Keynes and the abandonment of the Quantity Theory of Money

I've been reading Peter Temin and David Vines new book Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy (see also this). It is a very introductory and conventional reading of Keynes, with the distinctive characteristic that describes the development of Keynes' ideas in the proper historical context. This is good, since Temin is an illustrious economic historian. But he is not a history of economic thought scholar, and that has important implications in this case.

If there is any doubt about the conventional reading of Keynes, one is reminded by them that Keynes theoretical innovation is that: "he abandoned the assumption that prices are flexible which had been made by almost all previous economists—including by him in his Treatise on Money—for the more appropriate assumption for the 1930s: sticky prices.” No notice that the whole chapter 19 of the General Theory (GT) is about wage and price flexibility to show that it does not solve the unemployment problem, and it actually makes it worse.

But that is not the the main problem with the book. That is, in fact, the common reading among both Old and New Keynesians, with the latter providing microfoundations for rigidities. The authors claim that: “in order to free the analysis from the assumption of full employment, Keynes had to free himself from the Quantity Theory too.” Actually that is incorrect, since one can have endogenous money, and abandon the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM), without getting rid of Say's Law, or the neoclassical version of it which implies full employment, as indeed Keynes had done in the Treatise on Money (TM), his Wicksellian book.

The view of the Keynesian Revolution as a movement from price flexibility to price rigidity is well documented, and even if it has no basis in Keynes, it might acceptable to some authors. Krugman, who is not a historian of thought, explicitly says he does not care what Keynes actually said, for example. Note that saying that Keynesian policies are necessary as a result of price rigidities is not the same that saying that Keynes actually said that. And for historians of economic thought the difference is important.

More problematic is the idea of the Keynesian Revolution as a movement away from the QTM. There is a lot of scholarship in this direction, including some from Keynes' own disciples, like Richard Kahn in his The Making of the Keynesian Revolution. Actually in the GT Keynes goes back to an exogenous money approach, and in that sense is closer to the QTM than in the TM, which had endogenous money. The important thing in the GT is that Keynes noted that the natural rate of interest in his TM should be abandoned. That is, the idea that the interest rate brings investment into equilibrium with full employment savings had to be substituted by the notion of changes in income bringing savings into equilibrium with autonomous investment. The theory of interest or monetary theory comes later as a result of the abandonment of the Loanable Funds Theory. This is not to say that the abandonment of the Quantity Theory of Money is not important, but clearly it is not sufficient to lead to a theory of effective demand. 

The book also tries to show that there is a continuity in thinking between The Economic Consequences of the Peace and the discussions about the reorganization of the world economy at Bretton Woods. This is hard to defend, in particular since the book itself shows that Keynes' theoretical views changed as a result of the economic policy events, like the return to the Gold Standard at the pre-war parity, and the Great Depression. One of the important things about Keynes is exactly that, as stated in the phrase often attributed to him, when he was proven wrong, he changed his mind.

Economists with K, or rediscovering something never lost

So there is a certain buzz about the two old Ks, Keynes and Kalecki, and what Krugman and Konczal, the new Ks, have been saying about their theories. Mike is more of a journalist, and it is certainly good that journalists get Keynes right. And even better if they get Kalecki. On Krugman I said enough. He should take a page from Keynes and learn that by 1936 he was:

"no longer of the opinion that the concept of a 'natural' rate of interest, which previously seemed ... a most promising idea, has anything very useful or significant to contribute to our analysis."

In all fairness, for heterodox economists this rediscovery of Keynes/Kalecki is both welcome and a bit frustrating (check the comments in Quiggin post; someone thinks that DeLong was the first to point the relevance of Kalecki's "The Political Aspects of Full Employment").

But here is my advice to recovering neoclassical economists, check these other economists with K, you might learn something: Kahn, Kaldor, Keyserling, Klein, Knapp,  and Kondatriev. Kuznets is often remembered, so no need for rediscovering him, I think. And you can always go back to Gregory King, if you're so inclined. A good active economist with K, that understands both Keynes and Kalecki and how their theories are related to the old classical economists and Marx is Heinz Kurz. I have a list with the Ms and Ss for you to 'rediscover' too.

PS: Just three books on Kalecki published a few years after he passed away that you may want to check out are George Feiwell's The Intellectual Capital of Michal Kalecki: A Study in Economic Theory and Policy, Malcolm Sawyer's Macroeconomics in question: the Keynesian-monetarist orthodoxies and the Kaleckian alternative, and The Economics of Michał Kalecki. For a discussion of Kalecki's views on economic development see this paper by Jayati Ghosh.

Sraffa and the Marshallian system

(Sraffa circa 1976)

G. L. S. Shackle argues in The Years of High Theory that ‘there began in the mid-1920s an immense creative spasm, lasting for fourteen years until the Second World War, and yielding six or seven major innovations of theory, which together have completely altered the orientation and character of economics’ (Shackle, 1967, p. 5). However, by 1967, the two most important developments of this period—Keynes’s principle of effective demand and Sraffa’s criticism of the marginalist theory of value—were rapidly fading from the main corpus of mainstream theory.

The relative ease with which neoclassical economics reasserted its main conclusions is, in fact, explained by Shackle’s account of those years. First, Sraffa’s critique of the Marshallian theory of value is seen only as a step in the development of the theories of imperfect competition by Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin. Second, Keynes’s General Theory is seen as stating that unemployment results from the existence of uncertainty and irrational expectations (Shackle, 1967, p. 129). Both developments can be interpreted as asserting that market imperfections render neoclassical theory, although internally coherent, irrelevant for the analysis of the real world.

Also Shackle’s failure in 1967 — well after the publication of Production of Commodities — to acknowledge the importance of the revival of classical political economy to the debates of the 1930s represents a serious inadequacy of his interpretation of ‘the years of high theory’.

Before getting into Sraffa's critique of Marshall, it is worth noticing that Sraffa came to economics via monetary economics, like Ricardo and Keynes. His dissertation for the Law Degree, L’Inflazione Monetaria in Italia Durante e Dopo la Guerra (subscription required), dealt with postwar inflation and the return to the Gold Standard, the same topic of Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform. According to Eatwell and Panico (subscription required), in the analysis of the asymmetric effects of inflation and deflation Sraffa reveals the heterodox character of his position, more akin with the works of the classical authors and Marx than the conventional marginalist analysis. The notion that social conflicts and monetary factors determine the normal real wage was part of Sraffa’s analysis, although several elements of his analysis were still conventional, e.g. the acceptance of the Quantity Theory and of the Purchasing Power Parity theory.

Sraffa’s criticism of the Marshallian theory of supply represents an analogous situation, in the sense that some elements of the conventional marginalist views were still present. Marshall’s or Sraffa’s dilemma (which appears in Sraffa's 1926 paper) refers to the incompatibility between increasing returns and perfect competition. It is a long period problem. Sraffa’s critique can be summarized in the following way. First, rising costs derive from diminishing returns to substitution, and, therefore, in the general case where there are no fixed factors, increasing costs do not seem to exist. Secondly, increasing returns are incompatible with perfect competition. In the long period, when the firm cannot experience marginal costs arising from the existence of some fixed input, there can be no diminishing returns. Replication is always possible, except for the case of indivisibilities. In addition, Sraffa showed that increasing returns to scale are inconsistent with the notion of perfect competition.

In the case of increasing returns, the average cost is decreasing, implying that the marginal cost is below average variable cost, and, hence, there is no infinite, non-zero solution for the profit maximization problem. In other words, there is a tendency for the firm to expand to infinite size. Sraffa’s argument proves the failure of perfectly competitive assumptions to determine any equilibrium of the individual firm. Two alternatives are opened by Sraffa’s critique of Marshallian theory. If it is not legitimate to treat average cost as either increasing or decreasing within the framework of perfect competition, we are left with the result that the only satisfactory assumption is that of constant returns. On the other hand, ‘everyday experience shows that a very large number of undertakings work under conditions of individual diminishing costs’ (Sraffa, 1926, p. 543), which suggests that we should instead abandon the notion of perfect competition.

Sraffa considered the imperfect competition approach to be the only logical way to develop the theory of value along Marshallian lines. However, he showed no inclination to pursue this solution, and he appears to have already been working toward the revival of the classical approach. The origins of this project can be traced back to his early draft of the opening propositions of the Production of Commodities, which he asked Keynes to read in 1928 (Sraffa, 1960, p. vi). The reasons for not pursuing imperfect competition were never quite explained by Sraffa, but are fairly reasonable to infer (note that in Cambridge it was two of his students, Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson, that developed the imperfect competition theory).

Note that in order to obtain partial equilibrium, which is what the Marshallian model presumes, one must assume that prices in a particular industry are not affected by and do not affect the prices in other industries. Hence, externalities have to be internal to the industry, since otherwise production in one sector would affect the prices in other industries [perfect competition in partial equilibrium, the U-shaped cost curves and the equilibrium at the minimum with marginal cost equal marginal revenue, require also that externalities are external to the firm, since if they weren't the firm would became a monopolist; of course externalities that are internal to an industry and external to firms are an empty set]. That seems to be a dead end. Sraffa was already interested in the determination of long term prices. By this time, the summer of 1927 when he was preparing his ‘Lectures on Advanced Value Theory’ that he gave from 1928 until 1930, it was already clear to him that he needed to start from classical preocupation of determining relative prices and one of the distributive variables (the rate of profits or wages) strictly in material terms, that is, the quantities of labor and commodities needed to produce commodities.

For further on Sraffa's critique of Marshall see Gary Mongiovi's paper here (subscription required). For a general critique of Shackle's stance in the history of 'the years of high theory' read this one. For the implications of Sraffa's 1960 book for economics go to this old post (yes on the capital debates!).

To Failure

The ministry of silly budgets

Philip Larkin was wrong; failure actually does come dramatically indeed. Or so it seems if you look at the failure of the fiscal policies of the Tory cabinet. John Lanchester has a great piece in the new issue of the London Review of Books showing the perverse effects of austerity. Yes the multiplier works, and it is rather large he contends.

As much as the story of the Cameron/Osborne failure [they've promised to reduce the deficit from 4.8% of GDP to 1.9% and delivered after two years a mild hike to 4.9%], or the problems with the 'independent' Office of Budget Responsibility [you have to love the name, it's like they work for the Ministry of Silly Walks] and the additional nuggets on IMF revisionism, there is an interesting take on the history of economic ideas.

Lanchester correctly points out that:

"About thirty years ago, when Keynes was in the depths of economic unfashionability, going up to a group of macroeconomists and trying to start a conversation about the multiplier would have been roughly like going up to a group of astrophysicists and trying to start a conversation about your star sign."

Lucas suggested that if you talked about Keynes at a conference people would giggle. Note that Richard Kahn, the one that formalized the multiplier in 1931, one of the few theoretical concepts that has direct economic policy applications and is passible of empirical falsification, did not win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize (known as the Nobel).

Even better, he actually gets a good definition of what would be essential in economics. In his words:

"Richard Feynman was once asked what he would pass on if the whole edifice of modern scientific knowledge had been lost, and all he could give to posterity was a single sentence. What axiom would convey the maximum amount of scientific information in the fewest possible words? His candidate was ‘all things are made of atoms.’ In a similar spirit, if the whole ramshackle structure of contemporary macroeconomics vanished into thin air and the field had to be reconstructed from scratch, the sentence which packs as much of the discipline into the fewest possible words might be ‘governments are not households’ (Italics added)."

Mine would be 'demand determines income,' but we are splitting hairs. The orthodox would be either 'markets are efficient' or 'supply creates its own demand.' And here lies a crucial problem. These last two are actually quite well known (Efficient Market Hypothesis and Say's Law), but the heterodox ones are not. Not only we have worse PR, but also when the mainstream fails it is very good at avoiding any blame. In fact, even Lanchester, in an otherwise perceptive discussion, falls into the trap that a good one sentence definition of the field of macroeconomics would be "nobody knows anything." Not true, 'the mainstream knows very little' would be better.

And here's to you, Mrs Robinson

Jesus loves you more than you will know (wo, wo, wo) ...I know, but I was going to talk about the other Mrs Robsinson, Joan Violet (née Maurice), the main disciple of Keynes,* as I had promised in a previous post. Joan Robinson's contributions to economics demand several posts. She has participated, as Maria Cristina Marcuzzo noted, in three Revolutions, namely: the imperfect competition, the Keynesian and the capital debates ones.

And to reduce her to those three one has to fit her contributions to growth theory into a subcategory of either the Keynesian Revolution (the extension of the Principle of Effective Demand to the long run) or the capital debates (the critique of mainstream growth theory), and omit her various other contributions to monetary theory (e.g. endogenous money and the circuit), methodology (e.g. history vs. equilibrium), Marxist economics and so on. She was prolific for sure.

There are several great reviews of her contributions in all of them, which would make my post irrelevant. But what I want to discuss is the point raised in Sergio Cesaratto’s presentation, that in the last one of those revolutions her contributions might have been seen as negative. In his exposition Sergio emphasized quite correctly her rejection, at least in certain contributions, of the notion of long term normal equilibrium positions, and, hence, the traditional method of economics.

This was done, for the most part, to emphasize the notion that history matters and that path dependency was important, since the process of reaching the equilibrium would affect the equilibrium itself. Arguably, the role of uncertainty, following Keynes and some post-Keynesians, played a role in her rejection of normal equilibrium positions.

Path-dependency is indeed an important feature of real economies, and Robinson was quite right in emphasizing its relevance.++ However, the fact that the normal or long run equilibrium positions might depend on the initial conditions and on the trajectory to its final position would render the very notion of equilibrium irrelevant for the analysis of real historical situations might not be granted.

In her view, the notion of equilibrium originated from a misleading mechanical analogy with movements in space, and shouldn’t be applied to movements in time.  However, nothing suggests that the long run position of equilibrium cannot be path dependent and actually represented by an equilibrium position. Let me suggest that the idea of the supermultiplier is, for example, a case in point. Output depends on the autonomous components of demand, and investment, as derived demand, behaves in a way which leads to the adjustment of capacity (supply conditions) to demand.  It is an equilibrating process, but not a unique one, or one that leads to a determinate path of accumulation, since alternative initial conditions (e.g. sizes of the relevant coefficients) lead to different outcomes.  Also, changes in several factors can affect the trajectory by which capacity adjusts to demand.

Further, uncertainty, or true, fundamental and non-probabilistic uncertainty was also a relevant component of Robinson’s critique of equilibrium positions. Uncertainty also suggests that historical processes are complex and could not be reduced to equilibrium analysis. This was also in line with the post-Keynesian developments in the 1970s, by Paul Davidson and others, that suggested that uncertainty was central for Keynes understanding of the functioning of the economy.

That is again true. Uncertainty was important for Keynes, and is central in the functioning of real economies. However, uncertainty does not preclude the use of equilibrium. Uncertainty implies that agents use conventions, rules of thumb in order to make decisions. In an uncertain world agents stick to social norms, and even if there is significant uncertainty on an individual basis, the institutional framework tends to reduce uncertainty. In that sense, for example, the New Deal reforms decreased to a great extent the degree of uncertainty in the functioning of the economy, and guaranteed a high degree of stability to workers.  Another example of how institutional framework would reduce uncertainty is the use of capital controls (and fixed but adjustable exchange rates) to reduce the pressures on interest rates during the Bretton Woods era. With that framework, fiscal expansion with low real rates of interest produced a normal equilibrium with low unemployment level. In other words, nothing implies that uncertainty suggests that the multiplier and accelerator processes are not operational or that normal positions of equilibrium cannot be achieved.

In my view, the two main problems to Joan Robinson’s critique of the equilibrium method in the latter part of her career are that, on the one hand, by emphasizing the independence of the investment function and of uncertainty it led to the development of a set of models (later incorrectly referred to as Kaleckian) that bring back the entrepreneur as the central figure in economic growth (the so-called profit-led regimes). On the other, and even more problematic, it took place at the same time that (as noted by Garegnani) the mainstream rejected the old notion of long term equilibrium, and started to use dominantly the intertemporal models (this ones in fact terrible mechanical analogies to movement in space).

The old classical (and indeed even the old Marshallian) notion of normal positions, which allowed for historical contingency and path dependency was abandoned by the mainstream, but that was seen by several heterodox authors as an improvement because now mainstream models were ‘capable’ of incorporating multiple equilibria and instability. In fact, Keynes point was that normal situations (and hence stable equilibrium positions) in capitalism were sub-optimal. And Joan Robinson, at least in part, is responsible for some of those heterodox (very confused) views of the development of the mainstream.

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* Richard Kahn would be the other candidate, but his contributions to the Keynesian Revolution were considerably less visible, if admittedly incredibly important, with the formalization of the multiplier on the top of the list. Kalecki and Kaldor, although quintessential Keynesians, were not disciples of Keynes in a direct way, and Sraffa, although personally close, and contrary to what some think, very favorable to the idea of effective demand, was not a disciple proper either.

++ Note that path-dependency is not exactly the same as hysteresis, a point raised by Mark Setterfield. I’ll expand on this on another post.

PS: A paper in which some of the pros and cons of Robinson's approach to economics, in particular on money and growth, is available here (subscription required).