Economics & Finance – Page 17

Positive linking: what do networks mean for public policy?

I ndependent and identically distributed. This assumption about data subject to statistical analysis is so routine that most students reduce it to the acronym “IID”. It means that the data follows a normal distribution and a routine set of analytical tools becomes available for the calculation of such things as confidence levels. Most of the evidence used by economists and other social scientists to support their theories is based on this type of analysis, and an IID assumption in the data. And yet human societies do not behave in accordance with this assumption; most of the choices we make are based on choices that other people have made, and are not independent. They are subject to network effects. It is a problem that most academic economists would rather not acknowledge. But the implications are profound.

This reflection comes to me after reading the book Positive Linking by Paul Ormerod. In this book Mr Ormerod attempts to show that all modern economics is deeply flawed because it ignores network effects, and that in future public policy should promote “positive linking”: promotion through network connections, rather than simply the design of incentives. He is only tangentially concerned with my worry over statistical analysis: he is more focused with the models built by economists based on rational people (or agents in the jargon) making independent choices based on an analysis of their options and preferences. These theoretical models lie behind the bulk of modern economic analysis, such how people might respond to taxes or changes to interest rates.

Unfortunately it is a very disappointing piece of writing. The language flows well enough, but it is full of repetition and digression. This sort of style probably works better orally than on the page, where it is a drag. But it is worse than that. His main concern seems to be to debunk conventional economic analysis rather than to promote a clearer understanding of networks and their implications. This verges on the unhinged sometimes, and you do not get the impression that arguments of the defenders of conventional economics get a fair hearing, and therefore that they are dealt with adequately. There are a lot of illustrations and “evidence”, but these are used anecdotally rather than to build up a coherent logical case. There are many digressions, for example about the rise of Protestantism in Tudor England. These seem to be included because they are good stories rather than taking his argument forward. The debunking of conventional economics is all rather old hat, though, and it has been done more coherently and entertainingly by authors such as Nasim Nicholas Taleb (of Black Swan fame).

The diatribes and digressions leave Mr Ormerod with inadequate space to develop his “twenty-first century model of rational behaviour”. His suggestions about how this might work in practice are left to a few pages at the end, and even this tends to drift into diatribes over how things are done now. For example he claims that sixty years of centralised, big-state social democratic government since the War has been a failure – on the grounds that unemployment is much the same on average as beforehand. But you can easily argue that this is the most successful period of public government in world ever – look at the rise in life expectancy, for example. Neither is it all that clear that everything, or even most things, these governments did was based on conventional economic models of human behaviour. Instead of explaining the religious dynamics of 16th Century England, he could have spent some time and space developing his argument here.

What a pity: because in the end I think he is right, and his suggestions for the way forward are sound. It isn’t that government since the War has failed, it is that its methods have run their course, and its policies now only seem to benefit an elite. Conventional economic analysis has more going for it than he suggests, but they are a blind alley now. But many economists and policy makers are in denial, to judge by the public debate – though some clear network-based ideas, like “nudge” theory are making their presence felt.

But there is a problem at the heart of the new twenty-first century network thinking, which Mr Ormerod acknowledges but dismisses too easily. The new models have weak predictive power. The point about normal distributions and the IID assumption that they are based on is that they produce a relatively tight distribution of data around a mean and few extreme results – “thin tails” in the jargon. There is a sleight of hand here: statisticians’ use of randomised data make their analysis sound more robust than it is; the IID assumption in fact makes the data tightly constrained. Consider a random walk, comprising a series of steps forward and equal steps backward. If the probability that your next step will be forward or backward is always 50% each, and the direction of earlier steps does not affect the direction of the next step, then this is an IID assumption. It sounds truly random. But you are unlikely to get very far from the starting point, which isn’t really very random at all. If your next step was more likely to be in the same direction as your last step than not, then you can end up anywhere. That’s real randomness, but it isn’t IID. There is no normal distribution. What looks like a soft assumption is in fact a hard one.

So it’s not just a question of changing the maths and updating the models. It is about accepting that social systems are fundamentally more unpredictable than we have previously accepted. It is not hard to see why policy makers and social scientists have struggled to accept this. I like to describe this by invoking the idea of “zeitgeist” – the spirit of the time, a ephemeral and unpredictable quality that in fact runs at the heart of everything. This is closely linked to Mr Ormerod’s ideas of networks, since it is networks that sustain the zeitgeist.

What to do? Mr Ormerod offers some useful rules of thumb. He also suggests investing more into research of network effects, which is self-interested but sensible, so long as we do not expect this to yield insights of anything like the theoretical precision of conventional methods. But ultimately his big idea, which he does woefully little to develop, is much greater delegation and localisation of decision making. Amen to that.

Can we learn from the 1930s?

Liberal Democrat conference goers are shaping up to a confrontation in three weeks’ time over economic policy. On the one hand the leadership wants to defend the current coalition government’s record; on the other many activists feel that this policy has been a dismal failure. This confrontation has been brewing for some years. It reflects a wider controversy in the country at large, though one senses that most people are now moving on. In this argument it does not usually take long before the government’s critics refer to the experience of the 1930s recession, or Depression, to back up their case. It’s worth unpicking that a bit.

My main source on this is a pamphlet produced by the think tank Centre Forum: Delivering growth while reducing deficits: lessons from the 1930s by Nicholas Crafts published in 2011. This concentrates on the experience of the UK. The first thing to point out is that the UK experience of the Depression is very different from the US one, though they are often conflated when people refer to the Depression now (just as the current experiences of the UK and US get conflated, especially noticeable when critics of UK policy quote U.S economist Paul Krugman in their support). The U.S. suffered a banking collapse, which then caused a catastrophic collapse in the rest of the economy, with real GDP falling by as much as 36% (hitting bottom in 1931); it only got back to its 1929 level in 1940. Behind the US collapse was a structural transfer of economic activity from agriculture to manufacturing, which it took the war economy to complete. Britain’s crisis was much less severe; it suffered a major loss of exports and economic shrinkage, but no banking collapse. The economy hit bottom also in 1931, just over 7% down from 1929 and was back to 1929 levels in 1933; by 1940 it was over 20% ahead. By comparison with the U.S. the structural move from agriculture to manufacturing was much more advanced when the recession struck. Britain was, however, struggling to adjust to a world where it could not rely on its Empire to drive its economy.

In fact, after flatlining in 1930 and losing over 5% in 1931, the UK made rather a successful recovery from the recession, as Mr Crafts (a professor of economic history at Warwick University) points out. This was achieved in spite the government cutting expenditure and raising taxes – austerity policies in today’s talk. Mr Crafts is very clear as to why: loose monetary policy. Specifically interest rates where kept low, and the authorities persuaded people that inflation would be persistent (at about 4%), giving negative real interest rates, while the pound was allowed to devalue. Something similar happened in the U.S in the New Deal era. Mr Crafts suggests that this formula should be repeated now, if the Bank of England could credibly suggest that inflation would increase to about 4% for the medium term, instead of its 2% target. This is quite topical, as this is almost exactly the strategy of the current Japanese government, the so-called “Abenomics”.

One point of interest in this is the rival claims of “Keynesians”, who advocate fiscal stimulus (extra government expenditure) and monetarists, who advocate loose monetary policy – though quite a few, like Mr Krugman, advocate both. Both groups refer back the Depression for support. In fact fiscal stimulus was not much used in the 1930s, while loose monetary policy was. Fiscal stimulus only came into its own at the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when it was led by rearmament and provoked by fears and then the reality of war.

I must admit that I find the parallels with the 1930s, especially in Britain, to be entirely unconvincing. The one clear lesson I would draw is that a banking collapse, as happened in the US in 1929, can be catastrophic. The world’s authorities were absolutely right to head this off in 2008-2009, even if that leaves awkward questions over how we got into the mess in the first place. That lesson was well learned, but there the lessons pretty much end. Further lesson-drawing leans on a species of macroeconomic blindness, a sort inverse of the composition fallacies that macroeconomists like to accuse their critics of. This entails taking false confidence by examining a collection of aggregated statistics, dipping down only selectively into the realities that lie behind them.

Consider some important differences between the world of the 1930s to the 2010s, for Britain in particular:

Britain’s banking sector was in much better shape in the 1930s. It was less dominated by big institutions (there was a thriving building society movement) and these institutions had not overreached in the way they had in 2008. The main barrier to borrowing was lack of demand for loans, which lower real interest rates incentivised.
There were many fewer barriers to house building in the 1930s. The main source of investment in the 1930s recovery was private sector house building. It clearly helped then that there was a severe house shortage, and inflation encouraged people to bring forward building projects. There is a housing shortage now, of course, and to be fair Mr Crafts says that barriers to house building would have to be tackled. But more than planning barriers are involved here. There is the general zeitgeist around the future direction of property prices; this is largely founded on the idea of restricted supply. Currently developers are holding back on many projects not because of finance, or lack planning permission, but because of doubts over the future direction of property prices.
Nowadays we live in a world of highly integrated financial markets and global trade. This has changed the way fiscal and monetary policy work. It is by no means certain (and in my view highly unlikely) that loose monetary policy would work itself out in such a benign way as in the 1930s. Would inflation in fact increase? If it did would wages stay ahead of prices? And if wages did not stay ahead of prices would companies invest their profits so as to boost domestic demand? (There is a fascinating aside in Mr Crafts’s pamphlet here. In the 1930s the Treasury assumed that prices would indeed run ahead of wages, boosting corporate profits, which would boost the economy. In fact wages kept pace with prices and the domestic demand was behind the growth). And bumping up inflation would quite likely cause the price of government gilts to plummet, making it harder to finance the national debt: in this day and age it is not as easy to inflate your way out of debt as many economists assume.

And that’s just the start. The more you investigate and think about the rights or wrongs of different policies, the less relevant the 1930s looks. It is just as bad for fiscal policy. In the 1930s and 1940s rearmament was a useful outlet. It soaked up surplus labour quickly and led to the building of industrial capacity that, as it turned out, could be readily reassigned to more constructive and benign uses. And the threat of war was horribly real, allowing the public to be mobilised behind the dislocation of the civilian economy. I cannot see what the modern equivalent is. Rearmament now, even if you can find a wider justification, would require the wrong skills and capabilities. The building of social housing is a possibility, I think, but would be insufficient in its own right.

Indeed I think the real issue of substance that divides critics of the coalition from its supporters, among Liberal Democrats anyway, is whether there is a pool of £20 billion or so of capital projects that the government can immediately and profitably get in motion. In the 1930s and 1940s it was weapons. In the 2010s it is what?

The Euro does not need a federal superstate to prosper

The Euro crisis is in one of its quiet phases. But few are foolish enough to think that its future is now secure. It is often said that the currency is destined to fail because of a fundamental economic law which means that you cannot operate a successful currency without the full authority and resources of a state behind it. The Euro needs to the apparatus of a federal superstate to survive, it is said. One Tory MP even suggested that the Euro’s promoters were committing fraud to suggest otherwise. But, for all that many in Brussels want it, establishing such a superstate is not politically feasible. And yet it is possible to see emerging the institutional architecture that will allow the Euro to survive and prosper without it. It’s a hard road, but there are enough benefits for the currency’s members to persist with it.

There are four key elements to the architecture. The first is an obvious one: a powerful European Central Bank (ECB), able to do what it takes to ride out the various crises that financial markets will throw at the system. The current ECB has proved up to the task, albeit by pushing at the boundaries of its formal powers, for example by buying the debt of member governments on the secondary market. Confidence that it can handle future crises is growing, adding to the overall stability of the system. And yet this power has its limits; it cannot transfer taxpayer funds from one country to another (referred to as “fiscal transfers” by economists), in the way a federal government could. The Euro has to find a way of existing without the sort of massive fiscal transfers that you see in the United States, for example.

In its place is the second element: provisions for states to default on their debts. This has been resisted tooth and nail by Euro federalists, but at long last it has been implemented for Greece. Alongside this, a crisis infrastructure is emerging, including crisis funds to support governments that are in the process of restructuring their obligations. This whole process needs to go further: publicly held government debt, e.g. that bought by the ECB, needs to be included, for example. Greece will surely need another restructure. But we are seeing the different nations’ bond prices reflecting the risk of default, and this imposes a discipline on government finances. And no government will want to follow the humiliating path of Greece into default, if they can help it.

There remains the problem of managing the banking system, which is very much run along national lines. While Greece got into trouble because of a profligate government, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus were brought down by banking crises. At first the response to a banking crisis was for governments to underwrite all banks’ creditors in order to restore confidence. Many applauded the Irish government when they did this early in the crisis; but it is a terrible idea, transferring liabilities from various people who should have known better to taxpayers who could ill afford it. Therefore the third element of the new architecture is to force bank creditors to pay, or at least contribute to, bailing out bust banks, referred to as “bailing in”. This solution was put in place for Cyprus, and hopefully will be the pattern in future. Of course it remains possible for financially strong governments, like Germany’s, to stand behind their own banks – but this should be discouraged. It is essential for discipline to be brought back into banking, and the system whereby bankers keep the profits and pass losses on to taxpayers has to be terminated.

But this approach is undeniably destabilising; it adds to the risk of bank runs. The obvious solution to this is to establish a Europe wide deposit insurance scheme, just as America has its federal scheme. Initially European governments seemed to favour this, but as they grew to understand its full implications, possible taxpayer transfers between states and increased central regulation, they have backed off. This has left us with the fourth and final element of the new architecture: emergency capital controls. This has been implemented for Cyprus, where depositors at Cyprus banks are suffering severe limits to their ability to move money out. It is an ugly process, and represents a big step bank from the integrated ideal of the Euro. The third and fourth elements in particular mean that a Euro held in a German bank is worth more than one held in a Portuguese one, say. But this is better than the alternatives, which attempt to wish financial risks away into an anonymous federal centre.

I believe that these four elements can evolve into a system that will give the Euro long lasting stability, and a better distribution of risk than a federal system would. We must remember that systems of human relations are only in a small part dependent of formal laws and powers, and much more based on expectations of how people should and will behave. This is how the management of the Euro is evolving. In the early days those expectations were wholly unrealistic, and ultimately required some kind of federal system to underwrite them. Now that we know this cannot be, new expectations are evolving. This is a bit like the way the British constitution and Common Law develops.

But is it worth it? Is it a loveless marriage between southern economies locked into permanent austerity, and more dynamic northern ones which are constantly being dragged down by their neighbours? (And France which manages to be on both sides of this equation at once!) If so the enterprise will lose political support and die anyway.

This question deserves a post all to itself, but I believe that all this pain has benefits to both sides. For the southern economies, joining the Euro was all about converging with their rich northern neighbours and their higher standard of living. Unfortunately they at first thought this would be easy. Lower interest rates and hot money from the north created a short term boom, but could not do the trick. Endless tax transfers (like between north and south Italy), are not on offer, and probably wouldn’t work either. In order to raise living standards the southern economies will have to undertake a painful series of reforms, rather in the way Britain did in the 1980s, Sweden in the 1990s, and, to a lesser extent, Germany in the 2000s. The process is starting, and the new disciplines of the Euro zone help this.

And for the northern economies of Germany, the Netherlands and Finland? Being in the Euro gives them a more stable economic environment, at a time when the global economy has been destabilised by the rising of China and other emerging markets. With a lower exchange rate than otherwise they have been able to preserves their exporting industries and maintain a degree of social stability. You only have to look at Britain to see what might have happened otherwise. There a short-term boom and appreciating exchange rate led to a flooding in of cheap imports and a hollowing out of export industries. Living standards grew for a while, but it could not last. The country is still struggling to escape the bust of 2008/09, with exports remaining weak.

The first decade and a half of the Euro has not been a happy experience, taken as a whole. But these are difficult times for developed world economies. In these circumstances the Euro remains a good idea, and indeed eastern European countries are still queuing to join. In the rough, interconnected world that is the modern economy, living with a freely floating currency is much harder than many would have you believe.

The GDP obsession

Today initial estimates of Britain’s quarterly GDP figures have been published. It has become a very silly circus. The BBC Today programme was giving it a lot air time this morning, in spite of not knowing what the crucial number was. Instead they made do with economists’ guesses. This is what they usually do, in spite of the fact that the guesses are often very wrong – though this time they were spot on. A much more informative discussion will be possible once the figures are released, and experts have had a chance to root around the detail. But by then it won’t be news, and the BBC won’t cover it. Meanwhile some even more meaningless political posturing is taking place. I just wish economists, journalists and politicians would show a bit of humility on the topic. As a measure GDP is not all it is cracked up to be.

The first problem is that, although it is quite a simple concept in theory, it is very complex in practice, making the implications of movements difficult to understand. In the UK economists have been puzzling over the fact that the current economic downturn (often trumpeted as being one of the worst in history) has not affected jobs nearly as much as previous downturns. This is often articulated as a “productivity gap”, since if income, and hence production, is falling faster than the number of jobs, productivity (production divided by jobs) must be falling. The Institute of Chartered Accountants’ Economia magazine ran a vey interesting article on this (Measure for Measure), which simply asked a whole series of prominent economists what they thought was going on. It was very revealing. Quite a few took a very superficial view, without probing behind the numbers much, speculating a bit, and then launching into some hobby horse or other, such as the need to stimulate aggregate demand, or let companies go bust more readily. But a number had clearly taken some trouble to get behind the numbers to understand what was going on. And when they did this, they picked up a very complicated picture, and they started to worry that the numbers were at all meaningful or accurate. Several speculated that the official figures were understating the level of GDP because they were not measuring some aspect of the economy properly, usually associated with services and new technology. They further speculated that, though GDP was artificially low now, this would be corrected in due course, when artificially high growth numbers would come through.

Another point that came through was that a large part of the “gap” arose from the fact that North Sea oil and financial services had shrunk. These sectors gave rise to a lot of product (albeit largely fictitious in the case of financial services) but not many jobs. Which leads me to a second problem with GDP: it doesn’t measure economic wellbeing very well. If these two sectors shrank, and it mainly affected a small number of very wealthy people, surely we can take its loss with a bit of a shrug? A big problem with the growth before the downturn in 2007 was that it benefited so few people (especially a problem in the US). Median real incomes and unemployment levels tell you a lot more. (There is an interesting article in todays FT by Richard Lambert on this). And, of course, there is the whole issue of wider wellbeing, which depends on the quality of personal relationships, the environment, and so on.

So, where does that leave any assessment of the current state of the British economy? The first point is that, although GDP numbers may not be as bad as we thought, economic wellbeing is not good for large parts of the population. Pay is not keeping up with prices. It is particularly hard for those with public sector jobs or dependent on benefits. A little bit of confidence is returning, and this will be good if, and only if, it leads businesses to invest more. If ordinary people simply decide to save less, and spend more, we will get a short-term lift to economic wellbeing, but it will not be sustainable.

Well, that is my personal view. Optimists, like the Observer commentator William Keegan, who also writes an article in Economia, think that there is a lot of spare capacity in the economy (people who are underemployed, for example, and working part time) so that any lift in demand will be self-sustaining, and that it doesn’t matter where it comes from – his preferred choice being from government, by cutting VAT and slowing down government cuts. Once this capacity is being used, we will be in a better position to reduce the size of government, if that is what is needed to make the economy sustainable in the long term. You hear a lot of this sort of view from professional economists, even very distinguished ones. To such an extent, indeed, that austerity policies are described as “discredited” by many, on the grounds that they have not delivered the steady GDP growth that these economists say is feasible.

Supporters of austerity are gloomier about the longer term economic outlook. The spare capacity highlighted by Mr Keegan and his friends is illusory: it is mainly in the wrong places. The economy before the crisis was unsustainable: too dependent on borrowing and a trade deficit. Furthermore, there are huge headwinds, in particular from an aging population and a workforce that will shrink (though Britain is not as badly off in this respect as many other economies, thanks in large part to a more liberal view of immigration, which politicians now regret). The economy has to be rebalanced and made more efficient: that means destroying a lot of the less efficient jobs, and creating new ones elsewhere. The wrong sort of economic growth will slow this down and simply create a bigger crisis later. There is no alternative to a slow and painful path of adjustment.

It is an old argument, with resonances of that between Keynes and the Treasury in the 1930s. Keynes is usually held to have been right then: the main problem was lack of demand, and it just needed to be kicked into place by government action. Many economists use this as evidence that we should repeat that prescription this time. But the world was a very different place then; there is no equivalent of the incipient manufacturing revolution to sustain growth now.

And this seems to be the biggest cost to an obsession with GDP. It gives economists the illusion that the issues are much the same, regardless of what is happening in the real economy. It is only when you try to get behind the numbers and ask searching questions, that you can start to understand the real policy options. Today’s figures will tell us very little.

The pensions blind spot

“All in it together? MPs WILL get a payrise worth up to 12%” thunders this morning’s Independent newspaper. While I’m not a big fan of our MPs, this headline has persuaded me that they deserve the payrise that apparently will be proposed by the independent body given the task of setting their pay. If even a supposedly more mature and considered newspaper like the Independent indulges in this kind of vindictive, misleading headlining, then something is clearly wrong.

This headline is revealing about how information is communicated in our society. First of all, no formal announcement has actually been made. The headline is based on a leak, which only reveals a partial picture. And yet by the time the full news is released, it will be old news. Speed trumps accuracy in the world of news media. The 12% figure is also misleading. It compares the proposed salary to be implemented in two years’ time to the current one. 9% is a more accurate number, and indeed this is what other organisations are reporting. Such considerations do not weigh heavily with headline writers.

But there is a further distortion. Apparently the proposal will be to reduce MPs’ pension entitlements at the same time – though the details don’t seem to have been leaked. So the total package will not be as generous as the headline writers make it sound. But here the journalists seem to be at one with the general public: treating pension entitlements as being of little real value, and failing to realise the implications of changes to it. Over the past couple of decades companies have been squeezing their employees’ pension plans hard, so that overall pension provision is now pretty meagre, when it used to be generous. This has barely reached the popular consciousness. Only public sector trade unionists have grasped that this is an fact a steady reduction in what people are paid.

There are in fact sound economic reasons for changes to pension arrangements. The proportion of pensioners to the working population is rising, and this makes pensions less affordable. Unfortunately high rates of pension saving don’t help change this dynamic much: this is one of those things that may work for individuals, but not for society as a whole. Pensions have to become less generous overall, and the collapse of private sector occupational pension plans is just part of that process.

But there is a big problem at the heart of it. Employers are in headlong retreat from pension provision, but individuals are not stepping forward into the breach to save more into personal pension plans. Even where they do, and they are being “nudged” into doing so by opt-out pension schemes, the amount being saved will go nowhere near providing for the scale of pensions the previous generation had been entitled to. This is sometimes offered as an example of irrational economic behaviour. But it isn’t. The transaction costs of saving weigh heavily on all but the very rich, and investment returns are dismal – even without the current regime of very low interest rates. Personal saving is a very inefficient way of delivering a pension for the majority.

It is better if the state steps in. A state-managed pay as you go scheme has comparatively low transaction costs, as well as reducing the risk to individual savers. Reforming the state pension is one of the more impressive achievements of the current Coalition government. It has been led by Lib Dem pensions minister Steve Webb, but it has not been politically contentious – the Conservatives deserve credit for letting him get on with the job – and Labour have not got in the way. Previous governments have changed their pensions ministers every year or so before any reform effort could get going. The focus has been on establishing a good basic pension to which everybody is entitled, which people can then top up through personal savings. Previous state schemes have tried to concentrate entitlement on the most needy, destroying the incentive to save, or to create complex entitlements based on income and contributions, which few understand because of the need not avoid double counting with subsidised private savings.

But the cost of this pension commitment will grow, and this is causing many sage heads to worry. Personally, I think we have to grin and bear it. If it looks as if it will run ahead of the ability to raise taxes, then we have to push the age entitlement back. But this is one of the critical strategic issues that our political leaders must grasp as our demography changes. Paying for the NHS is another.

These are weighty and important matters, which deserve much more attention than they get. They are much more important in the scheme of things than how much our MPs are paid. The country needs more MPs like Steve Webb, with both the intellectual and political skills to push forward difficult reforms like the one on pensions. We have a long way to go on that score.

Nowadays it seems to be the economists who are obsessed with the short term

The relationship between economists and politicians is often strained. It’s easy to think that economists are taking a detached view of public policy and its long term effects, while politicians simply jockey for advantage at the next election. But, strangely, that doesn’t seem to be the pattern right now. It’s the politicians who are urging short term pain for long term gain, while the economists say it can all be left for another day. It is the politicians who have a better grip on reality.

The nature of the relationship between political leaders and economists has changed as economics has evolved. I think it was President Truman in the late 1940s who said he wanted to find a one-handed economist, so fed up was he with his economic advisers saying: “One the one hand this, but on the other hand that”. He wouldn’t have that problem today: there is no species of public policy commentator that is more one-handed than an economist nowadays, so confident do they seem about what they are saying.

In the late 20th century supply-side economics took hold, after the economic traumas and stagflation of the 1970s. This held that the route to economic success was in making sure that markets worked efficiently and government expenditure kept on a tight reign. Economists bewailed the fact that their advice was so often ignored by politicians, who found their prescriptions unpalatable. Only the unelected President Pinochet seemed to take economists at their word, as he implemented a series of reforms in Chile. The expression “politically impossible” was frequently used in discussions of economics. In fact politicians, starting with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, largely implemented the supply-side economists’ advice, but this was only really acknowledged by most economists after the event.

But things seem to have moved on again. Politicians in Europe, including Britain, are grappling with the size of government in the wider economy, and pushing ahead with supply side reforms. This is hard political work, with scant reward on offer at the ballot box. But do politicians get credit from professional economists? Not a bit of it. Instead austerity policies are blamed for anaemic growth and high unemployment. Scarcely a day goes by without some economist, like Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf or Samuel Brittan thundering away that all this is foolish and bound to end badly: looser fiscal and monetary policies are needed, and the problems of government deficits can be sorted out another day.

What accounts for this? It is tempting to conclude that there is simply a time lag in economic thinking between the academics and the politicians. In academic circles the supply-side mania has run its course. It was always incomplete, and too often, not least during the great economic crisis of 2007-09, it had very little of value to say. Neo-Keynesianism had taken hold, with an updated series of macroeconomic models designed to deal with the issues that arose in the 1970s. The politicians, perhaps, haven’t moved on.

But I think there is a different explanation. It is that the politicians are much more aware of what is really happening in our economies, and the changes that are needed, while the macroeconomists are blinded by their use of aggregate statistics. The politicians can see that there are some fundamental problems with the way their economies are functioning, especially here in Europe. The first problem is that the state has become too large and inefficient. A second is that the progressive aging of populations is progressively weakening economies. A third is that globalisation has changed the rules of economic management. I could add a fourth issue, which is that the world’s financial systems have become dysfunctional, except that I think this is confusing politicians and economists alike, and is not a driver of tension between the two.

Economists agree with this analysis of problems by and large, of course, except that I don’t think that most have woken up to the implications of globalisation, and its profound implications for the way prices and wages rates are set. What the politicians appreciate is that these problems are desperately hard to fix, and that putting off the evil day is not going to help. In particular the central problem is to shrink the state. Politically it is much easier to put through tough changes in hard times, and not when things seem to be ticking along nicely. And if you look at the political forces that seize on what the economists are saying, you will find that they are mainly those that do not see the need to shrink the state at all.

Alongside this disagreement about the best time to reform is an economic judgement. Politicians are sceptical that sustainable economic growth is at all easy to find. Many economists think back to the decade before 2007, when 2% annual growth was more or less taken for granted, and assume with a wave of the magic confidence wand, this growth will come back – and that we might even be able to make up some of the lost ground. Even now I have seen some economists who should know better projecting trend growth before the crisis, to estimate the true cost of the recession. So in the five years since the crisis, the economy should have grown by 10%, they say; in fact it has shrunk by 4% (I haven’t checked that number), so the crisis and bad economic management has cost the economy 14%! But what if that 2% tend growth wasn’t for real? What if it was simply pumped up by borrowing and trade deficits? And what if the progressive aging of the population makes sustainable growth of 2%, or even 1%, unreachable? Blinded by their aggregate statistics, not enough economists are asking these questions, and still less following through their implications. But it is all too obvious to most politicians, and businessmen, come to that.

The gap between politicians and economists isn’t helped by the fact that the former keep using government debt as the main driving force of their argument. This is politically convenient, but the economists rightly spot that it is insufficient of itself. If the economy could readily be kicked back into a 2% growth trend with a bit of fiscal pump-priming, then the debt argument would not hold water. In today’s FT Samuel Brittan accuses politicians of falling for the fallacy of composition: that whole economies work like family budgets. In fact there are deeper reasons for what politicians are doing.

There is further disagreement over investment spending. Many economists think that they have found the magic bullet. Government funded infrastructure investment can both act as a short-term fiscal stimulus while delivering longer term benefits to the economy. So why are the politicians so reluctant to spend more on capital projects, and even cut them back? And yet this is another blinded by aggregates issue. The economists’ argument only holds water if the investment projects actually deliver economic benefits. This is much more difficult in practice than it is in theory. Under the last government investing in hospitals must have looked a sure-fire winner, given the ever rising demand for healthcare services. But we are now finding, as hospitals are collapsing under unaffordable PFI debts, that it wasn’t so easy. Too often they built the wrong sort of facilities. This is situation normal. The usual result of a public sector infrastructure project is to end badly. Japan’s investment splurge in the 1990s, in similar economic circumstances, simply caused many “bridges to nowhere” to be built.

And so, in this debate, my sympathies are with our political leaders.

Japan: are there lessons for other developed economies?

A while ago I wrote that the radical economic policies of Japan’s new government under Shinzo Abe would be an interesting experiment for the world. They were much lauded by austerity sceptics, such as Paul Krugman, who drew attention to aggressive monetary policies and fiscal stimulus, which they were advocating for other developed economies. I was sceptical. But early results have exceeded expectations. There is a good analysis here from the Economist, which also discusses the new government’s nationalist tendencies. Is this evidence that the austerity policies being pursued by much of the rest of the developed world are mistaken?

My scepticism when I last posted was based on two things. First that the policies hinged on companies raising wages, when their profits were under pressure. Second was that, based on Mr Abe’s previous form, I did not think that structural reforms to Japan’s economy would be pursued with vigour. On both counts it looks as if I was too pessimistic. This means that Japan’s economy might well get a sustained period of growth, and that it will reduce the burden of government debt. But applying its policies to other developed economies is problematic. There are three reasons for this.

The first is that for longer term success it is still the element of structural reform that is critical. Mr Abe refers to his programme as “three arrows”, in reference to a Japanese folklore story that you can snap the shaft of a single arrow easily, but not three held together. These three are monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform. Austerity policies in Europe and America are firmly based on structural reform: especially in reducing the size of the state. Opponents of austerity tend to want to halt or slow down structural reform. Some say that it should wait until growth is resumed; others would rather avoid the reform process altogether. The three arrows approach would in fact promote reform, alongside the monetary and fiscal palliatives, and, indeed, the more considered critics of austerity do say this. But here there is a problem: Japan does not have an oversized state, so cutting back government expenditure is not a major reform priority, as opposed to opening the economy up to more competition and reforming corporate taxes. In Britain, France, Italy, Spain and so on the size state has run beyond what the economy can sustain, and so it has to be cut back, which in turn drains demand from the economy in the short term. There is good reason to doubt whether fiscal or monetary stimulus, beyond their current levels, are compatible with the need to shrink the state.

There is a second important difference in Japan. Its economy has a trade surplus and (which is linked) a savings surplus, albeit temporarily challenged as it has to import energy while its nuclear programme is in abeyance. That means that a fall in the exchange rate, as has happened to the Yen, will generate an immediate bonus to businesses, easily outweighing the extra costs imposed on the economy. This allows companies to put wages up. The savings surplus also means that the economy is not dependent on borrowing from overseas investors, who might be shaken by such currency depreciation. This is not the case with the austerity economies. Where their exchange rates have fallen, as in Britain, this has simply contributed to the squeeze on consumers without benefiting business to anything like the same degree.

Mentioning the exchange rate brings me to a third observation. It is that a lot of Japan’s success so far has less to do with with the country’s actual economic policies than with the effect of announcements on the zeitgeist. Implementation has hardly started, and yet the exchange rate has already plummeted and stock market risen, which is having the necessary warming effect, and set off a virtuous circle. The same can be said, in reverse, for austerity policies in the West, of course. But where reforms are necessarily painful, this is almost impossible to do. Economists have long been reluctant to admit the role of psychology in macroeconomic policy, and have let it in only gradually (through such ideas a inflation expectations). Governments and central banks have long known it – and Mr Abe’s government is acutely aware. The question for Europeans, in particular, is whether further aggressive monetary easing, linked to higher inflation expectations, combined with some fiscal stimulus would lift the zeitgeist and get the economies moving again. We have reason to be sceptical.

Almost all the developed economies in the world are experiencing difficulties. It is easy to fall in with the idea that this must be for similar reasons and that the solutions for each economy are similar. In fact each major economy is unique. And the differences between Japan and the others is amongst the largest. Abenomics may work for Japan, but that does not mean they will work anywhere else.

How is Labour’s economic stimulus meant to work?

ON Monday at lunchtime Labour’s leader Ed Miliband was subjected to a fierce interview by Martha Kearney on the BBC Radio 4’s World at One. The main subject of contention was Labour’s economic policy, and in particular whether the party’s plan for a temporary cut in Value Added Tax would increase government borrowing. Mr Miliband did not want to say this, only that, because it would stimulate growth, it would help bring down government debt in the medium term. This was not an assured performance by Mr Miliband, but beyond that it seemed to me, perhaps unfairly, that he only had a superficial grasp of the economics involved. If so, he shares this superficial understanding with many members of his party, who lap up quotes from economic commentators such as Paul Krugman, and marry it to half-digested economic theory. So how is it meant to work? How can a temporary tax cut reduce government debt?

Let’s start with the Keynesian multiplier, which is widely taught in basic economics, and which I suspect comes to mind to most people here. You really have to do a bit of maths to understand the implications. Suppose you have an economy with a national income of £100bn a year, and an average tax take of 40%. You decide on a 1% stimulus with a temporary tax cut of £1bn. As people receive the extra money, 40% of it goes in tax, and they spend, say 80% of the rest on domestic goods and services (it doesn’t work if people use it to pay off debt or spend it on a foreign made car…). This adds £480m to the economy with extra expenditure straightaway. And this process continues in a virtual but diminishing circle, as that £480m is taxed, spent and so on. If everything turns out to be mathematically consistent the stimulus adds over £900m to the economy. You have nearly 1% growth! This has cost the taxpayer (added to national debt) of £1bn in the first instance, but a lot of this has come back in extra taxes from the growth.

This is what people half remember when economic experts like Mr Krugman say that stimulus can reduce debt. But there are two problems. First of all, although on my fairly realistic assumptions most of the cost is clawed back, about a quarter of it isn’t. Keynesian stimulus cannot pay for itself at this simple, basic level unless people increase their spending by more than the stimulus itself. And secondly, it is a one-time event, so that you get 1% growth for one year, and then it stops, unless you repeat the giveaway. This tax cut is temporary. When you put taxes back up again, the whole process goes into reverse and the economy shrinks back to where it started. Something very like this happened to the last Labour government’s temporary cut in VAT: a small bounce that was undone when the cut had to be reversed, which, of course, they then blamed on the Coalition.

All this is well known to the Paul Krugmans of this world though, otherwise they wouldn’t be writing economics textbooks and winning Nobel laureates. When they advocate stimulus they are actually talking about something else: the effect of such a stimulus on the national zeitgeist. That 1% lift may make people and businesses happier. Businesses go out and invest more money; people save less, perhaps thinking that their share and property values will go up, and consume more. If this happens then all bets are off; the economy grows further, the government gets more taxes and the stimulus can pay for itself quite quickly and easily. Investment is particularly important; Maynard Keynes’s critical insight was that recessions happen when investments don’t match the amounts people save.

What to say about this? There are two potential snags and an irony. The first snag is that the zeitgeist is a hard thing to manage. The whole thing can be undone by another crisis from the Eurozone, for example, which might reduce prospects for exports and dent confidence generally; or there could be some other crisis. The second snag is that this model of short-term growth assumes that there is spare capacity in the economy. When people and businesses go out and spend, domestic companies can readily ramp up production, employ new people and so forth. This is usually the case in a recession. But not always. In the 1970s, after the price of oil skyrocketed, the economy had to be restructured in order to grow – which was particularly hard because of the trade unions. Attempts to stimulate the economy simply led to high inflation while doing nothing for unemployment. Today, more flexible and globalised markets seem to have reduced the inflation threat – but stimulus can still be dissipated on imports and asset prices. What of the British economy now? Many commentators think that the British economy should be “rebalanced”, reducing its dependence on financial services and North Sea oil, as well as excessive private consumption fuelled by debt and property prices.

These potential snags to stimulus are why many critics of the government, such as the FT’s Martin Wolf, and many Liberal Democrats, such as the Social Liberal Forum, say that any stimulus should take the form of added public expenditure on investment, in infrastructure and homes. Since these have an inherent value, and help expand the economy’s capacity, there should be much less risk. This is a sensible idea in theory that is a lot less easy in practice. The public sector has a tendency to invest in wasteful projects for political rather than economic reasons.

This is where Labour’s plans are quite distinctive. They talk about temporary tax cuts, and hint at increased current expenditure. This is founded on a belief that there was not much of a problem with the pre-crisis economy, or unsustainable about the growth rates achieved in the years leading up to it. The crisis was simply a problem with the global financial system, and the country’s poor performance since is down to incompetent economic management from the Coalition. This is pretty much what Tony Blair said in his recent piece for the New Statesman. If you believe this then capacity is not at issue, and the zietgeist should be readily easy to fix.

And the irony? Left wing economic commentators like to laugh at the “Voodoo economics” of Laffer curves and self-funding tax cuts advocated by far-right commentators. Paul Krugman talks about their belief in the “confidence fairy”. But the left’s economic beliefs are no less dependent on their own confidence fairy.

Monetary policy is a useless collective noun

At the time of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 it was commonplace to say that modern economics, especailly the macroeconomic variety, was in crisis, and needed a fundamental rethink. Alas, the vested interests of established economists have prevailed. Very little rethinking has occured, and this mainly tweaking rather than anything big. This is most striking in the area of monetary policy. The debates now going on in Japan and Britain remind me of the academic papers and discussions that I read about while an economics undergraduate at UCL in 2005-08. Circumstances have changed (in Britain anyway) but not the economics.

Economists of complain that amateurs are guilty of the fallacy of composition: to assume that was is true for a household, say, is also true of all households grouped together in a single economy. It may sensible for a single household to save more of its income to repay debt: but if a whole economy tries this at once, it could be disastrous. But economists are guilty of their own fallacy, though one for which I have not found a commonly used name. I will call it the fallacy of collective nouns. It is idea that by collecting together a group of disparate elements and giving them a name, that you have created a new entity that allows you to ignore its component parts. Most macroeconomic concepts are such collective concepts: GDP, inflation, and so on. Such collectives are useful only up to a point, and then you have you have to look at their component elements. And yet most macroeconomists, even very intelligent and distinguished ones, can’t bear to let go of their collective concepts and carry on using them long after their usefulness has ceased.

This is clearly the case with the idea called “monetary policy”. The conventional idea is that an economy has something called a “money supply”, which can be manipulated through policy instruments under the control of a central bank. In turn this money supply affects the behaviour of the people that form the economy with fairly predictable effects on things like consumer prices,wages, investment and output. All of this is very questionable in a modern economy. It is much more helpful to think of the particular components of “monetary policy”: central bank interest rates, state purchases of its own and other bonds, bank regulation, and so forth, and how these affect the various parts of the economy acting through the financial markets.

The conventional economic thinking runs something like this: the economy (Britain and Japan in particular) is stagnating with relatively low levels of inflation, but high or rapidly rising levels of government debt. In order to pay back this government debt you need to break out of the stagnation and grow, or (whisper it) let inflation make the debt more affordable. To do this you need to “loosen” monetary policy and increase the supply of money. With more money in their pockets, people go out and spend more, leading either to growth or inflation. To do this the central bank lowers interest rates, and where this does not work, use other measures like Quantitative Easing. Cue lots of debate about the relevance of inflation targeting and its alternatives (nominal GDP targets for example), all well within the comfort zones of economists.

There are very many problems associated with this line of reasoning. It is far from clear what money is. However it is clear that commercial bank accounts form the most important part of it, and this is a function of commercial bank policies, not those of a central bank, whose influence is increasingly marginal. It isn’t clear that large bank balances lead to increased spending, least of all on constructive economic things like consumption or proper investment (as opposed to chasing up the value of assets in fixed supply). Rising prices do not necessarily make debt more affordable: that requires rising income for the people holding the debt. And it goes on.

All the verbiage around “monetary policy” is clouding the issue. There are two problems being faced the British and Japanese economies: weak output and excessive debt. Weak output in turn has two components: using spare capacity (i.e. that created simply because of slow demand) and strucural problems. In Britain there is a big argument about how much of the problem is spare capacity and how much is structural. If it is largely spare capacity then simple macroeconomic solutions may have merit: you just need to boost confidence a bit to lift demand. But even here it is not self evident that any of the loose money policies will be much help. In Japan there seems to be even less spare capacity.

I can’t help thinking that what policy makers really mean by “loose monetary policy” is higher wages. Increasing consumer spending power through increasing wages will lift confidence, and even if it is not based on increased productivity, it will make debts easier to pay off, including public debt through higher tax revenues. This lurks behind a lot of the talk about greater tolerance for inflation. But in Britain we have the wrong sort of inflation: rising import costs through a lower pound, and increased government charges. This really isn’t helping. If policymakers want higher pay it would be better to throw away the weasel talk about loose money, and talk about pay. There is some evidence for that in Japan, but this only serves to show how difficult the policy is in practice.

The Japanese government also deserves some credit for the fact that it is not advocating looser monetary policy by itself, though you wouldn’t guess that from much of the coverage here. It is one of three prongs, the other two being fiscal stimulus and structural reform. There is plenty of scope for structural reform in Japan, and this gives their economic policy some hope for ultimate success if they follow it through. But it is the prospect of quick and easy solutions through fiscal and monetary policy that is exciting people.

In Britain a chronic trade deficit shows major structural problems, no doubt partly as a result of reduced North Sea oil. This requires the economy to be producing different things, not just more all round. Loose talk using economic collective nouns is making this harder to see and address.

David Graeber’s Debt the First 5,000 years – the emperor has no clothes

One of the books I received for Christmas was David Graeber’s Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Mr Graeber is an American anthropologist, now working at Goldsmiths in London, who has been active in the anti-capitalist Occupy movement, and describes himself as an anarchist. The book promises to give some intellectual heft to the anti-capitalist case, by examining the origins and history of debt and money, and how we need to rethink it. So far so good. But after the book promised so much at the beginning, I can hardly contain my disappointment with its limp ending.

The book starts well enough. He immediately focuses on modern economics’s weakest point: the theory of debt and money. He may labour the nonsense of the economist’s creation myth of a barter a economy a bit too much: economists aren’t really interested in history after all. But economists’ confusion over the role and meaning of money is evident; personally I wouldn’t use the barter myth to illustrate this, but the way economists still talk about printing preses and helicopter drops when trying to explain monetary policy. Mr Graeber runs his hand across the soft underbelly of economics, but then, instead going in for the kill, he throws away the knife. He rejects the whole, quantitative, mathematical language of economics. He thinks that the discipline’s attempt to preserve moral neutrality is in fact condoning immorality and violence. Like it or not, numbers and mathematics are central to our society’s workings, and rejecting these tools out of hand leaves Mr Graeber’s arguments with very little purchase.

The full, awful implications of this are not immediately clear, however. Mr Graeber puts the question of money and debt into an anthropological context, and this is a good read. I found his categorisation of human interactions into three types very illuminating. These types are exchange, what he calls “communism” and hierarchical. The exchange relationship is the typical arms length commercial one: one item is exchanged for another, typically money, and there are no further implications for the relationship between the parties; it ends with the transaction. A communistic (or perhaps communal would be a less provocative word) transaction is typical of close communities: transactions aren’t exchanges, those who are able give to those who are in need, all a part of a wider, long term relationship. Relationship is also key to hierarchical transactions, but it is one of authority. A lower individual pays tribute to a higher one, while the higher one may cast beneficence to those beneath. Mr Graeber is careful to say that none of these is inherently superior to the others, and any society needs to use all three. But he complains that the modern world puts exchange relationships on a pedestal at the cost of communistic ones, costing the quality of human relationships.

All this leads into a broad historical narrative – the 5,000 years – of the Eurasian continent. Originally money develops as a credit relationship, and is not seen as a thing in itself: its accounting function is the critical element, and it is woven into the fabric of society, based on trust. But then the idea of precious metals, gold and silver in particular, becoming money in its own right rapidly took hold across the entire continent. The effect, in his telling, was malign. Money existed independently of states and relationships. Soldiers could loot money from one place as they destroyed it and spend the proceeds elsewhere. It facilitated both the running of armies and trading of slaves. Sinister, cynical empires came to dominate the world in Europe, India and China in the centuries before and after Christ.

These empires then broke down (or changed nature in China) as precious metal (bullion) money was drained from the system. In Mr Graeber’s telling this has much to do with the new world religions (Christianity, Islam and Buddhism) in what he calls the Middle Ages. His account is admirably even handed in its geography, rather than the customary focus on Europe. In this age Europe is a barbaric offshoot from the civilised worlds of the Middle East and China. Credit becomes central to commerce, which operates independently of the state, and is based on trust. This is something of a golden age to Mr Graeber, though not the European end.

This unravels in the Renaissance, with the Europeans leading the way. Gold and silver is looted in America and then traded with the Chinese. An age of violence and destruction is born, as trust is no longer required in trade and commerce. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries the malign instruments of modern finance, bonds and shares, are invented in order to fuel society’s appetite for war. Meanwhile, the slave trade takes off, destroying African society amongst other victims. An age often portrayed by western historians as one of progress, Mr Graeber portrays as one of a descent into destruction. This is deliberately provocative, but he has a point: this is an age of war, colonialism and slavery.

And it is here, as the industrial revolution begins, that Mr Graeber’s account runs out of steam. All the building blocks for capitalist society are in place, and its evil roots clear; he almost says “and the rest is history”. He swiftly moves on to his final chapter, where a new era begins with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, and with the inevitable collapse of capitalism in its wake. I was expecting to read an account of the era of economic growth, but there’s practically nothing there. And the awful truth dawns. Up to this point I had been giving Mr Graeber the benefit of the doubt, for all his provocations. But the emperor has no clothes. When it comes to describing the modern world he is utterly out of his depth and as a result anything of consequence he has to say (and there are some) seems a matter of random chance. An example is his idea that the purchase of US Treasury securities, which will always be rolled over rather than repaid, is in fact paying tribute to the primary military power. the USA. He spots a problem with this account: the Chinese are amongst the largest buyers, and they are power rivals. He then has to concoct a story that this is part of a long term Chinese game. This is really very silly. The Chinese are buying US Treasury stock because they are running a big trade surplus and there is nowhere else for its surplus dollars to go; the power transfer implied is minimal; but the trade surplus is an important element of the Chinese development strategy, which involves building up production in advance of consumption, and in the great scheme of things the dollar surplus isn’t that important to them; it’s only money – if they lost the lot in a crash tomorrow, how much does it really matter? The Chinese seem to have grasped Mr Graeber’s message about money rather better than he has himself. Mr Graeber’s lack of economic literacy has him floundering to comprehend what is happening around him.

His thesis is that modern capitalism is a typical bullion economy based on power and violence, and the absence of trust, with exchange and hierarchical transactions driving all else out. Most people in developed economies are little better than slaves, tied to their employers and struggling to pay off debt. Debt is used to enslave people. But this system is fundamentally unstable and is in the process of collapsing.

But after the emperor-has-no-clothes moment there is no aspect of Mr Graeber’s thesis that doesn’t look questionable. Is is really true to say that capitalist transactions are based on the ultimate sanction of force, and not on trust? Is it not trust that distinguishes advanced capitalism in say, Denmark, from the less developed versions in Russia and China?

And he misses the whole issue of growth. This process, driven mainly by increased productivity, has improved the lives of countless millions – and is genuinely popular with most people in both the developed and developing world. It is by no means evident that today’s workers can be compared to Roman and African slaves. And debt has played a critcal role in lubricating this growth process, by allowing investment: payment now for a later gain. The whole culture of investment is omitted from Mr Graeber’s analysis: debt for him has but one purpose: to enslave the debtor by forcing him to make a promise he cannot keep.

Mr Graeber’s failure is underlined by the absence of any practical ideas about how the world should change to make it better. His only idea is a Jubilee: a systematic forgiveness of debt. But he hasn’t thought about the social chaos that would result as all savings were wiped out. The modern way of doing a Jubilee is called hyperinflation. It is hardly evident that the phenomenon that created Nazism is necessarily helpful to the development of society and the empowerment of the poor.

Is there anything to be retrieved from Mr Graeber’s spectacular collapse when confronted with the modern economy? He happens to be right about an awful lot of things. Money is best regarded as an abstract concept, a social invention without underlying reality. Debt also is a social convention that can outlive its usefulness, and should not be treated as sacred promise. The exchange method should not be idealised as model for all life, as Chicago School economists do. And economic growth in the developed world does seem to have hit natural limits, whose consequences we still don’t understand. Capitalism may indeed collapse if it continues in its current form.

But the answer is not to condemn capitalism as the work of Satan, and hope for something better to turn up. Mr Graeber’s work is pure antithesis. Progress is made by synthesis: by taking capitalism and making it better. And you can’t do that by rejecting the discipline of economics, for all its manifest faults.