Tag Archives: Tyler Cowen

Shifting in a Keynesian direction

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First there were two articles, one by Paul Krugman with the title, Keynes is slowly winning and the other by Tyler Cowen in reply to Krugman titled, Keynes is slowing losing (winning?). There is now a third, Krugman’s reply to Cowen, In Front Of Your Macroeconomic Nose, in which he says what I believe myself:

Cowen seems to have missed my point; I wasn’t talking about the merits of the Keynesian case, which I believe have always been overwhelming, but about the way macroeconomics is discussed in the media and among VSPs in general. My sense is that this is shifting in a Keynesian direction.

There is no other theory known to anyone other than Keynesian. You can talk about debt and deficits until the end of time, but unless you can relate it to a theoretical understanding of what needs to be done and more importantly why, there is nothing to grab onto when trying to craft policy. Keynesian economics may be ruinous, but you can find it in a million texts and it has been taught for three generations, coming up to four. Even Cowen in his pussycat weak attack on Keynes can do no better than this at the end:

It would be wrong to conclude that Keynes was anything other than a great, brilliant economist. Rather these citations, plus many of Krugman’s points, give you some beginnings for this issue. It’s not nearly “Keynes’s time” as much as many people are telling us, after all his biggest book is from 1936 and that is a long time ago. Keynes is both winning and losing at the same time, like many other people too, fancy that.

Economies are not driven from the demand side. But other than myself and a handful of others, you will find hardly anyone else to say it across the wide expanse of economics. So on we go, tilting back to public spending while real incomes descend and our economies weaken with not a clue why that might be. So at least there is Johnny Cochrane writing this in a discussion of the articles by Cowen and Krugman:

I posted this last week, but I was unaware at the time of the Paul Krugman’s “Keynes is slowly winning” post; Tyler Cowen’s 15-point response, documenting not only Keynesian failures but more importantly how the policy world is in fact moving decidedly away from Keynesian ideas, right or wrong (that was Krugman’s point); and Krugman’s retort, predictably snarky and disconnected from anything Cowen said, changing the subject from Keynesian ideas are winning to the standard what a bunch of morons they’re not Keynesians though I keep telling them to be. . . .

In that context, I added two “Facts in front of our noses.” Keynesians, and Krugman especially, said the sequester would cause a new recession and even air traffic control snafus. Instead, the sequester, though sharply reducing government spending, along with the end of 99 week unemployment insurance, coincided with increased growth and a big surprise decline in unemployment. And ATC is no more or less chaotic than ever. Keynesians, and Krugman especially, kept warning of a “deflation vortex.” We and Europe still don’t have any deflation, and even Japan never had a “vortex.” These are not personal prognostications, but widely shared and robust predictions of a Keynesian worldview. Two strikes. Batter up.

But still no theory to explain why cuts to public spending will raise economic growth while increased public spending will slowly but surely reduce our standard of living. If, however, you are interested in understanding why, there is always the second edition of my Free Market Economics.

UPDATE: One of the great anti-Keynesians has written an article for this month’s Standpoint in the UK, Don’t let the Keynesians Wreck the Recovery. He discusses the famous letter signed by 364 economists across Britain warning of the consequences of Thatcherism, that is, the consequences of fiscal discipline:

Famously or notoriously, depending on one’s viewpoint, the 364 were wrong. To quote Nigel Lawson, who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1983, the timing of the recovery was “exquisite” in refuting the 364’s prognoses. Demand and output started to move upwards in the second quarter of 1981, just as the debate about the Times letter was at its most intense. Although unemployment remained high for some years, the economy gathered pace and in the late 1980s entered another boom. If this was a laboratory experiment for Keynesian economics, its results suggested that the textbook formulas were flawed. Old-fashioned principles of sound finance returned to favour in the UK, while the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product fell to manageable levels. For more than 25 years Keynesian fiscal activism was ignored or even forgotten.

But the events of the 1980s have been ignored, particularly by writers of textbooks. As Tim notes:

But university economists continued to teach Keynesian macroeconomic as if nothing had happened. Sure enough, in Britain many academics realised from the sequel to the 1981 Budget that something was wrong with Keynesianism or, at any rate, with the naive versions of Keynesianism which emphasised the blessings of fiscal fine-tuning. But in the American East Coast universities — notably the Ivy League establishments — the UK’s 1981 Budget was too parochial an event to justify rewriting textbooks and lecture notes. Such influential figures as George Akerlof and Robert Shiller of Yale, Paul Krugman of Princeton and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia, all now Nobel prize laureates, continued to teach that an increase in the budget deficit adds to aggregate demand and a decrease deducts from it.

And so here we are, dragging our economies down by pretending we are doing them good.

Disproving Keynesian economics once and for all

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I don’t allow comments on this blog mainly because I am not up to policing what other people say. But I read them and this today, from Rob, was stunning. Referring to my little rant on the uselessness of economic theory today, he wrote:

But at least it has advanced enough to tell us that for more growth, we need …. more broken windows:

The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University

I mean, what would a dead white male like Frederic Bastiat know anyway?

Tyler Cowen is, of course, a live white male, but given there are such things as negative knowledge – things that if you believe them make you dumber than if you knew nothing at all – it is possible for him to know less than Frederic Bastiat, dead though he may be. Let me quote from the opening of that column:

The continuing slowness of economic growth in high-income economies has prompted soul-searching among economists. They have looked to weak demand, rising inequality, Chinese competition, over-regulation, inadequate infrastructure and an exhaustion of new technological ideas as possible culprits.

An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.

Let me put it this way. There is bad economics, there is unbelievably stupid economics, and there is the belief that growth has slowed because there are no wars.

It is neither here nor there that there’s not all that much peace around anyway. But let me remind you of the greatest disproof of Keynesian economic policy in history. Everyone always points out that one Keynesian data point which is the so-called boom that came at the start of World War II. Not a boom at all since what most people remember about the home front was rationing and controls of every kind, and if you are thinking about the labour shortages, merely recall that around half the labour force under thirty was drafted into the army. But that’s not that point either, although it should put quite a dent into such Keynesian thought.

It is the coming of peace in 1945 that is the grand refutation of Keynesian economics. At the end of the war, within a year millions who had been overseas fighting, or had been part of the war effort at home, were suddenly in the labour market looking for work. Many women who had taken jobs while the men were overseas also remained in the workforce. The Keynesians were continually badgering Truman to maintain war-time deficits since, they said, if he did not the US would go straight back into the depression. Truman, however, having had a business background, hated deficits and the US virtually balanced its budget in a single year. No deficits, no stimulus, no nothing. The US slashed its expenditures and in so doing set off the greatest economic boom in world history, a boom that lasted straight through until ground into the dust by the war on poverty, and dare I say it, the unfunded, deficit-financed war in Vietnam.

Thinking about economic issues from the demand side is the single biggest mistake anyone can make in economics. In fact, if you do think that way, you aren’t even an economist since Say’s Law was once considered the best test of a sound economist. Not many of them around any more, I fear.

Here is the message. An economy is driven only by real value adding supply. Nothing else. This is the message of Say’s Law, supposedly discredited by Keynes but as accurate a statement of economic principle as there has ever been.