Positive Economist

Mana from government

2012-01-27T12:59:00.000-05:00

One sentence stuck out to me from an otherwise poignant article on healthcare and assistance for the very elderly:

Politicians are champing at the bit to cut back on Social Security and Medicare at a time when so many of us will depend on them.

I know this is just a throwaway shorthand and I shouldn't get so worked up about it. But I find it incredibly difficult to believe that any self-interested politician wouldn't lavish cash on the elderly (a.k.a. reliable voters) if it was feasible to do so. Even if I'm wrong about that, this is an example of an omission that sometimes bothers me: in some broad sense, resources have to come from somewhere. Slightly earlier in the article is this:

American political leaders are not preparing adequately for the huge demographic shift caused by the aging of the boomers, who began turning sixty-five in 2011.

So surely the earlier quotation should really say that all else equal politicians will have to find a way to cut back on Social Security and Medicare? What would the preparation be? The proportion of the population that is working-age is going to fall. That means fewer people working to turn stuff into other useful stuff, and more people not working but hoping for a share of the stuff. Something must give. Either more stuff has to be foregone by the workers, or less stuff enjoyed by the non-workers.

Government, whatever it is, isn't a grumpy gatekeeper protecting a bottomless barrel of stuff and saying "no, no, no". We can disagree about what government should do, of course, but let's not pretend that there aren't constraints.

Loaded words and modeling

2011-12-16T12:19:00.000-05:00

Here is a nice review by Burton Malkiel of "Models Behaving Badly" by Emanuel Derman. The models of the title are from the world of finance: how are assets priced?

I am a layperson to the world of finance, so I find it difficult how to apportion "blame" for financial crises on faulty models or fraudulent inputs to them. Certainly history is littered with financial crises, so the influence of modern modeling alone cannot explain everything.

In any case, I just want to take this opportunity for a small lament that the beautiful act of modeling must be dragged through the mud by a financial crisis in this way. It would be fair to say that I am almost fanatical about the virtues of the concept and practice of modeling. I believe that modeling is inescapable. The world is complicated. Our senses deliver so much information, our mental apparatus must work so hard, that to process the world around us is to model. It is too much to ask that we understand everything; we have to understand a version of everything that is not so complex as the world.

This is also why economics works with models. We don't have a scale replica of the world that we can play with to see how this affects that. We have to build a scale replica from scratch, using our best judgment to push insistently at the boundary between complexity (so that we can understand our model) and usefulness (so that we can make something from it).

In a way we are much luckier in economics than in finance. Progress in economic theory comes as our models are improved upon and refined, but we are more able to iterate forward because our models are not embedded in a Leviathan global finance industry that depends on their continued function. Creative destruction of old models is hard when the house comes down with them.

With all this in mind I want to highlight this passage from the review:

He sums up his key points about how to keep models from going bad by quoting excerpts from his "Financial Modeler's Manifesto" (written with Paul Wilmott), a paper he published a couple of years ago. Among its admonitions: "I will always look over my shoulder and never forget that the model is not the world"; "I will not be overly impressed with mathematics"; "I will never sacrifice reality for elegance"; "I will not give the people who use my models false comfort about their accuracy"; "I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many beyond my apprehension."

How many of these will I accept for economics? Certainly the first; the model is not reality. Certainly the second; math is helpful in model-building but is not the point of model-building. The fourth and fifth are hard to argue with.

The third I don't like. Everything that we do must sacrifice reality. The test of a model is not its realism (a realistic model airplane would be no fun at all). All models are unrealistic because all models are wrong. Of course elegance is not the test of a model either, except that an elegant model is one that illuminates a relationship in a clear way by cutting to the heart of what matters.

Anyway, the point is that I think that "model" is not a dirty word. I feel possessive about "modeling" much the same way as I feel possessive about "rationality" - what they mean to me is important and wonderful and I hate to see them sullied by misrepresentation that stems from their overlap with the real-world ideas of modeling and rationality. I wish that all of the things like these could have their own words that are not borrowed from natural language.

Abstract revolutions or: if something is new, the old thing must be bad

2011-11-21T12:01:00.000-05:00

There is a part of this small, otherwise enjoyable article about the advent of neuroeconomics that bothers me. The premise of the piece is that neuroeconomics is "seeking a physical basis for [economic theory] inside the brain". This is a field that is certainly sexy and possibly exciting; a while back I argued that it is a field that in some sense rediscovers the absolute primacy of "preferences" as the keystone of economic theory. I said:

The potentially exciting thing about neuroeconomics is that, even allowing for inexactness, it might tell us more about the actual hedonic motivators of people. Ambitious, yes, but not unimaginable. Of course, to an economist who wasn't under the mistaken impression that simplified preferences are supposed to be realistic, it might just amount to saying "your simplification is a simplification", which is slightly less exciting news. Or not news at all.

OK. In today's article, we learn that

modern economic and financial theory is based on the assumption that people are rational, and thus that they systematically maximize their own happiness, or as economists call it, their “utility.”

Since it's hard to figure out what is going on in people's heads, the argument continues, we employed an idea called revealed preference, the reconstruction of unobserved objectives from observed choice. Neuroeconomics, the claim runs, may one day be able to identify brain structures that are associated with various components of choice, and so neatly sidestep the problem of unobservability.

But this is much too much:

While Glimcher and his colleagues have uncovered tantalizing evidence, they have yet to find most of the fundamental brain structures. Maybe that is because such structures simply do not exist, and the whole utility-maximization theory is wrong, or at least in need of fundamental revision.

Utility-maximization theory is wrong. It is wrong by construction, because it is a model, and models are wrong by construction. Why must we go through this? It might be easier to sell me an iPod if you first convince me that CDs are useless, but that's marketing. Why do we need to market neuroeconomics this way? That tiny little word "wrong" up there is a sin, because it belies the very essence of modeling as a means to make sense of things.

Is it perhaps that what we should understand by the quote is that looking into the brain will tell us that people are not, in some sense, maximizing their hedonic pleasure by the choices they make? This amounts to both an attempt to open the black box called "preferences" and to pin down the (biological?) process by which decisions are actually made. If this is the sense in which utility-maximization will be proved "wrong", then in the first place it is not clear to me that neuroeconomics can accomplish such a thing. Leaving aside the tricky questions of intent, free will and consciousness, can there be anything inside the black box but another, and another? The leap from the correlates of physical choices in brain activity to the content or existence of a utility function is huge.

But more importantly, even taking literally the notion that we will be able somehow to trap preferences or process in a cage, it is surely impossible that any breadth or depth of evidence on what these preferences are could preclude the need for us to model. What if the thankless treadmill of refining imperfect models of the world could at last be switched off, that there is an apple of knowledge that will free us from the need for models ever again? This is a seductive idea, but it cannot be. To do away with models would be to be as complex as reality, and that is a fight that reality will win every time.

More rationality, and a million models

2011-11-16T12:50:00.000-05:00

Here is an article on a conversation with Raquel Fernández that I found very interesting. The whole thing is worth reading, but I will quote at length this passage on rationality:

There is a beauty to the models in and of themselves. You assume, for example, that people are rational. I don’t think any really good economist thinks that people are perfectly rational, but, on the other hand, if you want to model people as not rational, all of a sudden it’s not clear what choice you should make. There are a million and one ways to be non-rational; there’s only one way to be rational within the confines of a model. Rationality means one thing: you’re maximizing your welfare subject to constraints. Now, if you say people don’t always maximize, and they’re beset by this and that, then all of a sudden you can have a million models. And that’s a little bit unsatisfactory too.

This is pretty close to my own view. My extra take is that any "irrational" behavior - and so anything that the "million models" generate - can be rationalized, either by revising what we assume that the decision-maker cares about, or by adding constraints on the decision-maker's ability to choose: the question of rationality is a red herring.

Daniel Kahneman and the rational choice model

2011-11-10T11:39:00.000-05:00

Daniel Kahneman has a new book, "Thinking Fast and Slow", that is prompting a lot of excellent articles about his work. For example, Vanity Fair has a nice article by Michael Lewis. Back when I was an undergraduate, Kahneman and Amos Tversky's Prospect Theory paper was one of the first academic papers I read that motivated me to become an economist.

The article quotes Kahneman as being astonished to learn early in his career that:

The agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.

I just want to point out that this model of decision-makers in economic models is more innocuous than it seems. It means that when we put a decision-maker in an economic model, we assume that she

has things that she cares about, and
will do the best she can to achieve the things she cares about.

This is what we mean by rationality. The great thing about this assumption is that it is completely flexible - it can accommodate any preferences at all.

For example, the decision-maker might care about the wellbeing of her neighbor, and so give up some of her own material wealth to help her neighbor be better off. This is both rational and selfish!

For any decision we observe, some preferences will rationalize it. As economic theorists, the crucial assumption is therefore not rationality, but on what it is that the decision-maker cares about and what constraints there are on her making a good decision.

The great contribution of Kahneman and Tversky was to present evidence on the psychological constraints on our decision-maker's ability to achieve the things she cares about. Making decisions is hard: even if I know what I want to achieve, "doing the best I can" is subject to how I process the options I have to choose from.

Rationality is not supposed to be a realistic model of the process by which people actually make decisions. Rather it attempts to capture the outcomes of decision-making in a plausible way, so that we can try bit by bit to analyze economic settings without simply saying "people are completely unpredictable, so let's give up". Kahneman and Tversky helped to show how to write models of rational choice that better reflect the decisions we observe people make.

Meta-ignorance

2011-03-21T15:40:00.006-04:00

The "how badly people do on civics and general knowledge test" sub-category of Cheap Journalism is always good for some light entertainment. But this recent example from Newsweek is especially delightful for the pontificating it inspires.

For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead.

Goodness, where to begin!

Let's start with the obvious. It's always puzzling to see "competition" used with blithe disregard for what it means; why is it that competition is considered a lovely value at the level of the firm but a horror at the level of the country? Does a similar principle not apply? Of course decisions are interrelated and it is worthwhile to understand that interrelation, but the latent assumption seems to be that if we ain't getting ahead we're falling behind. It is not a fundamentalist opinion to demonstrate that the global economy is not a zero-sum game.

But that's too close to real arguments for my taste. Let's focus instead on

Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead.

This is a remarkably peculiar statement. To achieve more with a given set of resources requires innovation: once upon a time the only "production" humans achieved was to transform time and stone tools into dead animals and dinner. "Brains" have, of course, are irreplaceable in the process of achieving more. This is not abstract: the printing press, electricity, the loom, agriculture... we could populate this list ad infinitum. One entry on the list would be the Internet. The article is instead in a peculiar corner of arguing that brawn was enough to invent the Internet which immediately made brawn redundant.

Which is trivially nonsense. The "information economy", whatever that may be, is not a revolution in the progress that pushes gently but tangibly at the constraint inherent in turning scarce resources into output that humans value. That process has never been the brute force of brawn.

Shared economics

2011-03-18T10:29:00.005-04:00

Roger Goodell has joined the debate on the semantics of the word "economics". Welcome, Roger! From ESPN (warning: obnoxious auto-load video alongside article) today:

Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote NFL players Thursday, outlining the league's last proposal to the union and cautioning that "each passing day puts our game and our shared economics further at risk."

Now what might "shared economics" mean? Of the several points of disagreement between NFL owners and players in the current conflict, one is, of course, money. I'm going to regretfully assume that the resource to which Goodell's "economics" refers is only money. So what does he mean about that money?

Can "shared economics" mean a "shared allocation of resources"? It's possible; the two sides can take, in some sense, shared ownership of a specific or formulaic allocation of the pot o' gold from professional football. But this is odd. A problem (paraphrased) is that the owners want a larger cut of money off-the-top, which is different from the status quo. So the mutually agreed allocation of resources from the last CBA has thus far never been on the table.

The whole problem, of course, is in the sharing, in the allocation. It is nearly tautological that a disagreement about the allocation threatens the allocation. So that can't be it.

Can "shared economics" mean "shared money"? This is also possible. There's a work stoppage. In the worst case, the 2011 season is lost or curtailed and there will be a massive loss of revenue. Even in the best case, there is the fuzzier risk of alienating fans, contractual partners, and antitrust authorities, which could plausibly do the same. This seems a much likelier contender for what Goodell had in mind when he picked the word "economics" in his letter.

So to Goodell economics is a synonym for money, or revenue, or resources. This is depressing even for someone of my own view that the word "economics" is hopelessly lost to language forever. "Economics" is no more the resource than football is 22 people running around on some grass.

Hey, it's nearly Christmastime again!

2009-10-29T13:19:00.004-04:00

Look out! It's a book by Joel Waldfogel based on the deadweight loss of Christmas! I have made my point on the topic already, so I'm going to do my best to hide from any and all reviews of the new book.

Did I mention it's called "Scroogenomics"?

Leech the economy

2009-10-29T13:07:00.003-04:00

Anatole Kaletsky's evisceration of "old economics" in the London Times may be consistent with the general backlash during the current recession, but it's half-baked.

Today’s academic approach prevented economists from thinking about a world that is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inconsistent... others may revive the literary and anecdotal traditions of the great economists of the past... Smith and Hayek produced no real mathematical models. Their eloquent writing lacked the “analytical rigour” demanded by modern economics. And none of them ever produced an econometric forecast.

To wish simultaneously for a return to an "anecdotal tradition" and for theories to be "tested against reality" is perverse. The economy is indeed a complex system, and to draw correct conclusions on the relationships in a complex system requires more than anecdote. As epidemiology is to medicine, so econometrics is to economics; a
patient's recovery after leeching does not prove leeching effective, and folk inference in economics would be just as counterproductive, in its own way. The "analytical rigour" so disdained by Mr. Kaletsky represents the struggle to understand and draw inference from the very real complexity that to rely on anecdote risks ignoring.

The first idea, known as “rational expectations”, maintained that capitalist economies with competitive labour markets do not need stabilising by governments.

The second idea — “efficient markets” — asserted that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way, reflecting all the best available information and forecasts about the future.

The specific "theories" attacked by Mr. Kaletsky are also grossly misrepresented. Hell, the concept of a theory is being misrepresented. An economic theory is an if-then statement, and this is not a matter of mathematics, which is after all just a language like any other. No theory, no matter how it is expressed, can ever do more than suggest the outcome that would pertain under a given set of conditions. No theory, then, can "[maintain] that capitalist economies... do not need stabilizing by governments", or "[assert] that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way". To attack the assumptions underlying these theories is good and rigorous; to either attack the value of their existence is to distort the purpose of academic inquiry. It is precisely because
theories are if-then that any single conclusion can be given an 'if' and be co-opted and championed by the politically powerful of the moment, but the "assertions" come always from the interpreter, not from the theorem.

Literary and cross-disciplinary approaches to economics can have great value in conveying economic ideas and in complementing other forms of research. What would be unacceptable, however, would be the abandonment of valuable tools to help us to understand the way things are. Perhaps attacking economists makes us feel better, but this is like blaming the shipbuilder, engineer or mathematician for a drunk captain's crash.

And finally, because that felt a bit too serious, I must mention these:

Today’s academic economics reverses this process: if models disagree with reality, it is reality that economists want to change.

Policymakers who turned to academic economists for guidance in last year’s crisis were told in effect: "The situation you are dealing with is impossible: our theories prove that it simply cannot exist."

This is garbage.

It's called "the ivory tower"

2009-04-30T11:00:00.002-04:00

Here's a thoughtful antidote to "boo economists!" by Barry Eichengreen at The National Interest. Perhaps the most forceful point is this:

What got us into this mess, in other words, were not the limits of scholarly imagination. It was not the failure or inability of economists to model conflicts of interest, incentives to take excessive risk and information problems that can give rise to bubbles, panics and crises. It was not that economists failed to recognize the role of social and psychological factors in decision making or that they lacked the tools needed to draw out the implications. In fact, these observations and others had been imaginatively elaborated by contributors to the literatures on agency theory, information economics and behavioral finance. Rather, the problem was a partial and blinkered reading of that literature. The consumers of economic theory, not surprisingly, tended to pick and choose those elements of that rich literature that best supported their self-serving actions. Equally reprehensibly, the producers of that theory, benefiting in ways both pecuniary and psychic, showed disturbingly little tendency to object. It is in this light that we must understand how it was that the vast majority of the economics profession remained so blissfully silent and indeed unaware of the risk of financial disaster.

Eichengreen notes that business schools, for example, are part of the production line of financial labor and ideas and so have no inventive to rock the boat; however, he also directs a lot of fire at academic economists for being part of the stitch-up. I accept that the author surely knows better than me the "pecuniary and psychic" benefits to academics from the use of their work, but a counter-hypothesis would be ignorance rather than malice, a sin of omission, not commission. How many in economics departments know what's going on in industry - or even business schools? Is it enough to claim a quorum of the profession?

There's probably analog to the hard sciences here. Newspaper science (cf. Bad Science, for example) is to natural science research as financial industry models are to economics research, or something like that. Imagine a house full of economists (reality show idea?) - every so often one wanders out to hand some obscure technical document to someone from the outside world, and something inevitably gets lost in translation.

More navel-gazing

2009-04-22T15:33:00.003-04:00

Since there are now, I estimate, more articles on the economics profession's predictions/responses to the recession than there are atoms in the known universe, replying to them all would presumably take a very long time. One example will probably suffice.

In the Financial Times yesterday, John Kay talks about "How economics lost sight of real world".

The past two years have not enhanced the reputation of economists. Mostly they failed to point out fundamental weaknesses of financial markets and did not foresee the crisis, and now they disagree on appropriate policies and on the likely future course of events.

As I have (almost) argued before, this is - for better or for worse - not in the job description of the vast majority of academic economists. It is precisely like attacking a physics professor because there was a blackout last night. More importantly:

Economists, like physicists, have been searching for a theory of everything. If there were to be such an economic theory, there is really only one candidate, based on extreme rationality and market efficiency.... a few deranged practitioners of the project believe that their theory really does account for all human behaviour, and that concepts such as goodness, beauty and truth are sloppy sociological constructs.

I have addressed the "economists don't feel feelings" argument before. And, by the way, I guess you can color me deranged. Economics is a theory of everything!

First: the assumption of "rationality" that is central to economic theory is a modeling assumption and makes no restriction on behavior whatsoever. The auxiliary assumptions of what people care about - the things that they "rationally" try to achieve with their limited resources - are restrictive. Second: "market efficiency" is neither a theory or a modeling assumption. It is either a metric (one of many) by which we can evaluate outcomes (i.e. is this "efficient"?) or a result of an economic theory, which, like all economic theories, will probably require many assumptions.

I would agree with the proposition that it is wrong to assume that markets are "efficient" (and what does that even mean?). Economists do not make such an assumption. I would agree with the proposition that it is wrong to assume that people care only about their own material wellbeing. Economists do not make such an assumption.

Academic economists did not predict this recession because that is not what academic economists are "supposed" to do with their time.

Learning from your mistakes

2009-04-22T11:50:00.003-04:00

The big policy lesson from our current recession is: save money in good times to see you through the bad. Obvious? Apparently not, especially in Britain, where the government spent the unprecendentedly long expansion period from the late 90s to 2007 running deficits. But it's good to know that we can learn from our mistakes, right?

But [Alistair Darling] made clear his plans depended on a rapid economic bounce-back - with a forecast of 1.25% growth next year rising to 3.5% in 2011. [link]

The IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) report predicts the UK economy will shrink by 4.1pc in 2009, with the downturn expected to continue into next year when the economy will fall by 0.4pc. [link]

This is unacceptable. After years of squandering prosperity by running deficits in boom years, now the government proposes to dig even deeper.

My university, Brown, is cutting staff right now. By anecdote, it is far from alone in the higher education world in doing so. Why is it that a bad year means the operating budget is slashed? Why was the financial plan based on an assumption of constant, unlimited growth in the endowment (i.e. a constant, unlimited rise in stock prices)? Why were national governments operating under the same assumptions?

Experimental philosophy, experimental economics

2009-02-26T13:56:00.002-05:00

Interesting article at Prospect Magazine called Philosophy's Great Experiment, about the rise of 'experimental philosophy'. Doubly interesting to me, because it could equally well be talking about experimental economics, albeit a few years too late. Or about "neuroeconomics"; the philosophers in the article are using fMRI machines "to look for patterns of neuronal activity when subjects are presented with philosophical problems", just like the researcher who does the same for resource allocation - economics - problems. But here's the rub:

Some philosophers quietly dismiss the movement as a cynical step by researchers to appear cutting edge and to tap into scientists’ funding.

Indeed, it's easy to feel this way about the kind of experiments in which economists step on psychologists' toes. The drive toward empiricism in philosophy that the article talks about seems to be symptomatic of social sciences' and humanities' desire to be taken "seriously" as science.

And as we know, that means we need something falsifiable or verifiable. "There is no article in Prospect Magazine called Philosophy's Great Experiment" is falsifiable, because I can find such an article and falsify the statement. "There is at least one article in Prospect Magazine called Philosophy's Great Experiment" is verifiable, because I can find such an article and verify the statement.

In experimental economics, often it seems (at least to this observer) that we're replicating, or at least mirroring, psychology experiments. Unfortunately, the economics experiment is much less likely to be "scientific", not because of the method or the issue at hand, but because of the specific question. This is precisely what Lawrence Boland discusses in the paper "On the futility of criticizing the neoclassical maximization hypothesis" (pdf), which I read as a welcome withering put-down to all of those who claim to "disprove rationality", etc etc. He says:

Properly stated, the neoclassical premise is: ‘For all decision makers there is something they maximize’... The person who assumed the premise is true can respond: ‘You claim you have found a consumer who is not a maximizer but how do you know there is not something which he is maximizing?’

For experimental economists and experimental philosophers alike, the challenge is to pose a scientific question; without that, no method will save us. "Are people ethical?", for example, is equally a dead end as "are people rational?".

Failures of imagination?

2008-12-22T14:28:00.004-05:00

There's an excellent (long) article on the role and response of academic economists in the current crisis/recession/apocalyse/trendy-noun over at the Boston Globe. Not a lot of it is tremendously surprising, but it does interview a lot of big names in the profession to get their opinions. The rub is this: why didn't economists see all this coming, and what now for the profession?

There are (at least) two distinct kinds of failure that are possible here. The first one is a failure in reality, a failure to see things coming. The second is a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine what would happen as a result of that unforseen thing. In today's terms, the first would be a failure to predict that everything would go all to hell, while the second would be a failure to predict the consequences if things had gone to hell.

If you ask me, the first one is forgiveable. The article quotes Laurence Ball as saying "Nobody ever sees anything coming," he says. "Nobody saw stagflation coming, nobody saw the Great Depression coming, nobody saw Pearl Harbor or 9/11 coming. Really big, bad things tend to be surprises", which might be a tad extreme but is a sentiment I can agree with. It takes an extreme fatalist to think that we can see everything coming if we just try hard enough.

However, the second might not be forgiveable at all. It represents a failure of contingency planning. One might stem from the other: if I think it's very, very unlikely to rain, I might not want to waste too much time planning my umbrella strategy. If, however, we believe the article's claim that "some warned of a housing bubble, but almost none foresaw the resulting cataclysm. An entire field of experts dedicated to studying the behavior of markets failed to anticipate what may prove to be the biggest economic collapse of our lifetime", then we should be a bit perturbed. Again, the failure to see something coming is forgiveable, but to see it coming and fail to imagine the consequences is just plain strange.

This is a little scary, but I confess I have very little idea of how I, an economist, would be able to attack macroeconomic questions. I disagree with the first half of this (though not the second, which is that failure of imagination again):

"We have a very restrictive set of language and tools, and we tend to work on the problems that are easily addressed with those tools," says Jeremy Stein, a financial economist at Harvard. "Sometimes that means we focus on silly questions and ignore greater ones."

Similarly, I'm sceptical of this:

"...many of the models used to explain and predict the dynamics of financial markets or national economies have been scrubbed clean, in the interest of theoretical elegance, of the inevitable erraticism of human behavior. As a result, the analytical tools of the trade offer little help in a crisis, and have little to say about the sort of collapses that led to this one."

I am a believer in the predictive and descriptive power of the abstract model. Instead, the view I relate to is that of Jeffrey Kling:

"What we're experiencing now is a good old-fashioned financial panic... This is perhaps the biggest scale, but on some level it's not that different."

I think the economist's toolbox - the one that contains no doctrine, no assumption, just method - is well equipped to understand most everything. Unfortunately, the principle of 'garbage in, garbage out' applies to economics as much as it does to computer programming; perhaps the real failure is not of the discipline of economics, but the imagination of those who practice it. We are, of course, not rewarded by universities or journal editors for asking questions like "if there is a housing bubble, and if it bursts, then what?" Those questions aren't "research"; they're not rewarded and we don't have time for them. How can we be surprised that we were surprised?

Christmas redux

2008-12-22T14:23:00.004-05:00

It's Christmas time again. Tim Harford's on the case of that gift-giving economics article I talked about back in January, with typical accuracy:

"Waldfogel’s work is often misinterpreted as suggesting that gift-giving is pointless. That is not true. He explicitly excluded the sentimental value of gifts from his calculations, and, of course, the sentimental value is part of the purpose of giving presents."

More than that, though; his positivist reading of the original article leads to some very sensible, common-sensical normative prescriptions:

"the economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway have discovered that we prefer unsolicited presents to those we have specifically requested... All this points to the optimal gift-giving strategy: you need to minimise the deadweight loss while maximising the sentimental value. This suggests buying small gifts and striving for emotional resonance. Look for something inexpensive, and consider supplementing it with a letter, a photo, or time spent together."

Prescriptions we can all relate to.

Best article on banking culture

2008-11-21T11:03:00.002-05:00

Excellent article from Michael Lewis at Portfolio.

More ultimatum game ignorance

2008-10-20T11:17:00.003-04:00

I wonder what it is about the ultimatum game that makes for journalistic error? More of the same from Emily Yoffe in Slate:

We like to think we go through life as rational beings. Much of economic theory is based on the notion that humans make rational choices (which may mean that economists don't get out much).

"Rationality" is a model, and admits any form of behavior. It does not say how someone "should" behave.

In 1982, some economists came up with a little game to study negotiating strategies. The results showed that rationality is subservient to more powerful drives—and demonstrated why human beings so easily conclude they are being wronged. The idea of the "ultimatum game" is simple. Player A is given 20 $1 bills and told that, in order to keep any of the money, A must share it with Player B. If B accepts A's offer, they both pocket whatever they've agreed to. If B rejects the offer, they both get nothing. Economists naturally expected the players to do the rational thing: A would offer the lowest possible amount—$1; and B, knowing $1 was more than zero, would accept. Ha!

This is the Nash Equilibrium of the game, if both players cared only about money. It has nothing to do with "rationality".

In the years the game has been played, it's been found that almost half the A's immediately offer to split the money—an offer B's accept. When A offers $9 or even $8, B usually says yes. But when A's offer drops to $7, about half the B's walk away. The lower A's offer, the more likely the B's are to turn their backs on a few free dollars in favor of a more satisfying outcome: punishing the person who offended their sense of fairness. This impulse is not illogical; it is essential.

Only the hypothetical economists in the article found it illogical, and they're not real. Once more: rejection of a lowball offer in the ultimatum game is rational under the entirely realistic assumption that people care about more than money. Please stop attacking the straw economist who disagrees with that statement.

Economist versus economist

2008-10-02T14:51:00.006-04:00

This mostly innocuous entry at the Freakonomics blog is comparing the rejection of offers in the ultimatum game (where I propose a division of some money, you either accept or reject, we get the money if you accept but don't if you reject, and then we go home) to the rejection of the 'bailout' of the financial sector. It raised my ire with this:

Many economists cannot understand why they’d do such a thing. To an economist, an offer of even 1 percent would be worth accepting since it is free money, and because for the second player it is ultimately irrelevant how much money the first player takes home.

But most people do not think like economists. When offered 10 percent or 20 percent or even 30 percent of the total, they are disgusted by the inequity — and willing to pay the price for that disgust by rejecting the offer.

Show me a scrap of evidence that "many economists cannot understand why they’d do such a thing." Pardon my language, but that's bullshit. Really, what the hell. In fact, it's so infuriatingly ridiculous that I'm going to be forced to actually say something as clearly and calmly as I can, but I'm going to have to do it in boldface:

Economists are capable of feeling things.

Phew. No, seriously, the quotation claims that:

Economists don't understand that people care about things.
Economists don't feel feelings.
Economists do not conduct life in the same way as people who actually care about things.

Give me a break.

Big picture

2008-09-27T17:12:00.003-04:00

Neat little story related by Tim Harford:

Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, a Russian bureaucrat travelled to the west to seek advice on how the market system functioned. He asked the economist Paul Seabright to explain who was in charge of the supply of bread to London. He was astonished by the answer: "Nobody."

I like that because it is astonishing that these things take care of themselves (well, not that bread is wandering in to London by itself, but you see what I mean). It's also a fun reminder of the massive economic policy differences that are possible in the world - a reminder of the size of the question "how should I/we/the country allocate resources".

What's next for economics?

2008-09-25T17:18:00.003-04:00

Not every scientist is working on a cure for cancer, but it's surely one of the big open questions in medical science. Does economics have a cure-for-cancer question, one that every economist would sell his soul to answer?

A thought experiment: there's an economics seminar or lecture about to take place, in an hour, at a location an hour away from you. You hear a rumor about the content of this seminar. What credible rumor would make you jump in the car and high-tail it to the scene?

Again, being that it's probably foolhardy to speculate on what the next "big idea" might be, this might be an unanswerable question. Nevertheless, if it's not possible to think of an example, we might have a problem on our hands. Is this question different in economics than in other fields?

Broadly, there are three things that might qualify. First would be the uncovering of a new piece of evidence, a Dead Sea scrolls-type discovery that would be vital for some purpose or another. What might that be in economics?

Second, and related, would be proving of some unproven result. Whether an unproven provable theory can logically exist in economics is debatable; in theoretical economics, we're always subject to the underdetermination problem that skews the definition of "proof"; the theories are always logically consistent from within, and nothing is provable from without. In empirical work, we face not just the problem of where the evidence for our groundbreaking proof comes from, but if it is conceivable that the evidence could realistically exist to make such a proof. There a "proof" could rest on clever data collection or a new econometric technique that can interpret the real-world data in a usefully new way.

Third, we might have some methodological development, perhaps of the kind that saw "information" formally brought into the methodological fold in the 1970s. Whether this could rightly be called a methodological breakthrough is again not clear: is it not just a new application of the existing methodology?

Could neuroeconomics, partway closing the underdetermination door, do the trick? Will the modeling of complex systems by powerful computers help? All I know is that fewer than 1% of economics seminars are genuinely interesting in and of themselves (that is, apart from the paper and to the terminally curious); what could boost that ratio?

More investment banking schadenfreude

2008-09-19T21:40:00.003-04:00

I have to mention a New York Times op-ed in which Roger Cohen can barely contain his glee at the fate of the "masters of the universe" who may now be seeking alternate employement. I sympathize:

When I taught a journalism course at Princeton a couple of years ago, I was captivated by the bright, curious minds in my class. But when I asked students what they wanted to do, the overwhelming answer was: "Oh, I guess I’ll end up in i-banking."

Try teaching economics, sir! We're the ones who really get to see squandered potential: in economics classes, it's beyond overwhelming. And get this:

According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.

Isn't that a little bit tragic? Is the only thing we can offer our smartest young people a career in consulting and banking? Is it the only thing our smart young people want to do?

Hey, look, it's a financial crisis

2008-09-16T15:28:00.001-04:00

Nothing like a good financial mess to underscore just how little anyone really understands the "economy". By which I probably mean the financial system. I think. There's also nothing like a good financial mess to slaughter in cold blood any chance I ever had of convincing anyone that economics is not the same as finance.

Fortunately, the economics behind everything from risk trading to bailouts is very simple, even as the financial system manages to be opaque enough to make a lot of people look confused and silly. Even better, pretty much everyone understands that economics: for example, 'moral hazard' can mean something as simple as 'if the government is willing to bail out a bank when it's in trouble, risks for that bank are less risky so they might be willing to take more risks'. Of course, then you might well ask 'more than what?' or 'how risky?', but the idea is solid. Even the trading of risk is not especially difficult to grasp, because we're all familiar with the concept of insurance, and it's in exactly the same spirit, perhaps with a bit of hot potato thrown in as the risk gets chopped up and passed around.

But the system? I think that's pretty confusing. The BBC has valiantly compiled a little glossary of some of the jargon, but we're already in very, very deep; too deep for that glossary to be helpful. Sure, it might turn some otherwise baffling sentences into plain English, but what if I don't know, say, what the stock market is, what is does, what it means? What good is a passage like this one to me:

Not far behind was Royal Bank of Scotland, whose shares ended down 10.2% at 189.1p. Barclays fared better, its shares closed down 2.53% at 308p.

Hell, what good is that to anyone? What is it saying? For those of us who know what the stock market does, maybe because we've studied finance, were simply interested or just have that little piece of information in our heads, it means something, but how many people is that? It's just as bad as using the word 'economics', which I've already argued is usually meaningless.

It must be hell to try to write about a financial crisis for a lay audience. There's a perfect parallel between the entanglement of the institutions themselves and the contortions of language needed to explain it. Of course, personally, and I realize this is a terrible thing to admit, I'm experiencing delightful schadenfreude over the whole affair, so I admit to being less sympathetic than curious.

Strange quotations

2008-09-16T14:12:00.002-04:00

I'm scratching my head at this one from Barack Obama:

He added, "Senator McCain – you can’t run away from your words and you can’t run away from your record. When it comes to this economy, you’ve stood firmly with George Bush and a failed economic theory, and what you’re offering the American people is more of the same."

I struggle to even offer a guess as to what 'economic theory' he's talking about.

Goods, marketing, preferences and the Genius

2008-09-13T15:01:00.004-04:00

I've gotten used to ignoring iTunes pining for one upgrade or another - seems to happen every other time I start it up - but, this time, the promise of the Genius was too tempting to ignore.

The Genius is a new gadget attached to iTunes that is designed to create "smart" playlists at the touch of a button; pick a song from your library and it'll create a playlist made up of songs that fit well with the one you picked. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's precisely the same idea that personalized internet radio (my favorite is Pandora) has been trading on for a few years, with the obvious difference that Pandora and its cousins are capable of creating playlists built on more than one song or genre and that they can play you songs you don't own. Both Genius and Pandora are working on a collective wisdom principle - learning what to recommend based on what you like and on what people like you like, and so on. Actually, that even sounds a bit like the supposed basis for Goggle's search algorithm, right?

Anyway, I've been crying out for this: shuffle in iTunes is precisely useless, and I'm pleasantly encouraged by early returns from Genius. What's all that got to do with economics?

Well, what do we assume about preferences? We've always tried to be agnostic about what people like, which was neat for keeping us honest but made us a little fuzzy on where they come from or how they might change. Genius and Pandora are, arguably, operating on a person with malleable preferences, who's persuadable that she likes what's being connected. For these to be valuable products, there must exist preference for convenience (having playlists made for you rather than doing it yourself) or surprise (for hearing unexpected songs).

Or could it be as simple as information? Perhaps these things are most valuable as informers, letting us know what goes well with our music or showing us new music that we might like. Again, slightly non-traditional consumer theory, although imperfectly informed consumers isn't a new idea in economics or in life. Strangely, iTunes seems to be at a distinct disadvantage here; sure, this new gadget is designed to recommend things to you to buy at the iTunes store, but it's not a pure free-preview model like Pandora. Nevertheless, we're in the territory of deterministic preferences, and in particular the role of advertising.

The most commonly asked question about advertising in economics has been 'informative or not?', and there's the balance between these two functions: am I being coerced or informed when Genius tells me what songs I'm missing that would go well with one I own? The strict segregation of preferences and the tangible world of goods and budgets that is used in consumer theory is violated a little by this kind of thing; we get into nice philosophical questions like how to define a good. Are my preferences changing when I learn about these awesome songs I'm missing out on?

Economics From The Heart

2008-09-10T19:31:00.002-04:00

A brief interlude to recommend "Economics From The Heart", a collection of short Paul Samuelson columns from the 60s through the 90s. Doesn't look like it's in print, but you can get it used for cheap on Amazon. It's entertaining stuff, not just as a document of historical op-ed economics:

Billy Graham's book on angels sold well, one presumes primarily to non-angels. Intellectuals have a propensity to write books that are read only by intellectuals and therefore do not sell well. This despite the propensity of intellectuals to read books. That is all intellectuals are good for: to read, write and talk about books and ideas.

Measurement again

2008-09-09T11:22:00.003-04:00

From the New York Times:

During the boom years of the Bush presidency — remember them? — economic growth was an especially unreliable indicator of how most Americans were doing.

Our problem, again, is that semantically dead word 'economics'. 'Economic growth' is an especially fun one, not least because it actually refers to growth in GDP, which is something that's kind of confusing anyway. Look at this catalog of misery:

The numbers were impressive, but the gains were lopsided, benefiting executives and investors far more than hourly workers and salaried employees. Because the growth was fueled by reckless lending and borrowing, it created an illusion of wealth even as many Americans lost ground...

The government reported that the economy grew at a surprising 3.3 percent in the second quarter, while productivity (the measure of how much workers accomplish per hour) soared. Unfortunately, those bounces did not mean a rebound in the lives of most Americans.

Growth rose, but so did unemployment. Productivity surged, but wages fell. Fixing that disconnect is the central economic challenge for the next president.

Increased exports were responsible for last spring’s strong economic growth numbers. But selling more abroad has not led to more manufacturing jobs or working-class pay raises at home.

Oh my. One point is that the popular metrics - like 'growth' - clearly aren't capturing everything that's relevant, but we knew that. Another would be that it's therefore pretty odd that we continue to use the word economics when, lo, it's actually two degrees away from making sense: first, it usually means something like GDP or unemployment or productivity or something, and second, even that wouldn't actually tell a proper story.

Yet a third point is that the title of the article is "Real Life Economy": seems like there's a bit of a trust issue developing with the metrics the media reports when they talk about 'the economy'. Economists look silly again, but was it their fault? And are we surprised?

Using economics to talk policy

2008-09-06T15:56:00.004-04:00

A few years ago I took a course called "Economics of OECD Countries" with a wonderful teacher, Gavin Cameron, who sadly passed away recently. It was really an economic history course; we took a few big, general, flexible models from macroeconomics and used them to talk about the last hundred years in the rich countries of the world - the Great Depression, oil shocks, the 'Golden Age' of growth, the rise of computers, productivity. It wasn't an especially politicized class, just nuts and bolts economics, but I'll be forever grateful not just for learning a bit of history but for learning that a little model goes a long, long way.

For instance: the BBC website had a piece a while back about the presidential candidates' economic policies with this passage:

Mr McCain has endorsed "supply side economics", calling for more tax cuts for business to boost economic growth and sharp cuts in spending programmes.

Mr Obama, on the other hand, wants more domestic spending, particularly on health care, and has indicated that he is not averse to higher taxes on the rich to pay for it.

Again, I'm not going to start analyzing policy, but I really like - no sarcasm here, I promise - that the same debates that have cropped up again and again through the history of economic policy as an actual thing are still here. A crude characterization would be to call Obama Keynesian, on the strength of what the article is saying; it's the famous injection of spending by the government to try to prop everything up, the great policy success of the original Keynesian era. That was the one that dragged America out of the Great Depression.

Or did it? Surely a bold stroke to open the government's wallet when the whole country is broke, but, of course, there's plenty of wiggle room for debate. One of the many things we talked about in our course was the role of war spending in providing a natural bounce out of the Depression. Same concept, different reasons.

McCain's being painted in the BBC article as a supply-sider, which is something of a dirty little epithet around the Dem-leaning economics faculties of the world. Paul Krugman made his journalistic bones (as opposed to his impressive academic record) with "Peddling Prosperity", a big chunk of which was devoted to a critique of what came to be called supply-side economics. Perhaps I'm reaching a bit here, but you could plausibly argue that supply-side policy grew out of monetarism, which was itself the big weapon against the oil-shock driven recession of the 1970s. Keynesianism versus monetarism was the big debate in economic policy, and it lives still into the 21st century.

As a teacher, the beauty of these debates is that they don't need fancy techniques, or math, or number crunching, to be explained. Naturally some of the academics who've spent their careers on policy questions are doing very complicated things, but to explain - in simplified form, but correctly - what was driving the problems of the 30s, the 70s, or whenever, and the logic behind the policies that were tried, is easy. It takes a bit of clear reasoning and is even easier if we are willing to use a few simple diagrams, both commodities that go a long, long way in economics. It's possible, even, to boil the whole mixture off to a supply-and-demand story. Don't roll your eyes, though: there's a reason why that's the most famous, most reproduced little model in economics, and how awesome that we can use it to talk about the biggest policy issues of the last century.

Many economics courses are 'tooling up' courses, where you learn those models, the diagrams, the math; what is even more crucial are those courses like the one Professor Cameron taught me, the ones where we use those tools to think about interesting things. It's truly staggering how simple the tools are that we used, truly gratifying to learn how far even the simplest little insight can go.

Unexpected economics

2008-08-30T12:11:00.001-04:00

Market forces in Gailileo's "Dialogue":

The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them. What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold "precious," and earth and soil "base"? People who do this ought to remember that if there were as great a scarcity of soil as of jewels or precious metals, there would not be a prince who would not spend a bushel of diamonds and rubies and a cartload of gold just to have enough earth to plant a jasmine in a little pot, or to sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow, and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant flowers, and fine fruit. It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water.

Positive bias and normative bias

2008-08-29T13:59:00.004-04:00

The opposite of analysis is bad cliché, a sloppy knee-jerk. It's whenever an innocent-looking question in Econ 1 provokes a response that is answered with a phrase like "greedy companies"; it might even be whenever economics is confused with "business" or "finance", because, after all, what short-circuits economic analysis faster than pinning a label of bias on economists?

Not that you couldn't defend such a label. After all, it certainly looks like economists are biased when your first contact with them as a student of the subject is our friendly principles course. What a delicate balancing act, though. Bryan Caplan quotes Paul Krugman:

When the latest batch of freshmen shows up for Econ 1, textbook authors and instructors still try to separate students from their prejudices. In the words of the famed economist Paul Krugman, they try "to vaccinate the minds of our undergraduates against the misconceptions that are so predominant in educated discussion."

Make no mistake, there's a reason why it's so difficult to play devil's advocate to argue against the very real work of introductory economics courses. Is there a fundamental difference between positive bias and normative bias? Normative bias is opinion, and represents healthy disagreement: "I believe the minimum wage should be raised, even if it raises unemployment, because those people who do work at minimum wage are impoverished", or "I believe the minimum wage should not be raised, even given that those who work at minimum wage are impoverished, because it might wreak havoc with the labor market". Both acceptable, both, arguably, representative of what you might call "normative bias".

Positive bias is more problematic. It could be accurately called "being wrong". That's the kind of problem that leads the designers of introductory economics courses to swing wildly to the extreme of trying to batter the bias out, looking suspiciously like indoctrination in the process. Think of how disheartening it is, though, to face a whole class who have heard about "competition" with Russia, China, India, whatever country is the current flavor of Evil, and try to teach the theory of comparative advantage. A very real challenge for economists is to explain the (deceptively simple) positive theories that form the foundation for the argument in favor of trade (personal and international), markets, government, etc etc, while walking the tightrope across the normative ravine.

The challenge, then: is a student who says "globalization hurts America" wrong? Is this a positive bias or a normative bias? More accurately: is this an opinion or a misreading of fact? What about a student who uses the sinking-feeling phrase "greedy oil companies" when asked to evaluate the effects of a gas tax? Here's a passage from that Bryan Caplan article:

People tend, for example, to see profits as a gift to the rich. So unless you perversely pity the rich more than the poor, limiting profits seems like common sense.

Yet profits are not a handout but a quid pro quo: If you want to get rich, you have to do something people will pay for. Profits give incentives to reduce production costs, move resources from less-valued to more-valued industries, and dream up new products. This is the central lesson of The Wealth of Nations: The “invisible hand” quietly persuades selfish businessmen to serve the public good. For modern economists, these are truisms, yet teachers of economics keep quoting and requoting this passage. Why? Because Adam Smith’s thesis was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and it remains counterintuitive today.

And again, on international trade:

How can anyone overlook trade’s remarkable benefits? Adam Smith, along with many 18th- and 19th-century economists, identifies the root error as misidentification of money and wealth: “A rich country, in the same manner as a rich man, is supposed to be a country abounding in money; and to heap up gold and silver in any country is supposed to be the best way to enrich it.” It follows that trade is zero sum, since the only way for a country to make its balance more favorable is to make another country’s balance less favorable.

Even in Smith’s day, however, his story was probably too clever by half. The root error behind 18th-century mercantilism was an unreasonable distrust of foreigners. Otherwise, why would people focus on money draining out of “the nation” but not “the region,” “the city,” “the village,” or “the family”? Anyone who consistently equated money with wealth would fear all outflows of precious metals. In practice, human beings then and now commit the balance of trade fallacy only when other countries enter the picture. No one loses sleep about the trade balance between California and Nevada, or me and iTunes. The fallacy is not treating all purchases as a cost but treating foreign purchases as a cost.

My own bias is to worry that we mistakenly strangle normative bias out of the economics classroom by too-much, too-soon overzealousness. Yet how else will we be able to impart the simple, counterintuitive lessons that will help us to fight positive bias?

Samuelson's "Economics"

2008-08-26T12:19:00.004-04:00

Isn't this just a marvelous observation:

What sex is to the biology classroom, stocks and investment riskiness is to the sophomore economics lecture hall. That chapter on personal finance, put there to keep hard-boiled MIT electrical engineers awake, helped make introductory economics the largest elective course at hundreds of colleges.

That's from Paul Samuelson's article (pdf) discussing the 50th anniversary of the publication of his economics textbook. What a perfect quotation it is: students enroll in economics courses to learn about the stock market, despite it being, really, secondary to the discipline, and by indulging them we made economics courses wildly, unimaginably popular. Even Samuelson saw it!

Then again, Samuelson seemed to see a lot of things more clearly than most. Justin Wolfers at the Freakonomics blog discusses the textbook, and says this:

And while modern textbooks typically begin with a list of the dozen or so key lessons of economics, Samuelson begins with a single claim: “The first lesson in economics is: things are often not what they seem.”

This is the enduring brilliance of Samuelson's book. He would never have had the audacity to write down a list of "principles" in some misguided attempt to simplify or to circumvent argument or to hook a bored student; he discussed, sensibly, correctly, reasonably, lucidly. Even after he delivers his "first lesson" in the first chapter of the book, Samuelson gives a few examples then says:

...each of the above seeming paradoxes will be resolved. Once explained, each is so obvious that you will wonder how anyone could ever have failed to notice it. This again is typical of economics.

That's how it feels to study economics. Things might not at first be what they seem, but soon they are revealed to be exactly what they seem, and my goodness how did it ever seem otherwise.

That first chapter is rightly championed by Wolfers. It shows precisely why it's such a tragedy that Samuelson's textbook doesn't still dominate, why it's a tragedy that we now have textbooks that put the cart before the horse and show questionable "principles" up-front rather than discussing what's about to happen, then developing them patiently. Can this be beaten:

It is the first task of modern economic science to describe, to analyze, to explain, to correlate these fluctuations of national income. Both boom and slump, price inflation and deflation, are our concern. This is a difficult and complicated task. Because of the complexity of human and social behavior, we cannot hope to attain the precision of a few of the physical sciences. We cannot perform the controlled experiments of the chemist or biologist. Like the astronomer we must be content largely to "observe." But economic events and statistical data observed are unfortunately not so well behaved and orderly as the paths of the heavenly planets. Fortunately, however, our answers need not be accurate to several decimal places; on the contrary, if only the right general direction of cause and effect can be determined, we shall have made a tremendous step forward.

There you have a perfect, simple explanation of the problem of measurement. Here's more, this time on positivism and its limits:

At every point of our analysis we shall be seeking to shed light on these policy problems. But to succeed in this, the student of economics must first cultivate an objective and detached ability to see things as they are, regardless of his likes or dislikes... there is only one valid reality in a given economic situation, however hard it may be to recognize and isolate it. There is not one theory of economics for Republicans and one for Democrats; not one for workers and one for employers...

This does not mean that economists always agree in the policy field... Ethical questions each citizen must decide for himself, and an expert is entitled to only one vote along with everyone else.

Reading that collection of reminisces (same pdf as earlier) on the 50th anniversary of the book, I'm humbled again by how groundbreaking Samuelson's textbook must have been. We must fight, fight and fight over again to make sure that the foundations of his book - the true principles of economics - live on and on.

Common sense versus science

2008-08-24T14:09:00.004-04:00

We've all seen those faintly ludicrous reports of scientific studies confirming the obvious. Can something be so obvious that it doesn't qualify as research? Where is the line across which we have to devote po-faced time and valuable cash to figure something out? That's what I was wondering while reading Benjamin Friedman's review of "Nudge", the new Big Idea book (and obviously the one getting the most press, what with the Obama association) from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. It begins:

Yes, there is such a thing as common sense — and thank goodness for that.

So far so good.

Few people will be surprised to learn that the setting in which individuals make decisions often influences the choices they make. How much we eat depends on what’s served on our plate, what foods we pick from the cafeteria line depends on whether the salads or the desserts are placed at eye level, and what magazines we buy depends on which ones are on display at the supermarket checkout line. But the same tendency also affects decisions with more significant consequences: how much families save and how they invest; what kind of mortgage they take out; which medical insurance they choose; what cars they drive. Behavioral economics, a new area of research combining economics and psychology, has repeatedly documented how our apparently free choices are affected by the way options are presented to us.

The knock on behavioral economics as a discipline is that it's all a bit obvious. Even the things that are supposed to be revelatory are a bit "yeah, we know"; one classic example is the somewhat underwhelming finding that when people know they're drinking a more expensive wine they like it better than one they know is cheaper. The two obvious questions: are we surprised that people's enjoyment of a wine is influenced by its price? And is it research worth conducting?

Of course, sometimes "common sense" could be wrong, and the whole point of science is to confirm, reject or quantify phenomena in the world around us. For example, there was a lively debate - is it still ongoing? - about whether "institutions" or health was more important in fostering economic growth; the common sense answer is probably to say, well, neither good infrastructure or good health ever hurt anyone, did they? On the other hand, it would be nice to know, if it was possible, the hierarchy, especially if you really want growth but don't have an infinite budget to encourage it.

Behavioral economics is asking questions on a different order of magnitude than that, but the same logic is probably applicable, that in that field, as in all in economics, we might sometimes seem to be masters of the obvious - a lot of economics is common sense with a fancy outfit on - but, I guess, someone has to do it.

Off-topic: innovation, names, duplication

2008-08-23T23:44:00.004-04:00

Only because it's a really cool article and I just discovered it, and not because it really has anything to do with anything, "In The Air" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker is well worth a read. It's about a fascinating organization called Intellectual Ventures, but there are just a bunch of fun little snippets. A couple:

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern.

In the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.

Surely it must be getting harder to have simultaneous discovery, in a world where research communities are global and transmission is very fast? Gladwell's article goes on to talk about something like the standing on the shoulders of giants concept of building on the existing body of knowledge, speculating that multiples are proof of inevitability of inventions or discoveries.

What about economics? Are economic researchers building on existing research? It can sometimes seem that the questions we ask are so specific and arcane that the chance of simultaneous "discovery" is low; so much so that's it's tempting to wonder if we should even be using the word "discovery". I wonder what, if anything, we could attach the word to in the history of economics? Obviously hindsight is 20/20, but it's difficult to see what really was new or difference-making in the field, going back as long as you care. What has the discipline of economics done for us?

And what will it do, then? Gladwell's article talks about a group of smart people who get together to try to invent stuff. What "economic" (however they choose to interpret the word) questions would such a group want to tackle, if any? Where is the innovation coming from in our field? I look at the list of Nobel prize topics, and, don't get me wrong, I like finding things out for their own sake, but what are these things really doing, either practically, for the world, or simply for the body of knowledge we call economics? Of course we're not supposed to be able to see where the next huge idea is coming from - that's the whole point - but if we haven't had a really important idea from, or even an important question for, academic economists for so long, if ever, isn't a little pessimism forgivable?

I'm often tempted to argue, not entirely facetiously, that the methodology of economics and its status as a grounds for "discovery" was pretty much done 70, 80 years ago, and the rest is just application, gravy and statistical analysis. Even if that were true, would it be such a bad thing?

Arguing without moving

2008-08-22T14:10:00.003-04:00

Doesn't it sometimes seem like two arguers are actually saying the same thing in slightly different ways? The devil's in the semantics, or something, and a three-headed book review by Jonathan Derbyshire in the Guardian seems uncannily to be presenting a classic case applied to -what else? - economic man.

Here's a bit about Tim Harford's approach in "The Logic of Life":

Yet for all the demotic breeziness of their style, both writers have a serious purpose. In Harford's case, it is to defend a version of rational choice theory, which tries to explain human behaviour in terms of the maximisation of individual preferences or "utility". On this model, which Harford thinks applies more or less universally, human beings respond to trade-offs or incentives: "When the costs and benefits of something change, people change their behaviour." The important point for Harford is that those costs needn't be financial...

Proponents of rational choice theory say that to act in accordance with the cost-benefit principle is to behave "rationally" - in a distinctive (and drastically circumscribed) sense of the word. And Harford's contention is that we're much more rational than we're inclined to think. There's a "rational explanation", it seems, for more or less everything: for the shortage of eligible men in New York City, for instance, or for the evolved biological preferences of men and women.

We're again in a world where it's impossible to know exactly what drives people to make decisions, but where we can speculate that there are reasons for this or that decision, and speculate on what those reasons might be. But then here's this, in discussion of Robert Frank's "The Economic Naturalist":

One problem with this approach is that it seems to apply better to an ideal creature called Homo economicus, whose preferences are perfectly consistent, than it does to flesh-and-blood human beings... Homo economicus would never change his preference for a roast beef sandwich over chicken salad just because the waitress remembers they've also got tuna on the menu.

This is a reference to a classic "behavioral" result; but, then again, says who? It's of course possible to rationalize anything, as the behavioral school well knows when it invariably goes on to try to write down a model of a decision maker who would display these or other preferences. Aren't we still in a Harford world, where we can identify a potential justification for any superficially weird-looking decision? I don't see any difference between these "behavioral" results and this:

Frank's book, meanwhile, is based on an assignment he gave to students taking his introductory course in economics at Cornell University. The students were asked to pose and answer a question about observed events or behaviour, and what they came up with certainly wasn't the staple fare of Economics 101: why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets, they asked. Why is coyness often considered an attractive attribute? Why do women endure the discomfort of high heels?

All these phenomena obey what Frank calls "economic logic", the fundamental law of which is the cost-benefit principle. This says that an action ought to be taken only when the extra benefit that accrues from taking it outweighs the extra cost. So when a woman decides to squeeze her feet into a pair of stilettos, for example, she has weighed the benefit of being "more likely to attract favourable notice", as Frank somewhat coyly puts it, against the costs of discomfort.

Finally we get Stephen Marglin's "The Dismal Science" (uh oh):

Marglin argues that to think about people as always rationally calculating their self-interest is at odds with the way non-economists think about people... And you don't have to agree with Marglin that the way of life of the Amish people of Pennsylvania is the best counter-example to that to think there's something drastically wrong with it.

That kind of reasoning is an F. First of all, self-interest does not equal concern only for my own material outcome: I can, like, perhaps, the Amish people appropriated as an example, be self-interestedly concerned with my peers. I absolutely cannot believe that anyone finds it difficult to fit the behavior of someone who, for example, donates to charity into a utilitarian model of the kind economists use every day. Yet these are the examples we come up with to try to "disprove" the "rationality" of "economic man"?

Ideology, politics, economics

2008-08-12T15:59:00.003-04:00

Simply excellent paragraph from Free Exchange:

I have trouble with any ideological reading of the economics, because the two (ideology and economics) so rarely fit well together. I don't want to elect a free-market supporter or an interventionist. I want to elect someone who will carefully consider the issues and determine that here the government ought to assign pollution property rights, while here the government should reduce licensure, and so on. I want, in short, someone with enough intellectual heft to know the difference between good policy and good politics.

This promotes the idea a kind of cipher-wonk as a political leader, which is an interesting idea - do we want ideology-free politicians? - but I think extrapolating the point to economics in general is worthwhile. Ideology and economics really don't get on, and perhaps a lot of the misuse and misunderstanding of "economics" in political stumping and election coverage is indeed due to that tension, that ideology infests politics more than it can get into economics.

The very concept of positivist economics is precisely what the Free Exchange quotation is invoking when arguing that we should be electing someone who can do a proper analysis - an objective analysis - instead of someone whose prejudices and ideology biases them consistently in one direction or the other, regardless of the evidence.

Laudable? Probably. The sticking point, again, is that pesky word ought, as in "I want to elect someone who will carefully consider the issues and determine that here the government ought to assign pollution property rights, while here the government should reduce licensure, and so on." Then we're back to square one: we can elect our wonk, who does an objective analysis before enacting any policy, but at some point we need to figure out which option to take, and all the objective analysis in the world can't prescribe; again, there's no such thing as technocratic economics. Surely that makes it impossible to avoid ideology in politics? Surely, also, that's why sterilizing economics can't also sterilize economic policy. We can do that economic analysis, but we always have to answer the normative question of what we want if we are to make use of it.

Economics versus sociology: economic imperialism again

2008-08-08T19:22:00.002-04:00

The BBC, or at least Alan Connor in the Magazine, is of the opinion that economics is thieving turf from sociology:

There's actually nothing new in explaining how people decide or why people believe - it's called sociology. But if your boss wouldn't want to be caught with a sociology book in their luggage, there is now a range of delicious bite-sized chunks in books with titles like The Undercover Economist, The Rogue Economist and The Hidden Side Of Everything. Economics - once academia's dry "dismal science" - has decided to get tough.

The article's talking about some of the hot books, books from that sublimely irritating 'big idea' genre, that might be making waves among whoever reads them. At very least we know that they haven't learned the true history of the phrase 'dismal science'; more importantly, is the economics/sociology charge justified?

The question of economic imperialism is a familiar one, and I think one that comes from the supreme flexibility of economic modeling to be applied - for better or worse - to things that are pretty far away from what 'economics' is perceived to be. The gulf separating what economics is 'supposed' to be about from what its method can be used for is wide, and in it we can find the charge that economics is stealing from all over the place.

I wonder if the Connor quotation couldn't equally well read "it's called psychology", anyway. The kind of back-to-basics positivist modeling economists do these days naturally blurs the boundaries between disciplines that, maybe, were only ever separated by their topic of interest rather than their idealized toolbox for investigating those topics.

One of the titles specifically mentioned in the article is "Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; I haven't read the book, but I am irked by the Magazine article's summary of it. See if you can guess why:

The Buzzwords:

Econs (people that are perfectly rational but sadly imaginary)

The libertarian paternalism ideas are sometimes quite neat, the idea being that freedom of choice can be maintained but the framework of the choice changed - the famous example being requiring opt-out instead of opt-in to increase enrollment in pension funds - but, of course, even the brains behind something like that shouldn't be claiming to have proved irrationality. Just use a different word! Please! Mechanical or something, maybe?

The received wisdom of 'market capitalism'?

2008-08-06T11:41:00.004-04:00

I don't know what to think of "Economics Does Not Lie" by Guy Sorman in the I-just-learned-it-existed City Journal. It's reasonable and well-argued, even as it seems to push the buttons of the anti-economics set, and even as it seems to commit many of the same sins as those pesky "principles of economics". The agenda seems to be a vigorous defense of the capitalist economy - almost too vigorous, with plenty of pro-America, anti-'western Europe' digs. Weird? Hold that thought.

In the meaty bit of the article, Sorman begins:

If economics is finally a science, what, exactly, does it teach? With the help of Columbia University economist Pierre-André Chiappori, I have synthesized its findings into ten propositions... The more the public understands and embraces these propositions, the more prosperous the world will become.

OK, so I'm interested; seems like what we have might be an alternative list of what Mankiw calls "principles" (I despair of ever actually getting a proper use of the word in this context). Sorman discusses them at length, but here's the list:

1. The market economy is the most efficient of all economic systems.
2. Free trade helps economic development.
3. Good institutions help development.
4. The best measure of a good economy is its growth.
5. Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth.
6. Monetary stability, too, is necessary for growth; inflation is always harmful.
7. Unemployment among unskilled workers is largely determined by how much labor costs.
8. While the welfare state is necessary in some form, it isn’t always effective.
9. The creation of complex financial markets has brought about economic progress.
10. Competition is usually desirable.

First of all, I don't disagree with the assertion that "almost all top economists—those who are recognized as such by their peers and who publish in the leading scientific journals—would endorse" this list, although that's obviously verging on the tautology of the clique. As a list of the received wisdom, it's not bad at all, then.

Nevertheless, though this is a relatively less noxious list than Mankiw's 'principles', it can maybe be taken as received wisdom, but certainly not as axioms (not, to be clear, that Sorman makes any such claim). Where it fails, it fails because it suffers from the same diseases. What, for example, am I to make of the first one? Exactly what is the 'market economy' most efficient at achieving? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't just be 'efficient' in and of itself, right?

Aside from these familiar complaints of mine, there are a couple of other things worth mentioning, most especially this claim:

Now only one economic system exists: market capitalism.

Not only untrue, but completely untrue. Just as no country has ever tried to implement a wholly communist allocation of resources, no country has ever tried to implement a wholly capitalist allocation of resources. The accurate statement would be that the "markets with government" hybrid system is the dominant one in the modern world - as I've talked about before. As Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises blog points out in his response to Sorman's article, Sorman himself isn't even talking about "market capitalism", but about the hybrid system, which is further testament to its ubiquity.

Remember that thought we were holding? Here's the very last line of the article:

His article was translated from the French by Ralph C. Hancock.

Might the agenda simply be a reflection of the precariousness of the ideology of markets in France? Not such an outlandish proposition...

Economics = devil's advocacy

2008-08-01T14:13:00.005-04:00

There's some low-key furore over in Chicago over the naming of a new research institute after Milton Friedman: here's a little background from the New York Times. The real joy in the story comes from the "protest letter" sent to the powers-that-be by a ton of Chicago faculty, and John Cochrane's double-barreled destruction of said letter.

Highlights:

As usual, academics need to waste two paragraphs before getting to the point, which starts in the first bullet.

If academic writing stopped wasting ink, I'd eat all my hats. The point of the protest seems to be that the signatories don't want to be associated with the evils of "the neoliberal global order", "monetization", "globalized capital", etc etc, which are apparently inexorably linked to poor ol' Friedman, and Chicago. Leaving aside the issue of whether naming a research institute after Friedman would invite some kind of new or extra, real or perceived bias to the actual work of that institute, Cochrane makes a stab at devil's advocacy:

The content of course is worse. There isn’t even an idea here, a concrete proposition about the human condition that one can disagree with, buttress or question with facts. It just slings a bunch of jargon, most of which has a real meaning opposite to the literal. “Global South,” “neoliberal global order,” “the service of globalized capital,” “substitution of monetization for democratization.”

It's a familiar problem for all economists. Everything we're perceived to believe in and stand for - whether or not we do - is simply evil, enemy of the environment, the people, democracy(?), happiness, community, the poor. I mean, I'm super sympathetic to the perception that economics has an agenda; as I've argued with tedious regularity, the pollution of the beautifully hopeful positivist method by normative judgment - the very sin positivism tried to prevent - is the great tragedy of the teaching of economics, but, by god, when we have to argue against this kind of jargon with no intellectual content, is it any wonder we end up sounding like the frontline warriors of 'capitalism'?

Close to the ground

2008-07-28T14:12:00.004-04:00

Hey, it's John McCain time again! The Free Exchange blog has this (under the nifty headline 'Tsk-onomics'), on the familiar topic of McCain's support for the gas tax 'holiday'. Congress doesn't like it, economists don't like it, so far so familiar.

Apparently McCain's getting slammed for being rubbish at answering questions on this, and other, policies he's advocating, but let's leave that to the analysts. There's a fun exchange quoted from a George Stephanopoulos chat with McCain:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not a single economist in the country said it’d work.

MCCAIN: Yes. And there’s no economist in the country that knows very well the low-income American who drives the furthest, in the oldest automobile, that sometimes can’t even afford to go to work.

I think it's neat that presidential candidates get chips by opposing economists, and I don't mean that as an offended economist; I think it's interesting. Anyway, is there any merit in that particular McCain quotation? Or, to paraphrase: is economics too far from the ground? Is it too esoteric to properly understand the actual, real implications of its preditions, its recommendations?

The classic case, I think, might be the globalization debate, the protectionism debate: typical economist's position might be 'trade good because it allows specialization based on comparative advantage, cheap stuff, more to go around etc'; the counter-argument could run 'trade bad, erodes localism which we like, hurts those people whose livelihood depends on those things that their country will stop producing when trade makes it cheaper to get those things from other countries'.

Now, sure, the response to the latter is usually 'yes, yes, we know some people lose out, compensate the losers', but is that particularly constructive? Are we blind to the real, tangible content of the disagreement with the 'economist's answers'? Do we splutter and get indignant with John McCain because he had bad policies, or because we don't really get the argument?

When we say 'your gas tax holiday plan sucks, aha!', we lose friends and alienate people; could we actually make economists a little cuddlier and meet McCain halfway? How can we deal with the problems he's referring to, that people feel like they're struggling to get by? We don't deal with it by ridiculing, that's for sure. There's no need to compromise if you think a gas tax holiday isn't right, so by all means make that case, but every time an economist is painted into a corner as an enemy of the prosperity of the common man, we must argue our way out double-quick, as a matter of principle and credibility.

Education, or, What do people do?

2008-07-23T11:11:00.004-04:00

David Glenn in the Chronicle asks 'what explains the growing gap in wages?' The arguments covered run that the number of people going to college hasn't kept pace with the demand for skill by employers, and that the slowing of educational attainment has caused wage inequality to increase. I'm biased towards any argument for universal education, even up to the college level (whether this would really increase the level of 'skills' is another matter, but I think that's secondary), but I'm also a little skeptical that massively expanding higher education would bring down wage inequality in the way Glenn and his cited studies speculate.

First we have to worry about the usual signaling story - is college just an indicator that someone's smart rather than something that makes them smarter? - but more than that, what would people do? What do people do? The 2000 US census has this (pdf link):

Management, professional and related: 33.6%
Service: 14.9%
Sales and office: 26.7%
Farming, fishing and forestry: 0.7%
Construction, extraction and maintenance: 9.4%
Production, transportation and material moving: 14.6%

'Production occupations' on their own make up 8.5%. Now, a potted history of modern development might go something like this:

1) agriculture; we don't all have to be farmers anymore, let's start making stuff: industrial revolution
2) cheap global trade in stuff; we don't all have to make stuff anymore, let's do professional services
3) now what?

If you are even willing to entertain that kind of a story, you have to wonder what it would really mean in the labor market to hypothetically educate everyone to college level (again, I like it for its own sake; not trying to argue against education). Buying the skills angle from the Chronicle article probably means believing that if we educate everyone they can all get the kind of Wall Street/banking/consulting/legal jobs that are typical of the direction OECD economies are heading in, right? Perhaps some of the scientists can do tech research, but for a bunch of college graduates you're looking at a lot of things that don't exactly scream 'tangible production'.

That's not quite the same as the argument the Chronicle's citations are opposing, which is to say that wage inequality has gone up as demand for skilled labor has fallen; it's more to say that the whole production side of the US economy is just a whole lot different than it was when wages were more equal. We've got a chicken/egg problem: if we educated everyone, would
a) everyone, and thus the country, be more productive, and if so in what industry;
b) the wage gap close by bringing the bottom up and the top down;
c) a lot of college graduates work in unexpected places;
d) the breakdown of occupation change in some way, and if so in what way?
The last one would be very interesting, but which way would it go? Would we simply have yet more bankers and consultants, or would there be a more fundamental shift? Is it possible to get by on a smaller service sector, or would we end up with the same service sector populated by college grads?

Dinner party advice for the economist

2008-07-22T14:14:00.003-04:00

From The Economist's Free Exchange blog, comes some dinner party advice, based on Justin Wolfers:

JUSTIN WOLFERS discusses a common problem for the economist bon vivant—people are always asking you what's going to happen to such and such economic variable. Will the economy go into recession? Will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates? Should I sell my shares in Bear Stearns?

Very true. It's no fun at all to have to admit to being an economist.

On the Venn diagram of 'what people think of when they meet someone who introduces themselves as an economist', macroeconomic stuff (inflation, unemployment) and finance (stocks, commodities, assets) are huge whopping great circles, much bigger than they are on the 'what economists do' diagram. Hence the point of this site, I suppose.

Anyway, here's some advice:

Henceforth, when asked about oil prices, simply throw out some jargon, use phrases like "short-run volatility", and then suggest that the price in three months' time, or indeed a year, will be the same as it is today.

I love it.

Dead left

2008-07-19T18:20:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note to strongly endorse the excellent article on Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine": Dead Left by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. There's a long deconstruction of Klein's argument. He ends with this:

What makes Klein's thesis so odd, and so awful, is that in fact there is an unlimited supply of raw material, an abundant basis in reality, for the sorts of arguments that she wants to make. The last two decades certainly have seen the global spread of absolutist free-market ideology. Many of the newest adherents of this creed are dictators who have learned that they can harness the riches of capitalism without permitting the freedoms once thought to flow automatically from it. In the United States, the power of labor unions has withered, and prosperity has increasingly come to be defined as gross domestic product or the rise of the stock market, with the actual living standards of the great mass of the population an afterthought. Corporations, which can relocate nearly anywhere around the world, have used their flexibility as a cudgel against workers, who do not enjoy the privileges of mobility. Domestic policy has aggressively sharpened income inequalities, and corporations have enjoyed unfettered influence to a degree not seen in a hundred years. And the president did start a war without paying the slightest bit of attention to the country that he would be left occupying or how its people would react.

All these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and significant problems. It's just that they are not the same outrage or the same problem. And Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.

Ignore the past, and it shall teach thee?

2008-07-19T14:45:00.002-04:00

So why don't we teach much economic history anymore? An article in the Chronicle by Russell Jacoby asks this question, with similar for the history of psychology and philosophy, by wondering why Marx doesn't feature on your typical economics syllabus.

The analogy is probably to the natural sciences. Once we scientificize (is that a word?) economics, it becomes more reasonable to follow the path of the naturals - after all, the history of chemistry, for example, might be interesting, but it doesn't necessarily help you be a better chemist. Economists try to answer very specific, answerable questions: methodology becomes crucial, and while the foundation of methodology is important, it's not it. Here's what Jacoby says on the topic:

The flight from history marks economics and philosophy as well. Economics looks more and more like mathematics, in which the past vanishes. Sometimes it even looks like biopsychology. A recent issue of the American Economic Review includes numerous papers under the rubrics of "Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Decision-Making" and "Cognitive Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Behavior." But can we really figure out today's economic problems without considering whence they came?

Of course, my prejudice is the history of thought for its own sake is worthwhile. I want to know how economics evolved; how the foundations of the subject and a couple hundred years of thought brought us to where we are today. However: it's useful like that more to people like me with a predisposition to wonder about the philosophy of the subject than it is to those who are more interested in learning the tools to form and evaluate policy, for example. If I want to advise on school vouchers, to pluck one example, it doesn't necessarily help me to know the history of economic thought; I need to know the evidence on school vouchers. Obviously.

The 'economics as toolbox for analysis' - positivist, scientific economics - maybe doesn't need the past. Research building on research, like we do as academic economists, doesn't need the foundation of the history of thought. Seeing the evolution of the subject, and the little battles over the big issues of days gone by, might, however, make studying the subject as an undergraduate more interesting. Perhaps we could have both: the toolbox-y courses and the intellectual history, for-their-own-sake courses. Why do we need to justify the history only as something that contributes to the toolbox, especially when that might not even be true?

Maybe that's why courses in economic history or the history of economic thought are not as widely offered as you might expect. Maybe they'd be nice or interesting, but very few academic economists are historians or scholars of thought; we're scientists now. What faculty wants to teach a course so wildly unrelated to their other work, their research?

Economists talk weird

2008-07-17T11:32:00.003-04:00

I was going to rant a bit about "Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics" by Ben Stein from the New York Times, but, and I didn't even think this was possible, the whole thing is too ridiculous to justify it. Suffice to say it's more bad PR for the poor econ set.

One of my least favorite things about economists is that we often seem more prone to talking about normal stuff in economics-speak. You'd like an example?

In every long-term romantic situation, returns are greater when there is a monopoly.

Good grief. I mean, who is reading a bunch of aphorisms about 'love' translated into economics jargon and thinking 'awesome article'? Plus, as an added irritant, half the dodgy analogies are to finance, not economics, viz "[t]he returns on your investment should at least equal the cost of the investment" etc etc.

Who knows, maybe there could be something interesting under that title. What I hoped might crop up in an article with such a title might be something about the things people want, the monetizing of economics versus the rich motivations of life. From the tail end of the article:

Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money.

OK. It's the old "no-one ever died wishing they'd spent more time at the office" bit. Shouldn't that apply to economists too? Then why are economists so keen to spend all their time at the office by talking about normal stuff in economics jargon? That's tiresome, not fun.

What is a 'good'?

2008-07-16T11:51:00.003-04:00

One very important concept in economics is 'goods'. They're one of the most fundamental building blocks of the tangible side of economics. If economics is about resource allocation, 'goods' are what the resources are being allocated towards. What is a 'good'?

It's not quite so simple as just a thing, like a TV or a sandwich; 'goods' are anything - any thing - that one can allocate resources towards that contains value for that allocator (rather confusingly, 'services' are 'goods' too, by this definition; so is something like 'charitable contributions'). Yes, we're going to have to plunge into the pool of abstraction. First of all, we have to think about time and space: is a hot coffee in the morning in winter in New England the same as a hot coffee in the afternoon at a swim-up bar in the summer in the Caribbean? Doubtful.

We have two broad strategies, as economists, for dealing with that problem. One might be to say, well, people have different preferences at different places, at different times. That's difficult to work with because we have to try and hit a moving target, so to speak, and since we can't know preferences for sure anyway we sure can't know changes in them either. A second might be to say, those two coffees are different goods. That's also difficult to work with because then it's difficult to compare things at all.

In fact, in either case it will be very difficult to generalize. On the individual level, knowing how you allocated your resources in this situation at that time doesn't help me describe what you did or predict what you'll do in the future: if I see what you did at 11a.m. on Thursday when faced with the decision of coffee versus tea, how can that help me figure out what you might do at 10a.m. on Friday when faced with the same decision. These aren't necessarily the same 'goods' at both times, and in any case, the difference might not just be the time or something else that I can measure; it might be your mood or whether you're especially tired or just feel like a nice cup of tea for some mystical reason.

Seems trivial, but raise that to the level of the market for coffee, or the global coffee industry, or the impact of consumer decisions on the American economy, and the difficulty of defining a 'good' has snowballed into modeling chaos. For example, it's impossible to properly think about the current climate in the market for oil without thinking of the market for oil in the future. Of course, in the real world, the financial world, it's well understood that things vary in space and time: that's why we have things like futures markets, which let you buy 'thing X at time Y' (which is just a special case of 'good X now', really). These things are considered separate (though connected) markets, with separate prices.

And that's just how they were treated by economists as we developed microeconomics. The definition of a good was allowed to be very, very flexible and abstract, so that these 'things' don't just vary in physicality but in time, space, functionality, and so on and so forth.

It's not just time and space, though. An example: think of a college education. Is the good being sold by universities a 'college education'? Is it a 'degree from college X'? Is it a 'college education of quality Y from college X'? The signaling model by Michael Spence wondered (and I obviously paraphrase wildly) if people would still pay for a college education if it the education was intrinsically worthless but had the value of 'signaling' that you were willing to give up four years to prove that you were great.

Should it be surprising that the cost of a college education has been rising despite there being a bigger supply of colleges? Maybe not, if our definition of the 'good' includes 'quality', perceived or actual; it's easy to build a new college, but impossible to build a new college with a reputation to rival Oxbridge or the Ivy League. The supply of that good, whatever it is, is fairly well fixed. Econ 101 is obsessed with 'supply and demand' analysis; the fact is, supply and demand analysis takes you very, very far if you're prepared to speculate properly on what a 'good' is.

This is all quite similar to the corporate strategy mantra of identifying your 'core competencies' and defining the industry. For example: railroads and train companies aren't 'the railroad industry', but 'the transport industry', competing with airlines and buses, and maybe even 'the food industry' if they serve food, etc etc. That leads us dangerously close to the kind of 'provider of transport services' corporate-speak euphemisms that plague so many firms, but it's pretty much the same question as how to define a good in economics.

Game theory often looks silly

2008-07-07T20:02:00.003-04:00

From Tim Harford's blog:

"Game theorists know all about the centipede game:

One instance of the centipede game is as follows. A pile of $4 and a pile of $1 are lying on a table. Player I has two options, either to “stop” or to “continue.” If he stops, the game ends and he gets $4 while Player II gets the remaining dollar. If he continues, the two piles are doubled, to $8 and $2, and Player II is faced with a similar decision: either to take the larger pile ($8), thus ending the game and leaving the smaller pile ($2) for Player I, or to let the piles double again and let Player I decide. The game continues for at most six periods. If by then neither of the players have stopped, Player I gets $256 and Player II gets $64. Figure 1 depicts this situation. Although this game offers both players a very profitable opportunity, all standard game theoretic solution concepts predict that Player I will stop at the first opportunity, getting just $4.

Except, nobody really thinks this is the way players would behave in reality. The optimal strategy seems sociopathic; isn’t it worth playing cooperatively in the hope that the other player will do the same thing? (Unlike much real human interaction, standard game theory does not accomodate the “hope” that someone else will play suboptimally: optimal play is to be expected at all times. )"

Game theory is very clever and very useful, but often seems very naive. When it's used in economics, it's arguably the part of economics most hamstrung by the scattershot application of the "money=utility" fallacy. If you want your game theoretic result to be predictive or descriptively powerful, you must (must must) try really hard to make the payoffs reasonably accurate; in Harford's quoted example the assumption is that the players care only about cash and that, as Harford says, they aren't willing to take a shot on the other player prolonging the game. At the risk of being tautologically critical: can you read the setup of that game and not entertain the idea of waiting? I remember being taught the centipede game in David Myatt's excellent game theory course as an undergrad; he showed us the 'crazy centipede' variant, which wondered exactly that: what chance of you choosing to continue the game is enough to make me also want to continue?

The kicker to me is that 'game theoretic predictions' are overwhelmingly often not as successful for the players as alternative strategies, even when we're just measuring 'success' in the same cash-payoff terms as the theory. This is just what Harford goes on to describe:

But Ignacio Palacios-Huerta (best known to Undercover Economist readers as discovering that strikers and goalkeepers play optimal strategies in penalty-taking) and Oscar Volij gave the centipede game to skilled chess players. They found that the chess players were far more likely to play optimally; grandmasters always played optimally and took the $4. Hyper-rationality can be a disadvantage. (Or did the experiment discover something else: that chess grandmasters are sociopaths?) Palacios-Huerta and Volij don’t speculate. My guess is that they have discovered something about the rationality rather than morality or empathy of chess players, but I may be wrong.

It really does just beg for the 'behavioral economics' explosion: if predictions aren't great, and in any case are less profitable than reality, we're up the creek without a paddle or a boat.

Classifying economics: humanity or science?

2008-07-04T12:07:00.005-04:00

How should the discipline of economics be classified within academia - does it belong to the arts, sciences, social sciences, humanities? A wonderful article called 'The Burden of the Humanities' by Wilfred McClay in the Wilson Quarterly got me thinking about that this morning.

Even if we go by something so simple as what degrees are offered in departments of economics there doesn't seem to be much consensus. While the Bachelor of Arts remains perhaps the most common undergraduate degree in economics, the Bachelor of Science isn't unheard of; indeed, the London School of Economics, one of the most recognizable schools for the subject, awards the BSc. At Oxford University, the undergraduate degree is the BA, but at postgraduate level the MSc - is this a good reflection of the journey up the hill of science, math and statistics that we economists make on the course of our study? If so, why do so many North American universities - NYU, Yale, Brown, Toronto, etc etc - award the MA as a postgraduate degree (albeit in the US usually as a consolation prize for those abandoning the PhD)? What about something like Economics and Finance? Is that more BSc-ish than just economics?

Do we belong to the humanities or to science? This question is obviously closely tied to the ethos of economics teaching, especially the positivist teaching method and the quantification of the discipline. If your economics education focuses on the political, moral, philosophical, historical, intellectual parts of economics, it sounds more like the humanities. If it focuses on the mathematical, statistical, empirical, experimental, computational parts, it sounds more like science, or at the very least, 'social' science. Maybe since there's no 'standard' blend of these two categories in an economics degree it's right that we don't know which degree is more appropriate; all I know is that the scientific categories are much, much more prevalent in the content of US undergraduate economics education than the humanities categories.

McClay's essay talks about the defining characteristics of humanities, borrowing first from the National Endowment for the Humanities definition which allows the humanities to include, among other things:

"those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods..."

This would seem to allow economics into the party, since it is closely concerned with human behavior, especially microeconomics which is obsessed with how people make choices and decisions. Or is it? Historically, macroeconomics has often relied on a characterization of a country as a big machine, to ask how, for example, exchange rates interact with interest rates, or whatever. There has to be a human element buried somewhere, unlike in the natural sciences, but it's not the focus. McClay addresses just this point:

"But this can be stated more directly. The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon."

You could plausibly argue that the history of economic thought has been a reduction of the human to something else; this is valuable because it allows us to abstract from the uncertain world of how people behave into a place where we might be able to draw plausible, tangible conclusions, but just as it's taken the discipline into a place of backlash where 'behavioral economics' wants to recover a keen interest in the way humans operate, it might have carried away much claim we had to be part of the humanities. Of course this also implies that a bunch of the psychological-type economics that's so very popular at the moment might arguably be 'humanities', but that probably overstates the case, since psychology itself isn't usually considered as such.

McClay argues further about the tendency towards science and away from the humanities:

"For many Americans... [the humanities go] against the grain. After all, we like to think of ourselves as a practical people. We don’t spend our lives chasing fluffy abstractions. We don’t dwell on the past. We ask hard headed questions such as Where does that get you? How can you solve this problem? What’s the payoff? If you’re so smart, we demand, why aren’t you rich?"

There's a strong similarity between this line of argument and the tendency towards science within economics itself, and perhaps all the same questions apply there. If I imagine arguing that we should have more normative content in economics courses, I immediately imagine being challenged, 'where does that get you?', 'what's the payoff?'. Plus, as a nice bonus, 'why aren't you rich?' could, in another context, be a very pithy summation of the boneheadedness of economists towards the normative metrics of happiness or success.

The weird paradox, however, is that, to this eye, the practical value of the majority of economics research is very difficult to find; I know science for its own sake is still science, pushing the bounds of knowledge etc etc, and I know the charge can be leveled at any subject, but still, for better or worse, 'what's the payoff?' is a question we could rightfully ask in response to any claim of economics to be a science.

And what do we lose when we drop the humanistic from economics? McClay says:

"For you can’t really appreciate the statuary of our country—our political and social and economic institutions—or know the value of American liberty and prosperity, or intelligently assess America’s virtues and vices against the standard of human history and human possibility, unless you pay the price of learning the stories."

This is certainly true of the abandonment of economic history and the history of economic thought as fields of study in so many departments of economics. If we can argue for economics as science or as humanity, why have we dropped all humanistic study of it? Won't we lose the 'stories', the lessons of the past, the normative context, the ability to critically evaluate the scientific results that we might be able to squeak out of our modeling and empirical analysis?

Finally, McClay ends discussing the role of the humanities in contributing to the attainment of 'happiness' or satisfaction in life.

"...the lure of a pleasure-swaddled posthumanity may be the particular form of that temptation to which the Western liberal democracies of the 21st century are especially prone.

One of those things left behind may, ironically, be happiness itself, since the very possibility of human happiness is inseparable from the struggles and sufferings and displacements experienced by our restless, complex, and incomplete human natures. Our tradition teaches that very lesson in a hundred texts and a thousand ways, for those who have been shown how to see and hear it."

In the context of the study of economics, can't we make a similar argument? It's not just that economics may have contributed heavily to the 'happiness as goal' business, or to the wedding of income, GDP and money to 'wellbeing'; By abandoning the humanistic in the teaching of our subject, don't we neglect to show the next generation how to see and hear the humanistic as it relates to the organization of our economies, our world? Economics is not a technocracy. We need to understand its humanistic foundations if we are to wield its tools and arguments as experts.

Cash and sports

2008-06-30T22:05:00.002-04:00

Short interlude for some sports today, spurred only by the fact that this article by Gene Wojciechowski at ESPN was rather delightfully titled "The economics of insanity" by my iGoogle newsbar; sadly it didn't carry over into the article, but still some food for thought. The issue at hand is rookie contracts in the NFL:

"NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said it's "ridiculous" to reward untested rookies with lucrative contracts, and wants the issue addressed in contract talks."

I'm tempted to point out that no-one's forcing teams to enter into these contracts, but then I'm not completely sure what the rules are about draft picks going unsigned. In any case, the negotiated salary cap rules determine the total pot available to pay rookies, right? Either way, it's just more evidence in favor of the old truism that American sports are more socialist than their capitalist European counterparts: try this or this for some of the arguments.

It's staggering how exactly the analogy holds, precisely opposite to the stereotypes of American and European rules for resource allocation. American sports are organized to give every team a fighting chance of winning within a few years, with the help of active intervention in the form the draft and salary caps and the guarantee that a terrible season is not punished the following year, while European sports are dog-eat-dog, pure capitalism. Maybe it's because of cross-country competition in Europe: it would be hard for Spain, say, to use American-sport policies to level the playing field without players jumping ship to Italy or England and without Spanish teams being destroyed on the field by the elite of other countries.

Happiness and behavioral stuff again

2008-06-28T17:23:00.004-04:00

Via Arts & Letters Daily (again) comes a wonderful (and long) article by Alan Wolfe for the New Republic: "Hedonic Man, The new economics and the pursuit of happiness." There's far, far too much for me to discuss in suitable depth here, but, beyond recommending the article, let me pick out a couple of choice bits.

I wholeheartedly agree with Wolfe when he says:

"The social sciences are not just empirical; they are normative, too. It was precisely the insistent normative preference for market-based social arrangements that turned me against Chicago School economics. Governmental regulation is always sub-optimal, they inevitably maintained. Individual freedom is worth more than social equality. If market logic works for firms, surely it can work for recruiting an army, fighting poverty, or providing kidneys. Non-Chicago economists were subtler about these matters, and at times questioned the reliance on markets; but for the many sons and daughters of Milton Friedman, we are hard-wired to be rational choosers, and any efforts we make to direct the course of our actions collectively are bound to fail. Myself, I do not believe that any of these propositions bring us closer to a good society. Other people feel differently. Democracy requires that we argue out our differences. But democratic debate is not well served by pretending that the empirical findings of a single controversial approach in a single academic discipline contain definitive answers to these questions."

The presentation of economics as a discipline of study certainly does make it seem like we've magically cracked the nut of what is the 'best' way to organize a society, and, as I've argued before, that's not just dangerous, it's a misrepresentation of what good economic science is capable of. One reason why it's a misrepresentation is the measurement issue at work again: to say 'best', we need a metric, and to do that we need to ask what people want, to speculate on their motivations and desires. Of course, as misrepresentations go, it's a tempting one, because from day one of a Principles of Economics course it's made again and again and again.

Wolfe's article is built around the review of two books: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (which I've talked about before, much to the author's chagrin, so I won't return to it now) and Happiness: A Revolution in Economics by Bruno Frey. 'Happiness', as discussed by Wolfe, is concerned with exactly that big question in normative social science, which is: what exactly constitutes a 'good' outcome? It's exactly that question that's the dangerous misunderstanding within economics, the dangerous belief that we know what's 'good'.

Wolfe talks at length about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the pioneers of what has become 'behavioral economics', and I admit that I share Richard Thaler's reaction, as reported by Wolfe:

"When I read this paper," [Thaler] wrote of Kahneman and Tversky's classic article "Judgment Under Uncertainty," which appeared in 1974, "I could hardly contain myself."

He talks further about the supposed 'revolution' in economics to account for the kind of behavior documented by Kahneman and Tversky and the whole slew of experiments run by economists since:

"One has to wonder why the revolution in economics failed so badly even before it really got off the ground. Neoclassical economics may in some ways be preferable to what the revolutionaries offer, but it remains a vulnerable approach, stuck in unrealistic assumptions about human behavior and all too complacent about the beneficial equilibria established by markets. Nor can one deny the ingeniousness of the early days of economic psychology, especially the inventive puzzles that Kahneman and Tversky devised. If ever a field were ripe for revolution, it is economics. Yet if these two books are any indication, supply and demand, marginal utility, rational choice, and cost-benefit analysis are not going away. At best, economists will tweak their models a bit to account for some of our odder calculations. More likely, they will simply reiterate their belief that we need not examine the internal mechanisms of utility satisfaction because the price someone is willing to pay for something is really all we need to know."

Again, though, I offer this as the reason why the 'revolution' has 'failed': we simply can never say what motivates people, whether a person is "rational" or not. 'Neoclassical economics' does not restrict the range of assumptions one can make about human behavior. It is therefore completely resilient to any evidence on how people act in a given situation. That's not a defense of the approach, it's a fact. It's distressing, because my prejudice is definitely to agree that economics is 'complacent' about the superiority of markets (again, because we ignore the variety of normative metrics of comparison), and that there's too much arcana.

We need true normative debate. Look again at what Wolfe says about economics: "it remains a vulnerable approach, stuck in unrealistic assumptions about human behavior and all too complacent about the beneficial equilibria established by markets". It's a mistake to conflate this problem - the arrogant assumption that we know what's 'best' - with the neoclassical assumptions on human behavior, because, as I've argued repeatedly, the method of scientific economics doesn't actually assume anything about human behavior, as evidenced by the fact that the 'behavioral revolution' is comfortably within the confines of 'neoclassical economics'.

The real revolution would be quieter, and would say something much more familiar: keep your science separate from your opinion.

Happy happy joy joy

2008-06-23T20:32:00.005-04:00

Via the wondrous fark.com comes 'How Rich People Spend Their Time' from the Washington Post - it's about an article in Science written by a battery of psychologist/economist types, including Daniel Kahneman. Very relevant to the question of what motivates people; my first instinct was to assume that it might reveal what people with the time to do what they want do with their time, if you see what I mean, and while the actual intention of the article is somewhat different it's still full of fun.

The original article is behind the Science subscriber wall, but via the wonders of institutional access, I can get access to metaphysical nuggets like this:

Schkade and Kahneman noted that, "Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."

Perhaps some intriguing fact about human nature; perhaps not. The article goes on to talk about some well-known results in the burgeoning 'happiness' literature, like the importance of relative rather than absolute income, and adaption to circumstances. I think a great article about this stuff, for the terminally interested, is Richard Layard's 'Happiness and Public Policy'.

But the thing that hooked me on this particular Science article is the following piece of weird:

"In a representative, nationwide sample, people with greater income tend to devote relatively more of their time to work, compulsory nonwork activities (such as shopping and childcare), and active leisure (such as exercise) and less of their time to passive leisure activities (such as watching TV)."

Let me get this straight: richer people work more and buy more stuff, and poor schmucks watch a lot of TV? Stop those presses. The point of the article is well-made (from the the title, 'would you be happier if you were richer', right on down), and that is to say that people with higher incomes aren't necessarily engaging in relatively more 'fun'; however, there are a bunch of unasked questions. Does 'TV'='fun'? Is this really evidence that the rich are wasting their time, or are there other reasons why they endure work to get money?

The happiness literature is desperate to find an answer to the question of whether money buys happiness; an eerie similarity to the oft-(mis?)perceived economists' equation of money with happiness when modeling people, and surely as deserving of the same retort: we know people care about more than money. The obvious question is, well, obvious. What does motivate people?

The arrogance of economics?

2008-06-16T20:42:00.005-04:00

A while ago I mentioned the mysterious science of "welfare analysis". It tries to evaluate outcomes or predictions of economic analysis or modeling; the idea is to figure out whether x is "better" than y.

That's not an easy task; we have to figure out how we're going to measure things if we're going to compare them. Unfortunately, the only way to answer the question is to take a position on the motivations of the people who'd be affected by your policy. It's sometimes said that the noxious euphemism "thinking like an economist" means "taking all consequences into account"; leave aside for a moment the obvious point that that's not "thinking like an economist", it's "thinking properly", but rather let's figure out what "thinking like an economist" actually requires.

It often seems to require answering that question of "better", to require taking a position on how you're going to evaluate policies. It's more fundamental than assuming something about a utility function, or whatever it takes to perform welfare analysis, but rather seems to require an acceptance of those nefarious so-called "principles" of economics, an agreement with what constitutes a "better" outcome for society.

Then we're led into a world in which very few people who self-identify as "economists" profess support for any policy or means or resource allocation that lies outside the capitalism-with-some-government model that is the status quo. Is that because once a person has studied economics, it's obvious to them that this is "best"? Is it because it's impossible to succeed in the study of economics if you don't agree that it's "best", because you're turned off or ridiculed?

Economists run the risk of being seen as arrogant if we pretend to understand what a "better" outcome is. In the small this manifests as our faith in the cipher of "welfare analysis"; in the large it manifests as the homogeneity of belief and thought among economists.

'Good' versus 'bad' economics

2008-05-09T10:48:00.004-04:00

A peculiar distinction is often made between 'good' and 'bad' economics when analyzing economic policy. The current hot potato of a gas tax holiday in the US is a case in point - though it might be a trivial issue in the scheme of things, it did provide this absolutely outstanding moment from Hillary Clinton:

“Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton said, a response in line with some of the populist notes she’s been hitting in recent stump speeches on the gas tax.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, it just shows that declaring opposition to economists is just as popular a political strategy as declaring opposition to 'business' or 'the elite' or 'greedy oil companies'. This is almost certainly because 'economics' is perceived as being one and the same with these things, an ax wielded by the establishment to crush little people under the wheels of capitalism. Again, true economic analysis is valueless, and is subjective only once we evaluate the outcomes or the processes that would lead to or from one thing or another.

The other point, related, is the implicit invocation of a consensus among 'economists'. It's related because it is unambiguously true that the majority of economists evaluate things in a particular way - the subjective part is a collective subjectivity rather than a diversity of opinion. Why is that? Are economists molded into a particular normative stance that evaluates policies or outcomes in a particular way? A significant amount of work has been done on the question of which way the causality runs between studying economics and policy opinions: do economists dislike the gas tax holiday because they've studied economics or because people who dislike these kind of policies study economics?

The truth is that it's very easy to identify what 'good' and 'bad' economics are, because that label can be attached only to the logical, scientific chain of argument - the positive side - that draws the map from cause to effect. Of course we can argue about the validity of the links in the chain, test our assumptions, look to evidence, but the fact remains that 'bad' economics is that which fails to acknowledge the true effects of an action.

By contrast, the normative side cannot be labeled 'good' or 'bad', because it is only opinion. To argue against a normative stance is to argue against an opinion. This is why it is so dangerous for the 'Principles of Economics' to include value-loaded statements; this is why it is so dangerous to have a normative consensus among people who call themselves 'economists'. When that happens, we risk confusing the normative opinions of these people with a scientific conclusion; it is not.

If a politician was to ignore or lie about the tangible consequences of a policy, that is bad, in the sense of being misleading or untrue. However, if a politician acknowledges the best guess of the consequences, whether they argue for or against the policy is neither bad nor good. Economists would do well to remember that they are part of the second group, not the first. It is fine to point out misinformation, but to argue that 'economics tells us what to do here' is to assume that their opinion is good, which is a great sin of arrogance.

When one responds to the gas tax stuff with a line like (from Paul Krugman)

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory...

I'm sure they are really pointing out the tangible consequences of the policy, but the line between the positive and the normative is fuzzed, the value-free analysis becomes loaded with subjectivity. The two must be separated.

"Economics Basics"

2008-04-22T11:12:00.006-04:00

Looking for something quite different (as usual), and found this page, from something called Investopedia, which is entitled "Economics Basics". It makes me think, more than anything else, of the Telephone game (or Chinese Whispers if you're British), because it's one degree removed from everything - one degree removed from correct, one degree removed from stereotypically bad, one degree removed from sensible.

Economics may appear to be the study of complicated tables and charts, statistics and numbers, but, more specifically, it is the study of what constitutes rational human behavior in the endeavor to fulfill needs and wants.

Immediately the lean towards 'professional' or investment-bank type economists is obvious: academic economics is emphatically not the study of complicated tables or charts or numbers. Statistics, maybe. But that's fine, a good way to start, to address the misconception about economics and math-y stuff.

Wait, though: the "study of what constitutes rational human behavior"? That makes zero sense. I don't really understand what that would mean, let alone how it relates to economics. I don't know what 'rational human behavior' is; no-one does. No economist should say to a person 'here's what you should be doing' (with the exception of policy advising normative economists, for obvious reasons), and indeed they don't.

As an individual, for example, you face the problem of having only limited resources with which to fulfill your wants and needs, as a result, you must make certain choices with your money. You'll probably spend part of your money on rent, electricity and food. Then you might use the rest to go to the movies and/or buy a new pair of jeans. Economists are interested in the choices you make, and inquire into why, for instance, you might choose to spend your money on a new DVD player instead of replacing your old TV. They would want to know whether you would still buy a carton of cigarettes if prices increased by $2 per pack.

Snooze. And then we default right back to the 'economics is money' thing. Goodness me, but the problem of scarcity informs questions so much more vital than 'how does this guy spend his money on electronics'. Sure, we're interested in consumer behavior, but come on, this is Economics Basics! Give me some life. The fruit of the earth, the budget of a government, the precious time of a modern human being, all of these are scarce resources. All of these are used to fulfill wants and needs, and are subject to choices.

To study these things, economics makes the assumption that human beings will aim to fulfill their self-interests. It also assumes that individuals are rational in their efforts to fulfill their unlimited wants and needs. Economics, therefore, is a social science, which examines people behaving according to their self-interests. The definition set out at the turn of the twentieth century by Alfred Marshall, author of "The Principles Of Economics" (1890), reflects the complexity underlying economics: "Thus it is on one side the study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man."

I love that Marshall quotation. It sums up very well the state of the economics art at the time, the discipline spawned by interest in wealth and how it accumulates, perpetuates, moves around. I hate the repeated 'self-interests'. Delete 'self-' and you'd have a (semantically identical) but more neutral, and more accurate, statement. And again - broken record time - this is misleading on the rationality assumption. We don't make it because we know what rationality is, because we don't, or because we believe people are rational, because that's unknowable, or because we're grumpy bastards who shout 'humbug' at the rich tapestry of life. We make it because we want to try to answer questions that involve the actions of people and groups of people, and we can't start that unless we breathe life into those actors.

If I ask you how the process of exchange of stuff between people works, do you a) dismiss the question, because people are weird and unpredictable, b) tell a parable about a guy who makes wine and a guy who makes cheese who get together and have wine and cheese, or c) model some people who like some goods and show that they might prefer to trade some of their goods with each other?

Well, b) and c) are the same. They are only the difference between an idea and its mathematical expression. If you say a), you can't be an inquisitive human being, let alone an economist. Fine, I don't care about a lot of stuff, especially in economics, but these are questions we can try to answer, and the denunciation of any model of human behavior, implicit in criticisms of this straw-man 'rationality assumption' is philistinism and willful ignorance.

I don't suggest that Investopedia is willfully subverting the course of human intellectual endeavor, though. I just accuse them of being a bit narrow-minded in their Introduction to Economics Basics. I know that "Economics Basics" can't be complicated or anything, but is this what a whirlwind tour of economics has to look like? But wait: our Introductory Economics courses are exactly the same. Pot, kettle.

What economists do: the one model we use

2008-04-17T12:15:00.009-04:00

Economics is jargon-heavy, like, well, everything. Economists, I can attest, are especially fond of that academic disease of using their jargon in everyday conversation, a kind of subconscious economic imperialism. Nevertheless, there's a difference between specialist knowledge (with its public face, jargon) and the concepts on which a body of knowledge is built.

How could we distill economics to its base? This is a slightly different goal than defining the principles of economics; here we want to identify the actual applicable results that derive from the principles and recur again and again in the whole discipline. As a first pass at this problem, let's look at the model we use in economics. That's model, singular.

Modern economics is built on the formalized statement of the definition of the subject: some entity has objectives, and limited resources with which to achieve them. These become the objective function and the constraints. Now the entity could be anything: a firm, a person, a government, a group of people.

The objective function might be expressed in math, but it doesn't have to be. It reflects, obviously, the objectives of the entity, and these could be anything, but will typically have to be a simplified version of what an entity really wants or needs. This is one place where the abstraction from reality might have to be made, although we can imagine, as a thought experiment, the omniscient modeler who is not subject to this particular problem.

The constraints can, again, be put into math but doesn't have to be. It is the expression of scarcity; constraints can reflect anything that poses a challenge to our entity's achieving its goal. The abstraction is often necessary here, too: time, money, social convention, technology are just some of the possible constraints.

Now this is really a very simple idea, but all economics uses this as its base. We are concerned with the allocation of scarce resources in the quest to satisfy objectives, and this is the model of that. The math angle comes in to make this model give tangible and quantifiable results; we could make arguments without the math, but using it often helps to make things clear. The challenge for the modeler is to write the model cleverly, making simplifications enough to make the problem understandable, but not too many to make it irrelevant.

Theoretical economists are explicitly writing this model, over and over, and the illustrative economic models we present in teaching students use this model exclusively. Empirical economists use it too, not just writing it down, but in subtle ways: perhaps the empiricist can identify a precise moment or situation in which the constraints on a particular entity's problem changed, offering them a useful opportunity to see how choices change in the face of the discrete change in conditions.

This model gives rise to the marginalist result. It says that our entity will allocate resources to a particular use while the benefit of doing so exceeds the cost of doing so, and that the point at which the entity stops will be characterized by the balance of cost and benefit at that particular point. If the decision was changed slightly in either direction, the results would be less satisfying, either because the cost would exceed the benefit, or because the benefit would exceed the cost. That might sound complicated, but it is a familiar idea from everyday life.

In the jargon, the result is that marginal benefit equals marginal cost in the solution to this model of an entity facing a resource allocation model. That simply means that from the "solution", there is no change that would be a better result for the objective function. Not to say that the solution is a perfect prediction or description; the solution is to the model, not the actual problem faced by the entity. Perhaps the loaded meaning of the word solution is a hindrance here. Much debate has been staged over the extent of predictive or descriptive accuracy of this economic model.

Where it gets a bit complicated is at the point where we're unsatisfied with the objectives or constraints we are using in our models. Benefit and cost are pretty easy to think about when our abstraction acknowledges only money, for example, but what if my entity's objective function included the wellbeing of others, the environment, the amount of time spent in the sun, the quality of life? These assumptions are not just more difficult to incorporate, they are more difficult to interpret.

Where does all this fit in with the themes I've touched on before? The debate about rationality, economic man and realism informs directly the objective function. For example, the behavioral school could be characterized as seeking to come up with a more realistic, tractable objective function. The economics-as-money fallacy crops up in both the objective and constraints, yet how we denominate these things doesn't change the model one bit. The debate about math in economics informs the language in which the model is presented; non-mathematical economists still use the model, even if they don't write all these components down as mathematical relationships.

This is the model of economics. Two examples to show what's going on.

First: how would a subsidy on the wage of low-income workers, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, affect the number of people who work and how much they work? The common treatment of this problem in basic economics is to imagine a person who has a desire for money and for time, and to illustrate the wage subsidy as affecting the constraint, in this case the rate at which our person can earn money by giving up their time to work. We can then ask how this change in the constraint affects the hypothetical best choice of our simple person, and even ask how the person's relative desire for time and money affect this answer.

Theorists can try to answer this question by investigating the model itself; empiricists might look to the data to try to identify the change in actual choices observed when the subsidy is introduced. [Aside: as it turns out, weird things happen with the EITC during the income range when it's gradually phased out.]

Second: how would a person choose to react to another person they perceive to be unfair? Our person might have an objective function that includes preference for money and fairness, and their constraint could include the social norms for fairness as well as their money budget. This example is well-studied in experimental economics, where our person can decide to sacrifice some common good in order to punish a person who was greedy.

No matter what field of economics one works in, this is the one model most dominant in all of the work. It is, of course, very flexible (in fact, infinitely flexible, as I argued before), and I have stated it in the most general terms. Nevertheless, when economists argue, it is worth remembering that we all play the same game. It might just be the language, but it is a language that can seem daunting and restrictive to outsiders or students. I don't believe that is the case: the beauty of this most fundamental model is its simplicity and its malleability. To distill economics into its essence, this is the place to start.

Irrationality again

2008-04-13T11:17:00.000-04:00

I resisted talking about 'Predictably Irrational', a book by Dan Ariely, "the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the eRationality Group at the Media Lab", when the first wave of columns and reviews appeared about it. I haven't read it, but it is mining the vein of doing experiments to figure out how people behave.

The title, of course, is not palatable to me. It's not possible to test rationality. I see why it's attached to the work that behavioral economists do, but semantically, it's a real pain. Let me dive right in to this article, direct from MIT News.

"Though Ariely's book is often compared to the bestseller "Freakonomics"--both certainly share a quirky, hands-on approach to questions of everyday behavior--he says that in fact his research is almost the opposite of that book's. Those researchers found cases where people's behavior, even in seemingly irrational contexts, was perfectly rational and followed established economic principles. Ariely's work, by contrast, shows the consistently irrational ways people behave in situations where traditional economics predicts they would follow a course of rational self-interest."

Goodness me. Consider the bait taken: what's 'traditional economics' and why is it different from behavioral economics (or are they the same)? What's an 'irrational context'? Here's an example, from the article, of the Ariely book:

"Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone.

But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?"

First of all, if I see a plate of loose dollar bills in the refrigerator I'm pretty well out of my comfort zone. Can it be so hard to explain why people don't take dollars from a plate in a dorm refrigerator? Aside from being a bit silly, it's the first misperception of economics at work! 'The value was comparable'. Actually, I'm being unfair: this is worse than the first misperception of economics, because the Coke-dollar game, as reported by the article, is refusing to acknowledge any preferences whatsoever, ignoring, then, the most fundamental building block of modeling in economics. Maybe that's why it's 'not traditional'.

There are other examples in the article, and I'm sure the book is full of interesting experimental results. I can't get past that title, though, and it, like Freakonomics itself and the cottage industry it spawned, is squarely in the making-economics-look-stupid camp with the Christmas stuff. I'm sure insights from behavioral experiments can be informative beyond the triviality - the Obama advisers come to mind - but the press coverage for this new book has instead reinforced the discipline's 'quirkiness' and furthered, in some small and delightful way, the misunderstanding of economics.

Easy money

2008-04-11T11:32:00.004-04:00

Here are some numbers on average starting salary by college major from the Wall Street Journal. If we want to understand what drives people to study economics, part of the reason must be found here.

So, there's economics, a proud 4th with a not-too-shabby $43,419. First of all, being that I don't believe economics is vocational, and that I think we don't place a very high premium on intellectual excellence in the teaching of economics, this is already, to me, a bit weird.

The easy, and I think true, point to make is that if we do some kind of perceived difficulty/scariness of subject times starting salary, economics will win hands down. If all I care about is cash and how hard my degree will be, I doubt I'm choosing math or engineering over economics. It's easy money.

For once, I'm going to try to use some economics to talk about this. Labor and skills are scarce resources; salaries for graduates in the hard sciences are understandably high, since these skills are valuable and not so very many people study those subjects. But I see exactly zero reason why economics is different, in that light, from management science or history, for example. Does majoring in economics change your abilities in the same way that studying computer science makes you a better code-writer?

Where are the economists going, anyway? From the article:

Scott Bell, who plans to graduate this year from New York University with a degree in East Asian studies, was looking for a job in financial services or consulting. The 21-year-old was unable to land interviews with major investment banks, despite a strong grade-point average and an internship in the Tokyo office of global management consultancy Bain & Co.

East Asian studies would, in this context, seem to be more valuable than economics in preparing someone for a career in financial services or consulting. Economists seem to be facing stiff competition in the labor market for consulting and banking, and of course they are no more qualified for such jobs than anyone else who is literate and numerate, which might itself be contributing to the premium for economists.

I struggle not to fall back on the familiar signaling story for education. I said this a while ago:

Perhaps economics just looks good, perhaps even because it's confused with finance or business. Perhaps we, the educators, are complicit in the charade because it brings high enrollments and money. There is no incentive to change the program, even if the core is rotten. It's like an asset bubble - the value of economics as a major, the value of economics to a university, to economics departments, goes up and up and up, but at the bottom there is nothing.

I strongly recommend this short article, "What jobs do economics majors get?". Listen to this:

Employers are happy to hire students with undergraduate degrees in Economics. They are often looking for good mathematics skills, good writing skills, ability to use a word processing program such as Word and a spreadsheet program such as Excel. Some jobs require skill in using a statistics program - these are appropriate for people who did well in or liked ECON 3254. Computer programming skills are definitely a plus. Almost any programming language will appeal to most employers, although some have a preference for "C" and "Visual Basic."

OK, so employers want people who can read, write, do math and use a computer. Statistics is good. Computer programming is awesome. This has nothing to do with economics. And lo:

The important thing to understand about finding a job with an economics degree is that employers are less interested in whether you have a specific skill, like being able to find the intersection of the supply and demand curve, than they are in the package of skills that people with economics degrees have. Secret: most of the skills which people use on the job they learn on the job.

Cool, so all the stuff we teach in undergraduate economics is useless to employers (astonishment!), yet people study economics in record numbers. What's the disconnect here? Is it really just a house of cards, floating on air? What do we teach economics students to do that other students can't? What do employers think we teach? Back in the original article, this makes more sense:

A breakdown by industry shows that starting salaries for accounting and finance grads rose by a mere 1.9%, while business-administration and management graduates saw increases of less than 1%. The average offer for computer-science majors, on the other hand, rose 7.9%. Engineering graduates saw an average increase of 5.7%.

I'm not down on economics as a field of study. I think it can be interesting and multidisciplinary and philosophical and relevant and topical. However, it seems sometimes to all to be tailored to these numbers: you can earn big bucks by majoring in economics, and economics classes become just a crappy thing you have to do to get there. Everyone's happy with the status quo.

Simple arguments complicated by needless econ-jargon

2008-04-03T11:01:00.006-04:00

I'm all for novel arguments, but this one is a classic case of over-complication. The argument belongs to Charles Karelis, and reaches me via this article, called 'The Sting of Poverty' (bees feature as an extended metaphor), in the Boston Globe. The topic is relative poverty (in America, implicitly) and why poor people don't take actions to drag their sorry selves out of poverty. Hold that thought, especially if you see an obvious answer, and let's go through the Karelis argument, as characterized by the article.

"Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale."

I don't think so. For whom is it more costly to do all those naughty, naughty things? For the person with a beautiful job, beautiful house, beautiful spouse or the person with a low wage and low prospects? News: when your labor is worth less money, you have less incentive to work, not the 'strongest' incentive to 'subscribe to the Puritan work ethic.

And while we're on the subject, 'to an economist, this is irrational behavior' is literally offensive to this economist. First of all, please don't ever use the phrase 'irrational behavior'. Second, even to the most traditional, boring economist in the room, the motivation for the behavior being described is not difficult to speculate on. I just did, and I didn't even think that hard.

Continuing:

"It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.

"It's Econ 101 that's to blame," Karelis says. "It's created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty." "

No-one is more depressed about Econ 101 than me, but, yikes, economics is all about scarcity! If there was no scarcity, we can all go home and think about something different instead. I'm always disappointed when someone bashes Econ 101 for the wrong reasons, or bashes some jargon from Econ 101 then uses it anyway.

"The economist's term for the idea Karelis takes issue with is the law of diminishing marginal utility. In brief, it means the more we have of something, the less any additional unit of that thing means to us. In many cases, Karelis says, diminishing marginal utility certainly does apply: Our seventh ice cream cone will no doubt be less pleasurable than our first. But the logic flips when we are dealing with privation rather than plenty.

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before. If we have a sink full of dishes, the prospect of washing a few of them is much more daunting than if there are only a few in the sink to begin with. Karelis's name for goods that reduce or salve these sort of burdens is "relievers.""

A couple problems. This is a costs issue again, and the 'good' we're talking about is something like 'a car with no dents in it', which you either have or you don't. Diminishing marginal utility of a non-dent is something too esoteric even for an economist, methinks, and that is not a statement I ever thought I'd write. I'm also struggling very hard not to be facetious about the fact that 'money' turns out to be the 'reliever'. Yes, money is a pretty decent 'reliever' of financial hardship!

But then, at last, Karelis actually comes over to the light side:

"Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.

"The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity," Karelis says. "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty." "

Ah. So it is a cost thing. And there's one of those simple answers I was holding in my mind from the start: many things conspire to make it difficult for poor people to become rich, not least the fact that the problems pile up. Actually, we call those poverty traps (thanks, Wikipedia!).

What lessons can I take from this exercise? First: don't mess around talking about people's motivations and incentives, their 'utility' and preferences, when it is not necessary to do so. Maybe it sounds nice and jargon-y, but let's have a bit of Occam's Razor and just check if, in fact, it's just a cost thing. Second: a bee sting or car dent metaphor does not a new economic theory make, especially if your new theory calls for a reconsideration of scarcity(!).

The actual policy prescription Karelis is pushing is to simply give the poor money instead of bending over backwards with possibly more costly benefits-in-kind. The debate there is so involved and long-running that I'm not even going to try to describe it in one sentence, but suffice to say it exists, and of course anyone is welcome to join it. I just wish Karelis didn't invoke 'economics' to make his particular arguments, which are much simpler than they are made out to be, and require no dressing.

Literature or science?

2008-04-01T10:44:00.003-04:00

Here's an interesting post from Marginal Revolution, titled "Why are the social sciences backward?", and concerning (bear with me) an article about a book by Gordon Tullock from 1966. What's for us there?

First, the question is startling in itself given the scientific method in economics. Are the social sciences backward? Here's how Bruce Cadwell characterizes Tullock's position:

Tullock next turns to what he considers to be the real reasons behind the backwardness of the social sciences, which in his view is due to differences in the social organization of natural versus social science. The first difference is the relative absence of applied research: because there is no way to patent applied research in the social sciences (He asks, for example, how does one patent a new sales technique?), little of it is done.

This is clearly very different to the modern use of "applied" as it concerns economics, rather referring to concrete, practical methods that arise from the study of people. If that's the barometer, then I suppose you'd have to consider modern economics at least a bit backward, since not a great deal of it is concerned with this kind of thing, the closest approximation being the "policy implications" section tacked on to every economics research paper (a frankly baffling phenomenon).

Then again, is a "policy implication" really the equivalent of a "new sales technique"? What Tullock seems to be describing is really one degree more practical than economics ever gets. Again, though, this argument applied to the social sciences seems a bit like the difference between, for example, theoretical physics and engineering (to rely on my layperson's knowledge of both): could we really argue that the natural sciences are generating these practical advances at a greater rate than the social sciences?

[Cadwell:] Furthermore, the second motive for research, curiosity, is in the social sciences “likely to get distracted to essentially non-scientific ends.” This is because in the social sciences:

[The following is directly from Tullock:]. . . there is a strong possibility of artistic distraction. Literature of all kinds is quite frequently based on careful observation of human beings. A large number of brilliant men led by their curiosity to study their fellow men have produced great literature instead of science.

That's a particularly interesting one, and gives me pause for thought because I perceive a fundamental and disappointing lack of curiosity in the study of economics. I think Tullock's point here is badly dated by now, at least for this social science: the economics profession, I am confident in saying, will not tolerate "literature" over science at all, at least not in its peer-reviewed academic journals (book-writing occupies an orbit all its own). A little more light is shed by the Marginal Revolution commentary:

Tullock is responding to Mises and Hayek, who both thought that the social sciences were different because matters of human affairs are more complex and because of the subjective dimension of human choice and expectation.

In that case, Tullock could be considered one of the trailblazers of the positivist revolution that replaced big thought with neutral science. In a sense, the struggle of economics has always been to respond to that complexity and subjectivity by simplifying, abstracting, separating to the lowest common denominator of truth in the system. The 'backwardness' Tullock identified is certainly less evident, methodologically and in output, than it was at the time he was writing.

What economists do: theory versus empirics

2008-03-28T16:18:00.004-04:00

Down to dirty work today, as I make the bold claim to start talking about the guts of the economics profession. What are we up to? The first distinction in economics research methodology is 'theory' versus 'empirics'. Specialization has gotten to us in a big way here, in that theorists and empiricists don't really associate at all.

So what's what? Both methods are trying to attack similar questions - what happens if this changes, how do I achieve this, what is the relationship between these things - but use very different standards of proof. A theoretical 'proof' is to create a simplified model of reality to speculate on how the things might be related, while empiricists dig into big datasets to try to find the real-world relationship, the common problem being that things are pretty complicated. When economists talk about "applied economics", they are using a label for the practice of statistical analysis of data in empirical economics research, so in some sense "applied" is not really an informative word here.

When we actually want to answer questions, say for policy analysis or just because we care, it is obviously smart to draw on diversity and explore the theoretical reasoning behind the relationship you're interested in as well as whatever suggestive real-world evidence exists. Being that this isn't what economic research papers do, this isn't what economists do, though: we all do either one or the other whenever we write a research paper. Every economist is, first and foremost, a theorist or an empiricist (or both, but you see what I mean - they are distinct concepts at all moments).

The problem for empiricists is, in a way, harder than for theorists, because finding meaningful relationships in real data is surprisingly difficult, and assuming something away is a much more technical proposition when you have to kill it in your actual data rather than just in your abstraction. For example, if I see that the airport built a new terminal and that house prices went down, I can certainly argue that one caused the other, but actually proving it is a very different proposition. Econometrics is the branch of economics that tries to develop methods to analyze data where it's difficult to infer causality. Of course, this problem is common to all statistical analysis, not just economics, and it is surely true that really strong evidence is revealed without fancy techniques.

A lot of economists do "applied economics". Now this is going to be mostly just an anecdotal claim, but it's certainly plausible to argue that the things that made economists decide to become economists seldom include a burning desire to trawl through huge datasets and run a bunch of regressions; the questions that can be answered in this way are interesting, sure, but the work itself is not a lot of fun. On top of that, despite the positivist teaching of economics, the proportion of time spent on the empirical methods is very, very small compared to the proportion of economics research that is empirical. Not that this is a bad thing: there isn't a huge amount you can say about empirical methods before you're actually in a position to use them (and again: not that much fun), but it might be presenting a drastically skewed picture of what it means to be an economist.

There's actually a bit of a rift within empirical economics about the role of theory, which is a different matter entirely - I'll try to paraphrase to the best of my ability. That rift concerns the seed of the empirical test being done - should it be explicitly associated with a theoretical model of the relationship you're looking for in the data (that's 'structuralist'), or should the data be allowed to speak for itself and leave models out of it ('reduced form')? Now, the funny thing is that, as we know, it's possible to write down a self-contained and consistent theoretical model that proves any relationship you want; the value of the model depends entirely on how you judge the value of its own little world. Thus, employing theory as some kind of dual proof while doing empirical work is actually redundant; it can offer some clarification of what you think might be driving the relationship you've found in the data, but it's not especially helpful to say "hey, I found this empirical evidence - and look, the model says the same thing!".

Which, again, is different from the idea of puzzling out a theoretical idea then trying to find evidence to see if it's true or not. This kind of thing is actually not incredibly popular, perhaps because of the vastly different worlds theorists and empiricists orbit in - different methods, different seminars, different journals. The paradox is thus that very little empirical economics research actually tests theoretical economic hypotheses. Does each approach lend itself to different questions, never the two to meet, or is it in fact just that we don't like following on each others' coattails?

Back to the big point. Let's say I'm a research economist and I'm thinking of a question like this: "would a national health service be good for the United States?" What I will not end up doing is writing an answer to that question, drawing on the arguments and evidence from a variety of sources. The economist's role in answering such questions depends on which flavor of economist he is. The theorist might end up asking "how would it change the problem for an individual if they were faced with a national health service rather than the current system?" She might create a little model of a person facing choices between spending their money on health care or on other things, who goes on to interact with an insurance company in one instance or the new health service in the other, and figure out how that person's choices might plausibly change.

The empiricist might end up asking something like "how does the size of a deductible affect people's health care spending?", since this might tell us something about the zero-deductible world of national health care, or "how do wait times affect health outcomes?". Note that to answer the original question - should the US switch systems - using any kind of data, or indeed any kind of theoretical model, is staggeringly complicated and difficult.

Neither type of economist actually writes about the answer to the big question in their academic research. Instead, they go to the questions that their method might be able to answer, making just one brushstroke on the painting of the argument, and for theorists and empiricists, those questions are very seldom the same.

Searching for a schism

2008-03-26T15:42:00.004-04:00

Word reaches my desk this afternoon of an interesting-looking new book on the horizon, called "The Foundations of Positive and Normative Economics", an essay collection edited by Andrew Caplin (of the monkey brains) and Andrew Schotter. Details are a bit sketchy, but the idea is just fine with me. I have a high tolerance for this kind of thing, and hopefully it lives up to my expectations.

On that note, I hope for something a bit different to the endorsement quotes on the book's rather empty webpage:

"Are you puzzled by the implications of behavioral economics? Are we in the throes of a paradigm shift? Is neoclassical economics refuted? Economic methodology has never been more disputed. If you want to be part of the debate, this book is the place to start."--Ken Binmore, University College London

I still don't see this distinction between 'behavioral economics' and 'neoclassical economics', to be honest (see here, for example). Why is a different model of people an abandonment of neoclassical economics? 'People maximize stuff' is my minimalist description of neoclassical economics, and the behavioral set is just trying to figure out what the stuff is. Again (again, again), since it's not possible to test rationality, the 'maximize' bit just has to float out there unattached.

I don't really get this one either:

"Should economics take account of neuro-physiological data? Can subjective states of mind play a useful role in economic analysis? These and other provocative questions are examined and debated in this fascinating volume of essays from some of the deepest thinkers in contemporary economics."--Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Institute for Advanced Study

Maybe I'm behind the curve on this one, but I'm not sure what that really means. It gives the impression that this book might be predominantly concerned with the implications of psychological and neurological research, but to me all that is really something different from the epistemological question of what positive and normative economics are doing for us, where they came from and where they're going. The state-of-the-art in economic theory or modeling is one thing, but I hope the book tackles the big questions rather than obsessing about the value of behavioral evidence.

I disagree fundamentally that "economic methodology has never been more disputed", hence the futility of chipping away at the tiny and ultimately boring debates at the root of modern research. The assumptions, the beliefs can surely differ, but I think the approach is set on some fundamental level. Superficial differences in approach do not go down very far: yes, a 'behavioral economist' might be searching for realism by figuring out how people act, and an 'empirical economist' is running regressions on cleverly constructed data, a 'theorist' is off in the land of abstraction and algebra, but all are operating on the same field of positive economic science. The real question is how we got to be that way, not why some economists do one thing and some another. That's the question of the foundations of positive and normative economics.

Euphemism bingo

2008-03-21T18:37:00.005-04:00

Time for round two of economics euphemism bingo! This time I was especially exasperated because the article in question (from BBC News) is about the China-Tibet issue, not about business or stocks or some place where the euphemisms hide something unimportant.

Let's wade right on in:

"Some say that is not practical - that an independent Tibet would not be viable. It might struggle to cope economically."

Wouldn't have enough money? Lack of resources? Lack of infrastructure?

"A "one-country, two-systems model" is one possibility. So far, that model has gone well in Hong Kong - although Hong Kong and Tibet are at very different stages of development."

OK, tell me about the differences, then. What's a 'stage of development'? Why is it important?

"When they revised their plans for Tibet in the aftermath of the late-1980s protests, China's leaders thought a programme of rapid economic development in Tibet would stifle calls for political change."

Economic development how? More money? More resources? More investment?

Tibetans are frustrated despite heavy economic investment.

Delete economic? What is economic investment? What is non-economic investment?

To me, it's just lazy. Just say what you mean. The word "economics" is not a crutch or a bin into which you sweep all the stuff you don't want to talk about. Just stop using it altogether.

Sensible economic policy is not just found in textbooks

2008-03-19T21:28:00.006-04:00

Standard caveat: I remain apolitical here. Hat tip to Economist's View, whose discussion of Andrew Leonard's Salon article on some current trade policy touches on a lot of interesting things.

Apparently there's a "Trade Adjustment Assistance" program on the Senate radar. Now, this could be considered sensible economic policy, whether or not you agree with it.

"The Trade Adjustment Assistance program is designed to compensate manufacturing sector workers who are displaced by trade. It includes financial support for education and training, a health care credit, wage insurance and other goodies."

It's a well-worn argument that long-term benefits from trade with other countries might come with short-term costs for those workers who find employment in industries which produce goods most likely to be imported. Social justice might argue for support for such workers; help the worker, not the industry is not an original maxim. It can be applied equally to "dying" industries. If the typewriter industry is becoming obsolete, do you subsidize the typewriter producers or let them die and use your welfare state to support the people who are affected?

Maybe it's too harsh to say that this is not a textbook argument, but one certainly can't gloss over the negatives of any policy, no matter how positive the positives, and, recall, those pesky Principles of Economics said that Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off.

The Salon article refers to this, from The Atlantic, makes the forceful and obvious point (I will paraphrase) that a proper welfare state doesn't ask why, just helps the needy while they need, and that this trade adjustment business is a band-aid, a facsimile of a real solution for the problems of the consequences of harsh and widespread unemployment in whole communities at a time.

Not to wade into the politics where I don't belong, but I like this:

"Preaching the benefits of free trade without being willing to take care of the "losers" created by trade isn't very bright in an election year when workers are feeling squeezed, and the opposition party controls Congress."

Ignoring the electioneering stuff, the direct analog to an economics class or an economic policy debate would be to actually have a proper debate, an acknowledgment that everything isn't always super-awesome. Similarly, the Economist's View take:

"It seems to me that an administration that truly cared about the working class would be eager to find a way to help those who are hurt from trade, that they would make it a high priority and insist it get done, but there's little indication - through actual action - that helping workers hurt from trade, or from economic conditions more generally, is a priority."

This is perhaps one of the biggest economic policy questions: how big should your welfare state be? Design is one thing, but we have a fundamental philosophical question here, which is bigger than technicalities. Let's brawl that one out, historically, globally, politically, morally, economically.

Except for poor old John McCain, who gets kicked again. Hard. I'm on record: I think he is an economist (for a suitable definition of economist). Not Economist's View.

"I think a lot of people are missing the point about John McCain's lack of knowledge about economics... Anyone who really cared about economic policy and its effect on households would have taken the time to become familiar with the basics. How will he know how best to help workers if he has no idea about the underlying economics? If he asked, there are very prominent economists who would be happy to spend an hour once or twice a week - kind of like a principles course - explaining how the economy operates. But he never bothered, never took the time, because he apparently doesn't care enough to give up the time necessary to actually understand the polices he is voting on. I wouldn't mind the ignorance so much if there was any indication at all that he had tried to over come it, any indication he thought it was important enough to learn about, but there isn't."

We're going to give McCain the Principles of Economics course? I just got chills. Surely not the one we give the poor undergraduates? From me:

"A list of "principles" pregnant with loaded statements is not the right way to present our discipline."

Let's not indoctrinate John McCain too!

Microeconomics in six words

2008-03-17T15:33:00.006-04:00

This is certainly frivolous, but in the spirit of the addictive six word memoir (see here and here), I got to wondering about the six word memoir for the traditional undergraduate Intermediate Microeconomics course. My best effort is:

"Markets work, except when they don't."

Intermediate Microeconomics is a course I have both taken and lectured. It's the gateway drug to economics electives, in a way that the Principles courses I hate so well are not: it is dry and musty with terminology, calculus and diagrams. Relating student to material is the difficult part, as with all of these positivist courses. When I took the course, it was split half and half between the dry stuff and policy debates that applied it, which was perhaps a good idea.

A six word syllabus for Micro?

"People, firms, markets: now with calculus!"

The technical parts of the course are about the foundations of all scientific theoretical economics: how we can model people, how we can model firms, how we can model interactions. It builds, in my opinion, towards the two monumental political economic results in our canon, our intellectual arguments for and against markets as a resource allocation mechanism. They are the first and second theorems of welfare economics. The first one sets out the conditions under which markets will give a Pareto efficient allocation of resources, and the second one sets out the conditions which would make lossless redistribution of resources possible.

First of all, these are tremendously elegant, in the mathematical sense. Second, they are utterly unrealistic. Together, this makes them a fascinating and infuriating jumping-off point for all debate about the appropriate way to allocate resources, in specific situations and in the wider sense. They don't answer the questions. They beg us to ask when we can do better; they beg us to ask what better even means. All philosophical, moral and political debate on economic policy bursts fractal-like from these seeds, the painstaking culmination of the "how", the layering of the interactions of all the actors in the economy.

That's when technicalities can become interesting. It made me want to follow those paths where they led.

Eternal students

2008-03-14T12:24:00.000-04:00

Just in time to miss the question of economics as vocation versus learning for its own sake comes this article from BBC News. "French students shy of the real world", it says, and the message is that France is a mess because French students are intellectually curious. Perhaps I paraphrase slightly.

France may be a global leader in high technology, but employers complain that today there are far too few students studying science and technology and there are far too many studying "soft subjects" which leaves them ill-prepared to join the real world of work.

I asked a passing student what he wanted to do when he left university. "I want to be an eternal student, " he said. "Just learning for learning's sake."

Fair enough, that might not get a great deal done in the scheme of things, but what a great sentiment. We are, after all, talking about a rich country here. Some young people will surely become scientists and engineers, if that's what they want. Some other young people will find that a "soft subject" (?) will be the one that stimulates them to want to know and to learn. The luxury afforded to the people who do not struggle to find food to eat or a place to live is to indulge in pursuits like these. We can afford to foster excellence in knowledge and learning, whatever form it may take.

Or we could start a state-run forced labor program.

"But with such poor economic growth and such huge public debt, this country now needs its clever young students to leave the university campus and start ploughing their skills and enthusiasms into the profitable world of work."

Chills. Why not just set up labor camps and get it over with? Who said anything about "growth" or "profitable"? Didn't the student just tell you he wants to simply learn? Was it not once the case that universities and learning were valued on their own merits? Can the technical and vocational not coexist with the abstract? I know there exist some non-technical careers out there for which the key requirement is "intelligent". As an employer, maybe I need scientists, but maybe I need people who are bright and creative and literate.

As I argued yesterday, there are particular implications for a field like economics which is torn between feeling itself purely vocational and purely not. This French debate then mirrors the tension at the heart of the teaching of economics; can it not be OK to pursue this field because it's interesting?

Then it's bizarre that it feels like many students take economics courses not because they enjoy them or because they are vocational. Perhaps economics just looks good, perhaps even because it's confused with finance or business. Perhaps we, the educators, are complicit in the charade because it brings high enrollments and money. There is no incentive to change the program, even if the core is rotten. It's like an asset bubble - the value of economics as a major, the value of economics to a university, to economics departments, goes up and up and up, but at the bottom there is nothing.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there is something down there. But if it's not intellectual curiosity, a desire to know, then what is it?

Is economics vocational?

2008-03-13T10:50:00.004-04:00

Being that we have not the faintest idea why people choose to take economics courses, this will be a difficult question to answer: is economics vocational? What exactly would an economics education prepare you for?

My stereotypical economics major wants to be an investment banker or something of the sort (again, pure prejudice, since no evidence exists). I argued a while ago that maybe - maybe - the sub-discipline of finance could possibly be considered vocational for those types. Economics courses will be of no practical help, although I suppose the civics that passes for Econ 101 might help with terminology. My advice: go to a school that will let you major in business.

So: what would an economics education prepare you for? To be more explicit: "if I major in economics, what will I be able to do, or be better at, that I couldn't otherwise have done, or done so well?" Some suggestions, and justifications.

Statistician or data analyst. Econometrics is usually a requirement for all economics majors. Since the computing revolution, economists have lovingly embraced statistical analysis as a way to coax the relationships in the real world out of data. Theoretical and practical data preparation and analysis will be practiced in econometrics courses, and any course falling under the foul name of "applied economics".

Policy wonk. Economics can inform argument and debate about policy. This is especially true of economics courses that straddle positivist analysis and normative debate, such as public economics. The purely esoteric economics courses might not be the ideal ones to make this point.

Philosopher. Economics contains a lot of points of philosophical debate. "Welfare economics", which tries to discuss and provide metrics for normative goal-setting, is a particularly rich field for flights of fancy. The realness of economics does not take it out of the philosophical world; it's elusiveness holds it in.

Applied mathematician. I'm very doubtful about this one, but here it is anyway. Economics can't teach you math. Plus, economists are like the chimps jumping up and down to reach the fruit when we could just ask the giraffe - it feels like any mathematical or technical problem we have would be immeasurably simpler for a mathematician or computer scientist to solve than it is for the economist. Nevertheless, it may well be the case that studying economics could make a person better at applying mathematical methods to the tangible.

Academic economist. Our courses are taught with the same positivist motivation demanded in the research conducted by academic economists. The "applied" courses accomplish this for the type of researcher who does data work, and the theoretical courses accomplish it for the type of researcher who does, well, theory work. I'm worried by the lack of diversity in the models and applications we present - it doesn't reflect the range and power of economics - but nevertheless, the method we present is, for better or worse, the same as the method we use.

Historian / person-of-the-world. No idea what I should be calling this, but an economics education should (should) include some history of thought and history of economic policy. One of my favorite college courses was one where we took one simple, flexible model of a country's economy - really simple, just pictures and words - and used it to debate the economic history of the 20th century. Whatever that type of knowledge-for-its-own-sake is called or is useful for, I'm throwing it in this list.

I've kind of exhausted my ideas. Now, at least here in American colleges - or maybe just this American college, though I suspect not - "academic economist" gets far, far, far, far too much play. Far more than anything else on my list or anything else that could be on the list. I would be utterly astonished if the non-existent evidence on why people take economics courses showed that they all wanted to do write academic articles in economics. Astonished and miserable. Yet, here we are, in a situation where economics courses are most commonly run without philosophy, history, politics, debate.

Academics do economic science in a vacuum without these things. It has to be that way, because we want to isolate facts as well as we can isolate them. That doesn't mean that we should be teaching economics that way. It could be so rich. Yes, the science can be interesting, but so can the history of the world, the intellectual foundations of the discipline, the policy debate built on the evidence. I'd hate to think we're robbing our students of these things.

Perhaps the answer, then, is that economics is not fundamentally vocational. Aside from my pet issue of economics-abused-as-civics, we have a problem with economics teaching if it is trying to pretend to prepare people for something specific. It can surely help a person develop skills, but at least as important, and probably more interesting for the average student, is teaching economics as an intellectual pursuit for its own sake. We know what would make our courses more interesting (not the same thing as pandering, I hasten to add), more intellectually exciting, yet we pull back. Is it because we believe we're training all our students to be academics?

Confession

2008-03-11T12:50:00.000-04:00

From the department of weird: "Fewer confessions and new sins", from BBC News. Apparently the Catholic Church has made up some new sins.

"The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell". The new mortal sins were listed by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti at the end of a week-long training seminar in Rome for priests."

So here they are:

"Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature"

I'm trying not to blaspheme here, but what a minefield. Let's try to ignore from the start the problem that all the things that they're trying to avoid here are covered by the good ol' seven deadlies. Right off the bat, "morally debatable experiments" is semantically identical to "experiments", so science is a sin. At least "genetic manipulation" fits with the ethos of the Church. I have no idea how one "inflicts poverty". Define "drug". Define "rights". Define "excessive". Ugh.

Anyway, the economics-related point here is that this made me think of the "value of income" stuff from yesterday. Is it OK to "accumulate excess wealth" if you use it to alleviate poverty, or are we to be banned from accumulating wealth altogether? Is the Church guilty of ignoring the righteous consequences of an expansion in the amount of stuff to go around? If we can't do productive stuff, will that "inflict poverty"? I feel like this in an implicit damnation of capitalism, but the moral judgment of capitalism - just like the moral judgment of socialism, anarchism or indeed anything - is not that easy.

I actually think it makes it worse that this comes from an obviously traditional institution. It's great that there are forces out there trying to promote social awareness and conscience, but that list is ridiculous. Give me pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth, and stop trying to be trendy.

Money. Again.

2008-03-10T10:44:00.004-04:00

Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before. No preamble:

"But there is a much bigger problem, one that challenges the very foundation of the presumed link between per-capita G.D.P. and economic welfare. That’s the assumption, traditional in economic models, that absolute income levels are the primary determinant of individual well-being."

It's déjà vu all over again, as they say. I've challenged this before (see here for GDP, here for money and here to hammer the point home), and of course money-centrism remains misconception number one about the practice of economics, especially the type of welfare economics the article is talking about. Again, I can only reiterate that agnosticism over people's likes and dislikes is a tenet of the practice of economics, and assumption and approximation only serve to make our questions answerable.

Getting off that familiar track, this instance is actually especially fun because it comes from a New York Times article which begins:

"DOES money buy happiness? This week, Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, will join a long line of people who have taken serious stabs at trying to answer that thorny question. He will hold a hearing exploring whether traditional economic measures like per-capita income accurately capture people’s sense of well-being."

Strange how Senators spend their time, really. Surreality aside, Robert Frank, the author of the article, does cite some neat hypotheses on the money issue, so I'll try to forget the economics equals money lament for a second. The object of investigation is how income inequality affects general wellbeing.

"[surveys find] that when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income."

That's probably bad news for the Senator. I propose Dorgan's Razor: to make everyone happy, make each person richer than everyone else. Oh dear. Is that a depressing impossibility result? If everyone had the same income, would we all be miserable because we were all no better off than anyone else? Seems a little extreme. Perhaps that points to the weirdness of the money metric generally.

It's not all bad news, though:

"Yet in many other categories, greater levels of absolute income clearly promote well-being, even in the richest societies. The economist Benjamin Friedman has found that higher rates of G.D.P. growth are associated with increased levels of social tolerance and public support for the economically disadvantaged. Richer countries also typically have cleaner environments and healthier populations than their poorer counterparts."

I see this as broadly similar to the importance of economic growth for the poor; whatever the value of GDP or income as a measure of individual wellbeing, it's surely the case that societies with more resources can simply afford more, in the truest sense. Those societies can afford more social spending, more sacrifice of stuff for environment, more health; the equivalent of poor countries being able to afford more when less people have to break their backs in subsistence farming.

It's also related to things like the pension "crisis" in aging countries like America, Japan and Britain. The more stuff there is to go round, the less acute the problem of providing "enough" for both the workers and the retired becomes, regardless of how many of each type there are. Further still, it's related to philanthropy, which this article contorts itself to provide an evolutionary explanation for. Philanthropy on the Gates Foundation scale cannot exist without affluence.

Senator Dorgan should be applauded for asking the question of what the goal of GDP growth really means for the wellbeing of the population. A richer set of goals could well be a good thing; perhaps we would be willing to sacrifice some income for greater equality, a healthier environment or the alleviation of global poverty. It's important, though, to ask about the value of affluence not just for the individual but on a large scale too.

Economists in fiction: Noboru Wataya

2008-03-08T17:08:00.005-05:00

Not to get too "Dear Diary", but I am reading "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami, and, lo, the protagonist's brother-in-law is an economist.

On academia:

"Noboru Wataya chose to remain in academe and become a scholar. He was no fool. He know what he was best suited for: not the real world of group action but a world that called for the disciplined and systematic use of knowledge, that prized the individual skills of the intellect."

Noboru's book, a perfect parody of economics books everywhere:

"Noboru Wataya published a big, thick book. It was an economics study full of technical jargon, and I couldn't understand a thing he was trying to say in it... I couldn't even tell whether this was because the contents were so difficult or the writing itself was bad... Two expressions he had coined, "sexual economics" and "excretory economics," became the year's buzzwords."

Freakonomics, anyone? Fashionomics? Freedomnomics? The most delicious morsel of the lot is Noboru's approach to public debate, what could be the credo and the damnation of positivist economics:

"But if you paid close attention to what he was saying or what he had written, you knew that his words lacked consistency. They reflected no single worldview based on profound conviction. His was a world that he had fabricated by combining several one-dimensional systems of thought. He could rearrange the combination in an instant, as needed. These were ingenious - even artistic - intellectual permutations and combinations. But to me they amounted to nothing more than a game. If there was any consistency to his opinions, it was the consistent lack of consistency, and if he had a worldview, it was a view that proclaimed his lack of a worldview. But these very absences were what constituted his intellectual assets. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of them."

Welcome to our world.

Noble goals

2008-03-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

Talking about growth and development yesterday made me think of the twin institutions that bear the brunt of a decent portion of the anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-America, anti-"economics" anger in the world. Those would be the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (perhaps we could throw the World Trade Organization in too). Remember the Seattle riots around the WTO meeting in 1999? How I sympathize with those who would criticize these institutions, who would debate their goals and their practices. Yet here I go, so help me, to try to raise the defense.

Forget for a moment, if possible, any prejudice for or against these institutions. These were not organizations born of evil purpose. Let's read along with the part of the Bretton Woods agreement that set up what is commonly known as the World Bank:

"The purposes of the Bank are:

(i) To assist in the reconstruction and development of territories of members by facilitating the investment of capital for productive purposes, including the restoration of economies destroyed or disrupted by war, the reconversion of productive facilities to peacetime needs and the encouragement of the development of productive facilities and resources in less developed countries.

(ii) To promote private foreign investment by means of guarantees or participations in loans and other investments made by private investors; and when private capital is not available on reasonable terms, to supplement private investment by providing, on suitable conditions, finance for productive purposes out of its own capital, funds raised by it and its other resources.

(iii) To promote the long-range balanced growth of international trade and the maintenance of equilibrium in balances of payments by encouraging international investment for the development of the productive resources of members, thereby assisting in raising productivity, the standard of living and conditions of labor in their territories.

(iv) To arrange the loans made or guaranteed by it in relation to international loans through other channels so that the more useful and urgent projects, large and small alike, will be dealt with first.

(v) To conduct its operations with due regard to the effect of international investment on business conditions in the territories of members and, in the immediate post-war years, to assist in bringing about a smooth transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy."

This reflects both the origins of the Bank as an institution of post-war reconstruction. The World Bank was set up to help nations and people who were in need. Don't these goals seem kind of noble, or important?

The IMF equivalent:

"The purposes of the International Monetary Fund are:

(i) To promote international monetary cooperation through a permanent institution which provides the machinery for consultation and collaboration on international monetary problems.

(ii) To facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy.

(iii) To promote exchange stability, to maintain orderly exchange arrangements among members, and to avoid competitive exchange depreciation.

(iv) To assist in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments in respect of current transactions between members and in the elimination of foreign exchange restrictions which hamper the growth of world trade.

(v) To give confidence to members by making the Fund's resources available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.

(vi) In accordance with the above, to shorten the duration and lessen the degree of disequilibrium. in the international balances of payments of members."

It's a triumph of global cooperation that institutions like these exist, with the aims - broadly expressed - of achieving stability, development and prosperity. It's amazing. Like I said, part of me hates playing devil's advocate for institutions that are routinely characterized as evil tools of evil people in evil countries, but, if you don't like these institutions, at least tell me you don't reject the idea of these institutions.

Yes, we know that these institutions have dropped the ball - to put it mildly - in the past, and that is not an economists versus the world thing, it's just a fact. Yes, it's incredibly, astonishingly misguided to put headquarters of these institutions in the capital of America, and all the more unfortunate given the strong feelings that alone arouses. Yes, the balance of power in the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, hell, the UN too, is probably a mess.

But here's the rub: I want international cooperation that tries to tame the beast of the global economy, of the complex and difficult problems that arise when everyone in the world interacts while trying to make the best out of what they have. I want to worry about figuring out how to help countries and people who want help, and then giving it. I want to acknowledge that we're all in this together and that our decisions matter for each other.

We - everyone - are the people who can embrace the ideals that gave us unprecedented international cooperation in the aftermath of a bloody and destructive war, and develop those noble ideals into institutions that work, practically, for everyone. I can only quote the first principle of the World Trade Organization: "The first step is to talk". If you believe the institutions are sick, let's cure them rather than let them die.

Life is good: economic growth, war, and $1

2008-03-04T11:27:00.005-05:00

The unfriendly face of economics is the bland incantation "economic growth", which, following the "show, don't tell" principle, means "more stuff". Sounds a bit unpalatable, does it not?

We're in measurement-problem-land again, unfortunately. I think a careful normative economist would define "economic growth" as either an increase in the resources (of whatever type) at people's disposal, or some development that helped people get the things they liked (whatever they are). Unfortunately, again, we get stuck a little on what we can measure, using the amount of measurable stuff like income, goods or services to proxy what we'd really like to achieve.

On top of and related to that, there's the diverse backlash against "materialistic" economic growth. My own belief - for what it's worth - is that it's a bit weird that economic growth ascended to such dominance as a policy goal. Being anti-growth is something different entirely, though; by any definition, the role of growth is radically different for the world around me than for the poor.

This recent Economist article argues forcefully that the world is headed in a historically pleasant direction. It's too rich in detail to do justice to here, but among other things it offers a version of the most compelling defense of economic growth: some people are really, really struggling. It stretches empathy to its absolute limit to try to imagine the most crushing poverty in the world, and if that sounds like a cliché, tough.

"In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history."

I remember vividly the slow, horrifying process of understanding what $1 a day means. No jargon: it means that the amount of stuff - any stuff - that a person living on $1 a day can afford is equivalent to the amount of stuff I could afford to buy if I had one US dollar in my pocket every morning, and nothing more. It's not about exchange rates or the price of stuff or anything like that: it's real That's very close to being literally unthinkable.

Yes, the figures quoted in the Economist article are averages, and yes, measurement is a problem. But still:

"A World Bank study of 19 poor countries concluded that every 1% increase in national income per head translates into a 1.3 point fall in extreme poverty... The result [of economic growth] is that the number of very poor people in the world is falling fast—even though many critics continue to believe that the poor have not really benefited from growth. In 1990 those on $1 a day accounted for more than a quarter of the population of developing countries. By 2015, on current rates, the proportion of very poor people should have shrunk to 10%. Moreover, these monetary measures probably understate the real gains from things such as lower child mortality, safer water, literacy and other social achievements. A rich man appreciates his extra cash but this does not compare with what a poor family gains from seeing an infant survive childhood or learn to write."

If you tell me you oppose "economic growth", you'd better be damn specific. I doubt anyone opposes this. This is the variety of difficult that led Robert Lucas to famously declare that "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else." Here's a nice quotation about that quotation:

"The Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas once said "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else." Non-economists, especially those associated with the environmental movement, regard this as evidence that economics is a form of brain damage, a cancer on our earth. But rural Chinese peasants surviving on less than a dollar per day do not regard economic growth, or Wal-Mart factory jobs, as a cancer."

There are a lot of "development economists" out there these days, and it's easy to be facetious and question the real value in what they do, but goodness, they're dealing with issues whose importance is overwhelmingly difficult to comprehend. I hope they find success.

Not, of course, that economic growth is ever all that matters. The Economist article concludes with the argument that the incidence of war is declining, representing another huge boost to the wellbeing of people around the world. The picture presented there is slightly less rosy than on poverty, but still unusually optimistic. I like the big-big picture view of global trends; putting the modern era in the broadest historical context is a great way to make our problems seem petty and life seem good.

The war talk reminded me of the excellent book "The Bottom Billion" by development economist (the label is mine) Paul Collier, which is a kind of synthesis of much of his, and related, research into the causes of extreme poverty. From the FT review of the book:

"About 80 per cent of the population of developing countries lives in countries whose populations are becoming better off. Billions live in countries that are developing very swiftly. But almost a billion people – 70 per cent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa – are in economically stagnant or declining countries. In all, 58 countries are in this desperate condition. Yet, as Collier remarks: “An impoverished ghetto of 1bn people will be increasingly impossible for a comfortable world to tolerate.”

Collier argues that these countries have fallen into one, or more, of four traps from which it is virtually impossible to escape. These are the “conflict trap”, the “natural resources trap”, the trap of being “landlocked with bad neighbours” and the trap of “bad governance in a small country”."

Among other things, Collier investigates the link between conflict and poverty. His book is, to me, a triumph of realistic but fundamentally optimistic policy debate founded on careful, broad scientific research. The world is moving in the right direction, argues the Economist, and Collier and his kind are desperately throwing the line to the most impoverished, the most vulnerable. Think of this next time you read the words "economic growth". Whatever it is, it need not be the ultimate goal of human endeavor, but is it an evil?

Experiments

2008-03-03T12:37:00.006-05:00

Found at Environmental Economics: a new book called "Environmental Economics, Experimental Methods" has just surfaced, a happy example of (at very least) broadly innovative methods in economics (the experimental part) being wedded to policy questions outside the popularly perceived scope of economics. The book describes a variety of laboratory experiments whose results are relevant to environmental policy. The contents are here (pdf).

The experimental revolution must really have arrived for a book like this to exist. The whole problem of inferring causality in the complexity of the world is an acute problem that science has always tried to solve, one that the social sciences naturally have particular difficulty with. In economics, from this common difficulty came abstract theorizing, econometric inference from real data, and, latterly, randomized trials (aspiring to be cousin to the same in medicine) and laboratory experiments (aspiring to be cousin to the same in psychology).

A simple characterization of the difference between those last two might be this: the randomized trial method tries to isolate the effect of one thing on another, while the experimental school is entwined with the behavioral economists who seek to isolate the way people act. Clearly this steps on some psychological toes; our method is certainly pretty similar, with the possible exception that we're . We usually get people to sit at consumers and make decisions about what to do while they're interacting (usually anonymously) with other people in the experiment.

I think it's pretty amazing that experimental economics has exploded so quickly to generate a whole (big) book applying its results to a niche like environmental economics. Whatever you make of the experimental field, it's surely a pleasure to see an expansion in the range of scientific methods economists are employing. Logic, math, statistics; now trials and experiments.

On a completely unrelated note, I love this post, from Environmental Economics, about explaining your job as an economist.

"'Oh really, what do you teach?'...
'Economics.' The glazed look...
'Oh so you're in the business school?'"

I bet misunderstanding about what economics is can be even more annoying for an environmental economist than it is for the rest of us...

Why don't we understand economics education?

2008-03-02T11:10:00.004-05:00

Increasingly preoccupying my thoughts recently is the remarkable fact that the economics profession doesn't really know anything about how undergraduate courses are received by the students who take them.

Unquestionably, the most common type of research into undergraduate education is the type like this, this, or this (sorry to link to protected academic articles): teaching methods. The semi-famous series by William Becker and Michael Watts derides "chalk and talk" in favor of more creative methods of lecturing. In "Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk", those authors conclude:

"In contrast to the passive learning environment that characterizes the teaching of economics, class discussion and other forms of active learning, rather than extensive lecturing, are now the dominant forms of instruction in other fields of higher education."

I agree in principle that it's no fun to try to learn - really learn - any subject by sitting in a lecture, but goodness me, "active learning"? How about "devote some time to reading a variety of books and material on the subject you're learning"? How about "sit down with colleagues or experts and talk and listen"? In my life, those have been the most effective ways of getting information and understanding into my head. Am I alone? To me, that's active learning, and it doesn't require fancy technology or a three ring circus, just a good library and good educators with time to devote to small groups of students. Lectures, especially to large classes, must naturally be presented without a lot of nuance.

The cult of the classroom experiment, or demonstration, or performance art, or audience participation, is not, however, the real issue. By far the bigger problem is that we have no idea - repeat, no idea - what students want, expect or get from economics courses. Why do they enroll? Why don't they enroll? Why do they drop out? Why do they major in economics? What do they think economics is about, before, during, after they take economics course? What if they never do? Who do we lose?

Why don't we have the first idea about the answers to those questions? Have we ever asked? The mind boggles. We're try to patch up the wreckage of the lecture system, when all the while we might be sailing to entirely the wrong place in our leaky boat. Forget the method for a moment - what are we even actually teaching?

In a separate article to the one I quoted up above, William Becker's "Teaching Economics in the 21st Century" says:

"Media headlines scream the need to understand macroeconomics. At a minimum, courses in macroeconomics should enable students to have a greater understanding of the economic news as it appears in the Economist, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal than those without an education in economics."

I've covered this ground before. How about, at a minimum, we teach economics properly? How about, at a minimum, we kick civics into a course where it belongs and actually show students what economics can be, and what it is? Compromising the integrity of an entire field of hundreds of years of intellectual thought with political, philosophical and moral implications so that people can understand the Wall Street Journal? Who wants to understand the Wall Street Journal?! From the same article:

"Departments of economics have two powerful reasons to care about improving the quality of their teaching. First, the contest for resources within institutions of higher education implies that the number of majors and enrollments matter.... Whether students will take more courses in economics or choose to major in the field because of improved teaching is hard to say, but, at least, improved teaching is unlikely to hurt enrollments!"

Hilarious, I'm sure. I'm kidding: it's sickening. Can we entertain the notion that perhaps higher enrollments are not compatible with improved teaching? We are supposed to be running an institute of excellence in learning and thought. Whoring for enrollment is disgusting.

Simplify, simplify

2008-02-28T11:47:00.001-05:00

I might just go ahead and quote myself:

"One of the principles of writing economic theory is to create a simplified abstraction of reality."

This is from an article by Russell Jacoby in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"The world is complicated, but how did "complication" turn from an undeniable reality to a desirable goal? Shouldn't scholarship seek to clarify, illuminate, or — egad! — simplify, not complicate? How did the act of complicating become a virtue?"

This is quite clearly not an article about economics (phew). It goes to show how very, very different we've become from the other social sciences and arts. Yesterday I was talking about the development lab at MIT; would they say, "Ah, there's a million and one things that affect the quality of education. I'm going for a drink."? Of course not. Economics seeks to expose in the simplest possible terms the relationships around us. Indeed, the world is complicated; that's why the MIT lab has to perform randomized trials to isolate the effects of programs. It's why theorists create little models of the world.

Contrast this with this characterization from Jacoby:

"The refashioning of "complicate" derives from many sources.... [acaemics] will prize efforts not only to complicate but also to "problematize," "contextualize," "relativize," "particularize," and "complexify.""

In economics we want to know: what you're saying, why you're right, and what could make you wrong. That's about it. One of the most valuable consequences of treating economics as a science is that we parachuted out of this borderline nonsense:

"They will denounce anything that appears "binary." They will see "multiplicities" everywhere. They will add "s" to everything: trope, regime, truth. They will sprinkle their conversations with words like "pluralistic," "heterogenous," "elastic," and "hybridities." A call for "coherence" will arrest the discussion. Isn't that "reductionist"?"

This explains a big part of the schism between positive economics and other social sciences; we are OK with leaving some things out if it helps. When it comes to the policy debate and the normative questions, we have to throw all the other stuff back in, but "it depends" is a conclusion acceptable in positive economic research only if you can tell me exactly how and why it depends.

Jacoby has the neat sign-off:

"The cult of complication has led — to alter a phrase of Hegel's — to a fog in which all cows are gray."

In economics, our judgment cows are gray, but our scientific cows are black and white.

Relevance

2008-02-27T11:47:00.000-05:00

Making Economics Relevant Again, from David Leonhardt in the New York Times, has been recommended to me by more than one tipster. First of all, the most astonishing thing in the article, to me, is this table that includes an account of the number of economics degrees given every year since 1949: I thought majoring in economics had been on a steady upswing for decades, but apparently a lot fewer people were studying economics in the 90s. The number is just back up to where it was in 1990.

Anyway, the article kicks off:

"It was only a decade ago that economics seemed to be an old and tired discipline. The field no longer had intellectual giants like John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman who were shaping public policy by the sheer force of their ideas. Instead, it was devolving into a technical discipline that was even less comprehensible than it was relevant."

Possible revisionism here, but it's certainly a tempting argument. It might reflect the sleepy state of economic policy rather than the discipline as a whole, but I take the point. We're pointed to an old New Yorker article from 1996 which drives the point home in spectacular fashion; forgive the long quotation:

"A few weeks ago, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to William Vickrey, an 82-year-old professor at Columbia, and James Mirrlees, a 60-year-old professor at Cambridge.... the newspapers had some difficulty explaining the prize-winning work, which the Nobel committee referred to as "the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information." ..But when reporters tracked down Vickrey, an amiable bear of a man, he refused to play along: instead of expanding on the obscure mathematical theory that gained him world attention, he insisted on talking about his practical ideas for reforming the subways, the electoral system, the budget deficit, and much else besides. A "Times" reporter tried to pin him down, but Vickrey quickly dismissed his prize-winning 1961 paper as "one of my digressions into abstract economics." And he went on to say, "At best, it's of minor significance in terms of human welfare.""

What a priceless story. However, it might not just be the abstract math that marginalizes economics: Leonhardt goes on to argue that some economists are disgruntled at what they see as the cause of the "recovery" he perceives in economics. I can't really argue with this:

"the new research often consists of cute findings — which inevitably get covered in the press — about trivial subjects, like game shows, violent movies or sports gambling."

It's like the Christmas stuff I talked about before. It isn't a true reflection of economics research and it makes economics look ridiculous. To try and figure out what really mattered, Leonhardt decided to survey economists to find out who they thought "was using economics to make the world a better place". It's a question begging to reject Vickrey's digressions into abstract economics. Presumably, to be an economist who actually does some good for the world, your research must be good science and very, very close to a solid and appealing economic policy. And lo:

"there was still a runaway winner.... the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee."

I won't try to put this any better than the original article:

"They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics.... The basic idea behind the lab is to rely on randomized trials — similar to the ones used in medical research — to study antipoverty programs. This helps avoid the classic problem with the evaluation of aid programs: it’s often impossible to separate cause and effect."

Let's figure out what's going on here. The research uses randomized trials to disentangle causality, the ubiquitous problem for figuring out relationships from real-world data; because the method is strong, they can rely less on normative judgment when they make the jump from the science to the policy, thus cutting ideology out. Just like the Obama team I was talking about yesterday, the gap between science and policy is vanishingly small here, but clearly it's crucial for the success of the whole venture that the science be pure as snow. The science can't tell you you're right or wrong to hold the belief that children should be educated - that's all on your head - but it can perform the true role of positive economics and help you figure out exactly how to improve the quality of education if that's what you want.

The reason why these development economists are perceived as the most "relevant" is twofold: they have easy to understand, convincing science and they explicitly embrace the normative implications of their science. Their science is as sophisticated as it gets, but they certainly don't need esoteric math. On that note, the last word goes to that New Yorker article:

"One way to encourage economists to become more worldly might be to abolish the Nobel Prize for economics, which since its introduction, in 1969, has helped foster a professional culture that values technical wizardry above all else. Deprived of the publicity surrounding the annual Stockholm ceremony, economists would actually have to do something useful to get noticed."

EDIT: Actually I'm not sure that should be the last word. By the merits of, for example, the work Duflo, Banerjee and co. are doing, they would absolutely qualify for a Nobel memorial prize in economic science. The prize does seem to have become at least as much an applied math prize as a "good economic science" prize, which I guess is the problem the New Yorker article is highlighting. The problem isn't the prize, but the criterion for winning, perhaps.

Turning economics research into policy

2008-02-26T10:54:00.004-05:00

Hat tip to the inimitable GoodLiberal for pointing me in the direction of an excellent article I would certainly have missed otherwise. It's by Noam Scheiber and it's about Barack Obama's advisers; in particular some of the economic policy advice he's been getting. You can find it here, but get it while it's hot because it might move behind the subscriber's wall at the New Republic. To be clear, the economic policy parts are most interesting to me, but there's more to it than that.

It's interesting both how Scheiber characterizes the type of economic theory that's apparently fueling some Obama policy, and how the path from one to the other winds. There are so many fun lines I might just go ahead and start quoting. On the distinction between academics and nonacademics:

"In economics, it's the academics who are first-rate engineers and the nonacademics who are either dreamers or technicians."

Very well put, though I fear a little harsh on dreamers. Research and teaching in academia are indeed geared towards the sterile positivism; the engineering analogy is well drawn. I do wish we had a bit more dreaming in the dreamy spires of academia though.

The article starts out by describing "behavioral economics", that field that's trying to figure out how people act and how to build it into economics.

"Behaviorists like Thaler believed that the perfectly rational, utterly selfinterested maximizers of economists' imaginations had little in common with actual human beings, who frequently err when making simple calculations, who have trouble with self-control, who often act out of altruism or spite. But what's really interesting is how Thaler and his fellow behaviorists responded to this fairly critical insight. Though rational self-interest was the central tenet of neoclassical (i.e., modern) economics, they didn't take a wrecking ball to the field and replace it with some equally sweeping theory of human behavior."

Behavioral economics is possibly the least revolutionary revolution ever to hit an academic discipline, because, as Scheiber is alluding to, the behavioral school is absolutely not changing or abandoning the methodology of economics. As I've noted before, the "perfectly rational" economic man can happily do whatever the behavioralists want him to do to be more "realistic"; it's therefore not necessary to come up with a whole new way of modeling people.

Instead the behavioral school is writing down models of "perfectly rational, utterly selfinterested maximizers" who act in accordance with the behavioral evidence. That is, writing rationalization of the "irrationality" we observe. Contrast this with the traditional criticism of economic man, which is to throw up ones hands and loudly reject the whole idea of trying to predict what people will do. I prefer the behavioral way.

Anyway, what's coming from having this type of economist on the Obama team?

"For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias."

Does it take an economist to suggest this? Of course it does not; the article argues, however, that the "engineers" in academia are the ones who can tell you if the opt-out policy will increase saving or not. That's a nice example of the value of positivist economic science: it gives you the evidence that switching from opt-in to opt-out might increase retirement saving, which is handed off to the policymaker, who says "I want to increase retirement saving", and proposes opt-out. Presto. Did any part of the economic science at the bottom of the pyramid require esoteric math or have an ideological bias? Doubtful.

Here's an even better one:

"Obama wonks tend to be inductive--working piecemeal from a series of real-world observations. One typical [economic adviser Austan] Goolsbee brainchild is something called an automatic tax return. The idea is that, if you had no tax deductions or freelance income the previous year, the IRS would send you a tax return that was already filled out. As long as you accepted the government's accounting, you could just sign it and mail it back. Goolsbee estimates this small innovation could save hundreds of millions of man-hours spent filling out tax forms, and billions of dollars in tax-preparation fees."

How simple, how wonderfully useful that would be. How fickle am I that I would vote purely on the basis of an easier tax return?

"The Clintonites were moderates, but they were also ideological.... The Obamanauts are decidedly non-ideological. They occasionally reach out to progressive think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute, but they also come from a world-- academic economics--whose inhabitants generally lean right."

Oh really? Aside from the repetition of this common error about economists' politics, this implies that the positivist approach to academic economics is bleeding into economic policymaking, drastically shrinking the gap between the science and the normative judgment informed by the science. The crucial distinction remains - for example, I could argue that it's wrong to make people opt-out of a retirement scheme rather than opt-in, a violation of their right to be left alone, and I couldn't be wrong, despite what the science said would happen - but the information on which the policy is based is very close to the policy itself.

The Cold War revisited; elections and policy

2008-02-25T11:34:00.005-05:00

Here's a third-hand recommendation, with a hat tip to Economist's View: an interesting Paul Krugman article on why capitalism "won" the Cold War. The thesis is this:

"Communism failed because of an inability to provide a sustaining reason for existance; only under crisis could it work.... [it] failed as an economic system because people stopped believing in it, not the other way around."

The hybrid system of regulated capitalism alongside a centrally planned public sector dominates the modern world. As far as I can tell, a purely capitalist economy is equally difficult to find in history as a purely communist society; perhaps the hybrid reflects some natural impossibility of living at either extreme. The argument that some resources are best allocated, or some goals best achieved, by one mechanism and some by the other is a strong argument - though of course not one immune to counterpoint.

There isn't a lot of big economic policy debate these days. The dominance of the hybrid system naturally pushes policy debate into a very small subset of all the possible economic policies. That's not necessarily a criticism; you could, for example, blame either status quo lethargy or status quo satisfaction for containing the debate.

That makes the Krugman article a bedfellow of a recent mini-debate about whether elections matter for economic policy. Economist's View also covered that one here; it seems to have kicked off with a Tyler Cowen article in the New York Times with the perfectly descriptive title "It’s an Election, Not a Revolution".

Cowen says:

"This election is certainly important. But based on the historical record, it isn’t likely to result in a major swing in economic policy. Fundamentally, democracy is not a finely tuned mechanism that can be used to direct economic policy as a lever might lift a pulley. The connection between what voters want, or think they want, and what ultimately happens in the economy, is far less direct.... Shifts in economic policy are usually quite moderate."

The Economist's View cites a counterpoint from Kevin Grier:

"I see real differences. I don't see McCain lifting the cap on FICA earnings. I don't see McCain going for publicly created "green jobs". I do see both of them "fixing" the AMT. I don't see McCain as so anti-trade as Obama."

I'm sorry, but I think I just went in to an apathy coma. Not to be too obnoxious, but if that's the best we can come up with, I'm taking Cowen's side all day long: the big questions are not asked. It could be a product of the political system, of apathy, of satisfaction, of something else entirely. Reflexive defense against attacks on the significance of democracy have grounds far larger than just economic policy, but it's difficult to deny that, for better or worse, we won't see any seismic shifts any time soon.

Economists' political preference

2008-02-23T17:17:00.005-05:00

While we're sitting in the old ivory tower, some economists are out there in the real world. They're very different from the academics, in their work and their demographics. The Wall Street Journal runs periodic surveys of private-sector economic forecasters; here's a bit from January:

"On the political front, most of the respondents expect a Democrat to be elected president this year, although they personally prefer a Republican."

Contrast this with the academic economists; here's the summary from a 2003 survey of members of the American Economic Association, one of the big "trade groups" of academic economists:

"The responses show that most economists are supporters of safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. They are evenly mixed on personal choice issues, military action, and the minimum wage. Most economists oppose tighter immigration controls, government ownership of enterprise and tariffs. In voting, the Democratic:Republican ratio is 2.5:1."

The academics seem like "social liberals", but I'd bet both the academics and the private-sector economists are "fiscal conservatives" (with apologies for possibly bastardizing the political terminology). Perhaps it relates to the liberal-friendly character of academia, the subject of the study I cited here. Here's another result from the survey of the forecasters:

"Some 56% of the economists disapproved of President Bush's stewardship of the economy, while 44% approved. That is especially startling considering 59% of the economists said the stock market performs better under Republican presidents, compared with 28% who said it favored Democrats."

The Republican preference of the private-sector economists does seem to be grounded in their beliefs about the effect of the political climate on the financial sector. Academic economists, by and large, don't care a lot about what's happening in the financial sector (or, indeed, about anything that might be identified as "economics" by a layperson). The first-guess potted conclusion is probably that the non-academics care about the financial ship - which is indeed their livelihood - enough that they want a Republican to steward it, while the academics care more about politics that isn't economic policy, where they prefer Democrats.

Does positivism indocrinate?

2008-02-22T12:09:00.003-05:00

Somewhere in the history of the practice of economics we went positivist. Research and teaching of the subject both became technical and methodological, preoccupied with the "if this, then what?" questions of economic science, and rejected policy debate as unscientific. A semi-famous quotation from Keynes:

"The Theory of Economics ... is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions."

Weirdly, this sterilization has in fact had the paradoxical effect of reducing the scope of economics that's presented to students and researched by economists. Ronald Coase puts it like this:

"Mainstream economics, as one sees it in the journals and the textbooks and in the courses taught in economics departments has become more and more abstract over time, and although it purports otherwise, it is in fact little concerned with what happens in the real world.... economists since Adam Smith have devoted themselves to formalizing his doctrine of the invisible hand, the coordination of the economic system by the pricing system."

I'm not arguing for anarchy in the profession. It just seems strange that we sterilized the science, freed it from value judgments and the real-world status quo, then presented it using nothing but the status quo to illustrate our tools. We worked so hard to show that our method gives you all the levers and buttons you could ever want, then obsessed over one or two of them.

Did the positivist revolution lead to a sterilization of normative economics as well as positive economics? Keynes' "correct conclusions" are positivist conclusions; there cannot be "correct conclusions" to the actual, real-world questions that the science of economics is supposed to inform.

There's a crucial difference between carving normative judgment from economic science and ignoring normative judgment altogether. It's particularly difficult to illustrate in classes the difference between the two sides of our coin when we never hold normative debate. Does that make the positivist content of our classes seem like ideological indoctrination?

If we either presented a full diversity of positive models when we taught our methods, or engaged in actual normative policy debate to illustrate the application of our methods to real, difficult problems, we can preserve the positivist revolution and show the next generation of economists that Keynes was right. Economics can be a method for everyone, not a doctrine of the status quo. Economics can be scientific, but teaching economics like a natural science would certainly not be my first choice.

Visiting the real world

2008-02-20T12:27:00.003-05:00

Economists don't spend a great deal of time in the real world. We're especially bad at having arguments, which is strange, considering that we have an infinitely flexible method and a bunch of unanswerable normative questions.

Unfortunately we're all adrift on the ocean of economic science. The work that researchers do generates the kind of tedious methodological debates that help seminar audiences catch up on their sleep, but it doesn't generate actual ideological debate: perhaps that's the biggest possible endorsement of positivism in economics, but we didn't need to lose it.

I always liked the Oxford Review of Economic Policy; it's one of the few examples of a true economic policy journal, which means that while it's still a bit dry, it's non-technical and, more to the point, actually talks about real stuff. For example, this issue from last year is a survey of what's going on with pensions - not exactly riveting, but if you're into that kind of thing, an invaluable look at how economic science can inform ideological debate on pension reform. This one does much the same for growth and development in India.

The saddest misconception about positivism in economics is that we must sweep out all normative debate in order to be "scientific". Yes, we have to avoid ideological prejudice when we research what's actually going on, but doesn't it seem like we're building a fancy machine and never turning it on? Our "scientific" results don't change the fact that our economic models don't provide any "answers" to the great normative questions of what we should be doing.

It all must be especially boring for the poor undergraduates who are the cannon fodder of scientific economics. They get the distilled versions of some of our scientific methods and modeling - without, mind, necessarily finding out about their flexibility - but don't get any practice in using economic analysis to engage in real policy debate. Perhaps it's another casualty of the loss of the essay in economics; perhaps that comes from our huge enrollments, victims of our own success.

Just because positive economic modeling is supposed to separate itself from ideology, it doesn't mean that economists should. Perhaps if we argued a bit more, we'd bring some life back to our discipline.

Do as I say, not as I do

2008-02-19T12:47:00.005-05:00

Another Arts & Letters tipoff today. The teaser for the article reads:

"Do professors indoctrinate students by expressing a political ideology in the classroom?"

Similar to what I was talking about the other day when I was arguing that ideology leaks into economics courses when we start using them as civics lessons. The article being referred is from the Chronicle of Higher Education, asking why academia is liberal. Yesterday I reported a survey that found majority liberal political views among economics grad students; it's not controversial to suggest that university and college faculties are predominantly more liberal than the population.

The article also mentions the real source of the Arts & Letters teaser quote: a study by Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner called, delightfully, "My Professor is a Partisan Hack" (you can read the whole study (pdf) here). That study tried to figure out how students perceive the political leaning of their professors, and how similarity with the students' own views affected their enjoyment and perception of their courses.

The authors asked students to complete course evaluations that, among other questions, asked them to identify their professors' political and ideological views, and to report their own confidence in their answers. The surveys were all done after political science courses. The Chronicle article summarizes one of the big results:

"their research showed that students were turned off when professors expressed views that were contrary to their own..."

Perhaps not surprising. The article goes on:

"Mr. Maranto asked the Woessners to contribute a chapter to his book on why conservatives don't pursue doctorates. Typically, he says, there are a few answers to the question. Liberals say conservatives want to make more money than professors earn, while conservatives argue that they get less encouragement from professors than liberal students do."

I would love to do a similar study for economics courses. Some interesting questions:

Can students confidently identify political ideology of economics professors? Should they be able to, given the supposed neutrality of what we teach?
Would students correctly guess that the majority of economists identify themselves as liberal? Does the content of economics courses skew this perception of the professors' beliefs?
Are non-conservatives turned off by economics courses?
Do students see economics professors as spreading ideology? If so, is the ideology consistent with the professors' beliefs? Is it consistent with the students' perception of the professors' beliefs?

We need to know how the teaching of economics meshes with the students beliefs and opinions. I strongly believe that the economic method is capable of accommodating and being used by people of any political or ideological belief, but I'd be astonished if such a survey of economics students revealed that this was in fact the case.

Here's my pitch: do economics professors indoctrinate students by expressing ideology in the classroom? If they do, I believe they are committing a far graver sin than political science professors who do the same. We can separate policy debate from opinion in economics; we can separate out method from our beliefs. Do we?

The Woessner article concludes:

"professors may be well advised to strive for political balance—vigorously challenging students’ viewpoints and presenting multiple perspectives without identifying their own political orientations."

If we could accomplish something like this in economics - value-free and varied economic method, plus lively ideological debate on economic policy - we might get economics courses that are interesting, useful and diverse. That would beat the mangling of positive and normative economics that too often passes for a real economics course.

The Making of an Economist, Redux

2008-02-18T19:20:00.005-05:00

Last summer I read "The Making of an Economist, Redux" by David Colander, a 2000s do-over of a 1980s survey of whats going on in the wee brains of economics grad students. A little bit of introspection goes a long way, but not much of what's going on in the book really seems like me or economics grad students I know.

Right up front we get a peach of a definition:

"For example, were an undergraduate student to ask an economist how to become an economist.... he would most likely tell her, 'To become an economist who is considered an economist by other economists, you have to go to graduate school in economics.'"

And we thought defining "economics" was hard! Indirectly, this really tells you as much as the book itself about what economists are up to - that is, forming a closed shop where only PhDs may enter. That would be less worrisome if we weren't beating diversity out of PhDs almost as aggressively as we beat it out of "Principles of Economics" students...

Anyway, the book surveys economics graduate students. Well, economics graduate students at one of the "elite" (book's word) schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Yale). Colander defends this choice by pointing out - correctly - the disproportionate influence of economists stationed at those schools, which hire new faculty predominantly from one of the others' PhD pools. Perhaps limitations in the research budget are to blame, but it would be very interesting to see what was going on at other institutions as well. Non-US universities, smaller schools...

It might change a few of the most surprising results of the surveys. On the issue closest to my heart, 40% of the grad students surveyed disagree that "we can draw a sharp line between positive and normative economics". Which makes my eyes water.

On the other hand, a bunch of boring-type economic policy questions drew pleasingly all-over-the-place answers. One with some degree of consensus: A strong majority agreed with the statement "Income distribution in developed nations should be more equal", which is emphatically not what I would expect the public perception of an economists' opinion to be. It probably partly reflects political beliefs; the students' stated political allegiance breaks down like so:

Conservative: 16%
Moderate: 24%
Liberal: 48%
Radical: 6%

Not sure what "radical" is trying to catch, but there it is. Is it strange that all these budding economists are "liberal"? In my experience, not really, and in any case, the stereotypical right-wing markets-crazy economist is actually not one with actual basis. Believe it or not, devotees of the "economic method" are not necessarily fiscal conservatives, for example.

More relevant to the issue of what economists do is the question of what the students believe helps people succeed in grad school: a full 67% said "having a thorough knowledge of the economy" was unimportant, which I would wholeheartedly agree with. In courses at the undergraduate level, I was exposed to plenty of history, of the subject and of the world, and plenty of policy debates; at the graduate level, math. And statistics.

The closed shop isn't much interested in policy debate. It's not necessarily the job of academic economics to do these things, but I can attest that it makes most graduate-level courses as much fun as a slap to the head. We dive down the rabbit-hole of the literature of our chosen field, but lose whatever tenuous grasp on reality we once had.

An interesting side-effect of this infatuation with what other economists have written (even at the expense of what other economists have thought) and of the closed shop is that PhD theses are interchangeable. Everyone's doing pretty much the same thing, geared towards the ubiquitous "job market paper" that is supposed to prove to the union bosses how good you'll be at publishing papers like theirs. It's either a theoretical paper that looks like other theoretical papers, or an empirical paper that looks like other empirical papers.

I don't know how much this is true of other disciplines, but I often feel that very little of what we research is question-led, which also kills a big chunk of the chance to be daring or creative. There's not a lot of big-picture, big-idea, thesis-for-its-own-sake intellectual masturbation going on - and I do mean that as a criticism. Colander's survey shows our diversity; do we really all want to produce the same work? Can there be more than one way to do good science, good economics? What made us want to become economists? What happened to the questions we wanted to ask? Graduate students: this might be our last chance to ask them.

Economic literacy, or how we squashed dissent

2008-02-16T14:37:00.009-05:00

My heart smiles on veterinarians today:

"Popular misconceptions

Economics is commonly viewed as being focussed on money. This notion has been reinforced in veterinary medicine..."

A quotation, apparently, from "Veterinary Epidemiology" by Michael Thrusfield, that I stumbled upon while prowling for some evidence on what we're doing to economics students.

A large chunk of the evidence on that subject comes from formal economics articles ridiculing the population's incompetence. This one actually asks students some questions testing so-called "economic literacy" (who sets monetary policy in America, what are profits for, what happens to export if the dollar increases in value (yawn)) and this one has some suggestions on how to promote it.

I'll put aside my skepticism that knowing, for example, the difference between fiscal and monetary policy is important to a person. The questions that aren't purely civic literacy are boring and/or irrelevant; more dangerously, the promotion of "economic literacy" in an introductory economics course represents another challenge to the correct perception of what economics actually is. If we make civics the goal of introductory economics courses, we lose any semblance of teaching "principles", and slide further into pretending that economics will offer the technocratic "answer" to your every question.

As if to reinforce this fear of mine, the questionnaire article finishes up by trying to convince me that

"...economic knowledge has a direct and substantive effect on opinions about economic issues"

That's seems reasonable, until the example:

"An opinion question asked: If the supply of oil was reduced by a crisis in the Middle East, do you think the United States government should prohibit oil companies from raising oil and gasoline prices?

Over four in ten college seniors were opposed to allowing the oil companies to raise prices, hardly a strong endorsement of competitive markets.... what college seniors know about economics directly affects their acceptance of a market result."

Where do I begin? What breathtaking arrogance it must take to assume one has the unimpeachable answer to an "opinion question". What a sad revelation of the true failure of economics teaching it is to equate "economic literacy" with "a strong endorsement of competitive markets". Worse than sad, it's infuriating. When this passes - in the supposedly prestigious American Economic Review, no less - I am entirely unsurprised that students who take economics courses answer "opinion" questions differently than other students. Our economics courses are dogmatic and pass opinion and ideology as scientific fact.

This isn't political: I hold my own beliefs, as anyone is entitled to. Perhaps "economic literacy" would help people decide what they believe. That's the difference between "I'm not sure would happen if we tried to move to socialized health care" and "I think I have a reasonable idea of what might happen if we tried to move to socialized health care". I'd be thrilled if we could help someone answer that question.

What my profession seems to be pushing is instead the difference between "I don't believe that the market mechanism is always best" and "I believe that the market mechanism is always best". Is it possible that "economic literacy" could change my mind? Of course it's possible; that doesn't mean that it will, or that it should. There's a very fine line between wishing for economic literacy and wishing that people believed what you believe, and crossing it is unacceptable.

Of course it would be great if we all knew a bit more about how the institutions that control our resources operate. Keep it out of my "principles of economics". If you care so deeply, make everyone take a course called "how economic policy works in the United States". Don't pollute my discipline with your sleight of hand. If suppression of debate, and sacrificing the chance to teach economics without ideology attached are the price of "economic literacy", it's a price far too high.

Now that I've gone off the deep end, I should point out the classic survey of public versus economists, the "Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy" which is actually pretty interesting. The (comparatively) reasonable "Straight Talk About Economic Literacy" (pdf) by Bran Caplan is a nice (but long) article that talks about the survey and asks why the responses diverge.

Is it too late to enroll in veterinary school?

The Affluent Society

2008-02-15T11:14:00.004-05:00

Today I learned that it's been fifty years since the publication of The Affluent Society, by one of the 20th century's great normative economists, John Kenneth Galbraith. That I found out is thanks to this article that, remarkably, argues that Galbraith was "the midwife of miserabilism" because he rejected growth as the sole societal goal, which fits nicely into what I was saying about metrics the other day.

Probably predictably, I dislike the phrase "economic growth" and avoid it wherever possible. What does it mean? Presumably growth in "GDP", whatever that is, not that "GDP growth" gets a lot of play in the contexts that use economic growth instead. The kind of argument Galbraith was making - that we should aim for more than growth, and that growth can have ill consequences - often gets wrapped up as an "anti-economics" argument, for the same reason that "economic growth" is considered the correct phraseology.

It's true that "political economy" was money centric in the beginning: it was called "The Wealth of Nations", after all. While - perhaps because - authors like Galbraith were attacking the "value of our stuff" as a meaningful objective, economic science was maturing to the point where we could suppress the objective and attempt to sterilize the descriptive part of our job. Whether society aims for "GDP growth", putting a man on the moon or turning lead into gold is another one of those normative questions that belong to a forum of debate.

That's what makes Galbraith's essays so important - he was trying to convince, not to prove. He was a master of the provocative opinion piece. The Affluent Society remains a vital argument in support of public works. Paul Krugman was very critical of Galbraith's stature as an economist in "Peddling Prosperity", which probably misses the point that Galbraith was making arguments, not scientific economic theory. As a manifesto writer, he was very special indeed.

Economic systems in action

2008-02-14T15:36:00.004-05:00

Here's a neat article (found via the invaluable Arts and Letters Daily) which is, indirectly, about applied economics. How do you allocate scare places in college classes to a student body?

The article talks about the systems at a few colleges, ranging from sleeping in line to auction systems; the question at hand is "what should we do to allocate these places?", a nice normative economic question. Wharton's business school apparently gives students points which they spend in anonymous online auctions to bid for places in courses.

"In other words, Wharton has what may be the most sophisticated, and most confusing, course-registration system ever devised. And, arguably, the fairest. "It's capitalism gone nuts, but it's also absolute socialism because everyone is born with the same number of points," says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy."

It's certainly not "socialist" to give everyone the same number of points: capitalism and socialism are methods of allocating resources, not methods that decide who gets the resources to start with. A socialist system of allocating places would presumably get all the students on campus into a big room and have them decide, which would at least be good fun. I think Wolfers might mean it's "capitalist but egalitarian". Equality of opportunity is a different concept from resource allocation.

It's interesting to see systems of resource allocation go off the deep end: the middle way of just allocating places randomly or having people line up is significantly simpler than either the auction system, or my hypothetical socialist system. How can we make the decision about what system to use? Just like all normative questions, we can't say which system is "best" or "fairest", only try to figure out what each system would mean and argue about the rest.

The ends versus means issue in economic systems is an important one. The thought experiment goes like this: if the people's council knew how a capitalist system would allocate resources, they could choose that allocation. Would that make the socialist system the same as the capitalist system, or is there more invested in the resource allocation mechanism than just the end product? Even figuring out consequences is not enough to answer normative questions.

Here's the clincher though, about the MIT lottery system:

"The lottery is supposed to be equitable and impersonal, according to Bette K. Davis, office director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. But that's not always how it works out. Ms. Davis says that often students who lose the lottery wheedle their way in by talking directly to the professor."

Capitalist, socialist, anarchist: it's all about who you know.

Measurement

2008-02-13T11:06:00.004-05:00

Just after talking about the euphemistic use of "economy" yesterday, I found an even better one here:

"Nearly all Italians drink bottled water rather than the piped stuff. The industry is worth an estimated 3.2bn euros (£2.38bn) a year to the Italian economy."

It would be very refreshing if they'd just say "GDP", since that's what they mean. That wouldn't make it any less understandable either, because "economy" is equally vacuous. Let's play the show and tell game again: what does the quotation mean?

It can't mean that "if no bottled water was sold, people would spend 3.2bn euros less" - I'm sure they'd find another way to spend it. It can't mean "worth 3.2bn euros a year to the Italian resource allocation", because that's not a sentence. It can't mean that "Italian workers/producers would get 3.2bn less in wages/payments a year", because I'm sure that they could do something else besides produce bottled water.

My best guess is "the Italian bottled water industry makes sales worth 3.2bn every year". Why, oh why, can't the reporter simply say that? It's not remotely the same thing as any of the other suggestions I just made, yet I guess they're all technically possibilities if we read "economy" as "system of production and consumption" or something like that. If I want to be really obnoxious I could ask whether the reporter has measured every consequence of the hypothetical disappearance of the Italian bottled water industry to come up with his figure.

More to the point, let's forget about the absurdity of the quotation in itself and ask why the "worth" of any effect on the "economy" measured in money? This screams a confusion of metric and quality, a cardinal sin of positive science; even if I could get an accurate figure for the effect of something on "Gross Domestic Product", I still think "worth" is too loaded a term.

A big chunk of the gulf between theoretical economics and empirical testing of real-world relationships is the metrics we use. Our abstractions work (or can, or should work) in a world where we measure outcomes agnostically: if you care about this. Theoretical economists can play in imaginary worlds all day, exploring the "relationships" between fundamentally unmeasurable things under their assumptions. On the other hand, some imaginary concept like "utility" is singularly useless if we want to actually talk about the real world. Empirical economists must deal with this problem somehow: if you want to talk about the effect of this measurable thing on that measurable thing you must explicitly ignore the intangible (like, perhaps, satisfaction).

Then what conclusions can we draw? This affects that, but not how "good" it is. This is, again, the reason why economics can never be a technocratic prescription of what "should" be done; we simply have no real-world metric to answer the question, and our theoretical metrics are unobservable. It's the power and beauty of the science - we don't have the answers. Is someone pretending to? Just for fun, I Googled "what's wrong with GDP". When our metrics are the sole determinant of policy, of course the metric - and, by extension, economics - comes under intense attack.

Now that's all well and good until we get to economics teaching, practice and discussion which ignores this important conclusion. I don't deny the challenge of constant vigilance to make sure student, reader, researcher know that we're dealing with only what we can measure, but nothing short of a commitment to acknowledge the limitations of measurement at every turn will be enough to dispel the notion that the science of economics can tell us what to do.

Euphemisms

2008-02-12T10:27:00.000-05:00

It's just semantics, but I wish there was an easy solution to the problem of using the word "economics" as a euphemism for real stuff. How unusual would it be for this story on General Motors' headache-inducing losses to expire without a use of the word "economics" or "economy"? There's actually only one:

"But the worsening economy in the United States led to higher fourth-quarter losses in the region: $1.1 billion, compared to $30 million in 2006."

What does that mean? Does it mean "people are losing their jobs"? "There might be inflation going on"? "People are defaulting on their mortgages"? Seriously, if it means anything in itself, I don't know what it is. I even looked up the word "economy", and I think the definition that's being implied is "the system or range of economic activity in a country, region, or community": almost a perfect tautology.

That old writer's maxim "show, don't tell" should be, in my ideal world, applied to every use of the phrase "worsening economy", "economic trends", "the economy", and all the others you can think of. They're empty on two levels: structurally there's the reflexive definition, but more importantly in a news story designed to inform, it obscures whatever the actual thing is.

Here's another example:

"The Bank of England cut UK interest rates last week to 5.25% from 5.5% in an attempt to prevent a major slowdown in the economy."

What does "major slowdown in the economy" mean? More unemployment? Less money for the common man? So help me, GDP? It surely can't mean a "slowdown in the allocation of resources", because that's not a sentence. Show, don't tell. Actually, the second example actually might be a step up from the first because it has the slightly less loaded "slowdown" rather than "worsening". Don't tell me how to feel when whatever you're talking about happening happens!

Heterodox economists

2008-02-11T11:16:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago, seemingly every book review section in every newspaper or magazine carried a review of "How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read" (here's an example). How is a literary critic supposed to resist reviewing a title like that?

I have here a book called "A Guide To What's Wrong With Economics"; how am I supposed to resist looking at a book like that? More to the point, I haven't actually read it properly yet, but just by browsing I know what it'll say, because it's actually a (very thorough) critique of that thing called "neoclassical economics", which is familiar but important stuff, even if my guide would be a bit different. Economists who write these kind of books are, by the way, called "heterodox economists", though perhaps not by themselves.

There are lots of promising chapter titles, anyway: "The Pitfalls of Mainstream Economic Reasoning (and Teaching)", "Five Pieces of Advice for Students Studying Microeconomics"... there's a whole section called "Micro Nonsense"! I feel compelled to share this brilliant quotation:

"Because there is no direct access to the 'real' world, an economist is forced to see that world through the lenses of theory."

Either I'm living in a complicated dream, or we do actually have access to the real world... I see what the author (Charles Wilber, in the chapter "Teaching Economics as if Ethics Mattered") is getting at, though. It's a theme that keeps cropping up throughout the book, one that seems to be raised again and again, something like "there is not enough diversity in economics teaching and practice". I think Wilber might be saying that the economist is forced to see the world through the lenses of a particular theory that he, and the heterodox economists, dislike.

Superficially, I agree, if by that we mean that too often differences of opinion are suppressed in the profession, when in fact positive economics is logically incapable of doing so. However, the criticisms being raised again and again in the book are that "neoclassical economics" is taught as a loaded dogma, which is terrible, but not the same thing. The method of economics, whatever you think of it, can accommodate anything, any theory. Not just that, but exactly the same "anything" could happily be accommodated in any other method.

Would the authors be happy if we taught our methods on a blank slate, or would they demand that their own particular views were put on the academic pedestal? This must not degenerate into an arms race: the method is the language, not the meaning. I am suspicious that the "heterodox" economists want to change the language only to change the meaning. Please: there is no substance in a method, a language.

Actual theories are invoked incessantly, through all chapters: the usual suspects, like perfect competition, "rationality", equilibrium... what's "wrong" with economics, according to these essays, is that these theories are presented as "true". Now, of course, a proved theory cannot be false under its own conditions; by "true" we really mean "does not conform to the real world, either in assumption or prediction". That's something I can buy into, and that is, perhaps, the valid, practical version of the criticism.

It's twofold: first, using methods to promote a single normative angle is certainly possible, but doesn't show what the method can do, and in any case is probably bad teaching. Second, it might indeed be nice to bring some more reality into introductory economics courses, not just "applications". There are certainly valid reasons to construct abstractions, but it might keep people on board if we devote at least some time to economics that conforms to reality - it's odd that when a student progresses through an economics sequence, the economics she sees often gets less unreal as it gets more esoteric, if that makes sense. We don't need boring tables of numbers, just show the flexibility of the economic method to deal with the real.

What bothers me about this so-called "heterodox economics" is that it's attacking the wrong thing. They are not questioning the teaching and practice of economics by digging as far as it's possible to dig to find the true foundations of what we do, absent any superficial details. Whether it's right or wrong to try that, it's fundamentally different to the heterodox method. See the wood for the trees: you don't have to convince anyone - student, economist, layperson - that economic theory is usually unrealistic. Deep down, though, we're all playing for the same team, and if we could just figure out what our team was doing, we could have a real competition.