It is ten hour drive each way from my home in Virginia to the GENCON gaming convention I attended last week. Those hours driving were more fun than the convention, because I spent them talking to the smart polymath
Since they're moderated, I'd ask that this version, w/o typos and with a few additional sentences be used instead. I apologize for the sloppiness.
This description of the academic macroeconomic consensus is wildly off the mark. It’s just a description of the “freshwater” rational expectations (or real business cycle) school associated with the University of Chicago, and completely ignores the “saltwater” school prevalent at Harvard or MIT. Freshwater views are stil, I'd guess, narrowly the minority among academic economists, and have essentially no adherants in the policy world (e.g., the Fed, ECB, IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc.) or among Wall Street economists. Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson and a variety others have been arguing in a various fora that the RE school has proved its uselessness in the current crisis. (Larry Summer’s takedown of real business cycle theory in the Minneapolis Fed Quarterly Review still says most of what needs to be said.) The school’s preeminence in academic macroeconomics probably peaked a few years ago. Alex Tabarok and Alex Cochrane are showing their intellectual insularity, not accurately summarizing the academic consensus. It's ironic that the freshwater view would receive such strong expression on this website, where biases and heuristics in decion-making are key themes. The now abundant literature on behavorial economics and finance has taught us that people simply don't make decisions as idealized rational agents optimizing an intertemporal objective function. (Even if individuals did, additional strong assumptions are needed to move to statements about the behavior of the macroeconomy.)
It's odd that the comments have focused on the mention of Keynsian economics. (I can't resist commenting myself - it was frustrating earlier this year to hear the New Deal invoked almost daily on the radio as proof that a stimulus was needed, when my excursions using Google indicated that this was controversial at best. It looks to me like what pulled us out of the depression was selling war supplies to the British; but I know little about it.)
But, I thought this was the more important part of the post:
The US has a finance and policy elite defined by college ties and related social connections, an elite with a strong sense that only people in their circle can really be trusted, and that their institutions must be saved at all cost at taxpayer expense if necessary.
I am fairly confident that the average policy maker has little to no background in economics and finance. I am sure of this because I have seen the debates on the floor of both house and senate and all but one or two members have a significant grasp on monetary policy - let alone macroeconomics or price theory.
Agreed. For example, the concept of "opportunity cost" is unknown in American political debate.
Why should they? Their constituents don’t know enough about how economies and policy to realize that they should look for these things in a representative.
I wrote a post about this on Less Wrong called Mechanics without wrenches.
In a fairly obvious display of the powers of signalling, while I've always respected you for your keen insights, finding out you went to GENCON has made me feel genuine affection towards you, as the in-group implied by that affects me much more on a conscious daily level than most any other group we might share membership in.
sounds incorrect or at least significantly incomplete to me.Should look at how various differentiating beliefs for an organization make them more competitive.
Some narrow affiliation beliefs may be arbitrarily bad for broader affiliations. Some may be bad for broader affiliations but may help the narror in competition with other narrows.
I wrote part of that poorly. I meant that Prof. Hanson wrote it in such a way that the two seem inseparable in outcomes (regulatory capture vs. naive belief that what's good for GS is good for America). I think it's reasonable to reserve regulatory capture as an alternative theory.
"As We Go Marching" discusses how policies associated with Keynesianism (deficit spending to revive an economy) had been popular among politicians for years before Keynes came up with a justification. Rawls similarly came up with a Theory of Justice to prove how reasonably people must assent to the Great Society, and in a personal letter logically proved that baseball (which was then much more popular) is the greatest sport.
Keynes should not be so associated with the New Deal either. He wrote to FDR advising against some destructive policies that lowered output.
sincerely and self-interestedly assume that what’s best for their most narrow affiliation is also what’s best for their broadest affiliationSounds about right, and I think also applies to the neoconservatives. They don't just echo the Israeli government, and in the case of policy toward Serbia they thought they knew better. They've got a vision which they think must be in the best interests of the U.S, Israel, and most of the world and would rather not even consider that there could be tension among those different interests. It's the halo-effect where the things you like are just plain good by nature without drawbacks.
Macro economics is in practice, merely sound of courtiers flattering the powerful
Macro economics is in large about ill defined quantities such as aggregate demand. If one constructs a theory of ill defined quantities, it is easy to get the results that politicians and bureaucrats like to hear.
There is some symmetry. Is the CEO telling a self-serving story? or did the I-bankers tell him a self-serving story? The story would be most credible if the cynical explanation came from the VC. If the VC has sympathy with the similar tech CEO, but knows that he has to appease the I-bankers, it may be a self-serving story for the VC to see himself as wise and cynical, but at least he's not painting his actions as the best possible world. (and, yes, I do know how an IPO works.)
The part that seems least plausible to me is "forced out." That makes it sound like he couldn't cut a cynical deal to install a figure-head rain-maker.
The timing is deceptive. He wasn't an isolated academic. He was advocating his policies to politicians long before they saw print. And some of them saw print in the "Treatise on Money" in 1930 and "The Means to Prosperity" in 1933. That might not contradict the other claims, depending on their meaning, but it might.
TGGP is historically correct that influence flows from policy to academic theory and not the other way. By the time Keynes published his "General Theory" in 1936, the New Deal had already been under way in the US for three years, and comparable policies were being pursued in other countries. Academic theory has mostly been a post-facto justification of what policymakers did or wanted to do well before it was formulated.
I don't doubt your general ideas here and definitely think they are mostly correct. I, as I see many of the other poster here, don't necessarily believe that Keynsian economics is dead--as there are a lot of "professional" economists who buy into it, whether or not you or I do.
Another quibble is with the story of Bill learning to fly from a distraught ex-CEO of a tech company. I doubt if you or Bill truly understand how venture capital works, because if you did your story would sound much less plausible. A venture capitalist invests in early stage companies and gets equity, these investors expect to invest in a firm that will either a) go public, in which they will monetize their equity (they don't keep public companies on their portfolio) or b) get acquired by another company, in which again the VC montizes the equity. A VC will have no control of a public company and cannot oust a CEO. Also, VCs are almost always ex-CEOs of successful tech companies that have cashed out, they nearly all have experience starting and running tech companies--they empathize much more with the CEO of a portfolio company than with the Wall Street elite. The likely story here is that this ex-CEO had a very big, great idea and was a reasonable manager of a start-up company but was not ready to be a corporate apple-polisher and run a business with more competition, smaller margins, etc, as it is a very common story that founders get ousted as CEOs.
As Bill said, "You (through Cochrane) use a bit of sleight of hand."
There is a case to be made against the stimulus, but some economists argue that policy makers would be wise to ignore a lot of recent macro. I would expect Prof. Hanson to be more sympathetic of the criticisms of macro. http://delong.typepad.com/s... http://krugman.blogs.nytime...
How about this Arnold Kling quote:
"I have always thought that the issue of the relationship between financial markets and the "real economy" was really deep. I thought that it was a critical part of macroeconomic theory that was poorly developed. But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation."
Since they're moderated, I'd ask that this version, w/o typos and with a few additional sentences be used instead. I apologize for the sloppiness.
This description of the academic macroeconomic consensus is wildly off the mark. It’s just a description of the “freshwater” rational expectations (or real business cycle) school associated with the University of Chicago, and completely ignores the “saltwater” school prevalent at Harvard or MIT. Freshwater views are stil, I'd guess, narrowly the minority among academic economists, and have essentially no adherants in the policy world (e.g., the Fed, ECB, IMF, World Bank, BIS, etc.) or among Wall Street economists. Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson and a variety others have been arguing in a various fora that the RE school has proved its uselessness in the current crisis. (Larry Summer’s takedown of real business cycle theory in the Minneapolis Fed Quarterly Review still says most of what needs to be said.) The school’s preeminence in academic macroeconomics probably peaked a few years ago. Alex Tabarok and Alex Cochrane are showing their intellectual insularity, not accurately summarizing the academic consensus. It's ironic that the freshwater view would receive such strong expression on this website, where biases and heuristics in decion-making are key themes. The now abundant literature on behavorial economics and finance has taught us that people simply don't make decisions as idealized rational agents optimizing an intertemporal objective function. (Even if individuals did, additional strong assumptions are needed to move to statements about the behavior of the macroeconomy.)
It's odd that the comments have focused on the mention of Keynsian economics. (I can't resist commenting myself - it was frustrating earlier this year to hear the New Deal invoked almost daily on the radio as proof that a stimulus was needed, when my excursions using Google indicated that this was controversial at best. It looks to me like what pulled us out of the depression was selling war supplies to the British; but I know little about it.)
But, I thought this was the more important part of the post:
The US has a finance and policy elite defined by college ties and related social connections, an elite with a strong sense that only people in their circle can really be trusted, and that their institutions must be saved at all cost at taxpayer expense if necessary.
I am fairly confident that the average policy maker has little to no background in economics and finance. I am sure of this because I have seen the debates on the floor of both house and senate and all but one or two members have a significant grasp on monetary policy - let alone macroeconomics or price theory.
Agreed. For example, the concept of "opportunity cost" is unknown in American political debate.
Why should they? Their constituents don’t know enough about how economies and policy to realize that they should look for these things in a representative.
I wrote a post about this on Less Wrong called Mechanics without wrenches.
In a fairly obvious display of the powers of signalling, while I've always respected you for your keen insights, finding out you went to GENCON has made me feel genuine affection towards you, as the in-group implied by that affects me much more on a conscious daily level than most any other group we might share membership in.
sounds incorrect or at least significantly incomplete to me.Should look at how various differentiating beliefs for an organization make them more competitive.
Some narrow affiliation beliefs may be arbitrarily bad for broader affiliations. Some may be bad for broader affiliations but may help the narror in competition with other narrows.
I wrote part of that poorly. I meant that Prof. Hanson wrote it in such a way that the two seem inseparable in outcomes (regulatory capture vs. naive belief that what's good for GS is good for America). I think it's reasonable to reserve regulatory capture as an alternative theory.
"As We Go Marching" discusses how policies associated with Keynesianism (deficit spending to revive an economy) had been popular among politicians for years before Keynes came up with a justification. Rawls similarly came up with a Theory of Justice to prove how reasonably people must assent to the Great Society, and in a personal letter logically proved that baseball (which was then much more popular) is the greatest sport.
Keynes should not be so associated with the New Deal either. He wrote to FDR advising against some destructive policies that lowered output.
sincerely and self-interestedly assume that what’s best for their most narrow affiliation is also what’s best for their broadest affiliationSounds about right, and I think also applies to the neoconservatives. They don't just echo the Israeli government, and in the case of policy toward Serbia they thought they knew better. They've got a vision which they think must be in the best interests of the U.S, Israel, and most of the world and would rather not even consider that there could be tension among those different interests. It's the halo-effect where the things you like are just plain good by nature without drawbacks.
Macro economics is in practice, merely sound of courtiers flattering the powerful
Macro economics is in large about ill defined quantities such as aggregate demand. If one constructs a theory of ill defined quantities, it is easy to get the results that politicians and bureaucrats like to hear.
And this is why futarchy will never gain any ground.
There is some symmetry. Is the CEO telling a self-serving story? or did the I-bankers tell him a self-serving story? The story would be most credible if the cynical explanation came from the VC. If the VC has sympathy with the similar tech CEO, but knows that he has to appease the I-bankers, it may be a self-serving story for the VC to see himself as wise and cynical, but at least he's not painting his actions as the best possible world. (and, yes, I do know how an IPO works.)
The part that seems least plausible to me is "forced out." That makes it sound like he couldn't cut a cynical deal to install a figure-head rain-maker.
Michael is right.
The timing is deceptive. He wasn't an isolated academic. He was advocating his policies to politicians long before they saw print. And some of them saw print in the "Treatise on Money" in 1930 and "The Means to Prosperity" in 1933. That might not contradict the other claims, depending on their meaning, but it might.
TGGP is historically correct that influence flows from policy to academic theory and not the other way. By the time Keynes published his "General Theory" in 1936, the New Deal had already been under way in the US for three years, and comparable policies were being pursued in other countries. Academic theory has mostly been a post-facto justification of what policymakers did or wanted to do well before it was formulated.
I don't doubt your general ideas here and definitely think they are mostly correct. I, as I see many of the other poster here, don't necessarily believe that Keynsian economics is dead--as there are a lot of "professional" economists who buy into it, whether or not you or I do.
Another quibble is with the story of Bill learning to fly from a distraught ex-CEO of a tech company. I doubt if you or Bill truly understand how venture capital works, because if you did your story would sound much less plausible. A venture capitalist invests in early stage companies and gets equity, these investors expect to invest in a firm that will either a) go public, in which they will monetize their equity (they don't keep public companies on their portfolio) or b) get acquired by another company, in which again the VC montizes the equity. A VC will have no control of a public company and cannot oust a CEO. Also, VCs are almost always ex-CEOs of successful tech companies that have cashed out, they nearly all have experience starting and running tech companies--they empathize much more with the CEO of a portfolio company than with the Wall Street elite. The likely story here is that this ex-CEO had a very big, great idea and was a reasonable manager of a start-up company but was not ready to be a corporate apple-polisher and run a business with more competition, smaller margins, etc, as it is a very common story that founders get ousted as CEOs.
What do modern macroeconomic models say should have been done (and if you have the time, why)?
As Bill said, "You (through Cochrane) use a bit of sleight of hand."
There is a case to be made against the stimulus, but some economists argue that policy makers would be wise to ignore a lot of recent macro. I would expect Prof. Hanson to be more sympathetic of the criticisms of macro. http://delong.typepad.com/s... http://krugman.blogs.nytime...
How about this Arnold Kling quote:
"I have always thought that the issue of the relationship between financial markets and the "real economy" was really deep. I thought that it was a critical part of macroeconomic theory that was poorly developed. But the economics profession for the past thirty years instead focused on producing stochastic calculus porn to satisfy young men's urge for mathematical masturbation."