economics – Page 2 – thinking liberal

Rethinking Liberalism 2: economics

The discipline of economics pervades all reflection on public policy. This is only right, as it is this discipline that tries to reconcile supply and demand for resources, and present a rational framework for choices. But it can be pernicious. It can frame the policy debate in the wrong way. As we refresh liberal policy ideas so as to put sustainability and human needs at the heart of public affairs, this is becoming a major problem. Liberals must challenge many tenets of conventional thinking.

First of all, let me say what I’m not going to talk about. There has been much heated debate on the value of austerity policies in tackling the recent economic crisis. I have read some liberals who say that “Keynesianism” is a core liberal belief, something given added resonance by the fact the Maynard Keynes was a Liberal. These tended not to be professional economists, who are careful not to label their beliefs with the name a of a dead economist, however inspirational. And it is based on a misunderstanding that Keynesian policies implied free public expenditure at all times, rather than being a temporary measure in response to a short term crisis. The problem that I have with economics applies as much to conventional, liberal “Keynesian” economists, such as Paul Krugman, as it does to the neoclassical ideologues – though the liberals are the more pragmatic, and the more likely to support changes to the conventions of the discipline. Having said which, I am sure Keynes would have recognised the value of what I am trying to say.

The problem that I want to deal with lies at the boundary of what professionals call “positive” economics, which refers to the factual or “scientific” side, and “normative” economics, which deals with policy recommendations, and where personal value judgements play a role. Much normative economics is presented as if it positive. Policy makers have taken simplifying assumptions used in positive economics, and used them as the basis of concealed value judgements.

I need to get more specific. These are the sorts of things I mean:

Economic growth is good for a society and should be an objective of public policy.
High productivity, the key to economic growth, is therefore a critical policy objective.
Free trade promotes economic welfare and drives economic growth forward, and should therefore be maximised.
The more people consume the better off they are, and the healthier an economy is, provided that spending does not outreach income.

I could keep going. The issue is not that these assumptions are wrong – they have served policy makers well – it is that life is not as simple as that, and we should always question them before using them in the decision-making process. And increasingly they are taking us in the wrong direction.

To be fair, economics does not stand still. I did not put on that list that aggregated income is the critical measure of success, and how it is distributed is of secondary importance. Economists (some of them at least) are at last seeing through that idea, which had been universally accepted. Also a worship of open market mechanisms for allocating resources is coming under question. And indeed, you can have perfectly sensible conversations with professional economists in which it is clear that they understand the limitations of their discipline. But when they get back to their desks and analyse policy options, the same old things keep coming up.

The result is that policymakers are trying to push the economy in a direction that it does not want to go. Growth remains obstinately slow, distribution becomes more skewed, public services struggle for funding. We worship highly centralised, “efficient” and specialised models of business and public services that are failing to meet human needs. And we are heading in slow motion for an environmental disaster.

Economics needs to adapt to the modern world. To do so it must start to take on board ways of thinking. Consider the following, none of which are particularly wacky in terms of economic theory, but all of which undermine the conventional wisdom of public policy making.

Wealth must circulate for a healthy economy. This is the main idea of George Cooper’s book Money, Blood and Revolution. If wealth is accumulated by a rich elite, it drains the life out of an economy because they don’t spend it, or don’t spend it efficiently. They save too much, and the bulk of their saving goes into unproductive assets and speculation, and not enough into productive investment. Worse, they use their accumulated wealth to skew the workings of society in their favour. This presents an economic argument for progressive taxation and the taxation of wealth – as well for trying other interventions which distort the way incomes are set.
Consumption should be optimised, not maximised. Once basic human needs are met, the utility of consumption rapidly diminishes, and often gets tangled in a zero-sum game of status competition. This challenges the idea that economic growth is the be-all and end-all, as well as bringing distributional issues to the fore.
Don’t confuse the acquisition of wealth with its realisation. This is a related point. The conventional wisdom, based on the gods of maximising consumption and productivity, is that we should go out in the world and work as hard as possible for the common good. But what if somebody wants to work less and consume less? Or if she prefers to consume less goods, but which are made in a less “efficient” way (organic vegetables, say rather than mass farmed ones, for example). Provided that she does not consume more than she produces, does this really matter? What is the point of piling up wealth if we can’t use it in the way that we want? Economists frown on organic vegetables as they reduce productivity, but the ability to choose such low productivity goods is a sign of a wealthy society. They are confusing the creation of wealth with its realisation. This suggests that the more developed a society becomes, the less worried it should be about productivity and income growth.
Trade is a means to an end, not an end in itself. No human activity has done more to banish poverty than trade. Yes we should celebrate it, and yes protectionism usually ends badly. But there comes a point when its uses diminish. Trade between the developed world and China had economic benefits when China had a pool of very unproductive agricultural labourers who could be used to make cheap industrial goods. But these benefits diminish as China catches up, and as this happens, it is more than likely that the volume of trade (and its benefits to the developed world) will diminish. That’s economics. Don’t panic. The party was fun while it lasted. Globalisation remains key in the world of information and ideas. Trade of physical things remains is important to helping undeveloped countries to develop (though the locus of that trade is likely to be mainly with middle income countries rather than developed ones, as these bulk larger). But trade of physical things over huge distances is not so important for the sustained progress of developed economies.

Liberals should believe that an economy should develop based on free human choices, long term sustainability and a degree of human solidarity which diminishes with distance. Increasingly human preferences, technology and world development will take us away from the mass-produced, high productivity, high consumption, global trading society that policy makers favour, guided by economic conventional wisdom. It isn’t what people want (free human choices), it isn’t sustainable (carbon emissions and world resources) and it is less needed for human solidarity (developing countries are increasingly able to look after themselves, while the need for more localised solidarity grows). The discipline of economics needs to catch up.

The complacency of salt-water economists

In his recent book on economics (reviewed by me here), George Cooper presented the discipline as being an irretrievably fracture, in need of a radical step change. There is an alternative view. This is that in fact the profession is split between two orthodoxies, with a diverse bunch of heterodox economists on the fringe, unable to get serious traction. The two orthodoxies are often given the names “salt-water” and “fresh-water”, because the former are popular in U.S. universities on the east and west coasts, and the latter with those in the Midwest – especially Chicago. This is worth picking apart.

Followers of each of the orthodoxies assume that criticism of economics is directed mainly at the other orthodoxy, and not at them. The heterodox say that the whole lot is in a mess. The fresh-water school do seem be in eclipse. This school, often termed “neoliberals” outside the US, believe that free markets are the fairest way of allocating economic resources, and that government interference almost always makes things worse. Many assume that they were cheerleaders for the rampant excesses of the financial sector before the crash, and hence have had their come-uppance. This criticism is wide of the mark, however. The banking boom arose at least as much from lop-sided government intervention as it did from “light-touch” deregulation. Fresh-water economists can plausibly blame the crisis on government intervention, not its absence – and in particular the crazy desire of politicians to boost property lending to all and sundry.

In fact there are other fatal problems for fresh water economists. First is that they opposed serious government intervention once the bubble blew. This was self-evident nonsense, ignored to a greater or lesser degree by practically everybody – except where government borrowing presented a practical problems. There have been loud arguments over austerity that have been so loud, but these have been on degree of intervention (big or massive?) and on completely different territory to that advocated by non-interventionists. A second problem is posed by what is usually called “inequality” – whereby it appears that the benefits of growth in developed economies go predominantly to the rich – and that most people in the US have seen little or no benefit from decades of economic growth. It is a central facet of fresh-water thinking that distribution of wealth and income is not an important concern for economists and policymakers. They have almost nothing to say here. And people are starting to notice that in countries with minimal governments (Somalia, say), the economy tends to be in pretty bad shape. Of course fresh-water economists remain well funded, as their views provide convenient support to many vested interests, and they are not about to go extinct. But you don’t hear very much from them these days.

Unlike the salt-water types. These are popularly referred to as “Keynesians”, and are now very well entrenched right across the political establishment. Their most visible cheerleader is Nobel Laureate and columnist Paul Krugman. They were as wrong-footed by the crisis as any of them, but quickly found the groove again. They provided the intellectual heft required to support government intervention after the crisis, though they usually complain that this intervention was inadequate.

Salt-water types do not consider that the crisis showed that their thinking was seriously flawed. Consider this piece a few weeks ago by Mr Krugman. He simply suggests that salt-water economists were a bit misinformed – because they underestimated the practice of shadow banking. Shadow banking, in this context, refers to the practice of banks hiding their dodgier lending by creating off-balance sheet entities to take them. To be fair on Mr Krugman, in the run up to crisis his writing was hardly cheerleading for the supposed economic miracle – though that seemed to derive from his hatred of the then Republican establishment, and their attachment to fresh-water thinking.

I can understand some of Mr Krugman’s frustration with the so-called heterodox economists. They tend to be pretty unconstructive – picking at the orthodox modelling assumptions (incidentally, largely shared across both orthodoxies), without suggesting much that could replace them in a useful way, to give the discipline a better predictive power. The beauty of the salt-water orthodoxy is that it finds it easy to tack on new ideas and integrate them – they have done this quite spectacularly with many of Milton Friedman’s ideas (on money, inflation and unemployment), even though he is one of the spiritual fathers of fresh-water thinking. They are now trying to do so with ideas on inequality, an issue that they acknowledge. Thomas Piketty, the French economist who is making a splash on inequality, looks more like somebody extending the salt-water orthodoxy, rather than challenging it.

For me this is much too complacent. Regular followers of this blog will not be surprised to read that Exhibit A for the prosecution is thinking on monetary policy. Salt-water economists inhabit a world where the ideas of money supply, demand, interest rates and inflation interact in a relatively predictably way, to form an important way of regulating economic growth. Thus there is talk of raising inflation a bit, so that negative real interest rates can be implemented, which in turn will boost demand and get the economy growing. It is not that I think this line of reasoning is entirely mistaken, it is that it is an oversimplification that is more likely to lead to policy mistakes than insights.

Take Japan. This country is probably further down the path of accepting salt-water economics than any other. It has drastically loosened monetary policy (through a process of quantitative easing) with the aim of raising inflation, which in turn will help the process of managing interest rates and boosting sagging demand. But there is a snag: while prices are rising to a degree, wages are not keeping pace. Employers will consider giving employees a temporary bonus, but not raising basic pay. Without raising pay, all the nice things that are supposed to arise from inflation – like making debt easier to bear – will not happen. Economists simply assume that if inflation gets going in consumer prices, wages are bound to follow. But this does not seem to be true of a modern, globally integrated developed economy. There are plenty of other pitfalls in Japan’s strategy too.

The people at the heart of the salt-water school, like Mr Krugman, are a clever bunch. Heterodox economists do not seem to be unsettling their intellectual grip. Perhaps they are right that the orthodoxy must evolve rather than make a step-change. But if so it surely needs to evolve a lot faster.

Does money really grow on trees?

A few months ago David Cameron, the Prime Minister, defending the government’s austerity policy said that “Money doesn’t grow on trees!”, a well used expression when discussing household budgets. The Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf responded that money did indeed grow on trees, and the money tree went was the Bank of England. Can Mr Wolf be right?

Mr Wolf was referring to the Bank of England’s policy of buying government bonds, known as Quantitative Easing or QE. One arm of the government, the Treasury issues bonds to pay for government spending; another, the Bank of England, buys them by simply adding to its reserves – creating money. Actually, the Bank doesn’t buy the exact same bonds, it buys others that had been issued earlier – but it amounts to nearly the same thing. The extra money ends up in the accounts of major investors such as insurance companies or pension funds, at home and abroad. Government spending has been financed by the creation of money. Hence money seems to grow on trees.

This type of financing is associated in the public imagination with disaster – such as the hyperinflation in Germany and Austria after the First World War, or more recently in Zimbabwe. In conventional economic theory an increase in money supply, if not matched by expansion of the economy, leads to inflation. But there is no increase in inflation in either Britian or the USA, which are both practising QE, and in Japan, where increasing inflation is actually a policy objective of QE, the increase in inflation is anaemic. So what is going on?

There are three problems with the conventional economic theory of money. First is that only trivial amounts of money are represented by notes and coins, whose circulation is controlled by the government. Instead we use bank accounts provided by commercial banks. Economists have tried to understand this type of money in equivalent terms to notes and coins. People bank money and the banks then lend it; the banks do not create money, though the central bank may. But further reflection reveals that this is not the way it works, as the Bank of England has recently admitted. It is the other way round: banks create money by lending it to people. With this more realistic idea of what money is, we can see that far from the money supply expanding with QE, it is shrinking as banks reduce their balance sheets after the boom years when they created money freely. You could then argue that QE is simply offsetting the shrinkage of credit from the banks, balancing the whole thing out. All will be well until the banks turn the corner and start creating money again.

But there is a the second problem. The overall supply of money, as far as it can be measured, does not strongly correlate with either the size of the economy or inflation, as monetary theory predicts. That’s because money doesn’t flow round the system at a constant speed. If you print banknotes, and people simply stuff the new notes under the their mattresses, the real economy doesn’t change. The electronic equivalent is people holding bank deposits which they don’t spend. That’s been happening a lot. Standard monetary theory, such as that put forward by people like Milton Freidman, is based on the idea that money circulates at a reasonably constant speed. But in fact people don’t behave that way.

But even if they did, there’s the third problem. Excess monetary expenditure does not necessarily lead to inflation; in fact in a modern developed economy it rarely seems to. Instead of people raising consumption which pushes up consumer prices and then pay, people spend it on assets or imported goods. Asset prices don’t seem to behave in a rational way, being subject to a price bubbles. In the modern globalised economy it is easy to import goods to satisfy any increase in consumer demand. And in any case the link between consumer prices and levels of pay has been broken. The wage-price spiral, at the heart of the way economists view the world, does not seem to happen in developed, globally integrated economies. Incidentally this is the problem that the recent aggressive monetary expansion in Japan (“Abenomics”) has bumped into; prices are edging up but companies remain reluctant to let wages follow suit, so that inflation simply makes people poorer. The concept of central banks targeting inflation as their main objective, the big idea of the 1990s, has simply led to complacency.

So the theory of monetary economics is in ruins. That does not stop usually quite economically sane publications. like The Economist, discussing whether central banks should adjust their inflation targets from 2% to 3%, or use nominal GDP as their reference point instead of inflation. This is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic (apologies for the over-used metaphor). Fortunately central bank professionals are highly pragmatic and they don’t seem to be letting the vacuum in economic theory lead them into being too dangerous, with the possible exception of Japan.

And the upshot is that in many developed economies, including the British one, governments can get away with the monetary financing of government spending, without much in the way of immediate adverse consequences. Money really does grow on trees! How on earth to understand this – and any not so benign consequences?

Well you have to recognise that money is simply a means to an end: a social construct to enable economic activity and regulate societal relationships. It often helps when thinking about an economy to take the money away and see what is going on in what economists call the real economy.

Let’s look at the real economic flows, which are at the heart of Mr Wolf’s analysis. The government is consuming more resources than it is receiving from taxation. This deficit must be supported from outside (you can’t print money in the real economy), and in general terms this is from two places: the private sector and outside the economy. The private sector, as a whole, is consuming less resources than it is producing and this surplus, in various direct and indirect ways is helping to support the government deficit. This is partly because people are working off their debts, but also because private businesses are hanging on to profits. Also the economy (in Britain and the USA in particular) as a whole is in deficit with the outside world: importing more than it exports. The government can safely run, or even increase, its deficit because it is balanced by surpluses by the private sector and the outside world.

But this is not sustainable in the long term, because persistent deficits lead to excessive debts, and the monetary economy breaks back into the real one. If the government has cleverly got out of financing its deficit with debt, it is simply passing on the affordability problem to somebody else. The assets being accumulated by the private sector and foreigners are not worth as much as they think. The government has avoided the risk of a solvency crisis by increasing the risk of a currency crisis or an asset price collapse. This may be localised, or it may be part of a gathering global financial crisis.

But if by running a deficit the government is staving off a wider economic disaster, or even bringing the country back to the path of economic growth, it is opting for a lesser evil. Mr Wolf argues for continued government deficits, financed by QE if necessary, on just these grounds. Austerity will simply precipitate the economic crisis rather than buying time to fend it off. He has a strong belief in a “trend rate” of economic growth of about 2% per annum which can be readily unlocked and get us out of jail.

That’s where I disagree. That trend rate may sound a small number, but it is in fact a very large one for an economy that is fully developed (China can grow faster because it is catching up). A special set of circumstances combined in the period 1945 to about 1990 or 2000 to make it seem normal – but we are in a slow growth world now.

So keeping government deficits going using QE to bypass the bond markets caries risks. The main priority for governments is to reduce their countries’ vulnerability to future crises and improve their resilience. That means rebalancing. Between public expenditure and tax; between rich and poor; between imports and exports; between financial engineering and productive investment; between young and old; between environmental degradation and restoration.

Government deficits may or may not play a role in this rebalancing process. For what it is worth I think the British government has it more or less right in terms of its overall austerity policies. QE may or may not be helping. But any money plucked from trees will, to mix metaphors, go off if it isn’t spent wisely.

Reinventing liberal economics

In a recent post I expressed frustration that conventional economics seems to have survived the meltdown of 2008 almost unscathed, as evidenced the chatter around the discussion of monetary policy. I mentioned one book, George Cooper’s Money, Blood and Revolution, that sought challenge it. On the strength of that the publisher sent me a review copy – and I have read it. It is interesting because the paradigm shift Mr Cooper advocates gives coherence to the idea of liberal economics, after its original conception turned out to mean libertarian economics.

Mr Cooper’s main thesis is that economics is a science that is in crisis (as opposed to the alternative view that it should not be considered scientific at all). He compares it to four specific cases of sciences in crisis: astronomy before Copernicus, anatomy before William Harvey established the principles of blood circulation, biology before Darwin/Wallace’s idea of evolution by natural selection; and geology before the acceptance of continental drift. Nearly a third of the book is devoted to developing this idea, before he gets to the discipline of economics itself.

The geology example is close to my heart. My father is a geologist, and I studied it at my first stint at university, at Cambridge in 1976-78 (I studied History in my final year – another story). My father had accepted the idea of continental drift – the notion that the continents are moving across the surface of the earth – by the 1960s, before the scientific establishment completely accepted it. By 1976 the idea of plate tectonics was conventional wisdom, and continental drift was treated as an obvious fact. What had made the difference (actually not mentioned by Mr Cooper) is that mapping of the ocean floor showed that the oceans were spreading, neatly illustrated by stripes of different magnetic polarity, following reversals in the earth’s magnetic field when the ocean crust was formed. It was new, killer evidence. Mr Cooper rather suggests that it was looking at existing evidence in a new way that led to the revolution. But that is a minor quibble – there was growing opinion behind the continental drift idea before the oceanographic evidence emerged.

The book is not a heavy read. It is less than 200 pages and it goes at quite a clip. It is well written, apart from a couple of quibbles. He uses the word “experimental” in place of “empirical” for real-world evidence. Perhaps his publisher advised him it was more accessible, but in my book experimental means carrying out experiments. There is a branch of experimental economics, but it is tiny. Empirical evidence in economics is gleaned from examining the shape of the real world, only rarely with controlled studies – a bit like astronomy, geology and evolutionary biology, in fact. His use of “principle” when he means “principal” looks accidental but I counted two instances.

This lightness of touch has advantages and disadvantages. It will help him with general readers; it will leave professionals picking holes. His focus is on the former since he judges that the demand for a paradigm shift is likely to be strongest from those outside the discipline. But we still need people in the discipline to flesh out the new ideas.

Moving on from the idea of scientific revolutions, Mr Cooper then explores the state of current economics, describing all the main schools of thought, each with ideas incompatible with others. I found this section illuminating and enjoyable. He could perhaps have brought out more the capacity for professional economists to engage in double-think – for the same people to hold incompatible ideas in their own heads, never mind the presence of warring factions who look on the same facts in different ways.

But Mr Cooper rightly says that it is not enough to prove the existing ideas wrong; you have to replace them with new ideas that work better. He outlines a new system of thought, based on two new concepts: competition and circulation of wealth.

Economists have much to say about competition, but it turns out that what they mean by the word is an artificial, anaemic version of the concept, operating within tightly constrained rules, where the object is to maximise individual welfare. The real human competition that drives human behaviour is about survival and status; it is about getting ahead of the other guy and staying there. Crucially it is about relative position and not absolute wealth. If competitive behaviour dominates, then human society will tend to stratify into a feudal system with a hereditary elite maintaining its dominance by force. Since such feudal societies are very common, including in newly developed social systems like that of North Korea, it is clear that such competition often dominant. It undermines the idea of libertarianism, which advocates minimal government and regulation, since these last two are required to counteract the tendency to feudalism.

Cooper’s second idea, that of circulation, stems from the observation that feudal societies are economically inefficient (look at North Korea again). Once the ruling elite have secured their status, they hold the rest of society in a static position so as not to present a threat. Economies are drained of vitality because the poor have no spending money, and the elite tend to hoard their wealth rather than spread it around. Democratic societies, on the other hand, have developed institutions, like progressive taxation, universal welfare and so on that recycle wealth from the wealthy to the rest, and competitive elections that ensure that political elites are recycled too. This creates a productive tension. Competition gives people the motivation to build successful businesses (and political careers) and innovate; governments recycle the wealth thus generated to prevent it from stifling the system.

This is a very liberal view. The right sees only a limited role for government and taxes, and does not accept that the presence of a very wealthy elite stifles the wellbeing of society. The left thinks that competition is destructive and tries to stifle it through excessive government. Liberals understand that people must be free to compete, but that government institutions are required to prevent all the power accumulating to the wealthy.

What does that mean in policy terms? Mr Cooper is particularly critical of the idea of monetarism – the management of the economy through regulating money and credit in the economy as a whole. He thinks this idea is largely to blame for the crisis, and it won’t help us out of it. The extra spending power it creates goes to the wrong people, i.e. the very wealthy. They either let the new cash fester unspent, or use it to create an asset bubble. Spending power needs to go the other end of society, which means Keynesian stimulus, focusing especially on productive investment. This sounds quite sensible. I am personally deeply sceptical of monetarism, though I don’t take the argument quite as far as Mr Cooper does.

How to take this new paradigm forward? It is starting to happen. Politicians and economists are talking a lot more about the distribution of wealth; this needs to be put back at the heart of macroeconomics – as it was two centuries ago with the ideas of Thomas Malthus. The publication of and interest generated by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is big step in the right direction. This adds a lot of flesh to the high level analysis, and may provide the first evidence of magnetic stripes on the ocean floor.

But there is a problem at the heart of economics which Mr Cooper barely considers, and which has to fixed. It is the public’s insatiable desire for economic forecasts, both to gauge the general economic weather, and to answer what-if scenarios (such as global warming). So far the only practical way of delivering these is through the use of neoclassical models using the ideas of independent, rational agents, optimising behaviour and equilibrium. The whole infrastructure of these ideas has to be taught to economics students to satisfy this demand. It is no use just saying that forecasting is going to be more difficult. If the discipline is to be regarded as a science, then new methods must be developed. I suspect that economics has much to learn from weather forecasting – another system that is never allowed to achieve equilibrium. Weather forecasts require very big computers which are able to model complex interactions between many component parts. Work is needed on something similar – massive multi-agent models, using insights into real human behaviour.

Beyond that, I would like to see ideas on human behaviour, such as tendencies to cooperation and competition, developed in a much more realistic and nuanced context, harnessing the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and psychology – replacing the rather crude Darwinism that Mr Cooper advances.

That said, liberals everywhere should take Mr Cooper’s ideas seriously.

Pensions, savings: sensible steps forward

This week’s UK Budget has revealed the usual muddle amongst politicians, journalists and the public over the whole issue of pensions and savings – with opinion strongly favouring several flavours of having your cake and eating it. This masks some profound and sensible reforms carried out by the coalition government.

First version of the cake. We like people to save. But we want them to spend to promote economic growth. We worry that a large part of the population will become dependent on the state and taxes because they save too little. But when they do, as in the early part of the 2008/09 crisis, we bemoan that fact that people aren’t spending and so causing economic slump. So interest rates crash to the floor in an attempt to reduce savings and increase consumption (alongside the vain hope that companies will be encouraged to invest more).

Next version. We want people to save more to not be dependent on the taxpayer, but we also want target state spending on the less well off, and tax the rich to pay for it. So we encourage people to save, and then confiscate the proceeds.

Another version of this is that we love the idea of exempting pension saving from tax but think that people who have accumulated sufficient savings for a reasonable pension (a million pounds for a pension of £35,000, for example) are part of a rich elite whose broad backs should carry the largest burden.

There is a genuine dilemma at the heart of this of course. For that reason a lot of hope resides in get-out-of- jail-free cards. One of these is strong economic growth. But that requires lots of people to work – which means retiring later and allowing immigration. We are clearly entering an era of low growth, thanks to demographics, personal preferences (i.e. people choosing unpaid leisure over work) and the changing nature of technological advance and the global economy. Remarkably few people have tried facing up to the consequences of this. Even some intelligent economists think that “trend growth” is a law of nature. Another get-out-of-jail-free card is that rising property values will compensate for lack of saving. Collectively this cannot make sense, but it has worked for many individuals, who therefore don’t engage with wider worries about the future.

Now let’s consider some difficult facts. I have already mentioned that economic growth is likely to be much lower in future. The next difficult fact is that private pension saving has collapsed in the last 25 years. Generous final salary schemes have been replaced by inadequate money-purchase schemes. It is now use just blaming Gordon Brown’s tax raid on pension schemes in the later 1990s for this (or Mrs Thatcher’s ill advised liberalisation of pension selling before that) and some are prone to do when you mention this. This at worst mildly accelerated a growing trend. The economics of businesses supporting these pension schemes became toxic even without the tax changes. This means that, as a generality, most people will not now have adequate private sector pensions. Instead as they approach retirement they will have accumulated a few tens of thousands of pounds in probably several schemes.

The next difficult fact is that the economics of long-term saving are toxic for all but the very well off (liquid assets of over £0.5m, say). The poor face the prospect of losing entitlements to state benefits if they accumulate wealth. Everybody will see any savings eaten away by costs which, even without a host of rip-offs, will always weigh most heavily on those with smaller savings. It becomes perfectly rational for a lot of people to not to bother with pensions savings – unless you count trying to own your own home.

When you consider all this, the attraction of tax funded state pensions become clear. That is why the current government has been right to make it reasonably generous, notwithstanding criticism form the right that we can’t afford it. It was also right to make this pension independent of private saving.

Now, what about the tax treatment of savings? To simplify, there are three groups of tax privileged savings. The first is domestic property. To buy your own home you pay out of taxed income and stamp duty on the purchase price, but the gain is exempt from tax. The second is Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), which, like property, are paid for out of taxed funds (subject to an annual limit) but income and capital gains are tax free. And third are pension plans, for which contributions are exempt from income tax, but it is taxable on drawdown.

The first and last of these are problematic. Domestic property because its tax exempt status has made it a highly attractive investment – but instead of this fuelling much in the way of building new, efficient property, it has simply driven prices up, making ownership out of reach for many younger people and driving a wedge between families with property and those without. Pensions are a problem because that particular route for providing tax exemption makes for maximum complexity. In fact they have become so hedged about in rules that most people don’t understand them.

ISAs, on the other hand, have an elegant administrative design which makes them easier to own than even taxed assets. They also have more chance of channelling investment into more productive parts of the economy.

Here’s why this week’s proposed reforms make sense. Currently money purchase pensions are forced to buy annuities, except in some carefully crafted circumstances, which tend only to apply to the better off savers. The original fear behind this annuity rule was the worry than pensioners would blow their savings quickly and then throw themselves into the arms of the state. But the state of private pensions is such that most people will rely on the state anyway, and most pension pots are so small that the amount of income that would be derived from an annuity would be derisory (and, presumably, a lot of value would be lost in administration costs). And those with larger pots are likely to be prudent with their wealth. If done properly, this will simplify the pension system, and make private pensions more attractive.

Extending the ISA allowance is more controversial. Many simply view this as benefiting the wealthy, as nobody else can save up to the £15,000 a year limit. There is some truth to this, but it will help level the playing field between financial investments and owning your own property. Since it is unthinkable to tax capital gains on homes, it may help to make other assets comparable in their tax status.

A lot of nonsense has been uttered as commentary: fears over people blowing money on cruises and fast cars – or rushing into buying property. My main worry is that the reforms will make it easier for better off people to save for their children, to pass on at death. This could reinforce the effect of inherited wealth, which is already growing. There may be mounting pressure to reduce Inheritance Tax.

But overall this looks a sensible step forward – and actually quite brave. It is surely no accident that unlike its predecessors the current government’s Pensions Minister, Steve Webb, really knows his stuff, and has been kept in post for the whole period. Liberal Democrats can take pride that he is one of theirs. There is strong political consensus in his reforms, and no party political benefit. But it is nice to feel that our party has contributed something useful to the process of government.

Re-shoring: good news that does not make us feel better

The British economy is perplexing economists. The economy as a whole is growing but we as individuals don’t seem to be any better off. Unemployment tumbles but pay stays rooted to the spot. This is called the “productivity puzzle”. Added to this puzzle is the phenomenon of “re-shoring”: the reversal of offshoring, the process by which manufacturing and services were migrated abroad, typically to China or India. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, made a speech promoting it last week. It is worth stepping back to think through just what is going on.

After all, when offshoring was popular, in the years of the Labour government from 1997 to 2010, it was hailed as a good thing in the long term, worth a little disruption in the short run. It meant that prices for goods and services were kept down, and therefore our collective living standards improved. Looking at the components of retail price inflation in the 2000s told quite a startling story: prices of manufactured goods were actually falling. Locally produced services could advance in price by 4% or so, and the Bank of England could still meet its 2% inflation target. That 4% reflected the advance in average pay – so advancing living standards were largely explained by lower priced imports. Offshoring was a very important part of this phenomenon.

And this conformed very neatly to the elementary economic theory of Comparative Advantage, first explained by 18th century economist David Ricardo, and part of any first-year economics course. This says that the benefits of trade arise from differences in opportunity cost, or comparative advantage, and not actual cost, or absolute efficiency. The Chinese had a comparative advantage in basic manufacturing; Britain had a comparative advantage in high-end services. So, even if British workers were more efficient than Chinese ones in basic manufacturing, it still made sense for Britons to import from China – and both countries drew benefits. Trade between the developed and developing world follows the predictions of Ricardo’s theory very closely. And supporters of globalisation, like the Labour big beast Peter Mandelson, pointed this out endlessly.

But economists rarely follow through the logic of Comparative Advantage. If two identical economies have identical opportunity costs for different goods, there are no gains from trade (not on the basis of this theory, anyway). Trade arises from differences in the shape of economies. Since developed and developing economies are very different, big gains from trade are to be expected. But what happens as the developing economy starts to catch up with, and resemble the developed one? The gains from trade reduce. I have taken the trouble to work this out with a crude model of a developed and developing economy. The catch up process is marked by an appreciation of the developing country’s exchange rate, so that it converges with purchasing power parity. The interesting thing is where the loss in gains from trade falls. The developing economy becomes more productive and efficient, so its losses from reduced trade are made up for by gains in productivity. But for the developed economy, there is no corresponding level of compensation; the gains from trade disappear and the economy is worse off as a result.

And this is exactly what seems to be happening now. China and (in a rather different way) India are catching up; their exchange rates appreciate relative to ours. Their wages rise faster than ours. The gains from trade disappear, and it is the developed countries (us) that pay the price. Re-shoring is simply part of this process. The great gains from globalisation prove to be quite temporary, in this respect at least.

But as China and India catch up with the West and Japan, won’t other developing countries take their place, just as China and India took the place of South Korea and Taiwan? Vietnam, Indonesia and African economies stand ready. But these emergent economies are as interested in dealing with China’s and India’s vast economies as they are with the developed world’s. The world is rebalancing and the old economies of the west cannot expect to stay in the driving seat.

So, what’s the bottom line? I think re-shoring is one of the factors that explains Britain’s productivity puzzle. We had outsourced lower productivity jobs abroad, and they are returning. It is good news for employment, and will help balance the country’s trade. It will make the British economy more sustainable. But it will not make us feel any better off.

Britain’s improved growth points to more government austerity

The UK economy has improved dramatically in the last six months. This is one of the most important developments in British politics. This week’s good news on employment is just part of a wide spectrum of measures showing the economy’s improving health. Economic commentary, with its narcissistic obsession with monetary policy, has concentrated on the implications for interest rates. But a more important question I whether the economy’s recovery is sustainable. And the answer to that seems to be… not yet. And while it isn’t government austerity has to be the priority.

The political debate around the economy has focused on the wisdom or otherwise of the government’s austerity policies, designed to fix the country’s massive gap between public expenditure and tax. The Labour opposition suggested that there should be less austerity, and even some temporary tax cuts to try and push the economy into a virtuous circle of growth. But the country is now embarked on just such a virtuous circle without the need for any fiscal stimulus. Additional private consumption is the main cause of this stimulus, according to the latest bulletin from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). This shows that the Labour policy might well have worked (i.e. that a bit of stimulus could set off a virtuous circle), though in the event proved unnecessary.

So intellectually developments have far from proved Labour wrong. But they are the big political losers. Labour’s policy might have been sensible in the circumstances, but they also suggested that the Coalition’s policies were doomed to failure, which has proved not to be the case. It gets worse for them. This level of growth undermines the case for any reduction in austerity polices – which could cause inflation. And yet their hard-core supporters have been rallying to the idea that the cuts in government services and benefits are ideological and unnecessary. Labour have switched their attack to the cost of living, which is still running ahead of personal incomes, but this too runs the risk of being undone by events. Politics is a momentum business, and all it would take is a general improvement in wage levels before the election in 2015 to sink their propaganda offensive. Their poll lead has already shrunk.

Meanwhile press attention has switched to the Bank of England, which has embarrassingly been taken by surprise by the growth spurt. It is not long ago that it suggested that unemployment would not fall to 7% until 2016 – we are nearly there now. I find the focus on monetary policy very irksome though. It allows commentators to pontificate well inside their comfort zone, and talk about short-term developments in financial markets. But, as longer term followers of my blog will appreciate, I think that the usefulness of monetary policy is exaggerated, and the theory behind it has been comprehensively shredded.

Instead the big question should be sustainability. Mainstream economic commentators don’t seem to be that concerned by this. Their analysis is based on the idea that sustainable growth depends on whether or not growth exceeds the trend rate. This trend rate, about 2% per annum, is the average rate of growth since the 1950s, and is primarily driven by a steady increase in productivity. Up to 2007 the UK economy was neatly conforming to this trend. Then the recession hit, putting it well behind the trend rate, with a lot of catching up to do. This sort of commentator often mentions a large gap between the current size of the economy, and what it would have been if it had stuck to the trend – with the implication that this gap is a matter of policy failure. Chief amongst these commentators in my eyes is the FT’s Martin Wolf. In a recent article he dismissed the idea that growth up to 2007 was unsustainable.

This is macro blindness: a failure to question the neat patterns created by aggregate economic statistics. In my view the UK economy cannot sustain a growth rate as high as 2% in the long term, hasn’t been able to do so since perhaps 2000. The reasons are demographics, the changing impact of technology, and a reversal of the gains from trade achieved with the rise of China and India. The main evidence, not mentioned by Mr Wolf in his article, was provided for me in a lecture in 2007 by Professor Wendy Carlin, my economics tutor at UCL. It is the combination of an appreciating real exchange rate and a wide trade deficit. This provides an illusion of growth, but it is not supported by the advances in productivity that are required to sustain growth in the longer term. It was not fashionable to say this at the time, but it proved prophetic. Productivity, incidentally, is an almost impossible factor to measure satisfactorily, and can only really be inferred indirectly. It is my feeling, not sustained by hard analysis, that a lot this growth illusion was from the reduced costs an increasing amount of goods, and some services, bought from China and India, and an important element of that trade deficit. This boost to the economy had “temporary” and “reversible” written all over it.

And the bad news is that the current spate of growth has suspiciously similar symptoms. The trade balance reported by the ONS deteriorated from under negative 2% of the economy in mid 2013 to over negative 3% in November (the latest data). I don’t have direct figures for real exchange rate (a rather tricky calculation), but sterling has appreciated since a low in about March. There seems to be no offsetting productivity gain, since employment figures have been very positive (a very good thing, in spite of some economists moaning about productivity). So we’ve just reverted to the unsustainable growth patterns of the early 2000s, without the benefit of cheaper imports to sustain living standards.

What, of course, we need to see is a rebalancing of the economy to something more sustainable. This will show through in increased levels of investment (still low) and a stronger trade balance. The confidence engendered by the recent spurt of growth may help with this. Meanwhile the government’s austerity policies need to be strengthened, if anything – otherwise the economy will be even less sustainable. Grim news for politicians of all persuasions.

Inequality should be at the heart of the economic debate

Today the eminent US economist Larry Summers writes in the FT. His subject is the US economy, but the problem he addresses affects most developed economies in some shape or form, and the British economy quite closely. Unfortunately, so many economists of his generation, an obsession with short-term macroeconomic theory means that he doesn’t seem to get the big picture. Inequality lies at the heart of our economic malaise.

This debate is being conducted by academic economists in their own language, but it matters to all of us. I will summarise. Mr Summers’s starting proposition is that the US economy is suffering from “secular stagnation”. What this means is that the economy is stuck in a pattern of slow growth that does not fulfil the potential that population growth and advances in productivity should give it. This certainly seems to be true, though I think that the ability of developed economies to grow consistently at 2% per annum, the “trend rate”, must be subjected to critical analysis, rather than simply assuming it can be continued indefinitely because it has been achieved in the second half of the 2oth Century.

Mr Summers then says that there are three basic ways of trying to tackle this. First is “supply side” reforms; this means trying to fix fundamental bottlenecks in the economy, such as education. Worthy though he says these ideas are, the problem with this is that it does not fix a lack of demand in the economy; there is no point in producing more if nobody buys. This line of reasoning is very much behind the Keynesian critique of austerity economics. While there is a certain logic to it, it sounds too much like saying these problems are too much effort to fix, so let’s try something else – which is a road to nowhere. It used to be that economists blamed politicians for being too short-termist; now it is the other way around.

The second strategy is to loosen monetary policy. The problem is that monetary policy in the US (and the UK) is technically very loose as it is. I say technically, because in some respects monetary policy is quite tight in fact (because banks are reducing their balance sheets) – though there is little the authorities can do about it. Further loosening of policy (as advocated by the likes of Paul Krugman, for example) will simply inflate bubbles and get us back to the fix we found ourselves in 2007. He is surely right here – though I would add that I think that monetary policy is massively over-rated as a policy instrument by conventional economists anyway.

The third strategy is to use government spending to keep up demand, preferably by spending on infrastructure, that will be of long term benefit to the economy. He also says that governments should try to persuade the private sector to spend more, by which he mainly seems to mean the corporate sector to invest more.

The problem I have with this is its superficiality. The “secular stagnation” problem Mr Summers describes is a serious malfunction of the economic machine. This can be seen most clearly if you follow Mr Krugman’s logic. He says that the way out is to reduce interest rates to the point at which investment gets stimulated. And since interest rates are currently low, that means that we should have an effectively negative rate by stoking up inflation a bit. In other words, he is saying that the problem is that profitable investment is impossible, so we need to encourage investment that is marginally unprofitable. How on earth can an economy grow on that formula?

Surely we need to spend a bit more time getting to the bottom of exactly why are in this fix, and then trying to direct public policy to fixing it. Here I follow another prominent US economist: Joseph Stiglitz (or I think I do). The culprit for lack of demand in the economy is quite clear: it is lack of investment, especially from the private sector. You can make up for this shortage of investment by running government deficits, but you are in trouble if this is more than a temporary measure. The problem is that there is systemic reason for the shortage of private sector investment, which running government deficits does nothing to fix. It is rising inequality. Big surpluses are accumulating in some parts of the economy: in the personal wealth of the very rich, and on company balance sheets. This is not being spent on investment, but being held in cash to spend later, or chasing a merry go round of assets, real estate and shares, whose overall quantity is not expanding.

There are two problems here: inequality and the fact that savings are not translated into proper investments. The first of theses is the more fundamental. The Economist published an interesting article on the subject, reviewing the work of a French economist, Thomas Piketty. They point out that the inequality problem has been with us before: in the period up to 1914, giving rise to the critique of Karl Marx, amongst others. Mr Piketty thinks that developed economies are reverting to the 19th century type. The problem is slowing population growth, combined with technology that makes it easy to substitute people with machines. If he is right, the problem is not about to go away. It is the central political question of our time.

So what are the answers? First of all we need to tax the rich harder. Given that so much wealth ends up in slippery multinational networks, this means international cooperation. It also means rebalancing industry and jobs so that we are less over-supplied with unskilled workers. The pressure on the finance industry, especially investment banking, needs to be maintained. All this means reversing the conventional wisdom of the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher years – but not a recreation of the failed policies that preceded them.

This is an agenda of the left. It will be vigorously opposed by the right. Perhaps at long last the consensus that has ruled developed world politics will break up. But economists like Mr Summers do us no favours by concentrating on palliatives rather than solutions.

Nick Clegg is right to aim for the centre ground

This morning I got a grumpy email from the Social Liberal Forum, a left-inclined pressure group within the Liberal Democrats. It complained about the apparent support the party is giving to the Conservative policy of aiming for a balanced budget, and so a continuing diet of austerity. It criticised this idea for being economically illiterate. It went on that the policy was

Cold comfort … to the people having to choose between heating their homes and eating this Winter, to those forced to go to foodbanks to feed themselves and their children, to families struggling with the cost of living crisis

They also criticised the party leadership aiming at a “mythical place known as “the Centre ground””, and of being closer to the Conservatives than Labour.

All this illustrates the disarray on the British left on economic policy following the unexpected turn for the better the economy has taken. Previously the left could unite around the proposition that the government’s austerity policy was “too far, too fast”, causing hardship amongst society’s least well off. They took immense comfort from the support of many Keynesian economic heavyweights, who said that, in the absence of growth, the state should disregard the government deficit and stimulate the economy to get it moving – or at least stop making the situation worse through cuts. Hence the government’s supporters being “economically illiterate”. Yes they said, the government should tackle the deficit, but not until growth has been restored.

Though some might not realise it, that fox has been shot by the economic upturn. It isn’t that those economists were wrong, or that “too far, too fast” did not have economic validity at the time; it is that circumstances have changed. If the economy is growing, it is not a good idea to add further stimulus to it. And the “later” when the government should start to tackle the deficit issue has started to arrive. The awkward question that much government expenditure before the crisis was unsustainable, and would have to be cut in due course, cannot now be dodged.

In response the Labour party has changed the subject. Instead it is focusing on a “cost of living crisis” which they blame on badly behaving businesses, from energy companies to house builders. They are proposing a series of populist but economically naïve policies to change these companies’ behaviour. They appear to have no macroeconomic strategy, and the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, is conspicuously floundering.

Politically, Labour’s strategy is interesting. Instead of following political conventional wisdom by chasing voters who float between the main parties (which is what is meant by the “Centre ground”) they seem to be chasing left-inclined or working class voters who will never vote Conservative, but who do not currently vote at all. Centrist voters are worried about the management of the economy, and seem to think that the Conservatives have the stronger case on that front. Instead of trying to reassure these voters by making it clear that they would continue with austerity policies to bring the deficit under control, they are chasing other voters.

What is even more interesting is that the Conservatives are also showing little interest in the Centre. Centre voters are worried about “fairness”, and the state of public services, where they trust Labour more. But instead of doing much to reassure voters here, they are stirring up headlines on immigration and the European Union, where they are proposing policies that are just as economically naïve as Labour’s. Again, quite apart from fighting off the populist challenge presented by Ukip, they seem so be after right inclined people who are not voting, but would never vote Labour if they did.

So if there is no serious contest for the Centre, and if both of the two bigger main parties are pursuing populist but foolish policies, there is surely an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg, their leader, is right to make a bid for this, which his party is doing with its “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society” slogan, which epitomises the centre ground. The critics within the party of this strategy are right to point out that this is not ideological secure space, and will do little to built the party’s weak core vote. But if the party is to hang on to its representation in Parliament it will need the support of floating voters.

And so to economic policy. George Osborne, the Conservative Chancellor, is wrong to make a fetish of budget balance – and perhaps deserves to be called economically illiterate to do so. But it is economically sensible to manage the public’s expectations on what the state can afford. It may be that some economists are right, and that a “trend rate” of economic growth of 2-3% per annum is there for the taking in the medium to long term, as everybody seemed to think before 2007. But there are good reasons to suppose that they are wrong, and that much slower growth is “the new normal”, once a bit of catch-up growth is over. If so we will have to get used to a much smaller state and a less generous benefit system. Floating voters sense this, and will not vote for the Liberal Democrats if they think that they might help the Labour party take risks by reversing austerity. Nick Clegg may or may not be economically illiterate, but he is surely right on that one.

The glorious irrelevance of Paul Krugman

The economic crisis that started in 2007 exposed deep flaws in conventional macroeconomics. This was wonderfully exposed by Adair Turner, as I have posted before. But many of the macroeconomics’s big beasts seem to plough on regardless. Most shameless of these is Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. This has become apparent in the latest kerfuffle to take the world of macroeconomists: the idea of “secular stagnation”.

This can get very technical very quickly (indeed the technicality of it is something of a hiding place), and I will try to spare my readers of these technical details. The idea of secular stagnation that is the natural rate of interest in many developed economies is less than zero, and has been for some time; since about 2003 according to some, or the 1990s to others. The natural rate of interest is that which is required to balance the supply of savings with their consumption in investment projects. If this rate is negative, then actual interest rates are doomed to be above this rate, and hence not enough investment happens. And because of this, growth rates are dragged down to stagnation levels, while the surplus savings are pumped into assets, creating bubbles, or else excessive debt-fuelled consumption occurs. If you want to read more about there is this excellent article by Gavyn Davies in the FT. This is behind the FT paywall. More accessible in is the speech by Larry Summers, another big beast of old macroeconomics, that set the whole fuss off, which is on YouTube. Unfortunately this takes quite a bit of reading between the lines to understand its implications. And then there is Mr Krugman, who weighs in after the speech with this blog post. This much the most accessible article in all senses – Mr Krugman is one of the best people at explaining economics ideas there is.

Mr Krugman says that his idea encapsulates what he has being saying or feeling for years; and having read him for years, I have no reason to doubt him on that. mr Krugman’s main interest is in an old battle: that between his own liberal-inclined system of “Neo-Keynesian” theory, and the “Neo-Classical” approach favoured by conservatives. To him the crisis and its aftermath simply proves that the Neo-Classicists were wrong. He is right there, but that’s a very old story.

The interesting point is that neo-Keynesianism failed too. It failed for two main reasons. First was that it ignored the implications of the financial system, and levels of debt, in particular. And second it stuck to a theory of money and monetary policy that had barely moved on from the days when most transactions were settled in notes and coins. This blinded them to the scale of the crisis that was building, and blinds them still to the effectiveness of different policy options. In particular they place too much faith in the usefulness of a loose monetary policy, and an obsession with the rate of inflation. Their support for loose fiscal policy is much better grounded. There is not a hint of these problems in Mr Krugman’s writing.

There is something very striking about Mr Krugman’s article. He doesn’t seem that bothered about the forces that driving the economic statistics. There is a bit of speculation that it is something to do with an aging population, but no attempt to get behind the implications of this. Instead he obsesses with good old-fashioned fiscal and monetary policy: the idea being that we need to fix short term problems, and that the more fundamental, structural issues, such as inequality, finance and the efficiency of government, can be fixed in due course later. His signature policy idea is that the rate of inflation should be raised deliberately so that negative real interest rates can rise, which will then help the economy back to growth. Mr Krugman has long advocated just such a policy for Japan and feels entirely vindicated that the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is now following his advice.

This insouciance towards the details of what is happening to economies is quite wrong-headed, though. He is right that growth rates in the developed world are stagnating, and that this problem dates back to well before the crisis of 2007. But we need to have a better idea of why. If it is for fundamental reasons, such as demographics and the changed nature of technological innovation, what is the point trying to take the economy to a place that it cannot go sustainably? And surely policy solutions must be sensitive to the complexities of an evolving economy? If labour markets work in a very different way, thanks to technological change and globalisation, then the old assumptions about inflation could be wrong. We are in danger of misreading the implications of a low inflation rate, and policies designed to increase its level could have malign effects. In Japan, employers are refusing to raise wages in the face of increased inflation expectations, so Mr Abe’s policy is starting to unravel.

Mr Krugman comes through as gloriously irrelevant to modern policymakers. Right some of the time, wrong on other occasions, and with nothing to say on many crucial questions, his ideas are so disconnected from the realities of the modern economy that they have become quite useless. Macroeconomics needs to learn and move on. The likes of Mr Krugman and Mr Summers should either embrace new ideas or bow out.