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There Is No Such Thing As Low-Wage Competitiveness

By Daniel Olah and Viktor Varpalotai.

An old myth

Moderate labor costs serve as the basis for the international economic success of a country – this has been the approach favored by policymakers and academicians since the eighties. Still today, most analyses and definitions of competitiveness refer primarily to cost and price factors since these are easy to measure. If you keep your wages down, foreign capital will find you – as the overly simplistic approach suggests, which is a very dangerous narrative.

Countries on the peripheries of the richer Western economies often tried to follow this path and it may indeed have been a crucial step towards attracting the much needed capital inflow into developing economies. Think of post-socialist countries which had to achieve what no one managed to do before: to transform their economies from a centrally planned one into a well-functioning market economy in just a few years without an adequate amount of capital, savings, technology, and know-how. A typical win-win situation: developing countries were offered a chance to integrate into global value chains, while companies outsourced production processes with low added value into these economies.

But there is a crucial problem with that: this is just the first period of childhood. To say so, the role of a low-wage model in an economy is similar to that of parents in human life: it is difficult to grow up without them in a healthy way, but once you are an adult you have to realize that you need to live your own life. This means commitment and efforts to move out from the parental nest. Although the low-wage model may be needed to grow up and acquire the potential for an own future life, every economy should move on. But this depends on willingness and ability as well since nothing comes for free. Becoming a successful adult is the most challenging transformation of our lives.

This story is exactly about being able to overcome the low-wage model. When the economy is growing in its childhood period it is key for economic development, but once it turns 18 it suddenly becomes an obstacle to it. The low-wage model conserves inefficient production methods and means no incentive for companies to innovate and invest in the future. A low-wage model is never truly competitive in the long-term: it is a necessary evil in the development process. Nicholas Kaldor already showed this decades ago.

It’s nothing new: Nicholas Kaldor already said that

Kaldor, the famous Hungarian economist of Cambridge University, claimed in 1978 that countries with the most dynamic economic growth tended to record the fastest growth in labor costs as well. The renown “Kaldor-paradox” may be confusing for policymakers influenced by the neoclassical mainstream. It tells us that keeping costs low may not lead to competitive advantages and faster economic growth. So let’s resurrect the Kaldorian ideas and see whether the relationship has changed at all (hint: it has not).

An Econ 101 course would tell us that there is no causality here, and it’s true. But another thing is valid as well: that average annual real GDP growth and the annual growth of unit labor costs per person employed are not negatively related in developed countries.

But let’s examine an even better measure, the export share of an economy, which is the best indicator to grasp export competitiveness in an international context. It shows us that in the case of OECD countries it is hard to find a negative relationship between unit labor costs and export market shares. (If we created two groups of OECD countries based on GDP per capita in international dollars we would find no relationship in case of the richer but strong positive relationship for the poorer countries.)

Increasing labor costs: a sign of economic success?

In fact, outside the pure neoclassical framework, the Kaldor-paradox is not a paradox anymore. A wide literature suggests that increasing real wages result in higher productivity: better quality of customer service, lower incidence of absences and higher discipline inside companies. Corporations gain on increasing labor productivity thanks to better housing, nutrition and education opportunities for workers. It is no coincidence that increasing wages improve mental performance and self-discipline as well (Wolfers & Zilinsky, 2015).

As for the companies, a main mechanism for adapting to increasing wages is to improve management and production processes and bring forward new investments. What is more: the often extremely large costs of fluctuation and that of recruiting workers may also be greatly reduced. And finally, the most important aspect: the increase of wages result in greater capacity utilization on the supply side, which results in growing capital stock in the economy (Palley, 2017). Could the Kaldor-paradox imply that most of the examined countries are wage-led (or demand-led) economies?

Several empirical results validate that export-competitiveness is nothing to do with depressed labor costs. Fagerberg (1988) analyzed 15 OECD countries between 1961 and 1983 – more thoroughly than this article does – and found the same results. He states that technological and capacity factors are the primary determinants of export competitiveness instead of prices. Fagerberg (1988) argues that the Japanese export successes are due to technology, capacity, and investments while the US and the UK lost market shares because they allocated resources from investing into production capabilities towards the military.

Storm and Nasteepad (2014) argues that the German recovery from the crisis is not primarily due to depressed wages but to corporatist economic policy, the key reason which focuses shared attention of capital, labor and government towards the development of industry and technology. As for Central-Europe, the case is the same: Bierut and Kuziemska-Pawlak (2016) finds that the doubling of Central-European export share is due to technology and institutions, and not due the cost of labor. In fact, unprecedented wage growth and dynamic export increases go hand in hand in many Central European countries nowadays.

And if we consider the new approach to competitiveness by Harvard-researchers then we come to the conclusion that economic complexity instead of wages is the key driver of future economic and export growth. Their competitiveness ranking seems much different from the traditional measure of the World Economic Forum, having the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and the Slovak Republic among the first 15 countries in the world. This shows that peripheric countries of the developed West may become deeply embedded in global value chains, becoming more and more organically complex and this complexity of their economic ecosystem has the potential for future growth – even despite forty years of communism.

This evidence shows that policymakers should be careful and conscious. Economic relationships or the adequate economic policy approaches may change faster than we think. Economies are just like children: they grow up so fast that we hardly notice it. That is what the stickiness of theories is about.

About the authors:

Daniel Olah is an Economics editor, writer and PhD student.

Viktor Varpalotai is the Deputy Head of Macroeconomic Policy Department at the Ministry of Finance, Hungary.

Behavioral Economics: Still Too Devoted To Homo Economicus?

How we interpret the “ultimatum game” suggests that it is. By Alexander Beunder.

It’s always an illuminating experience to discuss economic literature with non-economists, as these conversations often reveal the many blind spots of economists. Considering myself to be quite ‘pluralist’ and interdisciplinary in my economic thinking, a true adherent of the global Rethinking Economics movement (and somewhat involved in the Dutch branch), recent encounters with non-economists revealed I’m perhaps still more ‘orthodox’ than I thought.

These encounters revealed how one of my favorite fields – behavioral economics, a flourishing interdisciplinary field known for attacking the orthodox idea that people behave selfishly and rationally (as a homo economicus) – might still be too devoted to this idea they’re supposedly attacking. They revealed how standard interpretations of the ‘ultimatum game’ – a behavioral experiment which famously shows that people do not behave like homo economicus – might still be too tainted by the orthodox framework. Though behavioral economists have done a decent job in finding the anomalies in human behavior which seem to contradict economic rationality, they continue to, mistakenly, ‘rationalize’ behavior which can be rationalized.

As if the burden of proof is on them: people are rational until proven irrational.

They’re not.

Ultimatum Game: A Short Recap

Standard economics assumes people behave rationally and selfishly to maximize their individual welfare – as a homo economicus. Whether this is always true has been questioned even by the ‘founder’ of economics (see Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments from 1759) and, in recent decades, disproven convincingly by behavioral economists, conducting actual laboratory experiments with actual people.

A well-known experiment (even among cartoonists) undermining the notion of ‘economic rationality’ is the ultimatum game. For those unfamiliar with the game (others may skim), a short recap:

There are two players in the lab. The ‘Allocator’ is given a bag of money (say, 100 dollar). The Recipient’ starts with nothing. Then, the Allocator must offer the Recipient a portion of this bag (between 0 and 100). If the Recipient accepts, he/she will simply receive the accepted amount and the Allocator will keep the rest. If the Recipient rejects, both players receive zero! In the simple version, the game is played only once.

The results greatly contradicted the orthodox assumption of rationality. Under this assumption, the Recipient would never reject an amount higher than zero (even a penny) because by rejecting the individual payoff (the only thing homo economicus cares about) would be reduced to zero. However, real people generally do reject positive offers, especially relatively low ones. “The majority of recipients reject offers lower or equal to 20% of the endowment”, according to a meta-study of Tisserand, Le Gard and Le Gallo (2015).

The standard interpretation of this kind of seemingly ‘irrational’ behavior is that real people, unlike homo economicus, also care about values like, in this case, fairness. “The decline of an offer of .1c says, “I would rather sacrifice .1c than accept what I consider to be an unfair allocation of the stake”, economics professor Richard H. Thaler concluded in 1988. In economic parlance: “When a Recipient declines a positive offer, he signals that his utility function has non-monetary arguments”. (This ‘inequality aversion’ is also present in monkeys by the way).

And are the Allocators acting like homo economicus? That’s somewhat more complex. “The majority of proposers share equally, and offer 40% of their endowment on average”, say Tisserand e.a. This seems generous but can be ‘rationalized’; their main motive might be to avoid rejection (reducing the Allocator’s payoff to zero). However, results from a different game suggest there are also some non-monetary motives at play. The ‘dictator game’, developed by Daniel Kahneman, is the ultimatum game without the veto-power of the Recipient; the almighty Allocator can now offer zero without risking rejection and losing everything. However, Allocators keep offering positive amounts – between 20%-30% of the bag, according to Tisserand e.a. This can not be rationalized as homo economicus would, as a dictator, offer zero.

What’s Possibly Wrong With This Interpretation?

In recent decades, behavioral economics succeeded in demonstrating numerous ‘anomalies’ in a great variety of games; human decisions that can not be ‘rationalized’ and prove that people are no homo economicus but more complex beings. That is the great merit of the field.

Still, behavioral economists mistakenly observe a homo economicus when there’s no clear evidence for its existence. How can that be?

For example, when a Recipient accepts one penny from a bag of 100 dollar in the ultimatum game. This decision seems entirely rational and selfish and is labelled as such in the literature. Only a true homo economicus would accept one penny over zero pennies, ignoring the great unfairness of being offered only 0,01 percent of the bag of money (100 dollar).

I never doubted this standard interpretation, until I asked a non-economist friend what she would do if she was offered a penny in the ultimatum game. “I would accept”, she replied decisively. It surprised me as she’s normally very ‘progressive’ in her opinions – someone who cares a lot about ‘fairness’ – but she answered like a homo economicus. “Wouldn’t you think it’s unfair?”, I asked. “But if I reject the other one would also receive nothing, right? That’s a waste!”

So she’s accepting a low offer, like a homo economicus would do, but primarily because it would make the other person better off. Acting as a homo economicus because of her altruism. (One might even say she’s being extremely altruistic, as she’s being kind to someone who’s extremely unfair to her).

Wondering whether this was just a radical outlier to be ignored safely, I asked two other people (who had not heard each other’s answers) the same question and received exactly the same answers three times in a row!

It was surprising because it contradicted the standard interpretation, but it was perhaps even more surprising that I was surprised. Why did I not think of the possibility that a Recipient might accept a penny because of altruism instead of egoism myself? I had read at least a dozen of papers in which the ultimatum game was central or described elaborately. How come I had not thought of this possibility, which could have been ‘discovered’ by just using common sense?

Part of the reason must be that, in general, the literature on the ultimatum game doesn’t seem to question the rationality of the Recipient (but if you know of literature which does, do send!). It seems that even behavioral economics has its limits; it limits itself to ‘irrationalizing’ those actions that cannot be rationalized. As the decision to accept a penny can be ‘rationalized’ and explained within the orthodox paradigm, it is rationalized.

Behavioral economists ask: “Will subjects behave optimally? And if not, why … ” (Güth, Schmittberger and Schwarze (1983) in the first paper on the ultimatum game). Only when subjects do not behave optimally will they search for alternative, unorthodox explanations of human behavior. Behavioral economists focus on the, in the words of Thaler (1988), “anomalies” which are “difficult to “rationalize” or for which “implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the paradigm”.

There seems to be a tendency to assume rationality until the opposite is proven, or until the “anomaly” is found which cannot be rationalized. It is as if behavioral economists accept that the burden of proof is on them: humans are rational until proven irrational.

Of course, new experiments might reveal that human decisions which were previously ‘rationalized’ are actually completely or partially irrational (note the previously mentioned findings from the dictator game). However, this only highlights that the point of departure is economic rationality (rational until proven irrational).

This is problematic, as there is no convincing evidence for the idea that economic rationality is the ‘standard’ from which humans occasionally deviate. So why does behavioral economics start from a flawed foundation? Why is it still too devoted to the idea of the homo economicus, even though it has a reputation of aggressively undermining this concept? And how does this compromise the field?

A Symbiotic Relationship with Standard Economics

In its defense, there is an obvious explanation. Behavioral economics is still ‘in a relationship’ with orthodox economics and, in a relationship, one makes compromises. As Wolfgang Pesendorfer (2006) concludes in an evaluation of the field: “Behavioral economics remains a discipline that is organized around the failures of standard economics” and has a “symbiotic relationship with standard economics” which “works well as long as small changes to standard assumptions are made”.

We all know how stubborn the other side in this relationship is: standard economics will always ‘rationalize’ behavior wherever it can and will only recognize ‘irrationality’ when there is clear and convincing evidence of it. Understandably, behavioral economics devoted itself to finding this evidence – the “anomalies”, in the words of Thaler (1988), which are “difficult to “rationalize”. And surely, it has done an impressive job in finding them.

However, accepting this burden of proof remains problematic, for several reasons. Firstly, it will lead to false positives; ‘rationalizing’ behavior where rationality might, in reality, be absent. What’s more, in doing this, the field will repeatedly lend credence to the flawed concept of the homo economicus. Secondly, it will lead to false negatives; failing to observe ‘irrationality’ (like altruism) when clear and convincing evidence of it is lacking, or perhaps even impossible to produce, thereby ignoring the complexity of human motives. (What’s more, “that’s mean!”, the first person from my sample replied when I told her that her decision to accept a penny is normally labeled rational and selfish. Of course, no one likes to be labeled selfish when they feel they’re being generous.)

This article mentions only one example of a false positive/false negative, but we might discover many more once we rid ourselves of the orthodox idea that economic ‘rationality’ is the standard from which humans occasionally deviate. For example, when you’re buying a cup of coffee, which can be completely ‘rationalized’. But who knows? Perhaps you actually dislike coffee but wish to support the owner of the bar who is also your friend.

All of the above is not meant to downplay the achievements of behavioral economics. Neither to deny that economic rationality exists to a certain extent in certain situations. It is simply to argue that one shouldn’t label behavior rational and selfish without any convincing evidence for it, and behavioral economists might have done so too often.

It is to argue that behavioral economics should not let its “symbiotic relationship” with standard economics limit its own ambitions. This relationship, as Pesendorfer (2006) says, “works well as long as small changes to standard assumptions are made”. We should not fear bigger changes.

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REFERENCES

Güth, Werner, Rolf Schnittberger, and Bernd Schwarze (1982). “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 3, 367-88.

Pesendorfer, Wolfgang (2006). “Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A Review Essay on Advances in Behavioral Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature. 44(3): 712–721.

Thaler, R.H. (1988). “Anomalies; The ultimatum game.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 2, 195–206.

Tisserand J. C., Cochard F., Le Gallo J. (2015). “Altruistic or Strategic Considerations: A Meta-Analysis on the Ultimatum and Dictator Games”. Besançon: University in Besançon.

About the Author: Alexander Beunder is an independent journalist, economics tutor at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and previously involved in the Dutch branch of Rethinking Economics.

Rethinking Economic Growth: A Review of “The Growth Delusion” by David Pilling

By Raghunath Nageswaran.

If economic exchange determined by the market forces of demand and supply provided the right incentives for production, how should the exercise of measuring the economy and its performance be undertaken? When did the project of measuring the economy take off and why? Does Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the summary indicator of economic activity, reflect the significant facts of our economic life? And if it doesn’t, what can be done to ensure that it does, going forward?

David Pilling offers some thoughtful and interesting answers to such questions in his book The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations. The book is not a tirade against economic growth; it is not an anti-growth or a de-growth manifesto. Pilling makes his intention to broaden the conversation on growth very clear by including the words “wealth” and “well-being” in the title, concepts that go beyond the narrow definition of economic growth as an expansion in the flow of goods and services measured in monetary terms.

That GDP growth has become a proxy not just for the economic success of a country as measured in material terms, but also for the well-being of its people is a stark reminder about our fixation with an indicator that was devised to measure physical production during the interwar period. The notion of “economy” as an entity to be managed and captured in quantitative/monetary terms by experts came into vogue less than a century ago during the Great Depression years after Simon Kuznets presented his survey of the economic performance of the United States in the report National Income, 1929-32. This effort marked the birth of systematic national income accounting. But Pilling reminds us that:

Kuznets was striving for a measure that would reflect welfare rather than what he considered a crude summation of all activity. He wanted to exclude illegal activities, socially harmful industries, and most government spending. On many of these issues he lost.

This must serve as a useful counterpoint while arguing with uncritical enthusiasts of GDP, who baulk at the idea of using a different set of measures for capturing social welfare in its truest sense—people possessing the agency and capabilities to do things they have reason to value, as Prof. Amartya Sen has persuasively argued in his writings. GDP is not reflective of such a holistic idea of welfare because that would entail an assessment of the distributional impact of growth on various sections of the society, which the GDP isn’t equipped to measure or capture.

One must remember that the measurement of GDP is not a value-free exercise. A whole range of value judgements and assumptions are involved in the demarcation of the production boundary, therefore it shouldn’t be regarded as an innocent measure of economic activity. It is a deeply moral and political affair. The starkest example is the exclusion of household activity undertaken mostly by women, which is considered “unproductive” by conventional national accounting norms. Several scholars have developed and applied tools that measure the amounts of unpaid work done by women using time-use data and by imputing values to an entire gamut of chores, from dish-washing through breast-feeding to child-rearing.

Regarding the efficacy of economic growth as a means of furthering human welfare, there is a view among well-meaning sceptics that developed economies must get over their obsession with unfettered growth enabled by the endless cycle of production and consumption. In the book Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth uses the term “growth agnosticism” to drive home the point that developed countries should ensure that their people continue to thrive irrespective of the trends in economic growth.

While this is the outlook for the developed world, there seems to be a resounding faith in the indispensability of economic growth as a nostrum for developing countries. It rests on the belief that only faster growth can lift people out of poverty and generate more resources for creating a redistributive design. This is a contestable argument, given the inequality enhancing nature of economic growth we have seen in different parts of the world in the last three decades. It would be instructive to go beyond standard narratives to acknowledge the fact that growth doesn’t automatically translate into better living conditions for people, especially when the fruits of growth are mediated by the various fault-lines in the society, not to mention the very framework within which economic growth of a predatory variety takes place.

There are interesting and practicable proposals for ensuring that GDP is reflective of the “trade-offs” involved in our single-minded pursuit of economic growth in part three of the book. It is in this section that Pilling turns the spotlight on “the wealth and well-being of nations.” The chapter titled Wealth is a culmination of Pilling’s effort to indict us for our collective disregard for natural ecosystems from which we draw all our resources and inputs to undertake various economic activities. He draws our attention to the crassness and instrumentalism that characterize our ambition of maximizing current incomes. He says:

Recording today’s national income offers no help whatsoever when making intergenerational decisions. The signal it sends is to maximize growth today no matter what the impact tomorrow. At the extreme, one generation might use up all a nation’s forest cover and all its oil reserves in the interests of double-digit growth and in the expectation that future generations will somehow sort things out. Today a government pushing such policies would point to rapid growth as a justification for its actions.

This short-sighted approach to resource use and management has its origins in the theory that defines efficiency in most primitive terms: make the most of existing resources by allocating those to the profitable areas of production, which is determined by the existing pattern of income distribution. We need to recognize that the humane way of managing natural resources is to augment them and not depleting them for current consumption purposes. That way, both efficiency and equity concerns can be addressed as we allow resources to regenerate themselves and leave behind enough resources for posterity. Pilling’s conversation with the sagacious environmental economist Partha Dasgupta is by far the most illuminating section of this book. After positing that we need to take a balance-sheet view of economic progress to get a big-picture view of the state of our resources, Pilling shares nuggets of wisdom offered by Dasgupta. Dasgupta takes the broadest possible view of wealth/assets and says that:

Contemporary models of economic growth and development regard nature to be fixed, an indestructible factor of production. The problem with that assumption is that it is wrong. Nature is a mosaic of degradable assets. Agricultural land, forests, wetlands, the atmosphere—more generally, ecosystems—are assets that are self-regenerative, but can suffer from deterioration or depletion through human use.

The enduring impact of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism can be evidenced by the fact that individual utility, expressed in terms of market price, is still considered to be the best proxy for the subjective well-being of human beings, and it forms the bedrock of the measurement of social welfare in many theoretical exercises. The utilitarian way of looking at happiness and well-being has been the dominant principle for justifying all kinds of economic decisions and actions. While the standard interpretation of utilitarianism is the maximization of overall welfare, achieved when competing economic individuals are left alone to make “rational” decisions, a more creative and humane interpretation of the principle can focus on cooperation instead of competition and solidarity as against selfishness to maximize welfare.

It is certainly nobody’s argument that alternative measures such as Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index (GHI) and composite indices such as the Human Development Index (HDI) are necessarily fail-safe. As Pilling says in the opening paragraph of the last chapter, “if the beauty of GDP is aggregation, that is also its biggest flaw. No single number can capture all that is worth knowing in life”. The way forward is to use a dashboard of indicators that will reflect the variegated aspects of human life and the state of resources in the economy.

It is also imperative to seriously rethink the nature, composition, and distribution of economic growth in order to make growth, and its GDP measure, humane. Economic thinkers belonging to the “classical school” of economic thought believed that the question of distribution of surplus couldn’t be separated from production, as the contribution of different economic classes to social production was dictated by the prior distribution of endowments among them. To turn the focus back to ‘distribution’ we can draw inspiration and insights from the classical school.

The Growth Delusion is a highly readable and insightful book. It covers a lot of ground and the examples offered are wide-ranging. Pilling’s journalistic fervour and sharp wit make the narrative engaging. As the old Chinese proverb goes, a thousand mile journey begins with a single step. This book promises to be one such step in a long journey towards our realization that growth is a useful tool but an intolerable tyranny.

Raghunath Nageswaran has an M.A. in Economics from Madras Christian College, Chennai (India). He is a student of Indian democracy and political economy.

For Bold Solutions We Ought To Include MMT in Economic Discourse

By Justin R. Harbour, ALM

In a recent Financial Times article, Martin Sandbu identifies three major economic failures of competitive capitalism in the West: growing inequality; the disproportionate effects of The Great Recession on young people; and the threat of displacement in labor markets brought by improving technology and the presumed ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Sandbu connects these failures to recent victories of populist “extremist” parties in the EU, UK, and US, and asserts that if liberalism and competitive capitalism are to remain a viable and persuasive platform for the next generations a bolder thinking from the Western political economy is now more necessary than ever.

This need to revamp Western capitalism has brought renewed attention to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a school of thought that offers an important and bold perspective on economics and policy solutions. A universal basic income (UBI), universal basic services (UBS), and a job guarantee by the State are most commonly cited as a bold fix to current problems. So, it is worth asking, what are the merits of these aforementioned proposals, through the lens of MMT?

The Failures of Competitive Capitalism

To answer this question, we first look at the failures of the competitive capitalism. Growing inequality is nearly universal. According to the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD), the growth in inequality between the incomes of the top 10% of earners and the bottom 10% has not stopped since 1985:

The Great Recession accelerated this trend and brought into stark relief the confounding need of the West to rescue and protect the Recession’s primary contributors (i.e., “too big to fail” banks). This approach made the resulting trends in unemployment all the harder to take, especially for the West’s younger workers. A 2012 report on the employment effects of The Great Recession by Stanford University found that those groups hit hardest were found those 25-54 years of age (i.e., the “prime working age” range, and hence a significant variable in overall economic growth). The report also found that minority groups found themselves bearing more of the burden than their racial-majority peers. A similar report from the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis found that the recovery rates from unemployment after The Great Recession were lowest amongst younger prime-age workers and older workers. In Europe the young have fared even worse, according to a recent report from Eurostat:

The story for wealth creation and asset acquisition for younger citizens homeownership is similarly alarming. Since World War II, homeownership has been considered to be the financial outcome indicative of a successful economy due to its positive value as a long-term asset. The decline in home ownership thus includes a worrying picture, ceteris paribus. As shown in the graph below, declining home ownership in the United States accelerated during the Recession, and remains at a rate not experienced since the economic boom of the nineties:

Though homeownership is less likely to be understood as a sign of economic success and health in Europe, research suggests a similar trend in declining home ownership in the aftermath of the Great Recession was also seen in the EU. Taken together, these trends make a generation’s economic skepticism of the ability of our current economy to deliver prosperity more of a logical first principle than not.

Three bold proposals to address this skepticism have become nearly commonplace in such reform-minded discourse: a UBI, a UBS, and a job guarantee. What does each propose, and which is best suited to address the issues identified above?

Three Bold Proposals

A UBI offers all citizens a basic level of income. UBI’s proponents commonly claim that this income is necessary for a variety of reasons. The fear of artificial intelligence taking over traditional labor tasks is commonly cited in defense of UBI. Some UBI proponents also argue that such an income would enhance human freedom by providing an option free from coercive and freedom-reducing labor arrangements. A UBI could also streamline social entitlement spending to be more efficient and less bureaucratic. A UBS does not offer income, but a variety of services deemed essential to maximize freedom and economic potential. Though the services offered differ between advocates, they often include improved and free public transportation, access to the internet, and job training, among others. A job guarantee is just as it sounds: anyone needing or wanting work but currently out of work would be offered a job by the local government to provide labor and/or services toward local projects that a community needs.

Each of these proposals includes explicit costs that must be heavily weighed. For example, the literal cost of providing a UBI substantial enough to achieve its purpose is very high. Some have suggested that its cost could range in the 30-40 trillion-dollar range in the United States. Cost-of-living variations also diminish the streamlining argument for a UBI since adjusting it for regional purchasing parity may make it even more complex bureaucratically than the current system. Explicit costs also represent an issue for UBS, though ostensibly less so than a UBI. Though the job guarantee does face some cost concerns, important work has recently demonstrated that the opportunity costs of such a program are well worth the explicit costs it may incur.

Though each proposal is bold in its promises and its trade-offs, the more important question here is which offers a better redress of the concerns raised by the Great Recession. It appears that the job guarantee is the better situated to address all those concerns on both explicit and implicit cost fronts. The job guarantee addresses the unemployment problem and wages problem directly. The job guarantee has the additional appeal of making it more likely that the newly employed will accumulate enough wealth to make home ownership an attractive option, and thus satisfy the third concern. Conversely, a UBI only deals with the wage issue directly and therefore the unemployment problem indirectly, while a UBS program does not address any of the problems directly. There are several other variables at play that strengthen the argument for job guarantee over the others. Most importantly, the job guarantee is the only one that signals the value of work – an implication necessary for future growth if an economy hopes to move beyond its current frontier. In doing so, it is more likely to find traction in our polarized political paradigm by avoiding the typical debates associated with strengthening social safety nets.

The Rise of Modern Monetary Theory

The economic school most strongly advocating for the affordability of a job guarantee program – Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – has been experiencing a surge of public interest and acceptance as of late. This is not to say it is brand new or has not been trying to advocate for the policies its theory substantiates for a long time. But its appeal since the experience of the Great Recession is obvious once one digs into it. MMT is a theory of sovereign monetary policy that asserts that sovereign nations that issue debt in its own fiat currency cannot ever run out of money. Any restraint by a nation on their spending for any reason, including to stimulate demand or provide needed relief is, therefore, a purely political decision, and only restrained by the availability of real resources. MMT’s advocates thus model how under MMT’s reorientation of fiscal perspective, a nation’s fiscal and monetary policy options are much broader than under older and perhaps more dominant paradigms. The implication is that there are bolder and further reaching policy options always available to state to provide relief for distressed citizens during downturns if they can move beyond the unnecessary concerns for debt and deficits during such times.

The most notable of MMT’s more active contemporary economists include L. Randall Wray, Warren Mosler, and Stephanie Kelton. There are several websites dedicated to the defense of its theory by these authors and others: one by another of its theorists Bill Mitchell; and The Minskys, so named to honor one of the more prominent economists to set the foundations of MMT, Hyman Minsky. Of additional note would be Ms. Kelton’s work with the campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and her recent inclusion into Bloomberg View’s stable of writers – an inclusion suggesting that MMT’s theories are gaining traction. There have also been recent news items such as a history of MMT in Vice News and a review of its contemporary appeal in The Nation. Finally, there has been the consistent work and advocacy of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. MMT, in other words, appears here to stay.

Important work has been produced recently by MMT economists as well. In the United States, the Levy Institute recently published a report on the macroeconomic effects of canceling all student debt. The report finds that effects of such a policy would have a greater economic stimulus on employment and GDP than its costs can reasonably argue against. So too did the Levy Institute publish a report on the feasibility of the guaranteed job program discussed above. The job guarantee has helpfully garnered bipartisan support from the political right, left, and center.

Though popular within certain corners of the public sphere and gaining traction, it is not without its legitimate faults and challenges. Nonetheless, an undergraduate or higher level secondary student is unlikely to be exposed to MMT during their introductory training. I am not here suggesting that the more traditional curriculum is not appropriate for introductory students, nor universally ambivalent about the inclusion of emerging theories. But I am saying that for some teachers and some curriculums, finding ways to include such exciting emerging work with profound implications on their economic thinking and potentially their communities are harder the more they are not engaged with by “mainstream” outlets. What’s more, some of the more ubiquitous and far-reaching introductory curriculums (Advanced Placement in America, for example, or the International Baccalaureate program) don’t consider it at all.

At a time when some are rightfully calling for economists to better communicate economic concepts, ignoring newer and bolder conceptions of economic pillars that have popular momentum and real-world applicability behind them – such as MMT – leaves a fruitful learning opportunity to advance economic thinking and communicating skills for the youngest of economists at the door. Mr. Sandbu is right; the experience of the Great Recession by Gen Xers, Millennials, and those closely on their heels demands bold reform to reanimate the economy’s perceived legitimacy. A generation of economists and their work will be informed by their experience with the Great Recession. Let us all hope that MMT and its similar promising competitors are taken as seriously as the older theories so that we can rethink and rebuild economics in a way that makes economic thinking and understanding economic theory a universal pillar to our civic discourse.

About the author

Justin Harbour is currently an Instructor for Advanced Placement Economics at La Salle College High School in Philadelphia, PA. Having studied history, government, and political economy at UMASS, Amherst and Harvard University, he has previously published book reviews on teaching and education for the Teacher’s College Record and essays in CLIO: Newsletter of Politics and History, The World History Bulletin, and Political Animal. Justin lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children. Follow him on twitter @jrharbour1

Buying Power: an often neglected, yet essential concept for economics

Buying power is a concept that is absent from basic economic theory, and this has major implications both for theory and for the practical issues that we face. This absence is odd because buying power is central to how the economy works. Its importance is not a new observation.

By Michael Joffe.

In 1776, Adam Smith wrote that the degree to which a “man is rich or poor” depends mainly on the quantity of other people’s “labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase” (emphasis added). However, this idea of differential buying power has never been incorporated into economic theory, despite it being an obvious feature of the world we live in. The extent of a person’s disposable income and wealth gives them a corresponding degree of influence. It is like a voting system, where everybody votes for their view of what the economy should produce, but where the number of votes is very unequal. The term “power” here is best understood as meaning the degree of ability of a person or organization to bring something about. It is a causal (not e.g. a moral or political) concept.

Examples of its importance are everywhere. When prices rise, some potential consumers may be excluded – a form of rationing. In pleasant locations, affluent urban dwellers buy holiday homes, crowding out the local inhabitants who do not have the buying power to compete and therefore may have to leave the area. In low-income countries, the amount of transactional sex depends on inequality (the buying power of richer men), not poverty. Any industry depends on its (potential) customers’ buying power for support: washing machine manufacture is only possible if there is a market of people who can afford their product; luxury goods such as mega-yachts exist because there are mega-rich people to buy them.

Firms also have buying power, in varying degree, which enables them to transform the world, e.g. by taking possession of land and natural resources. Within the firm, the employers’ buying power is what enables them to employ workers, thereby creating the authority structure. And shareholders’ influence over the conduct of firms’ directors results from their ability to have bought shares. Finally, when China’s economy was expanding rapidly, its buying power created a worldwide commodities boom, with major impacts on (for example) Australia and Brazil, an impact that has diminished in recent years.

With a concept that is so obvious, one might expect it to be a prominent feature of economic theory. But in fact, it is only patchily represented. Notably, basic consumer theory obscures it completely, by looking at a potential consumer’s decision making given the amount of money that they have to spend – the fixed “budget constraint”. This naturally leads to a conception of the economy that neglects the role of effective demand.

At the aggregate level, in macroeconomics, buying power is represented: it is Keynes’ key concept of aggregate demand. It is also implicit in the flow diagrams that are often used to introduce students to economics, showing two-way flows with money in one direction and goods/services in the other, e.g. between households and firms in the aggregate.

Much of the controversy in economics is concerned with disputes over the competing varieties of macroeconomic theory, and other topics that are directly policy related. Commentators often say that micro is in a satisfactory condition, e.g. on the grounds that it is largely evidence-driven in specific areas such as labor economics, healthcare, education, etc. It is true that some good work is done in these applied areas. But the implication is that macro is the only problem, and this lets mainstream micro theory off the hook.

One implication – which is replicated across sub-disciplines such as health economics – is that the focus is mainly on the willingness to pay, obscuring the importance of the ability to pay. More broadly, it means that economics is a form of decision theory, and this often produces a default way of thinking that treats inequalities as an afterthought, rather than being inherent in how the economy operates. It has taken a huge rise in inequality in countries like the US and the UK, plus Piketty’s best-selling book, to bring this issue to mainstream attention.

This is especially problematic in the context of the widespread orthodox view that macro theory should be based on “micro-foundations” as if the micro theory is totally unproblematic. It implies adopting the extreme version of rationality assumed by mainstream microeconomic theorists, as well as optimization and so on. Naturally, there must be some correspondence between theories at the micro and macro levels – but that needs to involve concepts that correspond to the real world, both at the micro and macro levels.

But there is more: buying power is not the only type of economic power that we fail to recognize. Whilst monopoly power features in textbook economics and bargaining power is recognized, e.g. in game theory, other important types are neglected. These include corporate power and the power of the financial sector including the power of banks to create money. They overlap to some extent with buying power, but also have additional features that are beyond the scope of this article. This analysis is part of a broader rethinking of the foundations of economics, using concepts that actually correspond to the way the economy works – evidence-based economics.

Vast disparities in buying power have major macroeconomic and societal results. Inequality tends to lead to private-sector debt, which creates a vicious cycle, further enhancing the inequality. Private-sector debt also generates systemic instability and a risk of financial crisis. An IMF study concluded that restoring the bargaining power of the lower income groups would be the best way of reducing this debt, and enhancing the stability of the system.

Another consequence is environmental: increasingly rich consumers, in satisfying their wants, inflate their ecological footprints and damage the carrying capacity of the Earth. Recognizing and addressing over-consumption can play a major part in reducing our environmental impact.

Thus, buying power plays a central role, both in how the economy works and in pressing practical issues, and it is a serious error to ignore it. By incorporating it into our core thinking, we will be much better equipped to understand the economy and to address the challenges of increasing inequality, systemic instability, and environmental degradation.

About the Author
Michael Joffe was originally trained as a biologist, and for many years carried out epidemiological research at Imperial College, where he is still attached. He now applies his insight into the way that the natural sciences generate secure causal knowledge to his work in economics.

International Trade and Globalization: Are Benefits Truly Mutual?

By Aabid Firdausi.

The euphoria around international trade and the general consensus regarding capitalism’s inevitable sustenance among countries of the Global South is at least partly due to the absence of an alternative after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The politics of capitalism, with its expansionary dynamics, has assumed a truly “global” avatar by aggressively pursuing a neoliberal globalization agenda. Thus, we see much hype around the numerous trade treaties that governments around the world sign, claiming they would boost economic growth and create jobs. However, a critical examination of mainstream trade theories reveals several insights as to why there has been a hegemony of thought when it comes to attitudes around globalization.

The idea that “free” trade and globalization imply mutual benefits and prosperity for all the parties involved is simply accepted as common sense. Mainstream trade theories argue that if nations engage in international exchange, then all parties will be better off. Although this seemingly innocuous assumption is based on an unrealistic worldview, it has deep implications when translated into practice. This article provides a basic understanding of some of the areas that theories in mainstream international economics conveniently ignore.

It is pertinent that we pause and critically question what we are told, taught, and made to believe – for nothing that is promoted with such great fanfare by economic elites can be free of costs. When it comes to trade treaties, the devil often lies in the details, which often reveal policies that lead to the further immiseration of the working class and the peasantry, especially in the Global South. First, it is extremely important to understand trade in a historical perspective and how it has changed with different epochs within capitalism. The North-South trade in many instances was first a colonial tragedy (the British colonization of India, for example) and has now become a neo-colonial farce. This manifests itself in the myriad ways in how multinationals shape spheres of public and private actions from land-grabbing to a homogenization of consumption patterns.

Secondly, international trade theories blatantly disregard the asymmetric power relations that exist in the global political economy. Despite the dichotomous classification of nations on the basis of the degree of development, trade theories often assume that transactions between two unequal nations tend to benefit both. While it is naïve to discard any benefits at all from the process, it is essential that we ask who frames these trade policies and what sections of society receives the lion’s share of the benefits.

Third, mainstream theories often categorize labor and capital as homogenous and lump them together as factors of production. In reality, as it is obvious, labor and capital are far from homogenous. A critical reader looking at these flawed assumptions that most theories rest upon could easily conclude they would better suit interregional trade on an extremely local basis, than an international basis! The variations in factors on a local level would be significantly smaller than the variations and imbalances that exist on a broader scale.

Fourth, I would argue that trade theories commit a grave injustice in its treatment of labor, which shows the class nature of most theories and the subsequent policies that are influenced by it. Cheap labor is often hailed as a virtue of the Global South – and this is projected as an open invitation to set up sweatshops for global capital in the name of manufacturing competitiveness. Thus, the hegemonic narrative around the potential for trade is essentially dehumanizing in nature. Such trends that have been persistent since the vigorous promotion of mathematical economics have largely dissociated the discipline from the wider branch of social science.

Fifth, there exists a systematic misdiagnosis of the power relation between capital and labor. This is perhaps most evident in the asymmetries observed in the globalization of capital and the globalization of labor. While the former has largely been internationally mobile, the latter has not been so. Though this can be partially explained by the existence of the state and its territorial boundaries, it would be foolish to discard the class dynamics of this asymmetric transnational mobility.

Finally, the after-effects of (primitive) accumulation have largely been ignored in mainstream theories. The presence of regional endowments that creates a fertile land for foreign capital and the subsequent invitation of the so-called job-creating corporations ignore the displacement of the livelihoods of the peasantry. This dispossession that Marx referred to as the primitive accumulation has been rampant in the Global South. However, the compensation and rehabilitation provided to the dispossessed have largely been inadequate. This raises larger questions about what development actually is and whose interests it serves.

Thus, it is important that we see through the haze and understand the basis and implications of mainstream theories on trade, and who they truly favor. What is taught in classrooms shapes to a large extent convictions and the worldview of a large number of students. There is a pressing need to promote and develop alternative streams of thought that are “social” in nature amidst the contemporary backlash against capitalist globalization. It is necessary that an interdisciplinary perspective on globalization in general and international trade, in particular, is cultivated in academic institutions in the Global North and South. Only then can we undo the hegemony of the “globalization benefits all” narrative.

Aabid Firdausi is from India and is a Master’s student at the Department of Economics, University of Kerala. He is interested in understanding the socio-spatial dynamics of capitalism from an interdisciplinary perspective.

How Progressives Can Win Big: Casting out the Spirit of Defeatism, One Keystroke at a Time

By Steve Grumbine.

Progressives Trigger warning: Compassion required. When is the last time you heard Greens, Berniecrats or Indie voters not acknowledge the distinct and pressing need for election reform, campaign finance reform, voting reform? More to the point, when haven’t they mentioned unleashing 3rd parties from the fringe of irrelevancy and up onto the debate stage?

That is mostly what is talked about, simply because it is low hanging fruit.

It has long been known that our electoral system and methods of voting are corrupt, untrustworthy, and easily manipulated by less than savvy politicians, state actors, and hackers alike. The answers to many of these issues is the same answer that we would need to push for any progressive reforms to take place in America: namely, we need enlightened, fiery, peaceful, and committed activists to propel a movement and ensure that the people rise, face their oppressors, and unify to demand that their needs be met.

What is not as well-known, however, is how a movement, the government, and taxes work together to bring about massive changes in programs, new spending, and the always scary “National Debt” (should be “National Assets”, but I will speak to that later). In fact, this subject is so poorly understood by many well-meaning people on all sides of the aisle that these issues are the most important we face as a nation. Until we understand them and have the confidence and precision necessary to destroy the myths and legends we have substituted in the absence of truth and knowledge, it must remain front and center to the movement.

Progressives, like most Americans, are almost religiously attached to the terms “the taxpayer dollar,” and the idea that their “hard earned tax dollars” are being misappropriated. Often, the most difficult pill for people to swallow is the concept that our Federal Government is self-funding and creates the very money it “spends”. It isn’t spending your tax dollars at all. To demonstrate this, consider this simplified flow chart:

These truths bring on even more hand wringing, because to the average voter they raise the issue of where taxes, tax revenue, government borrowing, and the misleading idea of the “National Debt” (which is nothing more than the sum of every single not yet taxed federal high-powered dollar in existence) fit into the federal spending picture. The answer is that they really don’t.

A terrible deception has been perpetrated on the American people. We have been led to believe that the US borrows its own currency from foreign nations, that the money gathered from borrowing and collected from taxing funds federal spending. We have also been led to believe that gold is somehow the only real currency, that somehow our nation is broke because we don’t own much gold compared to the money we create, and that we are on the precipice of some massive collapse, etc. because of that shortage of gold.

The American people have been taught single entry accounting instead of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, or GAAP-approved double entry accounting, where every single asset has a corresponding liability; which means that every single dollar has a corresponding legal commitment. Every single dollar by accounting identity is nothing more than a tax credit waiting to be extinguished. Sadly, many only see the government, the actual dollar creator, as having debt; that it has liabilities, not that we the people have assets; assets that we need more and more of as time goes on, to achieve any semblance of personal freedom and relative security from harm.

In other words, at the Federal level it is neither your tax dollars nor the dollars collected from sales of Treasury debt instruments that are spent. Every single dollar the Federal Government spends is new money.

Every dollar is keystroked into existence. Every single one of them. Which brings up the next question: “Where do our hard-earned tax dollars and borrowed dollars go if, in fact, they do not pay for spending on roads, schools, bombs and propaganda?” We already know the answer. They are destroyed by the Federal Reserve when they mark down the Treasury’s accounts.

In Professor Stephanie Kelton’s article in the LA Times “Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies)” (which you can find here ) She states quite plainly:

“Whoa, cowboy! Are you telling me that the government can just make money appear out of nowhere, like magic? Absolutely. Congress has special powers: It’s the patent-holder on the U.S. dollar. No one else is legally allowed to create it. This means that Congress can always afford the pony because it can always create the money to pay for it.”

That alone should raise eyebrows and cause you to reconsider a great many things you may have once thought. It will possibly cause you to fall back to old, neoclassical text book understandings as well, which she deftly anticipates and answers with:

“Now, that doesn’t mean the government can buy absolutely anything it wants in absolutely any quantity at absolutely any speed. (Say, a pony for each of the 320 million men, women and children in the United States, by tomorrow.) That’s because our economy has internal limits. If the government tries to buy too much of something, it will drive up prices as the economy struggles to keep up with the demand. Inflation can spiral out of control. There are plenty of ways for the government to get a handle on inflation, though. For example, it can take money out of the economy through taxation.”

And there it is. The limitation everyone is wondering about. Where is the spending limit?

When we run out of real resources. Not pieces of paper or keystrokes. Real resources.

To compound your bewilderment, would it stretch your credulity too much to say that the birth of a dollar is congressional spending and the death of a dollar is when it is received as a tax payment, or in return for a Treasury debt instrument, and deleted? Would that make your head explode? Let the explosions begin, because that is exactly what happens.

Money is a temporary thing. Even in the old days we heard so many wax poetically about how they took wheelbarrows of government — and bank – printed IOUs to the burn pile, and set the dollar funeral pyre ablaze.

In the same LA Times piece, Professor Kelton goes on to say:

“Since none of us learned any differently, most of us accept the idea that taxes and borrowing precede spending – TABS. And because the government has to “find the money” before it can spend in this sequence, everyone wants to know who’s picking up the tab.

There’s just one catch. The big secret in Washington is that the federal government abandoned TABS back when it dropped the gold standard. Here’s how things really work:

Congress approves the spending and the money gets spent (S)
Government collects some of that money in the form of taxes (T)
If 1 > 2, Treasury allows the difference to be swapped for government bonds (B)

In other words, the government spends money and then collects some money back as people pay their taxes and buy bonds. Spending precedes taxing and borrowing – STAB. It takes votes and vocal interest groups, not tax revenue, to start the ball rolling.”

Let’s be clear, we are not talking about the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. We are not talking about Gandalf the Grey or Bilbo Baggins. We are not referencing “my precious!”. It’s not gold, or some other commodity people like to hold, taste and smell. It is simply a tally. Yet somehow, we have convinced ourselves that there is a scarcity of dollars, when it is the resources that are scarce. We have created what Attorney Steven Larchuk calls a “Dollar Famine”.

To quote Warren Mosler in his must-read book “The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” (you can download a free copy right here) he states:

“Next question: “So how does government spend when they never actually have anything to spend?”

Good question! Let’s now take a look at the process of how government spends.

Imagine you are expecting your $1,000 social security payment to hit your bank account which already has $500 in it, and you are watching your account on your computer screen. You are about to see how government spends without having anything to spend.

Presto! Suddenly your account statement that read $500 now reads $1,500. What did the government do to give you that money? It simply changed the number in your bank account from 500 to 1,500. It added a ‘1’ and a comma. That’s all.”

Keystrokes. Is it becoming clearer? Let’s go further for good measure. Mosler continues:

“It didn’t take a gold coin and hammer it into its computer. All it did was change a number in your bank account. It does this by making entries into its own spread sheet which is connected to the banking systems spreadsheets.

Government spending is all done by data entry on its own spread sheet we can call ‘The US dollar monetary system’.

There is no such thing as having to ‘get’ taxes or borrow to make a spreadsheet entry that we call ‘spending’. Computer data doesn’t come from anywhere. Everyone knows that!”

So why do we allow people to tell us otherwise? Maybe it is too abstract. And on cue, Mosler explains this phenomenon via a sports analogy for those who are not comfortable with the straight economic narrative:

“Where else do we see this happen? Your team kicks a field goal and on the scoreboard the score changes from, say, 7 point to 10 points. Does anyone wonder where the stadium got those three points? Of course not! Or you knock down 5 pins at the bowling alley and your score goes from 10 to 15. Do you worry about where the bowling alley got those points? Do you think all bowling alleys and football stadiums should have a ‘reserve of points’ in a ‘lock box’ to make sure you can get the points you have scored? Of course not! And if the bowling alley discovers you ‘foot faulted’ and takes your score back down by 5 points does the bowling alley now have more score to give out? Of course not!

We all know how ‘data entry’ works, but somehow this has gotten all turned around backwards by our politicians, media, and most all of the prominent mainstream economists.”

Ouch! Mosler pointed out the obvious, the propaganda machine has polluted our understanding. So how is this done in economic language? Let’s let Warren finish the thought:

“When the federal government spends the funds don’t ‘come from’ anywhere any more than the points ‘come from’ somewhere at the football stadium or the bowling alley.

Nor does collecting taxes (or borrowing) somehow increase the government’s ‘hoard of funds’ available for spending.

In fact, the people at the US Treasury who actually spend the money (by changing numbers on bank accounts up) don’t even have the phone numbers of the people at the IRS who collect taxes (they change the numbers on bank accounts down), or the other people at the US Treasury who do the ‘borrowing’ (issue the Treasury securities). If it mattered at all how much was taxed or borrowed to be able to spend, you’d think they’d at least know each other’s phone numbers! Clearly, it doesn’t matter for their purposes.”

So why do progressives allow the narrative that the nation has run out of points deter us from demanding we leverage our resources to gain points, to win the game of life, and have a robust New Deal: Green Energy, Infrastructure, free college, student debt eradication, healthcare as a right, a federal job guarantee for those who want work and expanded social security for those who do not want to or cannot work?

How has a movement so full of “revolutionaries” proved to be so “full of it” believing that we must take points away from the 99% to achieve that which the federal government creates readily, when people do something worth compensating? Why does the narrative that the nation is “broke” resonate with progressives? Why do they allow this narrative to sideline the entire movement?

I believe it is because progressives are beaten down. Many have forgotten what prosperity for all looks like or sounds like. Many are so financially broke and spiritually broken that the idea of hope seems like gas lighting. It feels like abuse. It crosses the realm of incredulity and forces people into that safe space of defeatism.

If they firmly reject hope, then they can at least predict failure, be correct and feel victorious in self-defeating apathy. If the system is rigged; if the politicians are all bought off; if the voting machines are hacked; if the deep state controls everything; then we think we are too weak to unite and stand up and demand economic justice, equality, a clean environment, a guaranteed job, healthcare and security and then we have a bad guy to blame.

Then we can sit at our computers, toss negative comments around social media, express our uninformed and uninspired defeatism about the system, and proclaim it is truth by ensuring it is a self-fulfilling prophecy about which we can be self-congratulatory in our 20/20 foresight as we perform the “progressive give-up strategy”. Or, if we want to achieve a Green New Deal, then in a radical departure from the norm we can own our power; we can embrace macroeconomic reality through the lens of a monetarily sovereign nation with a free floating, non-convertible fiat currency and truly achieve the progressive prosperity we all deserve.

The choice is ours. It is in our hands.

**For more of Steve’s work check out Real Progressives on Facebook or Twitter

PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

By Hannah Temple.

It is difficult to get through a day without encountering the idea that we as a species and a planet are at some kind of a tipping point. Whether for environmental, economic or social factors (or a mix of them all) there is a growing collective of voices claiming that the fundamental ways in which we live our lives, often linked to the structures and incentives of capitalism, must change. And they must change both radically and soon if we are to protect the future of the human race. Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future adds another compelling voice to this increasingly hard-to-ignore din. However, what makes this book refreshingly different is the tangible picture it paints of our possible path to a “postcapitalist” world. Mason’s belief is that capitalism’s demise is in fact already happening, and it is happening in ways we both know and like.

The book starts by looking at Kondratieff waves– the idea developed by Nokolai Kondratieff in the 1920s that capitalist economies experience waves or cycles of prosperity and growth, followed by a downswing, characterised by regular recessions, and usually ending with a depression. This is then followed by another phase of growth, and so on and so on. Many people, especially those that benefit from the current economic model, argue that what we are experiencing currently is just another of these regular downswings and we all just have to hunker down and ride the wave until the going gets good again. Mason, however says that even a quick glance at whatever form of evidence takes your fancy (global GDP growth, interest rates, government debt to GDP, money in circulation, inequality, financialization, productivity), demonstrates that the 5th wave that we should currently be riding has stalled and is refusing to take off.

The shift from the end of one wave and the start of a new one is always associated with some form of societal adaptation. Usually this is through attacks on skills and wages, pressure on redistribution projects such as the welfare state, business models evolving to grab what profit there is. However, if this de-skilling and wage reduction is successfully resisted then capitalism is forced instead into more fundamental mutation- the development of more radically innovative technologies and business models that can restore dynamism based on higher wages rather than exploitation. The 1980s saw the first adaptation stage in the history of long waves where worker resistance collapsed. This allowed capitalism to find solutions through lower wages, lower-value models of production and increasing financialization and thus rebalance the entire global economy in favour of capital. “Instead of being forced to innovate their way out of the crisis using technology, the 1 per cent simply imposed penury and atomization on the working class.”

This failure to resist the will of capital and the subsequent emergence of an increasingly atomised, poor and vulnerable global population is part of Mason’s explanation for our stalled 5th wave. The other half of the explanation comes from the nature of our recent technological innovations. Mason contends that the technologies of our time are fundamentally different to those of previous eras in that they are based on information. This is significant in that information doesn’t work in the ways that printing presses or telephones or steam engines work. Information throws all the basic tenets of capitalism- supply and demand, ownership, prices, competition- on their heads. Information technology essentially works to produce things that are increasingly cheap or even free. Think of music- from £10 for a CD in 1997 to 95p for an iTunes track in 2007 to completely free via sharing sites like Spotify in 2017. Over time, Mason claims the market mechanism for setting prices for certain information-based goods will gradually drive them down and down until they reach essentially or even actually zero – eroding profits in the process.

Capitalism’s response to this shift has basically been to put up lots of walls and retreat to stagnant rentier activity rather than productivity or genuine innovation. Legal walls such as patents, tariffs and IP property rights are used to try to maintain monopoly status so that profits can continue to be earnt. Politics is following in the same path with some real walls as well as plenty of metaphorical ones in the form of disintegrating international agreements and partnerships, import tariffs, immigration caps and so on. “With info-capitalism a monopoly is not just some clever tactic to maximise profit, it is the only way an industry can run. Today the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially-produced goods and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control over power and information”.

However, what seems to be part of the problem is, according to Mason, a critical part of the solution. These new sharing, or “information” technologies, have led to what Mason sees as an already emerging postcapitalist sector of the economy. Time banks, peer-to-peer lending, open-source sharing like Linux and Wikipedia and other technologies are not based on a profit-making motive and instead enable individuals to do and share things of value socially, outside of the price system. This peer-to-peer activity represents an indication of the potential of non-market economies and what our future might look like.

Mason argues that we have now reached a juncture at which there are so many internal and external threats facing our existing system- from climate change, migration, overpopulation, ageing population, government debts- that we are in a similar position to that faced by feudalism before it dissolved into capitalism. The only way forward entails a break with business as usual. Mason emphasises that it is important to remember that capitalism is not a “natural” state of being, nor has it gone on for such a long time. We live in a world in which its existence is seen to be unquestionable but we must take time to teach our brains how to imagine something new again. For Mason, in rather sci-fi fashion, this “something new” is called Project Zero.

Project Zero aims to harness to full capabilities of information technologies to:

– Develop a zero-carbon energy system
– Produce machines, services and products with zero marginal costs (profits)
– Reduce labour time as close as possible to zero

“We need to inject into the environment and social justice movements things that have for 25 years seemed the sole property of the right: willpower, confidence and design.”

Mason provides us with a comprehensive and exciting list of activities to be cracking on with to shape our new world. Some of his ideas are excitingly fresh and new such as the development of an open, accurate and comprehensive computer simulation of current economic reality using real time data to enable the planning of major changes. Others are more familiar such as the shifting of the role of the state to be more inventive and supportive of human wellbeing by coordinating infrastructure, reshaping markets to favour sustainable, collaborative and socially just outcomes and reducing global debts. He also supports the introduction of a universal basic income, the expansion of collaborative business models with clear social outcomes and the removal of market forces- particularly in the energy sector in order to act swiftly to counter climate change. He calls for the socialisation of the finance system. This would involve the nationalization of central banks, setting them explicit sustainability targets and an inflation target on the high side of the recent average to stimulate a “socially just form of financial repression”. It would also involve the restructuring of the banking system into a mixture of non-profit local and regional banks, credit unions and peer-to-peer lenders, a state-owned provider of financial services and utilities earning capped profits. Complex, financial activities should still be allowed but should be separate and well-regulated, rewarding innovation and punishing rent-seeking behaviour.

This push towards a system that rewards and encourages genuine innovation underlies most of Mason’s suggestions for our postcapitalist future. He contends that, if we continue down our current path, it will suffocate us and lead to a world of growing division, inequality and war. We already have systems for valuing things without prices. Working on optimising the technologies we have available to expand these systems, allowing us to live more sustainable, equal and happy lives, Mason argues, should be the key focus for us all.

This book review of Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism by Hannah Temple is originally posted at Rethinking Economics. 