On Re-Industrialization: Brief Comment on Krugman's column

I have written on deindustrialization before (see here and here), and commented on the CHIPS Act, and how it was one of the first, if not the first, re-shoring of manufacturing jobs into the US. Krugman just wrote a column on that, noting that the concern with manufacturing is now bipartisan, as Biden policies follow Trump's, he argues the former more successfully than the latter. Also, I should note that the the pressures for US corporations to reorganize their supply chains away from China is bipartisan, but that might take a long while.

I mostly agree with Krugman's take. But there are two issues with his argument, in my view. One more conceptual, and the other just observational. Krugman says that

"we shouldn’t fetishize manufacturing. A good job is a good job; there’s nothing inherently superior about manufacturing as opposed to health care or even entertainment."

This smacks me too much as an acceptance of the post-industrial society myths. Kaldor's laws suggest that you should care about manufacturing. For example, a great deal of the increases in productivity both in health care and entertainment are associated to the rise of productivity in manufacturing sectors, like pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, electronics, computers, etc. And exactly because the US still is important in all these manufacturing sectors, in spite of the decline of the share of manufacturing jobs in total jobs the nature of deindustrialization in the US was different than in other parts of the world, like Latin America. That was my argument a decade ago.

However, something happened in the intervening decade. While before manufacturing jobs declined, and production increased, in the last decade the trend changed. Now manufacturing production stagnated.

So manufacturing output never recovered from the 2007-8 recession, and effectively stopped increasing. Even the fast recovery from the pandemic seems to have stalled. Again, I don't think this spells disaster for the US economy, since US corporations are still dominant in many sectors that are crucial for the future of Industry 4.0 or whatever that is called. My example during the pandemic was the video conferencing platforms I use (zoom, teams, google meet, webex, and skype) are from US corporations. But it does say something about how difficult it will be for the US to disentangle from the Chinese supply chains.

Also, I think that the reason for this change in attitude regarding manufacturing and China are less connected to electoral politics, than Krugman suggests (he said: "it’s not at all clear whether these policies will succeed in their implicit political goal: winning back working-class voters who have gone down the MAGA rabbit hole). If the implicit goal was political it wouldn't be bipartisan, and the solution would require recovering manufacturing jobs, not production, and that will not happen, at least not a recovery to the previous peak. This is revaluing of manufacturing is not about winning elections in Pennsylvania (even if it might not hurt Biden), it is a geopolitical concern with US hegemony.

PS: And expect a significant backlash against industrial policy, and any "protectionist" measures in the US from the neoliberal establishment, which is still entrenched. See for example Adam Posen here, or this from The Economist, who said that: "America’s openness brought prosperity for its firms and its consumers, both Mr Trump and Mr Biden have turned to protectionism... Subsidies could boost investment in deprived areas in the short term, but risk dulling market incentives to innovate. In the long run they will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying." On this I'm with Krugman that is considerably less upbeat about the US's great economic moment.

Technological progress is NOT the cause of unemployment and inequality

Or that is what the recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) Report by Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens says. Their study is essentially a critique of a recent study by Acemoglu and a co-author that suggests that robotization would have a large effect on employment generation. Note that this is not a requirement in mainstream neoclassical (marginalist) theory. Actually, technological progress should generate higher real wages and higher employment in the conventional model of the labor market (which is fraught with logical problems; yep capital debates apply here).

The reason, I mean the probable underlying ideological reason, for the narrative about robotization is that one cannot blame unemployment and inequality (wage stagnation) on policy decision made by conservative (neoliberal)   policy makers. It's the result of the inevitable changes in technology that are dictated by competition. The argument is not very different from the idea that it was not trade, but skill biased technical changed that caused most of the disruptions related to globalization. At any rate, below you can see the growth in labor productivity has actually slowed down in the last decades, and capital investment that incorporates the new technologies slowdown in tandem with productivity.

As Mishel and Bivens note, if automation and robotization were behind lower growth of output and employment you would need an acceleration of those trends in the recent period. Actually, productivity and investment were higher in the 50s and 60s, the Golden Age of capitalism, when employment growth was relatively high. There are many reasons for that, and I would point to the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law as the relevant regularity that explains why productivity is structurally connected to economic growth and employment generation.

Economic Regularities and "Laws" and the Riksbank Prize too

I've been reading The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn by Avner Offer, Gabriel Söderberg, an interesting critique of the use of the Nobel Prize to undermine the Welfare State, essentially by conservative groups in Sweden, that were influential within the Central Bank (Riksbank), that disliked the Social Democratic policies in place in the 1960s. I have been critical of the Riksbank prize before (see, for example, here or here; check also Lars Syll's blog who often discusses the limits to the Nobel in economics), and this book is an interesting discussion of the socio-political forces behind the creation of the prize. I highly recommend it.

Having said that, I should note that the alternative to mainstream marginalist (neoclassical) economics is not Social Democracy. I guess one can actually be Social Democratic (Liberal in the US  New Deal sense of the word) and neoclassical. A good chunk of the Old Keynesians of the Neoclassical Synthesis sort were, and there are a few New Keynesians that are like that (many are simply Neoliberal). The alternative to marginalism, in my view, is a combination of the old surplus approach (classical political economy), particularly regarding value and distribution, and the Keynesian (and Kaleckian) analysis, regarding macro.

Also, I'm somewhat troubled by Offer and Söderberg tendency to read the Kuhnian ideas on the growth of knowledge in a nihilistic way, suggesting that economics cannot be seen as 'scientific' (surely a loaded term with more than one definition), and that there are no regularities in economics. They, for example, say that:

Feynman began by ‘looking for a new law’. But after three centuries, economics has yet to come up with a single non-obvious ‘law’, or universal regularity.

Don't get me wrong, regularities in economics are historically constrained, but there are more than a few. As any regular reader of this blog would know, I'm particularly fond of Okun's Law (and also of its inseparable fraternal twin Verdoorn's Law). I do think there is an important regularity behind the so-called Thirlwall's Law (that developing countries without a reserve currency face a balance of payments constraint more often than not), even if I don't think it is a "law" like the other two. In particular, I think that if one thinks of the persistent forces that operate within a particular mode of production, there are many other regularities that should (and to some extent are) part of economic analysis.

There are many mechanisms that capture the workings of those regularities in the economic system, like the multiplier and the accelerator. Theoretical constructs that are measurable, even if that is difficult and open to criticism. I guess I'm okay with the use of the term economic law, in a certain context. I suppose Marx also thought that capitalism, and other modes of production, were to some extent amenable of analysis on the basis of certain regularities, certain laws of motion, if one prefers (and, yes, that opens a discussion about determinism, but I'll leave that for another post).

Kindleberger (who I was lucky to see giving a talk in honor of Heilbroner years ago) wrote a little book on economic laws. The Iron Law of Wages, that Kindleberger discusses in his book, is very problematic (some discussion of that here), like the law of supply and demand, or the law of diminishing returns (they are not laws in my view, if that needs to be clarified). The other two Kindleberger discusses are much better, namely: Engel's Law and Gresham's Law. At any rate, for what is worth, I do think that there are many regularities that make economics scientific. Yes, sure social sciences are not like the hard sciences, but we do not live in post-modern world in which no regularities exist. But that does not undermine the authors' critique of the Riksbank prize, I might add.

On the AS/AD model and the micro/macro relation

I promised to discuss Nick Rowe's claim that one must start with Aggregate Demand and Supply (AS/AD) to explain macroeconomics. Nick's argument is that the AS/AD model is useful to analyze monetary economies, and he quite correctly points out that money must be part of the discussion from the start. In his words:

And if you don't start with money, monetary exchange, and AD and AS, you are doing macro wrong. Because the only thing that makes macro different from micro general equilibrium theory is the fact that macro incorporates the fact of monetary exchange, which microeconomists ignore.

While I tend to agree that macro should deal directly with monetary economies, it's far from clear that the only difference between macro and General Equilibrium (GE) micro is the existence of money. But before I get to that a few things about the AS/AD model in general and Nick's suggestions.

Sure money matters, but it's worth remembering that the basic macro principle, the idea of effective demand and the multiplier can be described without directly discussing money. Sure, Keynes noted that effective demand works in a monetary economy of production, and suggested that it was similar to Marx's capitalism (M-C-M') in the drafts of the General Theory (GT). But that was just to note that that the process of production is not about consumption, but about accumulation, something relevant for debunking Say's Law.

But the idea that investment (in this case as a proxy for autonomous spending) determines savings, and the adjustment process results from increases in income, does not require a previous discussion of money. So much so that Keynes himself suggests that he only came up with the theory of liquidity preference, and the monetary rate of interest, after the development of the multiplier (and his version the psychological law, and the propensity to consume below one; Kalecki does it by the share of income going to wages below one, and with workers consuming all their income).

So why is AS/AD important in my view, you may ask. I actually start with the Quantity Theory of Money to provide an AD curve (as suggested by Nick; but he prefers to make M endogenous as in a Wicksellian model), and a simple production function and labor market story for a vertical AS at the natural level of output to describe the neoclassical model. Exactly to show that in this case output is supply constrained and money does not matter. And that would contrast with the Keynesian view of a demand determined level of income and employment, and a world in which money matters.*

The worst part of using the AS/AD framework is that most students will mechanically believe in something along those lines, and in particular the notion that the two curves are independent. And even though by the end of the course I try to emphasize that the AS (potential output) can be moved by changes in the AD, along the lines of the Kaldor-Verdoorn, it is harder once they have been using both curves independently.

That leaves the issue of the micro/macro relations and Nick's notion that money, which he sees as a medium of exchange in typical neoclassical fashion rather than as a unit of account that represents the power of the State, is the main difference with micro. In my course, the first thing I discuss is the different views of what macroeconomics is, simply the aggregation of individual rational behavior, or as in Keynes' notion of the fallacy of composition something beyond simple aggregation. One example I use is Keynes' notion of financial markets as a beauty contest, that is, the idea that agents in financial markets are concerned with the average view of where the markets should be. So the behavior of one agent affects the behavior of others.

But the main problem with the notion of conventional neoclassical micro is more complicated than the lack of interdependence of preferences, or the lack of money for that matter, but the very core notion of the principle of substitution. I only discuss this in my course, briefly when I have to deal with investment behavior and Keynes' acceptance of the marginal efficiency of capital. And yes, that requires some understanding of the capital debates.

* I should add that I make the distinction that you could have short run effects of money in the simple neoclassical story, but not in the long run, in which cycles are dominated by technological shocks (phlogiston as Romer would aptly call them). In my view, in the long run the main effect of money would be on the level of the normal rate of interest, and it's impact on income distribution and the dynamics of debt. But those are discussed only cursorily in the undergraduate course.

Can Trumponomics work?

Work for whom?

That's what Martin Sandbu (subscription required) asks in the Financial Times. In his view, it might. He cites Ken Rogoff -- of spreadsheet fame -- who also has said that it's a possibility. Sandbu cites Summers doubts on Trumponomics, which are all based on supply side factors, but has very little to say about that.* Like Rogoff, Sandbu thinks that what matters is private investment that matters, meaning demand, and, as it must be in these cases, the confidence fairy makes an appearance. In his words:

"What matters, of course, is whether business investment will increase under a Trump economic policy. If it does, it could be because regulations are made business-friendly, because fiscal stimulus boosts aggregate demand and expectations of future demand growth, simply because there is something about Trump that changes the "animal spirits" of investors and business decision makers."

Keynes' animal spirits, also valued by New Keynesians, become relevant. However, the really relevant stuff in there is the fiscal stimulus and how much in terms of actual spending rather than tax cuts for the wealthy, and on what he will spend (e.g. infrastructure). On that, by the way, Trumponomics remains a mystery. But he is right that if: "if a greater fiscal deficit would have boosted growth under a president Hillary Clinton, it should also boost growth under a president Trump."
But the important point Sandbu makes is that:

"Whether greater spending leads to greater (sustained) growth depends on, as Rogoff rightly points out, whether there is much spare capacity in the economy today, or more intriguingly, whether supply capacity itself responds with faster productivity increases in a 'high-pressure economy' of strong demand."

Note that Rogoff only makes the point about spare capacity, and the intriguing idea that the supply constraint responds to demand is Sandbu's own. In other words, he argues that some sort of Kaldor-Verdoorn Law might be at work in the economy. And yes, that's absolutely right.

So can it work? Sure, but for whom is the important question you should ask. And it will be for the few? A boost to infrastructure spending would certainly help, and even military spending (and I'm not discussing the foreign policy implications of a Trump presidency), which is the way the US promotes industrial policy, might stimulate growth. But I would expect after his choices for the economic positions in the cabinet, including his last very anti-union Labor Secretary (and his twitter rant against the Carrier union leader) that the benefits will not be very well distributed.

* Rogoff thinks the economy is not growing less because of secular stagnation, as Summers, meaning it's not a permanent supply-side problem (negative natural rate of interest, or whatever version of the argument you prefer), but the result of debt overhang (more on this for a later post).

Cassidy on the productivity puzzle

John Cassidy is one of the best economic journalists around (together with Jeff Madrick probably). And not only because he has written about one of my mentors, Wynne Godley. In his last column he tackles the issue of productivity. And again I should say he is on the right track. He first gives a simple example of technological change from the donkey to the truck delivery system. Almost imperceptibly he tells you that you would change from one to another technology if: "you can find enough customers." Exactly, why would you invest in the new technology, the truck, if nobody is demanding more deliveries which would make the truck cost effective.

At any rate, he suggests three explanations for the current productivity slowdown (or the new concerns about it, since the Great Recession; this had temporarily vanished in the late 1990s when productivity picked up as a result of the so-called New Economy, i.e. information technology). The first, is that it's all a measurement problem, which in all fairness is not very credible. Then there is the Robert Gordon story that the third Industrial Revolution is less technologically dynamic. A supply-side story. And lastly, he hits the nail with the Kaldor-Verdoorn story. It is the slowdown in growth, mostly resulting from austerity. As the figure below shows productivity and GDP growth are highly correlated, and the question is whether you believe Gordon (with causality from productivity to GDP) or vice-versa, like Kaldor (Godley's intellectual hero, btw).

On Marx and other 19th century critical economists he might be wrong. But that is a topic for another post. On the calculations for Kaldor-Verdoorn go here (my method avoids the need to calculate potential GDP; on potential GDP see this interesting posts here, here and here by JW Mason).

Crazy as Adam Smith: the Media Discovers the Kaldor-Verdoorn Effect

So Kevin Drum at Mother Jones discovers the Kaldor-Verdoorn effect, and the fact that growing demand might be the main cause of rising productivity, and idea as old as Adam Smith in his vent for surplus model (chapter 3 of the Wealth of Nations says that the division of labor, that is, productivity, which is the basis for development, is limited by the extent of the market, that is, by demand). I posted extensively on that here (all post by date here), and produced, as far as I know, the only methodology to separate the Verdoorn effect (long term trend effect) from the Okun effect (cyclical effect) with one of my graduate students long ago (see here). And yes this is in part why a Bernie type policy would actually lead to significant changes in employment and productivity.

More on Secular Stagnation

Mauro Boianovsky and Roger Backhouse have written a brief post on the topic, based on a longer paper. As I understand the modern version, due essentially to Larry Summers, it basically suggests that there are insufficient investment opportunities, or a savings glut to use Bernanke's hypothesis, discussed here before. I explained why it doesn't seem particularly compelling story in that previous post. If public spending picked up in the US, so would private investment, and the savings glut would vanish. Yes global imbalances would increase. That would be good. Global imbalances would solve the 'secular stagnation' problem.

Note that the Summers' view is different than the Robert Gordon's view, but not incompatible with it, according to which the innovations of the third industrial revolution are less transformative than those of previous waves of technological change. As noted before also, since I believe the evidence for demand driven technological innovation is strong (something called Kaldor-Verdoorn's Law) I don't think there is much to this argument either. The Gordon hypothesis assumes that innovations are supply side determined, like most neoclassical economists, including Schumpeter.

Boianovsky and Backhouse point out something that I didn't know, since I didn't read Hansen's original paper on this, I might add, that the Turner's hypothesis about the closing of the Western frontier played a role in Hansen's stagnationist hypothesis. Not sure what's the mechanism, so I'll check and report back on that. Also they seem to suggest that Domar's debt sustainability condition depends on the Harrod-Domar model. That result, as far as I understand it, is completely independent of the growth model.

I should also note that the only forgotten author in this revival of the stagnationist thesis, is the most interesting of them all, namely: Josef Steindl, author of the 1952 classic Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism. Stagnation resulted from the oligopolistic structure of mature capitalism, in his view. Steindl was famously wrong, in the sense that the 1950s and 1960s were not a period of stagnation.* But at least his explanation pointed out in the direction of social conflicts imposed by the productive structure of advanced economies. As I said on my previous post on the topic, there is no secular stagnation problem, associated to lack of investment opportunities, in my view. There is a political problem that precludes more fiscal expansion, or in Steindl's terms, it's stagnation policy.

* An issue he discusses in his 1979 Cambridge Journal of Economics paper (subscription required).

Is labor productivity still pro-cyclical? Okun's Law is still fine

So there has been some talk about productivity not being pro-cyclical anymore. This is based on the notion that labor productivity increased during the last few recessions. Robert Gordon is the main source of this view. That is, it would seem that labor productivity is now anti-cyclical. Note that pro-cyclical productivity is what is behind Okun's Law. So below the data, from Fred. Labor productivity, the difference between real GDP growth and civilian employment growth and real GDP growth itself.

It is hard to look at the graph and suggest that the two variables are not positively correlated, even for the post-1980s period. But it is true that if you look at the shaded areas, which represent recessions, it seems that productivity fell before, and was already recovering in that period, at least since the Bush senior recession. This is more about the timing of the recessions, and how these are measured by the NBER, than about the strength of the pro-cyclical relation between productivity and output.

There are a few additional problems with Gordon's views. Note that Gordon does not explicitly deal with the structural relation between labor productivity and growth, the so-called Kaldor-Verdoorn effect, and that's why he finds that the Okun effect is weaker overtime. I had written before on this here (or here), and noted that the Okun coefficient has always been around 2 (by the way, with updated data still is; more on that on a latter post).

The inability to separate the cyclical and structural components of the relation is what causes the change in the short run coefficient (the Okun one). It is still true that as economies grow, productivity picks up, since producers try to adapt to increasing demand by utilizing more effective methods of production.

The mystery of productivity: what mystery?

Another old one. Trying to catch up after the Thanksgiving break. Mainstream economists seem always puzzled by productivity. It is the source of growth and a mystery (Helpman has a book titled The Mystery of Economic Growth). They refer to trends in productivity as puzzles, in particular the slowdown after 1973.

 

Alan Blinder: reminds us that after the surge in productivity growth, that for a while at least was referred to as the New Economy, associated to information technologies, has collapsed to even lower levels than the 1973-1995 period. He is, as a good mainstream author, quite puzzled. In his words, "quite surprisingly and still somewhat mysteriously, productivity growth plummeted [after 1973]... We are all in the dark."

In Jeon and Vernengo (2008) we suggest that labor productivity is endogenous, explained essentially by the expansion of demand, and old idea, implicit in Adam Smith's vent for surplus, and part of a well established empirical regularity, the so-called Kaldor-Verdoorn Law. In other words, it is the weak recovery, caused by a contractionary fiscal stance, and the slow pace of private spending growth as employment increases, that explains the poor performance of productivity. In this sense, the causes are considerably simpler, connected to macro policy, rather than the long-term pessimism of Gordon and Summers, which now talk about secular stagnation (see also this book).

Perhaps the more interesting stuff in Blinder's piece is his discussion of what the 'serious people' in the mainstream consider the natural rate to be. He says:

"the 'central tendencies' in the Federal Open Market Committee’s latest published forecasts range from 5.2% to 5.5% for the 'full-employment' unemployment rate, and from 2% to 2.3% for the potential GDP trend."

Note that Blinder also thought that the speed limit was around 2% back in the late 1990s (here his debate with Bluestone and Harrison). And yes he is a Keynesian (a New Keynesian). With friends like this...

Kaldor-Verdoorn's Law for Latin America

The Kaldor-Verdoorn’s Law (KVL) suggests that the rate of growth of labor productivity is determined by the expansion of demand. In other words, KVL suggests that there is a strong correlation between the growth of labor productivity and the rate of growth of economic activity.

The graph shows KVL for 7 Latin American Economies between 1950 and 2006. For similar analysis for the US see this paper.

Technological determinism and economic growth

Technological determinism is widespread. The Solow model basically suggests that it is technological progress, measured incorrectly as Total Factor Productivity (TFP), that drives growth. The same is true of Schumpeterian models with a demiurgic role for the innovating entrepreneur.

But technological determinism is not just typical of economics, historians too tend to accept that technology drives history. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith tell us in the intro to their edited book titled Does Technology Drive History? that:

The collective memory of Western culture is well stocked with lore on this theme. The role of the mechanic arts as the initiating agent of change pervades the received popular version of modern history. It is embodied in a series of exemplary episodes, or mini-fables, with a simple yet highly plausible before-and-after narrative structure. Before the fifteenth century, for example, Europeans are said to have known little or nothing about the western hemisphere; after the compass and other navigational instruments became available, however, Columbus and his fellow explorers were able to cross the Atlantic, and the colonization of the New World quickly followed. Newly invented navigational equipment is thus made to seem a necessary precondition, or "cause," of as if it had made possible Europe's colonization of much of the world. 

Similarly, the printing press is depicted as a virtual cause of the Reformation. Before it was invented, few people other than the clergy owned copies of the Bible; after Gutenberg, however, many individual communicants were able to gain direct, personal access to the word of God, on which the Reformation thrived. As a final example, take the story, favored by writers of American history textbooks, about the alleged link between the cotton gin and the Civil War. In the late eighteenth century, slavery was becoming unprofitable in the American states; but after Eli Whitney's clever invention, the use of African slaves to harvest cotton became lucrative, the reinvigorated slavery system expanded, and the eventual result was a bloody civil war.

And when it comes to economics technological determinism is not only a trait of the mainstream of the profession. The editors argue that Heilbroner (who was very open, but more conventional in is economics than people think) is the closest in their book's collected essays to accept technological determinism. Heilbroner's classic paper "Do Machines Make History?" starts with Marx's (Karl not Leo) epigraph (from The Poverty of Philosophy) according to which: "the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." Mind you, I think that regarding Marx, the quote might be misleading. Marx clearly thought that there was a technological component to the mode of production, but social relations of production mattered too.

What is NOT discussed in most analyses of the technological determinism by conventional and more than a few heterodox authors is the role of demand in creating the conditions for technological change. In that case, technological change is not the cause of growth, but the result. As in Adam Smith's story, it is the extent of the market (demand) that limits the division of labor (productivity). In modern parlance the idea is known as the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law.*

Obviously there is a certain serendipity in the process of technological innovation, and, hence, it is not uniquely determined by the pressures of a growing market. The point is more that there is no reason for an invention to be pursued systematically if it does not somehow provide for an existing and pressing need. Think of steam engines (the ones that give you the industrial capitalist), which were known for millennia, way before Newcomen and Watt, but had no relevant productive use until they were employed for pumping water out of mines. Only then the potential of the machine was comprehended, and the real work of incremental improvements that made it really useful started.

The question is then one of causality (as it often is between heterodox and mainstream views). Do innovations cause growth or are caused by growth (even if there is some two-way causality the question is which one predominates)? Were the high wages in England that forced capitalists to economize on labor (Principle of Substitution) and led to the Industrial Revolution, as Robert Allen suggests, or did the high wage economy, and the extended domestic markets (let alone the external markets) that provided the stimulus for technological change? I still believe that the weight of the historical evidence suggests that demand rules the roost.

The notion that technology is demand driven is also the only alternative, even though that is not understood very well by historians (economic or otherwise) to technological determinism. In this case, the reasons behind innovations are associated to the more complex social forces that determine the expansion of demand. They involve issues related to income distribution (high or low wages), or the social patterns that determine tastes and consumption (the reasons why the British consumed Indian calicos and porcelain pottery), the access to foreign markets, and the geopolitical forces that explain why some won and others lost in the pursue of those markets, to name a few. Note that power and politics are central to technological innovation, since they involve issues like income distribution and global access to markets. How can you understand the US National Innovation System (NIS)** without the Military-Industrial Complex and its role in providing access to global markets?

Sure enough a demand driven story has space for the sort of external supply-side effects that allow technology and innovations to thrive. So the expansion of demand in a society like England that was going through a Scientific Revolution would have more chances to lead to technological innovation (there is a gap between science and technology, of course) and  provide certain advantages over their competitors for global hegemony, to say the least. In other words, a demand driven story does not imply that supply side factors are irrelevant, they are simply not the prime movers.

* Neo-Schumepterians often refer to this view as the demand-pull hypothesis, due to Jacob Schmookler's Invention and Economic Growth.

** Another Neo-Schumpeterian beloved concept.

Demographic transitions, Malthusian traps and supply constrained growth

Gregory Clark's book The Farewell to Alms re-popularized the Malthusian model (for the relevant chapter go here). The basic idea is that population dynamics and the so-called demographic transition do have an important impact on economic growth. Robert Malthus' idea is relatively well known, even if there is an incredible amount of confusion in the way it is explained by modern neoclassical authors.

As all classical authors, Malthus assumed that real wages tended to be at subsistence levels. He emphasized more than others, eg. Smith or Marx, the physiological elements associated to subsistence, and his theory of population influenced David Ricardo (friends sometimes will push you in the wrong direction, but this should not be exaggerated; Ricardo was no Malthus). And this has nothing to do with some Iron Law of Wages (again this reflects the fact that mainstream authors like Clark have limited, to say the least, understanding of the surplus approach; for Ricardo and other classical authors on real wages see Stirati here).*

At any rate, Malthus notion was that if wages increased, population growth would ensue and bring them back to subsistence levels, hence real wages could not grow. In the mainstream story this is connected with lack of growth of income per capita. The economy would be in a Malthusian trap.** Population growth is bad in this Malthusian world, that is why the good reverend, like modern Republicans (and I would assume more than a few neoclassical economists), was for abstinence and delayed marriages.

The idea is that higher population, for a given technology, leads to more mouths to feed. Classical ideas that suggest that the extent of the market (and, hence, population) might have a positive impact on the division of labor (who said that?) are not discussed by modern neoclassical authors (also explains their dislike of Kaldor-Verdoorn Law). At any rate, the modern theory of economic growth is still dominated by supply-side explanations, in which technological progress is either exogenous (Solow) or endogenously determined by spending on education (or some variation of the topic in the endogenous growth literature).

Demographic transitions, in which the rates of mortality and fertility decline have in this view particular effects on growth. The notion is that the initial fall in fertility leads to a lower youth dependency ratio (less youngsters to feed), and is growth enhancing. Further, mainstream authors assume that workers in the labor force would have a higher savings rate (given life cycle hypothesis arguments) and that would lead to investment (yes, Say's Law). Jeff Williamson suggests (see here) that this, the so-called demographic dividend, in part explains the Economic Miracle in parts of Asia.

On the other hand, the same population dynamics leads to higher old age dependency ratio, and that should have (even if evidence is mixed on that) a negative impact on growth. Note that Eichengreen and his co-authors, suggest that slowdowns in growth are associated to falling productivity (not population dynamics), even if they measure that using Total Factor Productivity (which is not a measure of productivity, but of the changing patterns of functional income distribution; see here).

Mind you there is a more reasonable, demand-led, explanation for why population transitions might have an impact on growth. As the process of structural transformation from agricultural to industrial societies continues, more workers are incorporated in industrial jobs with higher pay, and even if income distribution might worsen, the expansion of urban population (and higher real wages) means an expansion of demand. Obviously once the transition is done, the expansion of real wages (not just from the rural workers moving into cities) must continue. In this case, the main cause for the limits to real wage expansion (demand expansion), and continued growth, come from the balance of payments, since higher wages and consumption lead to increasing imports.

There are many more limitations in the resurgence of Malthusian views in the mainstream. Including the Social Darwinist flavor of Clark's ideas, as noted by Deirdre McCloskey (here). But I'll leave those for another post.

* The main point that mainstream intepretations of classical authors miss is that there is no systematic decreasing relation between real wages and employment in Ricardo and other classical economists, something that Stirati makes clear.

** Note also that some authors suggest that this is the basis for Carlyle's epithet the 'dismal science' for Political Economy. As noted before by Vienneau (see here): "Thomas Carlyle did not coin the phrase 'The dismal science' to refer to Thomas Malthus's anti-utopian theory of population."

Okun's Law at 50

The IMF has written a good paper on Okun's Law (here), suggesting (from the abstract) that: "Okun’s Law is a strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantially during the Great Recession [and] accounts of breakdowns in the Law ... are flawed." nothing new really; I have said so a few months ago (here). Bill Mitchell has good post (here), which suggests correctly that the problem with the recoveries is not Okun's Law, but excessive fiscal austerity. I would add one more thing, not only Okun's Law works well in developed countries (advanced economies according to the IMF paper), but also in developing countries. Figure below is a crude representation of the Law for Argentina.

Note that the coefficient is more or less the same as in the US or other advanced economies. An increase in GDP growth of 1.87% reduces unemployment in 1%. Close to the 2 to 1 ratio. A more sophisticated and better estimatimated version that takes into account trend issues associated with Kaldor-Verdoorn, by Fabián Amico, Alejandro Fiorito and Guillermo Hang is available here (but in Spanish).

Macroeconomics and the financial cycle

Claudio Borio from the BIS has written a widely cited paper. The Economist has linked to it and suggested that so far his advice for including the financial cycle into macroeconomics has only been followed by a few. Besides Borio, Minsky, Godley and Lavoie and Keene are also cited by The Economist. The paper by Borio (he only cites Minsky), which has been a very influential voice suggesting that capital flows were pro-cyclical and more regulation was needed before the financial crisis, is somewhat underwhelming though.

For starters the definition of the financial cycle is based on individual perceptions. In his view, financial cycles result from "self-reinforcing interactions between perceptions of value and risk, attitudes towards risk and financing constraints, which translate into booms followed by busts." Then there is the question of the theoretical features for modeling the financial cycle according to Borio. There are three that are essential according to him. First, that financial cycles have endogenous causes, second, that debt must be present, and last but not least a different measure of the output gap. The last one is really the central theoretical modification in his scheme [note that heterodox models, like Kaldor's 1940 cycle model were endogenous, and Keynes had debt in the General Theory, in chapter 19 it is central, in fact].

The new output gap measure would include financial variables. He correctly notes that output gap measures take into consideration only inflation, when ascertaining whether the economy is above the potential or not, and that "it is quite possible for inflation to remain stable while output is on an unsustainable path" [and you can have inflation without being at full employment too, I would add]. His measure of the output gap would include information about asset price inflation too (property prices and measures of credit booms) and is shown for the US and Spain as the red line below.

Note that the new output gap shows the economy growing way beyond its potential in both the US and Spain before the crisis, more than in the alternative measures using a Hodrick-Prescott filter (green) and a conventional production function (blue). He concludes that: "potential output and growth tend to be overestimated" by conventional methods. Further, his point when arguing that the cycle is endogenous is that excessive booms are the cause of the collapse, so what is needed is to smooth out the boom. The prescription is to grow less and avoid to surpass the potential level, which is supply determined and exogenous presumably (since no word on this is uttered).*

He wants then to constrain booms, and macroprudential policies should be used for that aim. Further, while noting that in balance sheet recessions (following Koo) it is important to deal with agents losses head on, he suggests that "fiscal policy is less effective than in normal recessions" and that as a result of excessive monetary expansion after the bust "the central bank’s autonomy and, eventually, credibility may come under threat." So one really needs to kill booms, since nothing much beyond re-writing debt down and acting as lender of last resort with moderation can be done after.

I have several problems with these views, even if there are some good things, beyond good intentions, in Borio's paper. In fact, I think that there is significant evidence for the notion that potential output varies with demand expansion (Kaldor-Verdoorn Law), so that if a revision of the way potential output is measured it would be in the opposite direction. Mind you, if you check the chart above it means that Spain now is close to its potential level. I guess the natural rate of unemployment in Spain is around 20% or so (slightly below the current level). Note, also, that in Latin America we have been smoothing the boom with the consequence that our crises are not milder than Asia, but we end up growing less (see the paper by Pérez and Pineda linked here).

However, in my view the biggest flaw in the approach to financial cycles proposed by Borio is the absence of any discussion of how debt-deflation (the balance sheet recessions) affect and are affected by income distribution. There is no understanding of how wage stagnation in the center was as instrumental as financial de-regulation for the collapse, as noted by Barba and Pivetti (link here) or Jamie Galbraith's last book, not by chance called Inequality and Instability. This is again something that heterodox economists have known for a while and that the mainstream still has to learn.

* The reasons for the excess in the boom are associated to excessive finance [which he calls excess elasticity of the system], as in Shin's (2011) global banking glut, and not excessive savings, since he correctly points out that "expenditures require financing, not saving."

More on Italy: on Dean Bakers hypothesis

Dean Baker has suggested to Krugman that one reason for the lower productivity in Italy is that actual employment was higher before the euro, or if you prefer disguised unemployment was rampant. Then with the entry in the euro several workers that were not legally hired were, and as a result it only seems that productivity fell a lot. That is, it looks like a lot more workers are not doing that much more in terms of production, when in fact the actual increase in employment was not that large, and, hence, the fall in productivity not as big. Certainly an interesting possibility. Below the employment in Italy and in France compared (1970=100).

Note that, in fact, up to the 1980s employment grew faster in Italy than in France, and by the mid-1990s this trend was reversed. While it is true that in the late 1990s, with the euro, it seems that employment again grew faster in Italy (which may be due to Dean's suggestion), note that the proportional increase is relatively small (about 3.9% with respect to France from 2000 to 2006), and has reversed since the crisis. It seems that most of the fall in productivity is real, and caused by the fact that Italy grows less. Again, I think these reflects overly restrictive policies and reflects the well know regularity known as Kaldor-Verdoorn Law.

What's the matter with Italy? A reply to Krugman

Krugman has noted in a recent post that productivity in Italy, when compared to France, has been dismal, particularly since the late 1990s, after the launch of the euro. He correctly points out that the size of the Welfare State should not be the main culprit, since in France it is also large (larger according to him). The graph below shows the real GDP in both countries (1980=100) in domestic currency.

Note that since the launch of the euro Italy's GDP is considerably below that of France. In other words, Italy has grown considerably less than France since 1999. The real rate of growth of France was around 1.6% while that of Italy was closer to 0.7%. It should come as no surprise for those that think that the evidence is strong for the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law, which says that productivity results from the need to innovate when the economy is close to full employment, that productivity is higher in France. It's the lack of demand, caused by restrictive policies and the need to reduce debt in Italy, that explains the lower levels of productivity. Blame it on the euro!

PS: Just for fun, below the graph of Real GDP in Italy (Output) as a share of the French. Go back to Krugman's graph and see the similarities.

Path Dependency and Hysteresis

I promised to discuss the difference between these two concepts a while ago. The idea of path dependency is related to Joan Robinson’s famous objection according to which equilibrium is not an actual outcome of real economic processes, and it is for that reason an inadequate tool for analyzing accumulation.  Her view would suggest that path dependency should be seen as a property of models that break with conventional methodological stances, and, in particular, with the dominant neoclassical school.

It is important to note that mainstream defenders of the idea that ‘history matters’, like Paul David (of QWERTY fame), tend to disagree with the view that path dependency implies a rupture with neoclassical economics. David (2001, p. 22) says, in this regard: “imagine … my utter surprise to find this approach being attacked as a rival paradigm of economic analysis, whose only relevance consisted in the degree to which it could be held to represent a direct rejection of the normative, laissez-faire message of neoclassical economics!”  For David, path dependency is a property of dynamic and stochastic processes and cannot be used to assert anything about models and propositions derived in static and deterministic setting [which is, apparently, what he thinks neoclassical economics is all about].

Mark Setterfield's research might hold the key to this issue, by differentiating hysteresis [a concept from physics, that shows that mainstream economists do have physics envy!] and path dependency, and suggesting that the former, more typical of mainstream models, is a special case of the latter, more general and the concept often linked to heterodox models. He suggests that hysteresis is a variation of traditional equilibrium analysis, which implies that some displacements from equilibrium would be self-correcting while others would not. Hysteresis results from the non-uniqueness of equilibrium and under certain conditions the economic system would adjust to a new equilibrium. On the other hand, Setterfield argues that the typical path dependent model is based on cumulative causation, a concept that harks back to Gunnar Myrdal and Nicholas Kaldor’s contributions to economics. In this case, transitory shocks always have permanent effects.

A simple example might illustrate the difference between the more restricted notion of hysteresis and cumulative causation. In the conventional mainstream description of labor markets, an increase in unemployment insurance that allows workers to hold out longer for better paid jobs increases the natural rate of unemployment. After a fall in demand (an external shock), if structural changes to the labor market like higher benefits take place, the level of unemployment will increase and eventually fall, as real wages fall, but to the new and higher natural rate [think of Gordon's Time Varying NAIRU]. Hysteresis implies that history matters, but the system is still self-adjusting.

The quintessential example of cumulative causation is associated to the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law, which says that output growth leads to rising labor productivity. Thus, higher demand leads to higher output growth, which implies higher productivity, lower costs, and higher income in a virtuous circle of expansion. There are several possible expansion paths, depending on the strength of the multiplier-accelerator forces and the Kaldor-Verdoorn coefficient, rather than a single equilibrium to which the system adjusts. There is no adjustment to an optimal equilibrium level, no natural rate fixed or varying. The heterodox notion demands the rejection of the natural rate.

Is Growth Still Possible?

Paul Krugman has recently pointed out a very pessimistic, but very instigating paper by Robert Gordon, about the possibilities of long run growth. Gordon suggests, very boldly, that the: “rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.” In his view, long-term stagnation is a very possible outcome. The reasons are associated to the effects of technical progress on investment.

Gordon argues that, while the first (steam, cotton textiles, railroad) and particularly the second (automobile, chemicals, electricity, oil) Industrial Revolutions (IR) led to a significant increase in investment, the third IR (information technology) has been less prone to lead to significant increases in investment. Further, the advantages of the first and second IRs were incremented by demographic changes and the process of urbanization, which created the need for investment in infrastructure.

Read the rest here.

Productivity slowdown and and the return of secular stagnation

Robert Gordon has recently argued that secular stagnation is a likely possibility. Alvin Hansen, one of the most influential of the neoclassical synthesis Keynesians, was the father of the idea. For Hansen the reasons were associated with declining population growth, the disappearance of labor-saving technology, and the closing of new frontiers.

His views were published in a famous book titled Full Recovery or Stagnation?, in which he argued that investment opportunities were lacking. Since Keynes theory was also dependent on the expansion of autonomous investment, and Hansen was a Keynesian, the stagnationist thesis was considered a Keynesian theory. All in all, Hansen's views are not very different from Gordon's position. However, it is important to note that Gordon presumes that productivity determines growth, which is not a very Keynesian proposition.

The table below shows the rate of labor productivity growth from 1948 to 2011, and the two sub-periods that start with the productivity slowdown in 1973. Note that productivity growth follows the rate of growth of output (GDP).

This is not the Okun's Law discussed before, since these are averages that eliminate the cyclical relation between productivity and growth. In other words, the relation above is about the trend, something referred to as the Kaldor-Verdoorn Law (KVL). KVL suggests that productivity growth is not the cause of growth, but the result, and it assumes that growth is demand led, in Keynesian fashion. This would suggest, at least from the technological point of view, that there are less reasons than Gordon suggests for his pessimism. Of course one may very well think that stagnation in the US will result from the political forces that do not allow demand expansion. And yes everything hinges on the thorny issue of causality.