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.

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Questions of Market Solutions

Against the backdrop of a society that rarely questions the perceived superiority of “market-based” solutions, Michael Sandel skillfully explores the intersection between markets and morality. In a six-part video series, Sandel teaches viewers a very important lesson: in practice, there is no consensus on what a free market is, and what outcomes are optimal.

The video series “What Money Can’t Buy,” produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, takes viewers on a journey which compels them to critically engage with a series of questions that challenge the common perception that untethered markets provide optimal solutions to all problems. While the questions cover a variety of topics, ranging from selling organs to discrimination based on looks, the common thread is to highlight this: in economic terms, what could be seen as an optimal outcome is often not a desirable outcome for society.

By watching the series, one thing becomes evident: there is no clear line that marks where markets should begin or end. Furthermore, each individual has a different understanding of what counts as an optimal outcome. As we come to terms with the lack of clear answers, the perception that unregulated markets always objectively provide a better outcome is shattered.

Economics textbooks teach students that households and firms act as if they are guided by an invisible hand that leads them to desirable market outcomes. As everyone seeks to maximize their own utility, free markets allow individuals and firms to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges, with supply and demand determining ideal price and output levels. Thus, one should simply let markets work their magic — no outside intervention necessary.

However, not even Adam Smith, to whom the “invisible hand” observation is attributed, believed that unregulated markets can lead to the best outcomes for society. As Harvard professor Amartya Sen points out, Smith was aware of the limitation of free markets. He knew resources would be drained and society’s ills would go unaccounted for in the absence of government.

Today, it is largely accepted that governments do need to play some role in setting and enforcing rules that enable markets to operate. For example, it is not controversial that property right and contract enforcement are government actions that enable markets to function, and would not be considered an intervention.

What is less acknowledged by those who oppose regulation under the guise of protecting free markets, is that the boundaries between what is considered a necessary rule and what is labeled as intervention have consistently changed throughout time, along with what our societies have deemed acceptable or not. The idea of what should and should not be sold on the market has constantly evolved.

Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang points this out using a simple example: child labor. In our present society, not allowing young children to work is something that seems natural. Yet, in early industrial days, this was a heated debate. Opponents called the ban an intervention in free markets and the infringement on the child’s right to sell its labor.

“What Money Can’t Buy” showcases interviews with a number of prominent academics from across the ideological spectrum, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Minouche Shafik, and Greg Mankiw, as well as discussions amongst a group of students. Each episode features Sandel asking participants a sequence of questions around a specific theme, leaving it up to each of the respondents draw their own lines on what should or should not be a market good.  

The interviews present a variety of responses and arguments both in favor and against allowing markets to operate in various areas of our lives, and whether allowing markets in those areas would lead to better or worse outcomes for society. There is no consensus on what counts as basic regulation, or when a market is no longer “free”.

There are no right or wrong answers to any of the questions. However, this does not mean that the responses offered by participants are not challenged. Sandel consistently asks for further elaboration on the answers, and explanations for the reasoning behind those responses. What makes the series truly thought provoking is the way in which Sandel then asks respondents if they are comfortable applying the same pro-market argument to a somewhat similar, but instinctively more morally questionable situation.

Throughout the series, it becomes clear that often the arguments in favor of having a market for something, such as kidneys, operate in a vacuum which does not take into account the large inequities and power dynamics of our society. For example, Mankiw defends the need to have a market for kidneys by claiming it would lead to more donors, and more lives saved, thus improving outcomes for society overall. Yet, as Stiglitz points out, in our unequal society, would those selling their kidneys do so as a voluntary transaction, or be coerced by their economic despair? Furthermore, selling kidneys in a market would mean the price would be too high for many people to pay, thus effectively letting poorer people die to save those who are wealthy.

What Money Can’t Buy does not provide any concrete answers to the questions discussed, and does not decide for its viewers what is right, or wrong. That is not its goal. Instead, Sandel encourages viewers to engage with the questions and critically think about the role markets play in our lives, how they are structured, and who they inherently favor. As the series makes clear, there is no objective way to define a free market or what counts as intervention, and thus it encourages us to think about morality and what type of society we wish to live in and incorporate those principles in the way markets influence our lives.

Watch the series here.

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

Austerity in the UK: Senseless and Cruel

As the UK recorded its first current budget surplus in 16 years, the IMF was quick to use this development as sufficient proof to declare the austerity measures, imposed by the UK government in the aftermath of the financial crisis, a success. To the IMF, the UK case of eliminating its budget deficit, while avoiding a prolonged recession, and faring better than other European countries, supports the case for further austerity.

However, this overly simplistic interpretation disregards the long-term structural problems that the UK economy is facing, does not acknowledge the active role played by the Bank of England (BoE) in mitigating the crisis, nor does it attempt to understand what is behind the growing voter discontent that led to the Brexit vote. Furthermore, given that the austerity measures have been linked to 120,000 deaths, it seems rather odd to celebrate this approach.

While at a first glance, one might think the UK economy is in pretty good shape, with low unemployment levels and continuous growth for the last 8 and a half years, a closer look at the data reveals a less optimistic picture. As outlined in this report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) that I co-authored with Mark Weisbrot, the UK economy is facing some serious challenges.

The last decade has failed to deliver any improvement in living standards to most households, with real median incomes of working-age households barely returning to their pre-recession levels this year. Retired household have fared somewhat better, yet are under threat as a target for further spending cuts. While increased employment has meant household incomes reached their precession levels, real hourly wages have not. To make matters worse, a widely cited decline in the gender pay gap is due to a larger drop in male wages, rather than female wages increasing.  

One of the most striking and unusual aspects of the recovery is that poverty, by some measures, has actually increased for people of working age. After accounting for housing costs, the percentage of people aged 16–64 with income below the poverty threshold has risen to 21 percent in 2015/16, from 20 percent in 2006/07.

In terms of productivity growth, which is the engine of rising living standards, the past decade has been the worst for the UK since the 18th century. The slowdown in productivity growth means that GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than it would have been if the prior growth trend continued. The problem of slow productivity growth is directly linked to low investment levels in the UK, which has the lowest rate of gross capital formation amongst G7 countries.

The UK currently finds itself in an economy where demand is lagging, and the prospects of Brexit bring significant uncertainty over the future. This is an environment that is unlikely to attract major private investment, especially in the areas it is most needed. There is a clear need for public investment and spending that can grow the economy and improve living standards. More austerity might seem to reduce the government’s deficit now but its price will ultimately be paid through lost output and slower growth.

The negative feedback from the fiscal tightening was undoubtedly mitigated by the expansionary monetary policy conducted by the BoE, which also explains why the UK was able to withstand austerity without deepening its recession and fared better than countries in the eurozone. The BoE started lowering its Bank Rate in October 2008 until it reached 0.5 percent. The rate was further decreased in the aftermath of Brexit to 0.25 percent, only to be raised again to 0.5 percent at the end of 2017.

The most important step taken by the BoE was its Quantitative Easing program, launched in August 2008, to buy bonds and ensure long-term interest rates for the UK remain low. The European Central Bank (ECB) only took similar steps for euro denominated sovereign bonds in July 2012.

While the IMF portrays the UK net public debt-to-GDP ratio as unsustainable high (it was 80.5 percent in 2017), this assessment is mostly arbitrary, especially given the UK’s specific circumstances. The burden on the public debt is best measured by the interest payments on the debt, relative to the size of the economy since the principal is generally simply rolled over. At present, the net interest payments on the debt are about 1.8 percent of GDP, a number significantly lower than in the 1980s when interest payments on the debt were generally above 3 percent of GDP annually, and in the 1990s when they were between 2 and 3 percent per year.

It is essential to note that financial markets recognize there is little risk to holding UK bonds, and the UK government can currently borrow at negative real interest rates. Given that the UK issues bonds in its own currency, investors understand there is no risk of default.

There are many public investments that have a positive real rate of return by increasing the productivity of the economy. Thus, given the current circumstances, it seems rather absurd to focus on reducing the debt rather than growing the economy.  

There is no doubt that Brexit is one of the major challenges that the UK faces. However, particularly in this context of uncertainty, macroeconomic policies play an essential role. Unnecessary fiscal and monetary tightening pose an immediate threat to economic progress and the UK’s ability to improve living standards of its residents.

Imposing austerity on an economy where incomes have not recovered from the last recession, there is a large slowdown in productivity growth, an overall lack of investment, and the government can finance its spending at negative real interest rates is senseless and cruel.

For more details, graphs, and complete sources check out the full report.

 

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.

It’s Time to Guarantee Jobs

The first half of the twentieth century was a challenging time for economics. The Great Depression wiped out incomes, investments, and most importantly, optimism. But when the traditional laissez-faire approach proved ineffective, the work of Keynes and FDR showed that there was another way. The New Deal employed American workers directly and restored confidence among business owners. Today, we could benefit from a similar program. It’s time for a new New Deal, or a Job Guarantee Program, that secures employment to all who are able and willing to work. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. By Johnny Fulfer.


What We Learned from the Great Depression

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. economy was in a recession just over 48 percent of the time between 1871 and 1900. But none were as bad as the crisis that followed The Great Crash of 1929.  Nevertheless, orthodox economic theorists urged policymakers to maintain the status quo and argued the economy would return to normal as long as it was left alone. This perspective was influential and often framed the ways in which political leaders such as Herbert Hoover understood the crisis. Hoover was not only politically committed to free-market ideas, he was psychologically invested in them, urging Americans to show thrift and self-reliance, practices which later resulted in more turmoil.

Elected president in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt did not have an all-embracing theory that would solve all America’s problems. Rather, he employed a wide range of policies, some of which failed, while others were successful in getting people to work. Perhaps the greatest impact Roosevelt’s New Deal had on American society was the change in perspective policymakers had toward government intervention. Earlier leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had had only moderate success producing government initiatives to restrain the predatory nature of American capitalism. But after the Great Depression, FDR helped policymakers and citizens markedly change their views in favor of government assistance, temporarily pushing the conservative opposition to the margins.

As such, FDR’s  New Deal momentarily ended the ‘rugged individualism’ of the Hoover era and demonstrated that free-market economics could not be relied upon in a time of crisis. When the economy falls into a slump, the government must be used as a source of relief.

This, too, is the argument that John Maynard Keynes makes in his influential 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes challenged the neoclassical principle that the market naturally adjusts itself to full employment. Along with the two held theories of unemployment—voluntary and frictional—Keynes wrote, there is also the involuntary, which was the result of a shortfall in aggregate demand.

The volatility of investment, Keynes argued, is dependent on our expectations of the future. The only way entrepreneurs would invest is if they expect sufficient demand for goods and services. This was a problem during the Depression—spending money was scarce. When people are unemployed, or fearful of losing their jobs, they are likely to reduce spending. This creates a cycle of insufficient demand, bringing profit-expectations down. Increasing savings, Keynes showed, would only make things worse. A rise in savings would reduce spending, and thus bring down the total level of employment and income. Surplus inventories with nobody to buy commercial products would force firms to contract operations and lay off even more workers.

Therefore, Keynes concluded, there is no automatic recovery from depression; supply does not create its own demand. The only solution is for the government to heavily invest in public works, creating jobs and increasing demand to rebuild confidence in the business community.

Roosevelt’s New Deal did exactly this. It produced nearly 13 million jobs, over 60 percent of which came from the Works Progress Administration, an organization which hired a wide range of individuals, from artists and writers to laborers who constructed roads, bridges, and schools. An incredible number of public goods were provided through these programs, and money was placed in the hands of the workers, whose purchasing power gave business owners’ profit expectations the much needed boost.

 

Why We Need a new New Deal

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a report examining the current employment conditions in the United States. The unemployment rate stands at 4.1 percent, the BLS reports, which is roughly 6.6 million people in the labor force. While the unemployment rate is relatively low from a conventional perspective, Dantas and Wray argue that this does not consider the falling participation rate for prime-age workers and wide-spread income stagnation.

Moreover, we often gauge the economy based on the unemployment rate, although, this economic indicator does not consider the fact that 40.6 million Americans remain in poverty. A job paying the current federal minimum wage doesn’t mean a worker will make enough money to live without relying on various forms of welfare. In order to turn this around, we need a new New Deal.

While the New Deal of the 1930s was a centralized program, controlled by the federal government, Dantas and Wray propose that a “new New Deal” would be more efficient by creating a more decentralized workforce, hired by state and local governments to meet the needs of the local communities, with wages paid by the federal government. They propose a Job Guarantee program.

The idea behind this policy is that those who are involuntarily unemployed don’t have to be if the government supplied them with a job. Economist Carlos Maciel further argues that the Job Guarantee program would cost around 1 percent of the U.S. GDP, providing additional jobs through the multiplier effect. When the government invests $1, it multiplies through consumer spending, turning into $2 or $3 in the real economy. In his General Theory, Keynes estimated the multiplier to be somewhere between 2 ½ and 3.

Employment works in the same manner. If one new job is created from the initial government investment, the consumption created by the additional worker will produce more jobs in other industries, whose consumption will take the process further, until the multiplier is reached. Moreover, this program would redistribute money from current welfare programs toward the Job Guarantee program. Those who are currently under the poverty line will not need traditional welfare benefits if they have jobs that pay a living wage.

Perhaps the reason U.S. policymakers are hesitant towards a Job Guarantee program has less to do with economics, and more about an investment in the status quo, whether politically or psychologically. Many Americans are invested in the idea of ‘free markets’, whatever they envision that to be, pushing rational economic discourse and the notion of social justice to the margins, and elevating the politically constructed parallel between self-interest and the partial idea of the American Dream. We must move beyond the free-market ideology, which views everything as profit or loss, win or lose. Only time will tell how this polarized form of reasoning will impact the American people, especially the 40.6 million Americans that are currently below the poverty line, who stand to suffer the most.

About the Author: Johnny Fulfer received a B.S. in Economics and a B.S. in History from Eastern Oregon University. He is currently pursuing an M.A. in History at the University of South Florida and has an interest in political economy, the history of economic thought, intellectual and cultural history, and the history of the human sciences and their relation to the power in society. 

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.