The General Theory at 90: The reconstruction of macroeconomics

On February 4, 1936, Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (GT). I'm off by a few days. ROKE did notice it, but I had no time to post. I recently presented on the social policies discussed in the last chapter of the book at the ASSA Meetings in Philly (photo below; paper soon, hopefully).

Ninety years later, the book remains perhaps the single most important book in twentieth-century economics. The work that most decisively changed the direction of the discipline. And yet, much of what people think about the book is wrong.

The first thing to understand is that the GT is not a book about economic policy. Keynes says so explicitly at the outset. It is a theoretical work, written for fellow economists. It is not a blueprint for government spending programs. It is not a political manifesto. It is not a defense of deficit finance in simple terms. It is a theoretical reconstruction of how a monetary economy actually works.

The popular image of Keynes as the prophet of fiscal stimulus obscures this. Ironically, the book itself says very little about fiscal policy. There are some vague remarks about what Keynes calls the “socialization of investment,” but there is no systematic discussion of fiscal policy, for how to pursue expansionary fiscal policy or the construction of the welfare state, which is also often associated with Keynes. The policies we associate with Keynesianism, deficit spending, expansionary fiscal policy, tolerance for deficits and debt, at least in times of crisis, are not the core contribution of the book.

Another important historical irony, the GT arrived relatively late, both politically for the New Deal, but also in Keynes' own trajectory as a policy wonk. By 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal had already reshaped American politics. The Wagner Act had strengthened unions. The CIO was organizing industrial labor. Sit-down strikes in Detroit had forced General Motors to negotiate with the United Auto Workers. Figures like Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet position, were central to labor reforms. Obviously Marriner Eccles (see my paper on him here), and his advisor Lauchlin (not Laughlin) Currie (and on him here) had not yet won the battle for fiscal activism, but they were entrenched in the New Deal environment. The shift toward a more interventionist state was already underway.

In that sense, Keynes’ theoretical revolution did not initiate policy change. It provided a new framework for understanding an economic world that was already politically transforming. So what was truly new in the GT, you may ask? After all, many still claim that the Treatise on Money, his previous work, with endogenous money, and more institutional discussion was a better book (Schumpeter, for example; Friedman preferred his Tract on Monetary Reform, more aligned with the Quantity Theory of Money). The revolutionary core of the GT is the principle of effective demand.

Neoclassical economics rested on Say’s Law (and so did classical economics, properly defined, but in a different way; without full utilization of labor), the idea that supply creates its own demand. Production generates income, and income automatically generates sufficient demand to purchase output. Persistent unemployment, therefore, could only be temporary. Keynes turned that logic upside down in the GT. Demand generates income. Output and employment are determined by the level of effective demand. There is no automatic mechanism guaranteeing full employment.

This idea was not fully developed until 1932, during intense discussions in Cambridge among the group known as “the Circus,” which included: Joan and Austin Robinson, Richard Kahn, James Meade and Piero Sraffa. Their critiques of Keynes’ earlier Treatise helped push him toward the insight that defines the book. That theoretical shift, not fiscal activism, is the true intellectual rupture.

Another misconception is to assume that Keynes needed the GT to defend fiscal activism. Theory and policy would be tied up together. In fact, he had already been advocating public works and expansionary measures since the mid-1920s, especially after Britain’s return to the gold standard created severe deflationary pressures. The 1926 General Strike and the electoral victories of the Labour Party in 1924 and 1929 occurred in this context of economic stagnation (see my paper on this here). Keynes’ policy activism predated his theoretical breakthrough. In other words, the policy ideas were not new. The theory that justified them, and explained why unemployment could persist, was.

It is also worth dispelling another myth. Keynes was not a socialist bent on expanding the state at all costs. He remained, throughout his life, a liberal in the classical sense, though one deeply critical of laissez-faire orthodoxy. His goal was to save capitalism from its own instability, not to replace it.

The “socialization of investment” he envisioned was pragmatic, not revolutionary. It reflected a recognition that private investment decisions were volatile and insufficient to guarantee full employment, not a desire to abolish markets or even for economic planning.

Ninety years on, The General Theory still matters, but his views have been in retreat since the 1930s, and only succeeded, during the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism, because they could be incorporated within the mainstream of the profession. The irony is that the book most associated with fiscal stimulus is fundamentally about something deeper: a reconstruction of macroeconomic theory. That task is still ahead.

Lauchlin Currie's review of Keynes' General Theory

Curried Keynesianism in action

 

The review with an intro can be read here (or here). Currie is often considered the first Keynesian in the Roosevelt administration (I suggested here that, while not a professional economist, that merit goes to Eccles), and was also the first to work in the White House, before the Employment Act and the creation of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He was also later unjustly attacked as a Soviet spy, and Roger Sandilands has dealt with this here (subscription required). His biography of Currie is a must read.

The Gold Standard and the Depression

I have been teaching on this topic this week. One of the accepted views on the Depression is that countries that depreciated earlier recovered faster from the crisis. The classic paper by Eichengreen and Sachs sort of established the result.* The notion is the traditional one. Depreciation leads to lower prices in foreign currency, increased competitiveness and higher exports. Graph below shows the correlation between depreciation (since the exchange rate is measured as the foreign price of domestic currency, lower rate means depreciation).

The indexes show the difference between the exchange rate and export volumes in 1929 (100) and 1935. So in 1935 France had not left the Gold Standard and the exchange rate remained at 100, while the exports were close to 50% of their 1929 level. There seems to be a clear negative relation between the exchange rate depreciation and export performance. However, note that in the United Kingdom a depreciation of about 40% implied exports at around 75% or so of the 1929 level. Only Norway and Finland seem to have higher exports in 1935 than in 1929. This was not an external demand led recovery.

This suggests that if depreciation had a role it was more likely related to the space that breaking with the Gold Standard rules provided for domestic authorities to pursue expansionary policies at home. Note that in this context, the depreciation, as much as higher tariffs and other trade related policies, are less relevant for their role in stimulating external demand, than by their role in protecting domestic production.

In the US the group of economists that were in favor of the depreciation of the dollar (see the letter by Harvard economists J. Raymond Walsh, Lauchlin Currie, John B. Crane, John M. Cassels, Robert Keen Lamb and Alan R. Sweezy in support of FDR's depreciation policy in 1934; and yes that includes Currie, later advisor to Eccles, and Paul's brother Alan, a Keynesian, not a Marxist), were also in favor of domestic fiscal expansion, which was at the end of the day Keynes point too. You can see Keynes arguing why the abandonment of the Gold Standard would be a good thing here, at the beginning of John Kenneth Galbraith's documentary.

This is still an important point, since there are significant lessons, at least it seems to me, for the European periphery story, in particular Greece. Depreciation alone cannot do the job. But a combination of import substituting policies, to reduce external constraint problems, with expansionary demand policies might work.

* There are also issues related to the role of the Gold Standard in causing the Depression, since the crisis was international, and many authors think that this suggests that it must have international causes. Hence, the Monetarist contraction story, or the Keynesian consumption collapse story (including the more radical version in which income distribution plays a role) would be incomplete. In this view, the relatively high rate of interest, related to the not credible inter-war Gold Standard, would be the cause of the depression. This view, as I noted before, seems closer to Keynes' Treatise on Money than his GT.

How Keynesianism became a dirty word: not Hayek, the New Deal is the real cause

Noah Smith, now writing regularly for Bloomberg, had a piece on this subject. There are a few good points on how New Keynesians are really followers of Friedman, something Mankiw admitted long ago, and how everybody including conservative economists (meaning GOP economists like John Taylor and Ben Bernanke) are New Keynesians (these would be the potty trained GOP economists, not your supply-side fringe economists like Arthur Laffer). Note that this is essentially correct as pointed out here before, since New Keynesians accept fully Friedman's notion of a natural rate of unemployment, while Keynes explicitly said he wanted to reject the twin concept of a natural rate of interest.

Noah also suggests that Keynes only wanted stabilization policies, and no redistributive policies, which is more open to debate. Keynes was certainly a moderate reformer trying to save capitalism from itself, and was no fan of the Soviet experiment. On the other hand, he was an Asquith liberal, meaning concerned with the expansion of the welfare system, and knew that laissez-faire, if it had advantages in the past, was essentially dead.

In the General Theory (GT) he famously starts chapter 24, on his social philosophy, with the idea that: "the outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes." That is, income distribution is squarely in the middle of his preoccupations, and the socialization of investment at the center of his solution (let alone the euthanasia of the rentier). Using public investment, and one would imagine taxes, to deal with employment and income distribution, plus compressing the remuneration of rentiers, and keeping low rates of interest to expand the safety net, are not simply stabilization policies.

On the main topic of his piece, however, Noah is simply wrong. He argues that the reason why: "people think Keynesianism is socialism-lite [is] the fault of Keynes’s main intellectual opponent, Friedrich Hayek." First, while it's true that Keynes and Hayek had a few debates in the 1930s (but the key Keynesian author in these debates was actually Sraffa, not Keynes), prompted by Lionel Robbins plan to make the London School of Economics (LSE) an alternative to Cambridge, it is preposterous to say that Hayek was the main intellectual opponent of Keynes. In the GT, it was his own teacher Pigou, and the Marshallian tradition in Cambridge that Keynes was battling. In his personal debates Robertson was certainly more relevant than almost any other conventional (Marshallian) economist. Hayek was irrelevant.

Second, Hayek basically vanished, literally, after the 1940s only to reaper in the 1970s as a result of his dubious "Nobel"/Bank of Sweden's prize (see Sissela Bok's, Myrdal's daughter, story on that topic). By that time Keynes and Keynesianism were already dirty words. Early on Keynesian ideas were associated, fairly or not, with Roosevelt and the New Deal in the US, and then to the war coalition government in the UK, the Beveridge Report and the post-war Labour reforms. Keynesian economists were in many cases persecuted, like Lauchlin Currie, the first economist to work inside the White House, and one of the early Keynesians. But by the 1950s and 1960s (particularly after the Kennedy administration) one kind of Keynesianism was dominant anyway (the Kennedy tax cut and the economists working for his administration are the symbol of the dominance of Keynesian ideas).

So you ask why indeed did Keynesianism become a dirty word? Simply because even if Keynes had differences with Roosevelt (FDR was actually a sound finance guy) and with Labour, his ideas did provide the intellectual basis for New Deal policies, particularly after the 1937-38 recession, and for the expansion of the Welfare State in general. The economists that where against these policies by the 1940s were in the minority. Mont Pelerin is, if anything, prove of their sheer irrelevance. Friedman years later would complain about how ostracized he was (but less than Hayek, since he accepted the ISLM/Phillips curve apparatus of the Neoclassical Synthesis Keynesians; and that's why New Keynesians, who are really followers of Friedman, can say they are Keynesian, by the way). Liberalism, in the US sense of the word, was at its height. But the rise of conservatism (Goldwater was a joke back then) eventually transformed liberalism into a dirty word (that's why we use progressive now rather than liberal).

Hayek was resuscitated very much like conservative ideas. By the big bucks of business leaders and their think tanks that were against the New Deal. The rise of Hayek or of his renewed respectability results from the same forces that explain why Keynesianism and the New Deal kind of welfare policies fell in disrepute, to the point that Niall Ferguson could say that Keynesianism was flawed because Keynes was childless and gay. Oh well.

PS: In fact, the title of this blog is related to the view that Keynesianism is a dirty word, and that some people (Galbraith) unashamedly teach naked Keynesianism to innocent college kids. For more see here.

Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie and the Red Scare

In another post I pointed out one (and there are more) of the theoretical problems with Benn Steil's account of the Bretton Woods history. I would also emphasize that there are questionable historical assumptions too in his book. In particular, the book's description of both Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie as Soviet spies is problematic. Steil basically accepts at face value Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley's, two self-confesed Soviet agents, testimonies regarding White and Currie, and a certain interpretation about the revelations of the Venona Project after the fall of the Soviet Union (the original New York Times story here; subscription required).

I'm not going to get into the details, but on Currie, Roger Sandilands' paper (subscription required) is quite conclusive in my view suggesting that he did share information with Russians, but was in no way a spy. It is particularly important in this context what John Kenneth Galbraith expressed in a letter to Roger (in the paper cited, p. 99), namely:

"That he was a Soviet agent is, of course, untrue; what is true, is our failure to remember that the Russians in those days were our allies, and taking casualties beyond anything experienced by Americans. It was, in those days, official policy that we offer help, and the Russians could be certain, and rightly, of a warm reception as allies in Washington. As I say, this has now been forgotten; only those of us who were there remember our relief when they came into the War and the way they took casualties and suffering far beyond anything experienced ourselves."

On the White case the book to read is Bruce Craig's Treasonable Doubt that also suggests that the case against him is at best inconclusive, indicating that the information he shared with the Russian allies was not part of a espionage operation. This indicates that, while they passed information to Soviet agents, they did not intentionally betray the US national interests. As Julius Kobyakov, a Russian intelligence agent, suggested here: "Among the members of my profession there is a sacramental question: 'Does he know that he is our agent?' There is very strong indication that neither Currie nor White knew that."

On this very topic is worth noticing what Steil himself tells us about White regarding Bretton Woods negotiations. According to him: "White wanted to make the US dollar, and only the US dollar, synonymous with gold, which would give the US government a virtual free hand to set interest rates and other monetary conditions at will -- not just for the United States, but for the world." In other words, he put US interests above anything else in the Bretton Woods negotiations, something that would make the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an institution that owes more to White than Keynes, a tool of US interests and for creditor countries in general. If he was a Soviet spy then he had his priorities upside down, or was a terrible spy.

In more general terms, I would add, it seems that the line of attack on some New Dealers, like Currie and White, tainting them as Reds or fellow travelers, is not very different from the indictment of Keynes's ideas on the basis of his sexual orientation, recently brought to general attention in the Niall Ferguson case. One cannot trust the childless-gay-commie is the not so subtle message. If you cannot attack the ideas, go for the messengers' credibility, that's the right wing nut fringe strategy.

PS: Currie and White are only the tip of the iceberg. Svetlana Chervonnaya argues, convincingly, in a paper that Alger Hiss was not the Ales of the Venona documents, and that the case that he was a spy is also open. In the Rosenberg case, the Schneirs argue that while it is clear that Julius was a spy, a low level one that did not pass any relevant information on the bomb, it is also clear that she wasn't and that the US government knew it. If the US had given him the same treatment than other spies got, with similar offenses, he would have gotten a few years of jail time, and she should have not been accused at all. On the effects of this travesty of justice on the family it's worth watching the beautiful documentary by Ivy Meeropol Heir to an Execution.

Currie and the 1937-38 recession

Lauchlin Currie, the first economist to work in the White House (in 1939, that is, before the creation of the Council of Economic Advisers, CEA, in 1946) and main advisor to Marriner Eccles at the Fed, said this in a memo to Eccles in October 1937:

“When the Government disburses more to the community than it collects in taxes, it adds to national buying power and the demand for the products of industry. The excess of spending over tax receipts in the years 1935-36 was the primary factor in increasing national income, in increasing Federal revenues, in increasing national demand for goods and, hence, in finally making it profitable to make additions to plant capacity in 1936.
…
At a time when the national income is shrinking the Government is seeking to raise revenues and cut expenditures this merely intensifies the deflationary trend. We are in danger of starting again the hopeless attempt to increase Federal revenues when the national revenue is shrinking. The attempt failed in 1929-32. It will fall again. The only condition under which the Federal budget can be technically balanced in 1939 is a reversal of the present deflationary trend.”

I hope a memo like this has been sent to Bernanke. Hope springs eternal.