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.

The Flaw, inequality and the financial meltdown

Marie Duggan asked me about econ films the other day. Regarding the 2008 crisis Inside Job remains essential, but another documentary about the causes of the financial crisis, The Flaw directed by David Sington, is also worth watching. Around minute 22 you can see Louis Hyman (the short clip here is the initial part of that segment), Robert Wade and Robert Frank suggest that inequality was at the heart of the crisis. You can watch the whole thing on Youtube (for a fee) or on Hulu (with adds).

PS: An anonymous reader reminded me of Inequality for All by Robert Reich linked before here.

Classic Paper by Arestis & Eichner: "The Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist Theory of Money and Credit"

Recently, (see here) Matias posted a link to Fred Lee's collection of a classic set of by papers by the late Alfred S. Eichner. He mentioned that this not a complete set of Eichner's remarkable work, and that there are plenty of other exceptional pieces; in particular is Eichner's paper with Philip Arestis: "The Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist Theory of Money and Credit." This work has influenced my research tremendously (especially concerning the authors adherence to the tradition of Veblenian Institutionalism, and their emphasis of an 'open-systems' approach to political economy).

From the Introduction (which is worth quoting at length):

The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to identify the main elements of what constitutes post-Keynesian and institutionalist monetary theory and, second, to put forward a model general enough to encapsulate most, if not all, of the constituent elements of the post-Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit. One further novel aspect of this article is that we account for the possibility of the openness of economic systems. This is an aspect that has been ignored by the literature on both post-Keynesian and institutionalist economics. 

The emphasis in post-Keynesian and institutionalist monetary theory is on the proposition that "Monetary economics cannot help being institutional economics" [Minsky 1982, p. 280] and that "Capitalism is a monetary economy" [Dilland 1987, p. 1641]. In this view money capital is an institution that is inseparable from the other institutions that comprise economic systems. Money is not merely a medium of exchange. It is tightly linked to the behavior of the enterprise sector and the economy as a whole. Therefore, the basic theme in this approach is inevitably, "The Monetary Theory of Production" [Keynes 1973; Veblen 1964]. It is in fact this Veblenian/Keynesian premise that constitutes the core of what we have labelled in this study "the post- Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit." 

In this monetary theory of production, it is not surprising to find that credit rather than money is the mechanism that enables spending units to bridge any gap between their desired level of spending and the current rate of cash inflow. Money is viewed as essentially endogenous in a credit-based economy, responding to changes in the behavior of economic entities, rather than being subject to the control of the monetary
authorities. Money, in this view, is an output of the system, with the endogenous response by the financial sector governed by the borrowing needs of firms, households, and the government. Once it is recognized that money is credit-driven and therefore endogenously determined, any money creation emanating from fiscal or debt management operations initiated by the authorities or from a favorable balance of payments, can be neutralized through an equivalent reduction in commercial bank credit brought about by the actions of private economic agents.' It clearly follows that government may not be able to create money directly (see, however, Chick [1986]). 

What it can do, instead, is redistribute money among different groups of economic agents. This can happen when governments, in their attempt to increase/reduce the stock of money, set in motion the process whereby bank credit is created/destroyed by groups of economic agents. To the extent that the latter groups are different from those initially receiving/destroying money following the government's initiatives, redistribution of money between those groups takes place. 

The endogenous nature of money and credit is further elaborated upon in the next section with the constituent elements of the model under discussion being brought together in the section that follows. It is precisely here that the openness of economic systems is emphasized and its implications for the post-Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit are compared with the neoclassical view. A final section summarizes the argument.

Read rest here (subscription required).

Alfred S. Eichner's papers

Have been posted by Fred Lee and are available here. These are not a complete set of papers and books by Eichner, and I assume that they are the ones that are part of Fred's collection. Still worth checking out.

Below the text of the New York Times obituary (the pdf of the article here). Eichner had been a student of Eli Ginzberg, who was in turn a student of Wesley Mitchell and John Maurice Clark (his not too kind comments on his teachers here), and was the link to the institutionalist tradition.

Alfred S. Eichner Is Dead at 50; Major Post-Keynesian Economist

Alfred S. Eichner, a leading member of the post-Keynesian school of economics and a professor at Rutgers University, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Closter, N.J., where he lived. He was 50 years old.

Dr. Eichner suffered the attack while playing racquetball. He was pronounced dead at Pascack Valley Hospital in Westwood.

A native of Washington, he was a graduate of Columbia College and received his doctorate in economics from Columbia, where he taught from 1962 until 1971. He headed the economics department at the State University of New York in Purchase from 1971 to 1980 and joined the Rutgers faculty the following year.

Dr. Eichner edited several books, including ''A Guide to Post-Keynesian Economics'' and ''Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science,'' both published in 1983 by M. E. Sharpe. His latest book, ''The Macrodynamics of Advanced Market Economies,'' is to be published this year, also by M. E. Sharpe. 

One of the Best Teachers

He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Post-Keynsian Economics and he lectured widely and testified before Congressional and other legislative committees.

With Eli Ginsberg, a professor of economics at Columbia, Dr. Eichner wrote an economic history of black Americans, ''The Troublesome Presence: The American Democracy and the Negro,'' published in 1964 by Free Press. Dr. Ginsberg recalled Dr. Eichner this week as ''a first-rate historian and one of the best teachers'' of economics.

As a leader of the post-Keynesian school, a small but influential group of economists in Britain and the United States, Dr. Eichner sought to go beyond the theories of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government intervention in the free market and public spending to increase employment.

In the view of Dr. Eichner and his colleagues, investment is the key to economic expansion. He advocated a government incomes policy to prevent inflationary wage and price settlements as an adjunct to the customary fiscal and monetary means of regulating the economy.

Dr. Eichner is survived by his wife, Barbara; their sons, Matthew and James, both of Closter; two brothers, Martin, of Palo Alto, Calif., and Stanley, of Boston, and a sister, Belle Joyce Kass of Chicago.

There is more interesting stuff in Fred's page here.

On Paul Krugman and his call to stop listening to paranoid inflationists

From Alternet:

It’s been nearly six years since the demise of Lehman Brothers “ushered in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s,” and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman would like to move on. But he can’t, and by extension we can’t, because recovery is nowhere near complete. And going for the wrong policies at this moment of fragile improvement but enduring “economic weakness” would spell disaster, and possibly “permanent depression,” according to Krugman. The years since the start of the crisis have been largely defined by two camps, the “too-muchers” and “not-enoughers,” The too-muchers have warned incessantly that the things governments and central banks are doing to limit the depth of the slump are setting the stage for something even worse. Deficit spending, they suggested, could provoke a Greek-style crisis any day now —  within two years, declared Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles some three and a half years ago. Asset purchases by the Federal Reserve would “risk currency debasement and inflation,” declared a who’s who economists, investors, and pundits in a 2010 open letter to Ben Bernanke.

Read rest here.

Paul Davidson on The Gross Substitution Axiom, Heart of Mainstream Economics

By Paul Davidson, [h/t] Lars P. Syll

The gross substitution axiom assumes that if the demand for good x goes up, its relative price will rise, inducing demand to spill over to the now relatively cheaper substitute good y. For an economist to deny this ‘universal truth’ of gross substitutability between objects of demand is revolutionary heresy – and as in the days of the Inquisition, the modern-day College of Cardinals of mainstream economics destroys all non-believers, if not by burning them at the stake, then by banishing them from the mainstream professional journals. Yet in Keynes’s (1936, ch. 17) analysis ‘The Essential Properties of Interest and Money’ require that:

1. The elasticity of production of liquid assets including money is approximately zero. This means that private entrepreneurs cannot produce more of these assets by hiring more workers if the demand for liquid assets increases. In other words, liquid assets are not producible by private entrepreneurs’ hiring of additional workers; this means that money (and other liquid assets) do not grow on trees.

2. The elasticity of substitution between all liquid assets, including money (which are not reproducible by labour in the private sector) and producibles (in the private sector), is zero or negligible. Accordingly, when the price of money increases, people will not substitute the purchase of the products of industry for their demand for money for liquidity (savings) purposes.

Read rest here.

Gerald Epstein on Deconstructing Fischer's Grim Economic Forecast

Gerald Epstein discusses how Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer's has ignored real solutions to improve the economy, like increasing wages.

Regional Reserve Funds

The last issue of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) journal, CEPAL Review, has a paper on extending Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR; Spanish acronym). The topic of regional reserve funds has been in the news as a result of the Contingent Reserve Fund proposed by the BRICS last month.

From the abstract:

"This paper analyses the viability, implications and challenges of expanding the Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR) to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay. A regional reserve fund should be viewed as one of a broad range of mechanisms offered by the international financial architecture to address balance-of-payment difficulties. A fund with resources of between US$ 9 and US$ 10 billion at its disposal would be able to cover the potential funding needs of its members in the most likely scenarios, without necessarily becoming the lender of last resort for all its members. In more extreme scenarios, the fund should be able to "broaden its shoulders" by drawing on other components of the international financial architecture. Fund governance would present the main challenge resulting from an increase in the number of members."

Download paper here.

Jeff Faux on Brad DeLong’s Defense of NAFTA

By Jeff Faux

Brad DeLong recently criticized an op-ed I wrote about the negative impact of the twenty-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement on American workers. The stakes here are higher and more immediate than the rehash of an old ideological dispute. This is not so much about the past as about the future. Corporate lobbyists are pushing President Obama and congressional Republicans to pass the NAFTA-like eleven-country Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP)—right after the November election. Since it took effect in 1994, NAFTA has been the template for the subsequent series of trade agreements that have accelerated the globalization of the U.S. economy. But its failure to deliver as promised has soured the public and many in Congress on so-called “free trade.” Getting lawmakers to swallow the TPP will be easier if its promoters can somehow make lemonade out of the NAFTA lemon. To start with, DeLong fails to tell the reader that he is evaluating a law he helped to produce. He worked on NAFTA when he was a deputy assistant secretary in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department...

Read rest here.

Mishel, Shierholz & Schmitt on Wage Inequality, A Story of Policy Choices

Economists Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitt have published a new paper in New Labor Forum titled Wage Inequality: A Story of Policy Choices about the causes of wage stagnation and wage inequality in the United States.

Full PDF here.

Baker & Bernstein on The Incipient Inflation Freak-out

By Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein 

As predictable as August vacations, numerous economists and Federal Reserve watchers are arguing that the nation’s central bank must raise interest rates or risk an outbreak of spiraling inflation. Their campaign has heated up a bit in recent months, as one can cherry pick an indicator or two showing slightly faster growth in prices or wages. But an objective analysis of the recent data, along with longer-term wage trends, reveals that the stakes of premature tightening are unacceptably high. The vast majority of the population depends on their paychecks, not their stock portfolios. If the Fed were to slam on the breaks by raising interest rates as soon as workers started to see some long-awaited real wage gains, it would be acting to prevent most of the country from seeing improvements in living standards. To understand why continued support from the Fed is unlikely to be inflationary, consider three factors: the current state of key variables, the mechanics of inflationary pressures and the sharp rise in profits as a share of national income in recent years, along with its corollary, the fall in the compensation share.

Read rest here.

Josh Bivens With Another Reminder About the Stupidity of Austerity

By Josh Bivens

[...] there are multiplier effects, so if actual federal government spending was $118 billion higher today (that’s the gap between actual and “should be” spending identified), then overall GDP would be roughly $180 billion higher. So, the policy decision to pursue austerity is costlier (in GDP terms) than just the difference between government spending levels [...] Government transfers—Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare—are not classified as government consumption and investment spending in the GDP accounts. Instead, they show up as increased consumption spending [...] Most of the political argument has centered on the recovery phase of this cycle, simply because the actual recession began before the Obama administration took office. Further, it’s really only been since 2011 that government spending has been a truly significant drag on growth. Before then, between the Recovery Act and what we have called “ad hoc stimulus measures” (like the payroll tax cut in 2010), we didn’t have real austerity until the fallout from 2011’s Budget Control Act (passed in the wake of Republican debt ceiling brinksmanship in summer 2011) began.

Read rest here.

Mark Blyth's book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is highly recommended.

Kevin P. Gallagher On The Fed, Emerging Markets, & Role of The Dollar

By Kevin P. Gallagher

From Foreign Policy Magazine

Emerging-market and developing countries resented U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke during his spell in office. In 2012, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff scolded Bernanke and the Fed's loose monetary policy for creating a "tsunami" of financial flows to emerging markets that was appreciating currencies, causing asset bubbles, and exporting financial instability to the developing world. It may just turn out that they dislike Janet Yellen even more.Although it was Bernanke who started tapering the Fed's loose policy, Yellen will be the one to end quantitative easing and, eventually, raise short-term interest rates. And those could be an even bigger problem for emerging markets than the initial tsunami.Yellen's recent confirmation that quantitative easing (QE) will cease in October 2014 is the latest and firmest signal that U.S. monetary policy is reversing direction. The Fed began the year talking about the "tapering" of loose monetary policy, relaxing QE's bond-buying program and potentially raising interest rates. Now a concrete end to QE is on the horizon. The big question that emerging markets are now asking is how quickly and how suddenly interest rates will go up. Following the latest numbers that the United States' GDP grew by 4 percent during the second quarter, some monetary policy hawks are calling for interest-rate hikes soon to cool the economy. That's exactly what emerging markets are worried about....

Read rest here.

And for more on the role of the dollar in the world economy see here, here, and here