Barkley / everyone,
I too am getting tired of this [sub]thread, and presumably for similar reasons. Therefore, this will be my last reply.
Please note that what we're discussing here follows from my response and attempted correction of your (or, as you later claimed, Haberler's) lacking reproduction of "Austrian" theory. It may be in the context of the larger Say's Law debate, but specifically relates to the Austrian business cycle theory and capital and production theory. It is from this perspective I address the issues, and it is naturally also from this perspective my "irrelevant" arguments are expressed.
You may consider what I argued simply "blah blah blah," but I stand by the point I was making and you have not suggested a reason for me to reconsider. What I referred to with the term "blame" is that you have consistently treated "underconsumption" as a negative normative expression, and this may be a natural thing considering your point of view. What I claimed regarding this, which should have been obvious given the context of our discussion, related to two scenarios: (1) a normal market, and (2) a market subject to credit expansion (as this is the common cause of boom-bust cycles in Austrian theory).
In the former scenario, overinvestment and underconsumption may be logically identical. I did not argue against this on the aggregate level, where I am well aware of the fact that foregone consumption is savings/investment. If consumers forego consumption, the market undergoes a shift toward relatively more investment/production, which consequently facilitates increased future consumption. But there is no room for discussing "overinvestment" here since the increase in investment is due to consumer saving. Unless, of course, one considers that individual entrepreneurs err in their anticipations. I argued against such errors being a problem, since entrepreneurs err all the time and the market adjusts to such errors, and suddenly you seem to agree with this.
The latter scenario is dependent on an injection of new money through credit, which distorts relative prices by artificially decreasing interest rates. Here overinvestment can certainly be the case, especially in the sectors affected by the cheaper credit, but it does not follow from this that there is also underconsumption. Existing prices do not reflect the real capital stock in the market under the new quantity of money, which ultimately means production processes cannot be completed. Uncompleted overinvestment means the intended products for consumption will never see the light of day, so there is no corresponding underconsumption of those goods. Instead, the market undergoes a correction and relative prices are adjusted to again reflect consumers' preferences under the prevailing capital stock. The time element is anything but "irrelevant" here.
I guess one could compare the present [over]investments in distorted prices with present consumption levels at unadjusted "historical" prices... but I'm not sure what that means, if anything.
This was what I referred to, but you instead assert that I do not understand the "capital theoretic paradoxes" arising because the "micro time structure of production ... is not neatly characterized." Well, such problems is kind of the point of discussing the messed up relative prices due to expanded credit/artificially lowered interest rate. Your attacking the conceptualization of production processes by pointing to real problems caused by the inflow of new money doesn't really support your case (if anything, this supports mine).
But this only points to the underlying problem in this discussion: the inability to assess a theory on its own terms (in this case, Austrian theory). This is in fact why I first responded to Barkley Rosser's/Gottfried Haberler's (in my view) very strange depiction of Austrian theory, and it is why I cannot seem to get my points across.
This particular "discussion" on the [micro?] time-structure of production is very illustrative of this, where the [conceptual] analytical model used to point out the distortion to the market's production apparatus by expanded credit (in many ways akin to Keynesian stimulus) is attacked for not perfectly corresponding to the production structure under artificially low interest rates. But this is the very point I've been making! It is not a fault of the model that distortions that it is used to identify actually arise in the real world. Whether should be deemed "irrelevant" or "blah blah blah" or just stubbornly unkeynesian is another matter.
Per
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Per L. Bylund, Ph.D.
Baylor University
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Per,
I am going to keep this short as I am seriously tiring of this thread.
On the matter of BB and the average period of production, the issue is not his efforts to estimate some average for the economy as a whole. It is that he indeed developed this concept of roundaboutness and discussed it pretty much as you describe later others doing so, with more stages and so on. All this does get to the micro time structure of production, and your discussion simply fails to deal with the point that this is not neatly characterized when the time pattern of returns becomes complicated leading to capital theoretic paradoxes. Hayek came to realize this, and Roger Garrison is aware of this. Are you?
I find your continuing concern about "strangeness" of "underconsumption" to be basically irrelevant. This is not about "blame." If anything, the traditional underconsumptionists blamed the rich leaders for the underconsumption because they were not allowing the poor to have enough income to consume "sufficiently." The main point, which I think you simply are refusing to grasp, irrespective of what any Austrian or Haberler or anybody else has said, is that logically "overinvestment" and "underconsumption" are identical, even if the "blame" or political/policy implications drawn by those making these arguments are very different. For the former we only know that there is "overinvestment" because the resulting capital stock produces more than will be bought. In the latter we know that there is "underconsumption" because, well, what capital stock there is produces more than what will be bought. They are one and the same, although one can fiddle about over failed anticipations and unfinished investments blah blah blah.
Please remember the broader context here, the discussion of Say's Law, with some continuing to claim that it simply holds at all times and places forever, no matter what, even in the case of hoarding because, gosh, people are buying that cash to hoard with their incomes. However, even some Austrian economists recognized that in a secondary inflation there may be hoarding, and reduces both assets able to finance real capital investment as well as outright consumption, thus leading to the famous "underconsumption" that reveals that there has been "overinvestment."
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Barkley,
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your comment about the average period of production. You seem to be mixing different concepts wildly, and then dismiss your mix as Austrian and incorrect. I'm quite up to date on the Austrian analysis, both contemporary and historic such, and what you're saying makes no sense. It is true that Boehm-Bawerk attempted to calculate the average period of production for the economy as a whole, but it has since been a common Austrian critique of BB (e.g. Mises). I’m aware of no other Austrians trying to make such calculations.
The time-structure of production is, however, an important theoretical conception, and perhaps this is what you're referring to. I’m not sure where you find the “time horizon” (in the way you seem to use it) in this analysis: the “length” of a production structure refers simply to its number of conceptual “stages,” by which is meant how intensely is its relied-on division of labor (and capital, to add Lachmann's term). The need for “longer" (more roundabout) production processes arises since the state of the economy, due to competitive pressure, has already to a significant extent adopted the “best” production process utilizing the market’s present level of complexity. The only way of increasing productivity is then to “lengthen” the structure of production (introduce more capital [goods], split tasks, automate, etc.).
Whether entrepreneurs calculate different net returns to investments is from my perspective a different matter; it is an entrepreneurial problem, but does not affect the analysis of the production structure unless it is systemic (and we certainly cannot assume systemic faults from the get-go). It is true as you say that manipulation of interest rates in some sense makes entrepreneurs “blind” and therefore increases the risk for (eventual) errors. But there is a difference between saying entrepreneurs err because market signals have been distorted and to say that this effect is universal and immediate (no Austrian would claim the latter). The former is indeed the claim made in the Austrian theory of the trade cycle.
There is, by the way, a complexity here that affects the analysis. There is an ongoing debate among Austrians between those focusing on plan coordination (as Hayek, Lachmann) and price coordination (as Mises), which makes me reluctant to say what the Austrian take on this is. Time will tell which view is more appropriate, but it seems like the problems you state may be due to holding plans fixed over time, which (1) is not the Austrian conception, and (2) is in direct contrast with the price coordination argument. (By the way, I'm currently working on a book addressing this very issue, but from a market/hierarchy point of view - not primarily business cycles.)
Briefly about underconsumption. It is a “very strange” concept to me for the reason that it is negative and appears to shift “blame” and consequently turn the economic analysis inside down. Maybe you do not recognize the negative connotation of “underconsumption" (as “failing” to meet supply), but from my perspective it is confusing if not harmful to think of it in this way. Production is always speculative (entrepreneurial), and always undertaken to satisfy consumers’ [future] wants. Failure to do so is simply a failure of individual entrepreneurs to correctly (profitably) imagine the wants and needs of consumers. There is (and can be) no “failure” of consumers to acquire that which they do not want. To claim this is in my view quite preposterous, and misses the whole point of what drives the economy: producing to benefit consumers by satisfying their real (perceived) wants (in other words, profit) - not consuming to satisfy supply.
Entrepreneurs who repeatedly (or even consistently) fail will effectively be shut out as they will no longer have access to investment funds, while successful entrepreneurs gain greater influence through profit allowing them to repeat investments for the (future) benefit of consumers. This is the natural process of the market, and tampering with the interest rate changes the conditions on which entrepreneurs imagine the future and thus how they act/invest/produce. Of course this affects the production apparatus overall by shifting relative investments where expanded credit hits market sectors unevenly.
I agree with your statement that…
“Not enough is being bought to fulfill the supply. This will mean that there will need to be some adjustments of price, quantity supplied, quantity demanded, and so on, although these may not happen neatly, which is where all this discussion of lags and problems of adjustment comes in.”
…but I don't see a problem with it unless there are structural, systemic errors (such as under artificially high/low interest rates). In fact, these adjustments happen every day in every [open] market: some entrepreneurs have produced “too much” causing prices to fall, other entrepreneurs “too little” so that they don’t satisfy demand causing prices to rise. Market adjustments ARE the market process (a market without adjustments is not a process, but in a non-changing state), and the profit motive provides for a tendency toward equilibrium. But this does not change the fact that production precedes consumption and that one must produce in order to engage in market exchange.
I guess this gets us back to the main discussion in this thread. I just wanted to point out obvious errors in how Austrian theory was described (whether Rosser's or Haberler's). While adjustments and error corrections are core to the market process, such corrections are also important for the scholarly discussion.
Per
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Per L. Bylund, Ph.D.
Baylor University
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Per,
This is a sideshow, but I shall make a reply. Yes, I am well aware of heterogeneous capital, with some of my earliest publications dealing with capital theory debates over such matters,such as my 1983 paper in JET, "Reswitching as a Cusp Catastrophe." I note in this regard that while many Austrians used het cap to spell out their mechanism for readjustments, it was Hayek in his 1941 Theory of Capital (his least read book, I believe, particularly among self-styled Austrians) who among Austrians realized the limits of this analysis as he came to understand the same critique Sraffa would make later (and that Irving Fisher had made earlier), that in a world where capital investments can have complicated future streams of net returns, one cannot unambiguously rank them in order of the "average period of production" on some "longer" vs "shorter" time horizon. As interest rates rise, A may look better than B, then B may look better than A, but (oooops!) we may see a reswitch where A looks better than B again. Careful Austrian theorists such as Roger Garrison are well aware of this, as was Hayek himself, with some saying that it was this that led him to turn from trying to further study "Austrian business cycle theory" and to move on to other topics later in his career (although I am prepared to be corrected on this point by the leading expert on Hayek, if he is paying attention, namely Bruce Caldwell).
My use of the term "mere" implied that if adjustment costs were low, this readjustment of malinvestment would in principle not imply (or, "explain") aggregate downturns such as the Great Depression. Ahiakpor has hinted that disequilibria in one market just get offset by opposite ones in others so that in aggregate Say's Law can still hold now and at all times forevermore. It is only if there are some lags or adjustment problems that we might see a temporary slippage of total output or employment (What? That laid off steel worker in Pittsburgh is not instantly moving to Iowa to grow corn or to Silicon Valley to develop software???). However, Haberler, who was from Vienna and knew most of the leading Austrian theorists of his time, indeed, is often considered to be at least an Austrian fellow traveler, expressed his open dissatisfaction with this sort of argument, labeliing it unsatisfactory, while noting that several of the Austrian theorists failed to go beyond it and failed to notice how unsatisfactory it was. He makes it clear that from his view, one needs something more than just this (dare I use my term again?) mere readjustment to derive a more general downturn, and that mechanism indeed presented by various Austrians is the secondary deflation. I shall not repeat my discussion of the significance or nature of it again, other than to remind that the concept of "hoarding" shows up in some of those discussions, and we know that is a violation of Say's Law, unless you want to argue like James Ahiakpor that people "spend their incomes" when they "buy" cash to hoard.
I am sorry you find my use of the term "underconsumption" to be "very strange." You are welcome to your opinion, and I fully agree that not many have openly or clearly made the link between such ideas and those of "overinvestment." Now I see that you argue that the latter involves some failure of expectations regarding essentially future viable equilibrium levels of demand, although if those future demands are insufficient to purchase the output of completed capital investments rather than the uncompleted ones (assuming those are all is involved is how Hayek avoided this conundrum), then why is it unreasonable to describe these insufficent levels of demand to meet this future supply as being "underconsumption," aside from your finding it "very strange"? Not enough is being bought to fulfill the supply. This will mean that there will need to be some adjustments of price, quantity supplied, quantity demanded, and so on, although these may not happen neatly, which is where all this discussion of lags and problems of adjustment comes in.
I am tempted to ignore James Ahiakpor, who has now decided to diss Wicksell. OK, whatever. But I do wish to differ with his strong claim about there never having been a pure credit economy. The new book by David Graeber, "Debt," may be historically inaccurate, but it is not a priori completely implausible. He argues that what historically preceded the appearance of commodity money in simple, hunter-gatherer societies was a pure credit economy. In small social groups people help each other out, and everybody knows who has helped whom out and by how much. These social credit accounts can be maintained as long as the group is small enough and the economy simple enough. As it gets larger or more complicated, these accounts can no longer be properly kept, so impersonal money appears. Again, wee do not know if this is really the case, but he provides at least some anthropological evidence for it. Your straightforward claim simply is not as certain as you claim it to be, sorry, James.
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From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Bylund, Per L. [[log in to unmask]]
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Barkely Rosser, thanks for your kind and elaborate response. I did not realize you discussed from the point of view of Haberler's view of the business cycle, which deviates in some important respects from the "mainline" Austrian (Mises-Hayek) view. It seemed your references to the Austrian business cycle theory were yours rather than an account of Haberler's view of it.
Anyway, even though this is perhaps slightly off topic, I think you make some points that I would like to address. One such is what you infer from the "secondary deflation" following what you call "mere redistribution of capital investment from longer to shorter." If you think of the economy's whole capital stock as homogeneous, then I can understand the word "mere," but otherwise not. Yet this is not the full Austrian (by which I mean the Mises-Hayek) argument; the problem is the redistribution between market sectors of production forced by the expansion of credit. If the new money first enter the house construction market, actors in this market will bid up prices for those capital goods used in house construction - and cause specific assets to shift/move from other sectors (adjusted toward *real* consumer preferences) toward construction. There is relative "overinvestment" in construction and, as a consequence (and "later"), in supporting sectors, and relative "underinvestment" in other sectors. Hence, malinvestment in the economy.
But an important part of the Austrian story is that the demand for capital goods in construction is here driven by the newly created money through credit, the volume of which is not yet reflected in market prices. So, in a sense, the market is blind to consumers' real preferences. It also means that while prices will eventually be bid up overall in the market, this will happen only as time passes (as Cantillon effects). There is an "illusion" (it is partly real due to the non-neutrality of the effect of added money) of relative profitability in construction, so investments are made there. Production processes are also lengthened in construction, since longer processes are (by definition, one might say, since they would otherwise not be adopted) more efficient and thus increases output.
But the problem is that prices do not yet reflect the true money supply; there are plenty of "old money" prices in the market for quite some time before they are eventually adjusted through exchange (making winners and losers simply from their "closeness" to where the credit money first hits). This lacking adjustment means the existing volume of money can buy more capital goods than actually exist in physical reality; this means, ultimately, that production processes cannot be completed. Investments made are, in other words, greater than real savings in the market.
But a perhaps greater problem is the lack of real [future] demand for houses, since the increased savings signaled by the lower interest rate (meaning consumers' time preference has changed so that they prefer more future consumption to present consumption than was the case before) doesn't exist. In other words: entrepreneurs' investments in housing construction are, in aggregate, aiming for a nonexistent potential equilibrium (much higher demand than is actually the case). To call this "underconsumption" is very strange to me. To call the necessary correction of capital investments and production structures toward real consumer demand a "mere redistribution" is an understatement that in my view is well situated for winning the grand prize in the Understatement of the Century Competition. The market is in a complete mess (from the point of view of the consumer wants-orientedness of the production apparatus), which means the relative prices are distorted and no longer represent real consumer demand.
That deflation follows from this (and similar) scenario(s), at least in the boom sectors, is neither unexpected nor a problem. Relative prices always eventually (re)adjust to real consumer preferences, but this takes time as it is effectuated only through real people trading for real goods (and capital goods are quite heterogeneous and specific). Falling prices ("deflation") in the bloated sectors simply means capital [goods] will more quickly be made available to be (recombined/readjusted and) used to produce other consumers' goods.
This correction process, and the price deflation that it entails, is only "bad" if one adopts a[n unscientific] normative position such as claiming workers in the bloated sectors must not be unemployed. What's "bad" from my and the Austrians' perspective is the distortion of the market's production apparatus due to expanded credit (that is, not supported by real saving).
I suppose the rough image of the Austrian process above should in part explain why Austrians "did spend much time criticizing the policies of the central banks as playing a central role in the Great Depression." Of course they did! So-called stimulus (both by the central bank and through the expansionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt) only augments the problems and hinders the correction process, so the outcome is - from an Austrian perspective - greater distortion and, consequently, a more difficult (and so longer) correction process further down the road.
But I don't see how Austrians criticizing the central bank's policies in any sense negates what I said: that the cycles can be caused " also in a fractional reserve banking system without a central bank" but that "a central bank greatly augments the problem."
One last point. I've reread the section of Prices and Production that you quote from Haberler, and I cannot see how it supports your view. Hayek is contrasting the change in proportion savings/consumption (and consequent change in the structure of production) due to a change in time preferences with (your quote) a change due to new money. The former change, he says, can be expected to be "permanent" since it is based on a real change in preferences and because those abstaining from present consumption will benefit from the increased production. The latter is a forced decline in consumption due to higher prices (inflation due to increased money volume). And, he says, if these consumers would increase their incomes (that is, their penalty is lessened), they would then attempt to consume in the same proportion as before the credit expansion. Eventually they will rise, but there is no reason to assume a gain (as in the previous case).
From my perspective, there is no reason to assume that these consumers will regain the full extent of their lost purchasing power until the correction is carried out fully *and* there has been real economic growth through productivity increases in sectors that satisfy real consumer wants.
Per
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Per L. Bylund, Ph.D.
Baylor University
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From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rosser, John Barkley - rosserjb
Sent: Wednesday, February 5, 2014 1:29 PM
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Subject: Re: [SHOE] L'offre crée même la deman de
Per,
A couple of points in reply. First, there is no agreed upon and generally accepted Austrian business cycle theory, and I am fully aware that much of the discussion involves structural readjustment of the capital structure, but that alone does not explain a general downturn. There are important divisions within that school on various points, as well as some loose ends. However, the point is not what some nonexistent agreed upon theory is, but what Haberler said about their views, since it was Haberler who was brought into the discussion by Steve Kates as supposedly providing the bottom line disproof of Keynes and his view of Say's Law, even though Haberler notes Keynes's contributions to several of the theories of business cycles that he discusses, particularly the psychological one. I would also note before discussing your more specific points that nowhere in Haberler's excellent book does he ever even mention either "Say's Law" or the "law of markets." It does not come up.
Regarding Haberler's discussion of the Austrian view, it is true that he never specifically says that it is the failure to buy output that is the sign of overinvestment, although this becomes an apparent factor in the "secondary deflation" that is invoked by many Austrians in order to explain how a mere redistribution of capital investment from longer to shorter time horizon investments could turn into a general economy-wide depression. You are right that some Austrians, most notably Hayek, do emphasize this point that you mention about capital investments being unfinished and left so as a mechanism for initiating the downturn. However, not only does Haberler criticize him for this, he notes that other Austrians recognized that there will be a problem with already completed capital stock that must ultimately be disposed of due to the inability of its output to be purchased, mentioning Neisser in particular in this regard.
He also notes that there are two different views among the Austrians regarding the secondary deflation, essentially over whether it is unavoidable or not. He identifies Hayek, Mises, Machlup, Robbins, and Strigl with unavoidable view, identifying Strigl as stating the "most coherent" version of this view, "He admits that the breakdown of the boom induces a process of hoarding and deflation," with this then involving a cumulative downturn process (p. 58, Prosperity and Depression). He identifies Ropke as a leader of the other view, which (p. 57), but in noting the cumulative aspect of it, he says, "Hawtrey, Keynes, Pigou and Robertson have contributed most to the understanding of this phenomenon," not exactly a dismissal of the contribution of Keynes. And, while Say's Law is never mentioned, the previous quote about Strigl's view explicity mentions hoarding, which, well...
I certainly grant that the fluctuations of interest do not require a central bank in the views of all Austrians. It is however historically accurate to note that many of them at the time did spend much time criticizing the policies of the central banks as playing a central role in the Great Depression. One can find Haberler's discussion of the Austrian views on pp. 45-72.
Oh, in fact digging through this section, I have found a more specific quote from Haberler highlighting the failure of demand. Indeed, the quote is from Hayek himself (p. 49, Prosperity and Depression, from p. 57 of Prices and Production) and involves consumption in general, "Now the sacrifice is not voluntary and is not made those who will reap the benefits from the new investments. It is made by consumers in general who, because of the increased competition from the entrepreneurs who have received the additional money, are forced to forgo part of what they used to consume...There can be no doubt that, if their money receipts should rise again, they would immediately attempt to expand consumption to the usual proportion." Haberler then does say that those receipts "will rise sooner or later," but in the meantime, there is underconsumption until they do (he does not use the term underconsumption).
BTW, I take full blame/credit for making the analytical identification between overinvestment and underconsumption. Haberler did not do so, so to the extent that my argument regarding that is incorrect, it is my fault, not Haberler's. I grant that it is not immediately obvious on the surface that the Austrian capital adjustment model involves such underconsumption, but it certainly does seem to enter in for the adjustment to lead to an economy-wide depression, even if it is not labeled precisely as such, but merely as "hoarding," which we all know is the most famous violation of Say's Law.
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From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bylund, Per L.
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Subject: Re: [SHOE] L'offre crée même la deman de
While the tone in this debate (like all other debates that imply a possible critique of the “master” (to borrow Skidelsky’s preferred epithet)) makes me quite unwilling to take part, I feel I must correct Barkley Rosser’s several simple errors in his description of the “rightist” Austrian school’s “overinvestment” theory. Surely we can respectfully discuss the pros and cons of any theory as scholars and do our best to correctly state their argument?
So, for the record, the Austrian theory is not an overinvestment theory but a malinvestment theory. The distinction is especially important in a discussion like this, where some assume aggregate demand/supply and others do not. Overinvestment should mean “too much” investment, whereas Austrians use “malinvestment” to emphasize that there is a sectorial mismatch between supply and demand - there is relative overinvestment in some sectors and so relative underinvestment in other sectors. Simply saying “overinvestment” misses the point and completely ignores Austrian capital theory. It is no small mistake.
Furthermore, to Austrians the relative overinvestment (overproduction) in a certain sector is not due to an entrepreneur not being able to immediately sell all that was produced. (It has previously been suggested that even slight inaccuracy by entrepreneur(s) in estimating future demand somehow disproves markets, which is why I note the Austrian meaning here.) It is a structural (“aggregate,” if you will - but for that sector, not the whole market) phenomenon where the class of entrepreneurs are led to believe there is more savings than there really is. So they invest in temporally extensive production processes requiring capital [goods] that do not exist (at least not at prices in the vicinity of those estimated), and therefore cannot [profitably] be completed.
This shift in productive investment from certain sectors to others is not due to a shift (or expected shift) in consumer preference, hence over- and underinvestment at the same time (though in different sectors). (There’s also a shift from investment in relative lower-order to relative higher-order goods, especially in the “overinvested” sectors.)
The structural mismatch between productive investment and anticipated future demand (or consumer preference) is not a market phenomenon in the sense that it is due to interest rates having been pushed down below their natural rate. This is often caused by an increase in money offered through credit, which tends to hit certain sectors first and then, through Cantillon effects, spread through the economy’s sectors and produce extra-market winners and losers.
This does not require a central bank, as Barkley Rosser seems to suggest, but can be the case also in a fractional reserve banking system without a central bank. Austrians certainly don’t claim “everything was fine” (as in “there were no cycles”) before the Federal Reserve was established in 1913; they say it “got worse” with the Fed, as a central bank greatly augments the problem.
None of the problems noted above are even noticeable if we adopt an AD/AS point of view. As far as I know, Austrians don’t see any point in using such highly abstract aggregates, since the details of what is going on in the market are no longer visible. And the devil’s in the details, as we know.
Per Bylund
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Per L. Bylund, Ph.D.
Baylor University
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Before I respond to Steve Kates allow me to thank Tom Humphrey for showing up to clarify Wicksell's position on this matter. You now have a standing invitation to speak at JMU not far from where I think you are.
That said, allow me to reply to Steve, who has just provided low-hanging fruit for his critics. Oh, so you want to invoke Haberler? My remarks following are more seriously discussed in my "The Conceptual History of Economic Dynamics" forthcoming in a Handbook on History of Economic Analysis from OUP and presented last June at the U. of Richmond workshop on HES. So, of the 7 sources of business cycles that Haberler identifies, one is on underconsumption, three are on overinvestment, one is on the monetary theory, one is on the psychological theory, and one is on "harvest theories," drawing on Jevons and his sunspot theory, the only one of these that is unequivocally an exogenous supply side theory. To quote Buz Brock, as I did in the paper and the talk (available on video), "the sun is the only truly exogenous factor in the economy."
So, you sneer at Hobson's underconsumptionism. Let us get analytical: underconsumption is identical to "overinvestment." Sure, the two have very different political profiles, underconsumption being leftist redistributionism, while at least the monetary Austrians rightistly emphasize bad behavior by central banks jerking the interest rate below and above the supposed "natural rate" (see Wicksell), while the Spiethoff school emphazised lags in carrying out large-scale capital investments due to ratex not holding (which it does not empirically in the real world based on repeated experiments and basically every other data available), with the third being the accelerator theory first put forward by Carver in 1903 and then more famously by Aftalion in 1913, with this later being viewed as a "Keynesian" theory, although he never spoke of it, and for those who do not like it involving failures of ratex with "overshooting" of investment involved, all involving situations where capital investment has led to production of goods that demanders are not sufficiently buying, in short, an insufficiency of aggregate demand relative to aggregate supply. A failure of "Say's Law." Got it, Steve?"
So, bottom line? Despite political differences where Austrians blame naughty central bankers for all that awful "overinvestment," while socialist Hobson whines about poor people "underconsuming," they are analyticallly identical. We only know there is "overinvestment" if what is produced by the invested capital stock fails to be purchased due to, oooh, well, "underconsumption" of what that capital stock is supplying. Whatever one thinks is the policy solution to this appearance of "general gluts," a failure of aggregate demand to fully satisfy aggregate supply, whether better central bank policy or a redistribution of income, the basic analytical issue comes down to people not buying all that is produced, even if their ability to buy that is based on previous production, which is what most statements of the supposed "law of markets" really amount to, starting with James Mill himself, a potential aggregate demand to buy the aggregate supply, not a guaranteed actually existing real one there sufficient to actually purchase all of it in real time.
Let us be clear. What you, Steve, claim is a supply side phenomenon looks mostly like a failure of AD, even if Haberler did not specifically label it as that. Real investors overdid it for whatever reason, and we know they did so because AD was insufficient in the next period to buy their output, for whatever reason. AD < AS, "general glut," even if only short run.
I had said previously that I would not respond to J. Akhiapor, but he offered such a doozy of a quote that just slams this point in, even as he as usually delusionally thinks that yet again he has proved Keynes wrong. So, I shall simply quote directly from one of his recent posts. After as firms face an aggregate inability of demand to buy all their stuff and thus stuck with rising inventories, and so either borrowing to hold the inventories over to the next period or adjusting after that or maybe sooner by either reducing prices, "The rise of interest rates would put pressure on the seller to reduce prices or reduce the rate of production." Ah ha! The latter will lead to an increase in unemployment, and maybe these laid off workers will "spend" their nonexistent income to buy cash to hoard, well....
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From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Steve Kates [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2014 12:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] L'offre crée même la deman de
I certainly appreciate the replies to my previous postings by Daniele Besomi and Barkley Rosser.
Let me begin with a news item reporting on my testimony to the Australian Senate Economic References Committee. They were reviewing the effects of the stimulus and had invited me because of my views on Keynesian theory and policy. This is from the Sydney Morning Herald of 21 September 2009.
“Labor senator Doug Cameron said Prof Kates’ comments had certainly embedded in his mind that you should never let an ‘academic economist run the economy’.
“‘Why have the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, why have they got it so wrong and yet you in your ivory tower at RMIT have got it so right?’”
I can now more clearly see Senator Cameron’s point about academic economists, but I draw you attention to the second of his statements.
Since J.-B. Say had put together what is in English called the law of markets, it does not surprise me that the phrase “Say’s Law” may have turned up on various stray occasions. But as someone who had been curious about the origins of this term, which is used by none of the major classical economists, it did finally dawn on me that it had come from Fred Taylor, not least because he specifically states that he is inventing the term. He used the phrase in his 1909 article on teaching economics; it is in his 1911 and six subsequent student editions of his for-students-only principles text distributed at the University of Michigan and buried in a chapter he titles, “Certain Fundamental Principles of Trade”. But by the time his text is released commercially in 1921, Say’s Law is a chapter on its own, titled “Say’s Law” in big letters, and in that chapter Taylor specifically says he is giving a name to what he describes as a yet unnamed principle. That someone used the term in 1920 is not a surprise but the phrase Say’s Law does not enter into economic discourse in a big way until after that. If it pleases you to think that Keynes took the name because of one of these stray mentions picked up by Daniele, be my guest as long as you accept that he took it from somewhere else. It just seems reasonable to me that Keynes used the term because it expressed exactly the point he was trying to make. Whether he was reading Taylor directly, or someone else who had read Taylor who had used the term, we cannot know. But that he was reading the mostly American literature on Say’s Law is as near certain as any such thing can be. And the only reason anyone resists this common sense, indeed obvious point, is that it is damaging to Keynes’s reputation since it suggests that his letter to Harrod, about how he had on his own by himself thought up one idea and then another, is not what actually happened at all.
And perhaps it is Daniel who has not understood my point. His point, he writes, is that “Say's law was not ACCEPTED throughout the 19th century by writers trying to explain crises” (his emphasis). I don’t think that’s right. If you go the Haberler’s 1937 Prosperity and Depression, which is a compendium of all of the theories of recession that were then in existence, virtually all of the theories presented are about structural dislocations. In what was probably the most common theory of recession of the time, people had used their savings all right – hoarding was not the problem – but had produced non-saleable output leading to recession, with the reason for such dislocation often but by no means always related to financial mayhem of one sort or another. To the extent that classical economists had a view about saving as a cause of recession, it was that recessions might occur because the level of saving had been insufficient to complete all of the projects that had been commenced following the previous trough. There wasn’t too much saving, there was too little. Read Haberler discussing Hobson and under-consumption if you are looking for a dismissive view of oversaving as a theory of recession.
What Say’s Law said to economists was this: when trying to explain the causes of recession, “there is no deficiency of demand” (and that is a quote from Ricardo), so you should therefore look somewhere else. I will, for a change, let Keynes be my authority.
“Malthus, indeed, had vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective demand to be deficient; but vainly. . . . The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature.” (GT: 32)
It may seem a negative conclusion but it is a crucial one. There is no such thing as a general glut. Overproduction never occurs. Demand deficiency does not cause recessions. And so far as policy is concerned, increases in non-value-adding public spending cannot lead to a recovery but will, instead, make them worse. That is what I was trying to say to our Senate. Five years later, who has the runs on the board? Is it the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, or is it our classical predecessors? Is it Keynes or Mill?
So to come back to my original post. There may well be something to what classical economists had been saying, which is the point Francois Hollande has very bravely made. And it is brave since he will be opposed by his political enemies, by his political friends and by economists who refuse to think that just maybe perhaps Keynes was wrong.
Let me finish with a quote from another politician, the former Labour Prime Minister of the UK, James Callahagn, speaking to the Labour Party Conference in 1976 during the Great Inflation, which was also a period of persistently high unemployment:
“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.”
It’s not as if our economies, as a result of these high levels of public spending in the period after the GFC, returned to rapid rates of economic growth and low rates of unemployment. We have seen the effects of the stimulus and they are dismal. Hollande, who is a first rate economist, went into government as a Keynesian but a Keynesian he no longer is. Why anyone else still is remains the central question in economic theory today.
On 4 February 2014 08:24, Daniele Besomi <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Thank you very much, Richard, for your illuminating post. The story is now becoming very interesting: not only the story of the origin of Say's law, but also the story of the criticism of the law.
One obvious connection that springs to mind concerns Marx. His interpretation of the gluts debate was framed by means of the reproduction schemes, which he elaborated from Quesnay's Tableaux representing the circular flow. Marx derived dynamic equilibrium conditions, that showed at once how reproduction can take place (against Mathus and Sismondi's view), and how it can go wrong (against Ricardo and Say), to which he added an explanation of why it must periodically go wrong. Note that, similarly to Robinet/Mercier and differently from Ricardo, Marx's argument is framed in terms of equilibrium.
A less known connection concerns another French writer, Aguste Ott. He was a social economist, who could escape the grip on publication outlets firmly held by the French liberals because he was writing in a Catholic encyclopedia. In 1854 he wrote an article on crises where he explicitly rejected Say's law, and did so by means of tableaux of exchanges that bear some similarity to Marx's schemes (I do not think Marx had read Ott's piece). Again, equilibrium and its conditions —that is, the possibility of the circular flow to take place-- were at the centre of the argument.
A third connection concerns the definition of crises that were formulated in the 19th century. Obviously most of them were published in dictionaries. In most dictionaries (in particular in France) crises were defined in terms of disturbances of the normal flow of business, and occasionally in terms of some of the features that characterize them. Other writers, however, defined crises as situations where equilibrium is disrupted. So we have on one side an undertsanding in terms of normal/abnormal, or health/disease (both couples are easily understandable, but ill-defined: health, indeed, was understood simply as the absence of disease, and normality as absence of abnormalities, without any precise and positive characterization), and on the other side an understanding in terms of equilibrium/disequilibrium. Now, all the latter writers were German. This is by no means an accident, since within a tradition where theorists openly questioned Say's law the debate was framed in terms of equilibrium between supply and demand, and on the conditions that guarantee such an equilibrium. Such a question obviously wouldn't make any sense for the upholders of Say's law, and wouldn't arise if the validity of Say's law was never questioned. Obviously the analytical perspectives opened by an analysis in terms of precise notions such as equilibrium and disequilibrium are further reaching than the possibilities opened by a discussion in terms of ill-defined concepts.
Knowing now that at the origin of Say's law there was a conceptualization in terms of the conditions of reproduction of a circular flow helps making sense of what was lost in the process and regained later, and helps placing in a broader context the rescuing of the original problem.
Daniele Besomi
Il giorno 3-feb-2014, alle ore 18.02, Van Den Berg, Richard ha scritto:
> Since we should be concentrating on historical questions in these postings (roughly 'who said, what when and what could they have meant?' rather then 'were they right?'), it should be pointed out what the origin is of Danielle Besomi's (translated and very relevant) passage from Robinet's Dictionnaire. It is a verbatim quotation from Mercier de la Riviere's L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques of 1767. The most important thing about this is not that the date is quite a bit earlier than 1780, but of course the fact that Mercier's work was one of the great works of physiocracy (unfortunately never translated into English).
>
> Mercier's discussion is intimately related to Quesnay seminal conception of the economy of a circular flow of incomes. One finds passages similar to that of Mercier in other physiocrats. For instance how about this one from Le Trosne's De 'linterest social of 1777 (my translation):
>
> 'Reproduction and consumption are reciprocally the meause of one another. Although everything procedes from reproduction, since this is what decides about consumption and the means to pay for [reproduction], these two causes react upon one another. Reproduction is the measure of consumption, and consumption is the measure of reproduction'
>
> Le Trosne also uses the phrase 'products can only be paid for by products [les productions ne se payant qu'avec des productions]' which is worth noting since Say used identical words in the Traite of 1803 (p.180). Also cf. Mill (1808:83).
>
> Commentators like Marx and Spengler have pointed out that Say owed more to the physiocrats than he let on. Before one can start thinking about the question what interruption to circular flow are possible one first needs a clear conception about what circular flow is and here ideas really go back to the great Quesnay (yes building on authors like Cantillon and Boisguilbert).
>
> Of course, unlike Say, the physiocrats stressed that interruptions are possible and can be persistent. One of them is 'hoarding' (besides landlords spending too small a proportion of their rent income on agricultural products and wrongheaded government policies like indirect taxes and trade restrictions). They did however not, as far as I am aware, write about the possibility of 'general gluts'. Arguably, not even British (pale) imitators like Gray and Spence (to whom Mill's 1808 work was a response) were talking about general gluts.
>
> Richard van den Berg
> ________________________________________
> From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>] On Behalf Of Daniele Besomi [[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>]
> Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2014 7:34 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [SHOE] L'offre crée même la deman de
>
> If we want to set the facts concerning Say's law straight, let's do it properly. Its history begins far earlier than Mill, since it is very precisely stated in a dictionary in 1780:
>
> ‘Nobody can be a buyer unless he is also a seller; since buying implies paying, nobody can buy unless he sells, because only by selling can he procure the money to buy what he buys. From the fact that every buyer must be a seller and that he can buy only if he sells, a second axiom results, namely, that every seller must also be a buyer, and he cannot sell unless he buys. Therefore every vendor must, by way of the purchases he performs in turn, provide everybody else with the money for buying the goods the vendor wants to sell them.’ There may not be perfect matching between individual sales and purchases, but if someone becomes richer by selling more than he buys, someone else is ruined by buying more than he sells, so that ‘by the opposition between these two sorts of disorder, equilibrium is re-established in the general mass of sales and purchases (entry on COMMERCE in Robinet’s Dictionnaire universel des sciences morale, économique, politique et diplomatique, vol. 12, pp. 444–445).
> ......
--
Dr Steven Kates
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