the entrepreneur in directing our private sector firms, but the pretence found in modern macro that public spending – G – is as productive or as value-adding as private investment – I – is tearing our economies down, with no understanding of what is happening, least of all among our economists. That capitalists have been transformed into crony capitalists, who are now among the major welfare recipients taken from the massive tax revenues collected by governments, is a large part of the problem. What to do is hard to say, but first the problem needs to be recognised. That is what this book attempts to do.

Hayek v. Mises

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Sinclair’s post and the John Papola video on Mises v Marx was a really interesting but I doubt will have the same penetration as did his early video on Keynes v Hayek. This continues to provide some kind of ground for understanding the economic policies of our time, and the disasters of a demand-side approach to managing an economy. Central banks are now the major carriers of the disease.

As it happens I am in the last stages of completing my manuscript on Classical Economics and what is needed for a modern economist to follow the classics, which studying modern theory makes virtually impossible. This is the draft opening to the chapter on Austrian economic theory for your interest. Comments welcome.

Although Carl Menger initiated the Marginal Revolution with the intent to find a unified theory of value, the names now most closely associated with the Austrian School are Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. And while both are seen from a distance as almost one and the same, up close they were quite different from each other. There are many ways to highlight their differences, but here their approaches will be compared through their attitudes to John Stuart Mill, since both specifically identified themselves with the classical liberal tradition.

Where it matters is in the social aims an economist might hold. The essence of Mill’s approach to economic theory was to attempt to answer the question, what ought to be done to create the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people? Uppermost in his mind was the question of what can be done to raise the living standards and economic wellbeing of the individual members of the community. Yet while he called himself a “socialist”, it was the kind of socialism that by today’s standards would have had him grouped among the most market-oriented political theorists of the present day. In particular, he would find modern macroeconomic theory, and the policy matrix that accompanies its Keynesian basis, completely false. While he saw a definite role for government involvement in the economy, the basic framework was that everything that can be left to the market should be, while also understanding that not everything can be left to the market. He saw a clear but limited role for government regulation.

Hayek’s approach is similar to Mill’s (and I would say my own). Hayek discusses the economics prior to the publication of Menger’s Principles of Economics in 1871, noting that this was only “a mere twenty-three years since the great restatement of classical economics by John Stuart Mill (Hayek 1992: 96-97). He continues:

“It is important for proper appreciation of Menger, that we do not underestimate what had been achieved before. It is misleading to think of the preceding period, 1820-1870, as simply dominated by Ricardian orthodoxy. At least in the first generation after Ricardo there had been plenty of new ideas. Both within the body of classical economics as finally expounded by John Stuart Mill and even more outside it there had been accumulated an array of tools of analysis from which later generations were able to build an elaborate and coherent structure of theory after the concept of marginal utility provided the basis of the unification. If ever there was a time in which a quasi-Ricardian orthodoxy was dominant, it was after John Stuart Mill had so persuasively restated it. Yet even his Principles contain very important developments which go far beyond Ricardo. (ibid.: 97)

The point was that Mill had provided much of the raw material that the marginalists had been able to consolidate into a more unified whole. Hayek stops to state that

“It is indeed quite difficult to understand how a scholar of the penetration and transparent intellectual honesty of John Stuart Mill could have singled out what was so soon felt to be the weakest part of his system for the confident assertion that ‘there is nothing in the laws of value which remain for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete.” (ibid.: 98)

That Mill, the greatest utilitarian scholar of his generation, had no interest in making utility the core of his own theory of value may have been a conundrum to Hayek, although it might also have suggested that utility had been considered by Mill but then rejected. Yet the core point here is that there is no question that Hayek had a profound and extremely high regard for the economics of Mill, self-proclaimed “socialist” though he may have been. This is opposite to the attitude taken by Mises.

The economics of Mises is astonishingly detailed and profound. But what makes his approach so austere is its narrow focus on economic issues almost entirely outside the social and political arena. Hayek, like Mill, was continuously thinking through how economic conditions could be improved using as many arms as policy as possible, while always understanding the limits that are placed on the various possibilities available by the laws of gravity of economic theory which forbid various approaches to be adopted. Mises, on the other hand, thought that only an absolutely rigid adoption of market-based economic theory was acceptable. And unlike Mill, who even in 1848 could see how economic policies would be constrained by popular pressures to alleviate economic pressures and to use governments to temper economic outcomes, Mises accepts no compromise with the hard-edge views of how a market economy must operate. Here he discusses his views of John Stuart Mill in his Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (Mises 1985).

“John Stuart Mill is an epigone of classical liberalism and, especially in his later years, under the influence of his wife, full of feeble compromises. He slips slowly into socialism and is the originator of the thoughtless confounding of liberal and socialist ideas that led to the decline of English liberalism and to the undermining of the living standards of the English people. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely because of this – one must become acquainted with Mill’s principal writings:

Principles of Political Economy ˆ(1848)
On Liberty (1859)
Utilitarianism (1862)

“Without a thorough study of Mill it is impossible to understand the events of the last two generations. For Mill is the great advocate of socialism. All the arguments that could be advanced in favor of socialism are elaborated by him with loving care. In comparison with Mill all other socialist writers – even Marx, Engles and Lassalle – are scarcely of any importance.” (Mises 1985: 195)

An indication of how adamantine Mises’s political judgements are may be recognised in the following comment from the preface he wrote for Liberalism in 1962.

“In England the term ‘liberal’ is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists.” (ibid.: xvi)

At any rate, no actual socialists have ever cited Mill as the source of their views on how an economy ought to be managed. Yet Mises’s concerns over the drift of economic theory and government policy remain a vivid warning of how dangerous economic theory has become, both economically and politically.

A classic case of economic ignorance

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I am in the midst of finishing off a book on classical economic theory from which, and only from which, you can discover just how fatal to economic health modern economic theory is. The Australian economy is not far from disaster, real growth is falling as are real wages. But this we find at the top of the front page of The Oz.

PUBLIC SPENDING KEEPS NATION AFLOAT

Here are the opening paras.

Surging federal and state government spending has insulated the economy from a dramatic plunge in growth, as business investment and household spending shrank, raising questions about the health of the economy.

The latest national accounts show annual economic growth fell to 1.4 per cent — the slowest since 2009 — as rapid increases in public spending and global demand for the nation’s coal, LNG and iron ore papered over weak or falling household spending and business investment.

That it is the public spending that is taking the economy to death’s door occurs to no one. Let me therefore take you to a bit from the introduction to my forthcoming book.

The chapter goes to some length in discussing the advent of Keynesian theory, which was summarised by Paul Krugman in his introduction to The General Theory which was published in 2006, seventy years after Keynes’s original publication in 1936.

“Stripped down, the conclusions of The General Theory might be expressed as four bullet points:

1. Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which leads to involuntary unemployment
2. The economy’s automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it exists at all, operates slowly and painfully
3. Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce unemployment quickly
4. Sometimes increasing the money supply won’t be enough to persuade the private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the breach.

“To a modern practitioner of economic policy, none of this – except, possibly, the last point – sounds startling or even especially controversial. But these ideas weren’t just radical when Keynes proposed them; they were very nearly unthinkable. And the great achievement of The General Theory was precisely to make them thinkable.”

There is no question that Keynes did indeed make each of these more than just thinkable. He was able to turn these propositions into the mainstream where they have been accepted by virtually every economist ever since. It is classical economic theory that has now become unthinkable. The result of the Keynesian Revolution has left things so that the classical alternative is not just no longer contemplated by anyone within the mainstream of economic theory, but that no one within the mainstream even knows what that alternative is.

I stumbled onto classical theory by accident but it has been so accurate in allowing me to understand what’s going on that I can never understand why others don’t sicken of this Keynesian trash. It has never ever in a single instance brought an economy from recession into recovery. It’s all set out in my Free Market Economics. How we ended up in this dismal place we are now in is what my next book will go into chapter and verse.

The power of classical economic thought

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Here is a story picked up just today which had a bit in it I found quite striking since it presents a real-world economic event straight out of classical economic theory. It’s from an article titled, New recession warning: The rich aren’t spending. There we find:

The savings of the rich has also exploded, more than doubling over the past two years, suggesting that the wealthy are hoarding cash. The middle earners, or those in the 40% to 89.9% of the income distribution, have largely picked up the spending slack from the rich….

The middle-class consumer, however, is being buoyed up by strong employment and a relatively stable housing market. A U.S. economy that for over a decade has been defined by the rich reaping the gains and fueling the spending, has now flipped. Now, it’s Main Street that is prospering, while the investor class is signaling a consumer recession.

Which made me think of this from Mill’s Principles:

The proposition for which I am contending is in reality equivalent to the following, which to some minds will appear a truism, though to others it is a paradox: that a person does good to labourers, not by what he consumes on himself, but solely by what he does not so consume.

Clear as a bell to anyone versed in classical thought but to anyone else, specially to a student of modern macro, a statement near impossible to comprehend.