Tag Archives: Robert Shiller

A farrago of vacuous ideas and empty nonsense

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I came across a book in one of the still remaining second hand book shops I frequent by two Nobel Prize winners, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. It’s title was Animal Spirits with the basic premise stated on the cover, that “human psychology drives the economy and why it matters for global capitalism”. So far, so ordinary but since this is all part of the new direction in economics, I thought I would give it a go.

Well, what a farrago of vacuous ideas and empty nonsense. I had always thought it was ridiculous that Keynes had made such a fetish about “animal spirits” himself, seeing as how every classical economist was perfectly aware of how crucial business confidence is to economic outcomes. If nothing else, Frank Knight had published his Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in 1921, a book I am pretty certain Keynes raided in writing the General Theory published in 1936. That Akerlof and Shiller write as if they have introduced some new conceptions into economics was astonishing, but given the low level of historical knowledge within the profession, you can just about get away with anything.

But what really did get to me was this book, published in 2009 at the height of the GFC and as the stimulus programs were getting into full swing, were not just advocating such public spending but made it clear how much economists had learned from Keynes and how fortunate we lot were that economists such as themselves were now on the watch and in control of policy.

A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s. In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. . . .

In the middle of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In this 1936 masterwork, Keynes described how creditworthy governments like those of the United States and Great Britain could borrow and spend, and thus put the unemployed back to work. [My bolding]

I have an article on this book at Quadrant Online, Phlogiston with a Keynsian Twist. I think of it as a contender for the worst book on economics ever written. Lots of bad books on the subject, of course, but you don’t normally find two people at the highest level of the profession conspiring to write such stuff. Read the review, but spare yourself the trouble of reading the book, unless you would like to see just how empty economics can be in this day and age.

Is this the dumbest book on economics ever written?

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There will have to be a wall of shame for economists who endorsed Keynesian solutions back in 2009 who will need to have their beliefs brought back to haunt them. Picked up in a secondhand bookshop a particularly pathetic version of what had been quite common back in those heady days of the stimulus, this being a book titled, Animal Spirits, written by two Nobel Prize winners, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. If these types were ever capable of shame they would be buying up every copy in print and have them consigned to the flames. Instead and no doubt, they continue in the delusion that we have been saved from far worse by the timely actions taken to stimulate demand.

Mind you, I had been just as certain that the entire attempt to diminish the impact of the recession and return us to reasonable rates of growth would turn out the disaster it has been. But for myself, I can now run the told-you-so as much and as far as I like. There is not a shred of evidence, outside their own nonsense-Keynesian models, that the stimulus did anything but harm. But since they are incapable of even having a glimmer of a notion that the economic models they have devoted their lives to understanding are about as useful as the theory of phlogiston was in physics, they just carry on. It is only we critics who go back to those books and try to remind others that Keynesian economic policy has been an unmitigated disaster. So far are we now from a robust recovery, a ten year pause will turn out to be the best we can hope for. This is from the Preface, and recall that this is from 2009 just as the stimulus programs were getting under way:

“A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s. In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. . . .

“In the middle of the Great Depression John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In this 1936 masterwork, Keynes described how creditworthy governments like those of the United States and Great Britain could borrow and spend, and thus put the unemployed back to work.”

That was 2009. Is the world in 2014 the one they expected, the outcome they foresaw? I suspect not. Yet there is hardly another ripple of any other kind they could blame the deeply depressed nature of the American economy on other than the policies of the past five years. The one certainty is that no one is any longer telling us now about the great “masterwork” written by Keynes.

Almost as nonsensical is the potted history of economic thought they provide. Can they actually be as ignorant of pre-Keynesian economic thought as they suggest by these words:

“According to traditional economics, free market capitalism will be essentially perfect and stable. There is little, if any, need for government interference. On the contrary, the only risk of major depression today, or in the future, comes from government intervention.

“This line of reasoning goes back to Adam Smith.” (p. 2)

The notion that Adam Smith, or any other economist of the classical tradition, expected a ripple-free economy with no depressions and that no government interference was ever necessary is so lacking in historical accuracy that I would barely accept such ignorance from a first year student. That they could believe and commit to print such obviously untrue statements – obvious, that is, to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn even the rudiments of the classical theory of the cycle or what Adam Smith had actually written – is a disgrace.

But if I have to choose the least sensible statement they made in this startling superficial and inane book, it is their attribution of the cause of the Global Financial Crisis to an excess of saving, the precise issue raised by Keynes:

“In the short run, an exogenous increase in the demand for desired saving rate of just a couple of percentage points may be enough to tip the economy into recession, as indeed seems to be happening in the current financial crisis.” (p. 116)

The entire financial world held its breath as the banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, with every lender profoundly unsure of the safety of lending to others, and this is reduced to decisions to save. It is embarrassing to have to read such thoughts from two of the most respected economists in the world. This is more of the Keynes the master, but though no one any longer would write any such thing given how events have turned out, it makes one despair whether economic theory can ever again provide serious guidance to those who make economic policy. It is a frightening book lacking even the rudiments of depth or common sense.