Vince Cable and economics – what he says in Newswire

No time for a proper post from me this week. But I was intrigued by an article in Mark Pack’s Newswire (a Lib Dem newsletter), with an extensive quote from Vince Cable.

This shows how hard he is to pin down into conventional categories of economic thinking. But that’s for the best possible reason – he has studied and thought about the issues for a long time, and observed economic policy in practice in many different situations.

Here it is:

The roots of Vince Cable’s political beliefs

Placing Vince Cable on the left-right political spectrum never quite works because he combines both a passion for intervention to deal with market failures with a suspicion of the failings of big government. The roots of that combination are well illustrated in his excellent memoirs, Free Radical. They highlight how his work on development issues in Africa helped give him both those passions – seeing both the need for action and the consequences of government failure. Writing here exclusively for Lib Dem Newswire, Vince Cable sets out the roots of his political views in more detail.

My earliest political views were a reaction to the extremes I encountered growing up. My father was an upwardly mobile, working class, Tory who sought to inculcate some good values (hard work, thrift, respect for the law) and some bad ones (racism, which split the family when I married an East African Asian, my late wife Olympia). He died after contracting pneumonia delivering leaflets for Mrs Thatcher in the snow. My mother secretly voted Liberal, defying his instructions to vote Tory.

My best teenage friend was a card-carrying Communist like his father, a shop steward at York carriage works. His revolutionary zeal got him expelled from college, allegedly for arson. He tried to re-educate me in sound ideological principles but concluded that I was a ‘bourgeois liberal’ with Menshevik tendencies.

When I went to university I sampled both the Liberals, becoming their President, and also a student branch of the social democratic wing of the Labour party. Sensing that they were saying the same thing but using different language, I tried to achieve a merger. Both sides were outraged and the merger collapsed ignominiously, 20 years ahead of its time. I joined Labour, beguiled by Harold Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution.

As a young economist, educated by the disciples of Keynes, I was then exposed to real world economics as a Treasury official in Kenya. Experience of African development quickly taught me that textbook ideas of ‘planning’ – or Keynes for that matter – had little relevance. The state was usually a vehicle for predation and patronage. Wealth was created by farmers, especially by entrepreneurial African small-holders; by mainly Asian businessmen; and by professionally run multinationals. And then looted by politicians and civil servants

I moved on to Latin America where the fashionable nationalistic ideology of ‘self-reliance’ merely entrenched vested interests and reinforced extreme and often appalling inequalities. Much of my development writing would now be described as ‘neo-liberal’ but I think is right in that context.

The country which most influenced my thinking was India which I have visited many times over 50 years for family and professional reasons. I have seen India’s remarkable transformation, much of it based on the adage that ‘the economy grows at night, when the government goes to sleep’. I have always been torn between torn between my admiration for India’s democratic and dynamic ‘anarchy that works’ and my admiration for the technocratic revolution in modern China which has produced an economic, poverty reducing, miracle, albeit seriously illiberal.

Between the travelling I got involved in British politics and became a Labour councillor, helping to run Glasgow. The establishment was pure Tammany Hall, so I moved to the Left where the idealistic and capable people were. I marched proudly down Sauchiehall Street alongside the charismatic Communist leader of the shipyard workers, Jimmy Reid and Tony Benn, and contributed to Gordon Brown’s Red Papers on Scotland.

I led a somewhat schizophrenic existence teaching students Adam Smith’s economics in the morning and practising municipal socialism in the afternoon. I found a more comfortable place campaigning for Britain to join the EU alongside Labour figures like John Smith, for whom I later worked as a Special Adviser, and Liberals like David Steel.

My Fabian, centre-left, eclectic, version of social democracy didn’t long survive a move to London where the Militant Tendency and assorted Trots, including today’s leadership, were in control of the Labour Party. In the civil war which followed, I joined the SDP, albeit after some heart-searching, unsuccessfully contesting my home town of York in the 1983, and then the dispiriting 1987, election.

In the long period in the political wilderness before becoming MP in Twickenham I had two other formative political experiences. One was spending several years working on global environmental issues in the late 1980’s: helping to write the Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development and then one of the first intergovernmental reports on climate change. The other was when Shell recruited me into their long-term scenario planning team, later to be Chief Economist. I found the management culture admirably professional and honest, albeit conservative, and I like to think I helped to steer them towards a future in emerging economies and to a greater sense of social and environmental responsibility.

For the rest, my record as a Lib Dem MP after 1997 is reasonably well known. As an economic spokesman, my approach initially reflected the social liberal consensus of the time. The financial crisis changed everything. My intellectually eclectic background in economics helped me to see ahead and better understand the nature of the crisis, to write coherently about it – in The Storm – and to advocate correct but controversial measures like nationalisation of the banks and the taxation of property wealth.

The Coalition was a classic head-heart dilemma. My head told me that joining the Coalition was right and that we had no alternative but to address the massive budget deficit which was the legacy of a crisis of financial capitalism. My heart was definitely not with the Tories. But I found a useful role as an interventionist Business Secretary promoting industrial strategy and state-led banking, German-style innovation and training policies and applying a pragmatic, problem solving, approach to government. In a sequel to The Storm – After the Storm – I set out where I think we should be going as a country, now, in terms of economic policy.

There is one more important strand in my approach to politics. I have long been interested in, and worried about, the politics of identity. Bringing up a multiracial family and fighting racism; experience of the tangled web of religious sectarianism and incipient nationalism in the west of Scotland; immersed for over 50 years in the movement to anchor Britain in Europe: these have been major, often dominant, concerns. I wrote the first of two pamphlets for Demos in the mid-1990’s on identity politics and have seen its growing influence, culminating in the Brexit vote.

My first venture into fiction, the novel Open Arms – due out in a few weeks – involves the interplay of identity politics and personal relationships. And in the real world, I anticipate that the future of the UK and our party will be determined by whether national identity or a broader, more outward-looking, more European, view of the world dominate politics.

The rise and fall of neoliberalsim

The left loves to frame politics in terms of abstract nouns. And as is the human way, they are happier talking about what they are against rather than what they are for. Two abstract nouns in particular are top of the left’s hate list: “austerity” and “neoliberalism”. For the left’s challengers, it is usually best ignore this war on the abstract. It convinces few, after all – the left is much more effective when it campaigns on the concrete: food banks and bedroom tax, for example. Yet abstract ideas have their place, and it is worth exploring them more deeply sometimes. Austerity I will leave for now; I want to look a little more deeply at neoliberalism.

To most on the left “neoliberalism” is a scattergun term to brand all right and centre economic thinking that prevailed from the 1980s, after the collapse in confidence in the system known as “Keynesianism”, though Maynard Keynes would have disapproved of much of it. But if we are to understand what was actually going on we need to distinguish it from neoclassical economics, which was an important strand of thinking in this period. As its name suggests, neoclassical thinking harks back to classical economics, that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th century, before Maynard Keynes revolutionised economic thinking. This saw economies as self-correcting systems that did not need state interventions. At any point an economy is in an equilibrium, and any attempt to shift it would be self-defeating. Attempts to kick against this system would simply lead to such ills as inflation and unemployment.

Keynesianism fell out of favour in the stagflation of the 1970s, following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of managed exchange rates and the an explosion in the price of oil. Some economists used this to go back to classical ideas, saying that Keynesianism was a big mistake. In America these economists were often based in Chicago and the Midwest – and were known as “freshwater” economists in contrast to the “saltwater” sort on the American east and west coasts. They turned to the idea of “real business cycles”, which proposes that the fluctuations from boom to recession are driven by changes to the “real” economy in equilibrium – and not a process of disequilibrium, as Keynes had suggested. So, for example, in pre-industrial societies the cycle might reflect the effect of weather and plague. In the modern age economists call this changes to technology. The true heroes of a neoclassical economy are the entrepreneurs who advance the productivity that make us all wealthier – the American author Ayn Rand was something of a hero. The state and taxes were loathed.

In spite of some rather superficial empirical studies which provided some evidence to support it, real business cycle theory is almost self-evident nonsense. Modern economies are almost never in equilibrium; state interventions are frequently helpful. Neoclassicism kept going because it was politically convenient to a certain class of wealthy American, who funded supportive institutions – and it was, and remains, politically influential amongst US Republicans. It lost all credibility to everybody else in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008-2009, when the neoclassicists had nothing helpful to say. It was also clear by then that their advice in such places as Russia (post the fall of communism) and Iraq (post the US invasion) had been disastrous – they had advised the Republican US government to stand back and let things take their course – it was the economic wing of neoconservatism. Still, almost no idea is completely without merit. Technology has important implications for the workings of macroeconomics, and yet it is almost universally ignored by macroeconomists, who think that the economy worked much the same way in 1900, 1950 and 2000, and that all changes are explained by decisions in fiscal and monetary policy. In fact if you want to understand why Keynesianism worked so well in the 1950s and so badly in the 1970s, technology provides the most convincing explanation.

So, what is neoliberalism? It is an altogether more subtle economic analysis that sought to built on the insights of Maynard Keynes rather than throw them out. Indeed their ideas evolved into something referred to as “neokeynesianism”. At its heart are two ideas. First is that markets function as processors of information, and are the most efficient way that information about supply and demand can communicate and coordinate in our highly complex society. This is an idea developed by the Austrian economist (and sparring partner of Keynes) Friedrich Hayek, and who is the patron saint of neoliberalism (and much more pragmatic than his leftist critics pain him – he formed a common front with Keynes during the war). The second is that the incentives of people who manage institutions that are not subject to market forces, such as regulators and governments, are generally not aligned to the public good. These insights lead to the conclusion that even well intentioned state interventions often do more harm than good – and that it is best to try and design such interventions so that they work closely with market forces, aligning incentives and making better use of information.

Neoliberals sought to repair the tattered state of the Keynesian conventional wisdom with the idea of “equilibrium unemployment” – a state of the economy at which any increase in demand would simply lead to inflation – with the insight that the level of this equilibrium could be much higher than what was conventionally regarded as full employment. It depended on the state of labour markets and technology – best addressed through “supply-side” policies, which often meant deregulation. In the 1970s, they said, the trouble arose from over-managed labour markets (the effect on trade unions in particular) and technological disruption (especially the relative rise of energy prices) that rendered much of the industrial economy obsolete.

In terms of economic management, neoliberals liked free capital markets, including floating exchange rates (in contrast to Keynes’s preference for managed international capital flows, exemplified by the Bretton Woods system). They disliked the use of fiscal policy (i.e. the deliberate management of government budgets to regulate deficiencies in demand), as it was rendered useless by misaligned incentives – there would be a tendency to let booms run too long. They did like the idea of “automatic stabilisers”, being tax and benefit policies that tended to increase or reduce demand according to the state of the business cycle – and as such accepted a large state sector – unlike the neoclassicists. Instead they preferred to regulate demand through government intervention in interest rates, delegated to arms-length central banks (an idea which neoclassicists hated, incidentally – they want to leave interest rates to the market). Like their Keynesian predecessors, they thought that inflation was the critical sign of whether or not supply and demand in an economy were in balance – though they developed the idea that inflation could be built on expectations, as well as simply mis-matched supply and demand (i.e. if people expected inflation to be high, they would demand extra wages, turning this into a self-fulfilling prophecy). For all their scepticism of government, they still saw it as playing a central role in the management of the economy – and searched for optimal levels and designs of intervention.

Neo-liberalism became the conventional economic wisdom in the 1990s, all the way through to the great financial crash. This period saw an unprecedented advance in living standards across our globe. So why do most people think it has failed? Because the picture in developed economies in that period is much more mixed. In the US in particular, the economic gains have been concentrated amongst the wealthy, with large companies amassing unprecedented levels of profit. The destruction of many industries through technological obsolescence and globalisation left a huge legacy in ruined lives and failing local communities. And finally there was the crash itself, which most neoliberals had failed to see coming and to head off – and whose fall-out they proved ill-equipped to deal with.

And yet. The main advance in human well-being in the neoliberal ascendancy came in the developing world – and the adoption of neoliberal insights was clearly responsible for this – in China, India, and many other countries. And the failure of attempts to defy neoliberalism, in France under Francois Hollande and, more dramatically, by the Kirchners in Argentina, has led to local revivals of neoliberal ideas. Something has clearly gone wrong, but is the whole system really rubbish?

I will examine that question in a future post.

The real questions behind the politics of tax and spend

Warning: this is a longer read for those interested in achieving a deeper understanding of political choices, especially here in Britain. I write it to release some my internal tensions after a tough few weeks helping to organise my party’s general election campaign, while tackling questions posed by tightening school budgets.

The politics of tax and spend is close to the heart of Britain’s general election campaign. And yet the quality of economic commentary is very shallow. Here is my attempt at something deeper.

Running government finances is not like running a household budget. The primary constraint on a household budget is money, which can be treated as a fixed resource, and can be stored for use at a future date (so long as inflation is not a major factor). But looking at an economy as a whole, money is just an economic tool, a means to an end. Hoarding it is pointless. Money is tactics, not strategy.

So to look at matters strategically we need to take money out of the picture, and ask what it is that we are trying to achieve. A higher level of public services? More private consumption? More investment for the future? All of these things are constrained by real resources. By which we mainly mean people. If we want to increase the level of consumption or investment, more people need to be put to work, or the same number of people need to work harder or more productively. The latter may also be a function of capital assets, but capital assets are created by people working in earlier periods and forgoing consumption.

So, if you want to expand public services, the question arises as to where the extra resources are to come from. If you are hiring 10,000 extra policemen, those individuals may be doing nothing now, in which case the economy as whole expands costlessly. Or they may be doing important jobs elsewhere, in which case the recruitment will potentially reduce the production levels of their previous employers. And what if you simply raise the level of pay for the same work? Or increase the level of a cash benefit. That is a way of raising the levels of consumption for those targeted individuals. Who is to produce those extra things they are to consume?

And so we come to a central question of fact, which is discussed surprising little. The left claim that there is plenty of spare capacity in the economy, so if we expand the consumption of the disadvantaged, or the reach of public services, the economy as a whole will respond by utilising those spare resources, and nobody is disadvantaged. This idea goes by the term “Keynesianism”. It is more likely to be true in a recession than at the height of a boom. The right thinks that spare capacity is not so easily manipulated, and such expansion will usually come at the cost of private consumption, whether that is intended or not. And in Britain, when employment is at record levels, and we are still net importers of goods, this is not so easily dismissed. Some on the left counter with the hope that any reduced consumption will be by the rich, of luxury goods.

But many more thoughtful observers think that there is still spare capacity in the economy. They point to low levels of pay and productivity in many places. If there was more pressure from the demand side of the economy, then private sector produces might sharpen up and become more productive. And if the extra public resources were directed well, into investment, then that will help expand future capacity too. The likelihood of these outcomes depends a lot on the tactics.

But before considering the tactics – the details of taxation and monetary policy – we need to reflect that modern, developed economies are quite open. We can import resources from abroad. And we can import workers. For certain advantaged economies, like the USA, a high level of net imports is completely sustainable. And there are economies out there (Germany, for example) that are happy to be net exporters, for their own tactical reasons. But for others a prolonged period of net imports, especially if not used to create productive assets, can lead to a financial crisis and the seizing up of the economy. Where the UK stands between these two poles really is unclear; the country has been a net importer for most of recent history, and financially stable for most of that period too. But there will be a level of net imports that is unsustainable; and a financial crisis can take many years to build, as we found in 2008.

It is worth touching on the issue of immigration. What if the extra workers needed for expanded public services could themselves be imported, either directly or to substitute for home recruits? These workers will create demands of their own, but it is one way of squaring the circle. Indeed in the mid noughties, when the Labour government undertook a significant expansion of the public sector, this was one of the ways they were able to sustain it, using workers from the new entrants to the EU from central and eastern Europe. That Labour leaders are now saying that this influx was a serious mistake is a piece of hypocrisy; they love to take credit for the expansion of public resources at the same time.

It is worth trying to establish these basic rules on strategy – but it is not hard to see the strategy that public leaders converge on, from left and right. It is to expand public services and benefits (such as pensions and hardship relief) while taking up slack in the country’s productive capacity, or expanding that capacity through higher productivity. And so we turn to the tactics. If the tactics of expanding the public sector go wrong, there is a more or less disorderly reduction in the levels of consumption by the general public in order to make room.

We need to understand what we mean by this. In the conventional view of economists this about one thing above all: inflation. Most economists like the idea of a little bit of inflation (I don’t agree, but because I think inflation erodes trust in public institutions rather than its effect on short-term incentives, the obsession of most economists). But inflation can quickly become unhealthy, so that an increasing amount of effort is placed in managing money rather than valuable production, and it clogs the process of exchange, which is the foundation of a healthy economy. Inflation occurs when demand outstrips supply. Its effect in this context is either to undermine the attempt to expand the public sector, by eroding real wages or the real value of the benefits, or by reducing public consumption as real incomes are reduced. The so-called neo-Keynesian consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s built an entire edifice on this idea – using a targeted rate of inflation as the primary way of determining whether an economy was in balance. The idea still stalks the conventional wisdom.

But that was dealing with yesterday’s problem. Neo-Keynesianism was built in response to the 1970s phenomenon of stagflation, when the old-fashioned “Keynesian” model broke down (quotation marks because though Maynard Keynes’s fingerprints are on this old conventional wisdom, such a flexible mind would surely have moved on as the facts changed). But what emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was different. It was changed by two things – a shift in the balance of power in the political economy towards employers, and away from employees and unions; and the process of globalisation. Globalisation, we must understand, is a combination of more advanced production and communication technologies, and the opening up of new Asian economies into the global trading system, starting with Japan and moving by way of South Korea and Taiwan to the giants of India and China. This has broken down the previous relationships between demand, supply and price.

First, it has broken the link between prices and pay. It used to be easy to identify a single rate of inflation that, give or take, would apply to both prices and wages. At first this seemed to work in workers’ favour. Cheap imports from Asia held price inflation in check, but workers’ pay kept ahead. But since the crash in 2008 this has flipped. Rises in prices (often from those same Asian imports) are not reflected in pay levels. It makes no sense to talk of a single level of inflation, and to use consumer price inflation as a lone yardstick of economic health. And the second change is that other ways that excess demand can be satisfied have been made easier. It is easier to import goods and services either directly, by buying from foreign firms, or indirectly by domestic firms outsourcing production. We are still trying to understand what the impacts of these changes are. But excess demand is likely to lead to two things: fat profits by businesses as they are able to increase their prices while holding wages down, and an increasing trade deficit. It is also means that the risks of excessive inflation are much lower, as it quickly feeds into lower real incomes and dampening demand.

At this point we need to think about money. This, too, has changed dramatically, as technology has moved us away from physical currency to a much more flexible system of paying for things. The idea of “money supply” as being a physical thing that needs managing as such is increasingly old-hat – another nail in the coffin of neo-Keynesianism. Instead, policymakers need to think about interest rates, exchange rates and controls of the physical transfer of capital (in this case money balances not required for consumption) within economies (banking controls) and between them (exchange controls). If this goes wrong, people lose confidence in the means of exchange, and the economy rapidly melts down – as we can see happening now in Venezuela. This is what spooked so many governments in 2008 and 2009 when they launched into a series of panicky bail-outs of banks.

And so in this brief overview (that is already much longer than my usual posts) we at last come to where most of the political conversation starts: taxation and public debt. Looked at through the eyes of an economist (money is not a thing in itself, remember) the main purpose of tax is the regulate demand so that we have an orderly economy. Not enough tax, and the financial system becomes unstable, with or without inflation. Too much tax and it is a self-inflicted wound – living standards are lower than they need to be. Tax has other important functions too, of course. It is a means of wealth redistribution (and too skewed a distribution of wealth leads to a poorly functioning economy), and managing incentives. Whether an economy needs more or less tax at any given point depends on a wide variety of factors, of which the size of public spending is only one. This has led to a lot of tension between economists and politicians, especially in the austerity years from 2010. Politicians insist on talking as if public accounts were like household accounts; economists (or many of them) say this is self-harm. Actually a lot of the argument is at cross purposes. What the politicians do, and what they said were different things. Oddly enough, I suspect that politicians were in fact thinking long term, and trying to rebalance the economy, while economists were obsessing about the moment – a reversal of the usual characterisation.

And what of public debt? This again is not all it seems. Many governments, including the US, the UK and most spectacularly, Japan, have asked their central banks to quietly buy up government debt. This acts to in effect cancel it. The world has not ended, as some conservative commentators have suggested it would. What is going on? The central bankers are reacting to an unbalanced financial system. For one reason or another there is too much hoarding of money, by business organisations and rich individuals. This hoarding is sucking demand out of the economy. And it is also creating excess demand for short-term financial instruments. Governments are taking advantage of this by satisfying this excess demand by buying back longer term debt. They hope that in the process they will restore some of the lost demand by encouraging more genuine capital investment, as opposed to a continuing financial merry-go-round. There is little evidence for this working, though.

This makes it an extremely easy time for governments to finance budget deficits and investment – at least tactically. And that is why calls for more public investment at a time of high national debt only outrages conservative politicians and their allies. But the strategic question remains. As real resources are mobilised towards these ends, what will the impact be? There may indeed be spare capacity to be utilised, but that actually be what happens?

To me the key point to arise from this is that managing public finances is a matter of competence and discipline. The left may well be right that in the short term that we can expand the public sector with few real risks, even without raising taxes by much. But that could turn bad very quickly. Do they have the competence to appreciate when that moment arrives, and the discipline to act?

This is where the Labour government of the mid-noughties fell down. They expanded the public sector, while holding, or even cutting, taxes on mainstream income and consumption (as opposed to capital transactions). They secured growth with low inflation (those cheap Asian imports helped a lot), but not based on genuine productivity (supposed advances in productivity were in sectors such as finance where it turned out to be chimerical). Rapid immigration helped sustain this, but it created tensions, especially in working class communities. And they failed to grasp that the extent of the financial boom, which generated a lot of short-term tax revenue, was creating systemic risk. As a result the financial crisis was a rout for the UK, unlike the relative calm of better-managed economies such as Canada or even France.

And yet there is no sign that either wing of the Labour Party has learnt from this. They want to stoke up demand but have no understanding of when enough will be enough. The Conservatives have many faults (and their idea of eliminating the budget deficit is plain nutty), but to my mind they show a greater grasp of the strategic risks, and the need for discipline and competence (as do my own Liberal Democrats, come to that – indeed Vince Cable showed more awareness of the dangers in the mid-noughties than any other leading politician).

But quite apart from party differences, I feel that there is a deeper need to reform the process of governance so that these risks are managed more securely. There is a slo a need to reform the workings of the economy so that extra demand for goods and services does not simply end up in fat profits and foreign jobs. Alas there is little talk from any of the parties of how this is to be done.

Where is the light for towns like Wakefield?

Last week I spent a few days in Wakefield, a small city to the east of Leeds in West Yorkshire. The economic fortunes of such small towns in Britain is one of the big issues in British public policy. I am still searching for the answers.

Wakefield goes back at least to that era which Britons refer to as the Dark Ages – after the Romans left and England was subject to invasion successively by Anglo-Saxons and Danes. The Normans proceeded to raze it to the ground in the Harrying of the North, after William the Conqueror took over in 1066. But its geographical location, at an important crossing of the River Calder, a navigable waterway, ensured its future. The Normans built two castles there. It prospered as a port serving the wool and tanning trades. This economic success continued into the industrial revolution, when its river connections were boosted by canals. It flourished as an agricultural trading centre. It diversified into textiles, coal (mined nearby) and glass, and became an important administrative centre. Its grand church (the tallest spire in Yorkshire) became a cathedral with its own bishop in 1888, and City status soon followed.

Alas this has fallen apart. The coal, glass and textiles industries were wiped out in the 1980s, usually blamed on the policies of Margaret Thatcher, but in fact the result of changes to technology, assisted by globalisation. It lost its bishop in 2014. The town looks rather sad today. There are plentiful vacant spaces used as car parks. Empty shops scar its streets. Benefits are claimed by about 18% of the population, compared to the English average of 13.5%. Unemployment is higher than average, though, according to the claimant count (4.3%), far from catastrophic. There are few immigrants living there – a sure sign of a weak economy (though our hotel cleaners were east European). We could buy about ten houses of the same size from the current value of our London home. Let’s not overdo this. It it did not appear to be a disaster area. It was easy to find nice places to eat in the town centre. But our hotel (part of a characterless budget chain) was the only central one we could find. There were other hotels on the outskirts: a bleak land of dual carriageways, roundabouts, retail parks and industrial estates, dominated by national chains, doing things as cheaply as possible, and sending the surplus elsewhere.

Quite a bit has been spent on redevelopment. The town centre has a smart shopping mall (albeit with quite a few empty shops), and the central square looks newly revamped. The cathedral has been very tastefully restored and modernised, with some lovely new furnishings, and is an uplifting space. Above all there is the Hepworth, which was why we visited. This is a modern gallery that celebrates Barbara Hepworth, the sculptor and artist, who was born and brought up in Wakefield. This is a lovely building on the town’s otherwise derelict riverside – and a world-class gallery, taking advantage of many years of collecting by its unprepossessing but imaginative predecessor, the Wakefield Art Gallery (converted from terraced houses) – and the generosity of local artists like Hepworth and Henry Moore, who was born and brought up in nearby Castleford. The dedication to art does not end there. A few miles from the town there is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) – an outstanding collection of sculpture and other art, in the setting of an old country park – and another reason for our visit.

But how far can you regenerate a town on art? There did not appear to be many jobs in it. No flourishing urban environment has developed around the Hepworth in the manner of London’s South Bank, in spite of its riverside location. The same can be said for the YSP, which barely keeps a couple of snack bars going, in spite of its many visitors – though a posh hotel and conference centre is under development. The nearby motorway service area on the M1 motorway may do more business than both of these facilities put together.

So Wakefield has achieved a sort of economic mediocrity. There are jobs, and not just in the usual services, but it is not prospering. One clear weakness is the lack of a university (unlike nearby Leeds, and even Huddersfield, another smaller town nearby). Education should be at the heart of a modern economy. There is a decent further education college – but this is a neglected sector in Britain’s education system, starved by government austerity even as schools and universities have prospered.

The town must aspire to better. The weakness of such towns drives much of the foul political mood in not just Britain. People there feel left behind and neglected by metropolitan types who promise much and deliver little (or so it appears to their residents). New jobs tend to be poor quality; capital sends its rewards to the big metropolises or to offshore tax havens. Surely there is untapped human capital here? How can local networks be revived to counter the giant national and global networks that will otherwise suck these places dry? Too many economists are sinking into pessimism. A recent article in the Economist compared the fate of less-skilled humans to that of horses, which became obsolete a century ago. Is the weakness of such centres an inevitable consequence of the march of automation and an obsession with productivity?

I’m not convinced. I see too many jobs that need doing that are being neglected – in education, health, social care and local services generally – and in the world’s large but hollow corporations and state agencies, who pass the buck rather than solve problems. The liberal market economy, so favoured by the conventional wisdom of the 1990s and 2000s is failing – just as the publicly directed command economy has failed before it. But what to do? Local currencies perhaps? This approach is favoured by new economy thinkers like David Boyle – and regular commenter to this blog Peter Martin. Perhaps it is worth a try, but I suspect that political power structures must be altered first. It is no accident that countries with a highly devolved political culture, like Switzerland and Germany, are faring better than centralised polities like Britain and France. Though that is not enough – as the fortunes of the highly devolved United States shows. You need a strong social safety net too.

If I was trying to make something of Wakefield, I would start with its further education college. It has failed in a bid to acquire university status – but Britain needs world-class technical training for less academic young people and adults. Surely building on neglected human capital must be a large part of any solution? But that needs a strong state to provide up front payment and carry risk – and the state is weakening.

So a larger state, but not one dominated by giant agencies with Key Performance Indicators and lacklustre management; local democracy that does not turn into cronyism and mediocrity; thriving businesses that recycle their surpluses locally rather than send them elsewhere. A big challenge, but the future of liberalism depends on it.

Productivity statistics expose deep weaknesses in theoretical economics

I hadn’t intended to post for another couple of weeks, but this article in the Financial Times is too good to miss. It tackles one of the central issues in modern economic debate: why productivity growth is so slow. Productivity lies at the heart of the conventional view of public policy – and yet it is very poorly understood. This article sheds light on what is happening in the UK – and it should give politicians and economists pause.

Productivity is in principle a very simple idea. It is the amount produced by a unit of labour in a unit of time – the number of widgets per person per hour, for example. This immediately conjures up a clear mental picture of a factory producing cars, say. Count the number of cars produced, and the number of hours of labour required and it is easy-peasy, surely? Alas in a modern economy it is a much more difficult idea. What if your car factory is producing both Ford Fiestas and Mondeos, and switches to the smaller car? Has productivity gone up if more are produced? And how do you distinguish product enhancement from inflation? And then there are problems treating capital outputs and inputs, research and development, and so on. In the end the productivity measured across an economy is a bit of a balancing figure, as we accountants would call it – or a bit of a dustbin – what’s left when you’ve taken everything else out. It is just a number relationship without a coherent meaning in its own right. It is not like the concepts that physical scientists are used to dealing with – such as the temperature and pressure of a gas. Macroeconomics is heterogeneous, to say nothing of being subject to capricious social forces that tend to corrupt all attempts at measurement.

Now, what is the productivity puzzle? It is that productivity growth, as measured by macroeconomic statisticians, has slowed markedly since 2008, when the financial crash caused a dislocation in measured income. This applies to all developed economies, but to the British economy most of all – UK productivity growth, according to the article, fell from 1.6% per annum before 2008 to just 0.3% after. This has profound implications, since in the long term productivity growth is what drives income per head, alongside the average hours people work (influenced strongly by workforce participation – such as how many women are in paid employment). And this drives tax revenues, from which public services are funded. Since we assume that quality of life is mainly driven by income, and that public services can constantly be enhanced by extra spending (apart from occasional periods of “austerity”), this has profound implications. Prior to 2008 most economists assumed that productivity growth of 1-2% pa was a law of nature and main driver of “trend growth”, which could be baked into economic models. The corollary was that weak growth since 2008, and the failure of GDP to catch up with the pre 2008 trend-line, was a failure in macroeconomic policy.

But given the dustbin nature of the productivity statistics, it is very hard to drill down into them to find out just where the problem is – though that there is a problem of some sort is clear. This is licence for all manner of people to project their speculations into a fact-free zone. Mostly these are based on the intuitively obvious idea that the changes to the productivity figures represent trends in the efficiency of workers. Recently Bank of England bigwig Andrew Haldane moaned that the problem was that efficiency was stuck in a rut, especially in a swathe of mediocre firms. He based this on sectoral analysis which showed that the productivity had stagnated across all sectors – with economic growth mainly attributed to rises in employment, not efficiency.

The FT article, authored by Chris Giles and Gemma Tetlow, challenge that. A close examination of the numbers shows that the crash in productivity growth arises from changes in a small number of economic sectors, accounting for just 11% of income. These are banking, telecoms, electricity and gas, management consultancy, and legal and accounting services. Actually Mr Haldane’s and Mr Giles/Ms Tetlow’s analysis can be reconciled. Mr Haldane was taking a general view across the economy since 2008, where productivity growth is now very limited. The FT writers are looking at the transition from before and after 2008. The curious point is why productivity growth was so high in that small number of industries before 2008 – and the realisation that this is what was driving so much of the figures for productivity growth before that date.

And that leaves this blogger asking whether that pre-crash productivity growth – and by implication the pre-crash trend rate of overall economic growth – was in any sense real, other than statistically. In banking we know that in 2008 massive state resources were required to keep the industry alive, and that since then the industry has been much better controlled. This suggests that “productivity” would more correctly be described as “recklessness”. And in each of the other industries you can point to factors that demonstrate that growth was not simply incremental improvements in efficiency. For example in electricity and gas productivity was based on high inputs of fossil fuels and nuclear energy – and the switch away from these destructive sources of power has caused a decline in measured productivity. And how on earth do you assess the output of management consultancy, and accountancy and legal services? The transition may simply be from high margins in boom economy conditions to higher scrutiny when times were harder – or to put it another way, what was supposedly economic growth prior to 2008 was in fact concealed inflation.

All this supports the narrative that I have been promoting for quite a few years about the transition from growth to austerity. This is that the supposed growth of the economy of the early to mid noughties in the UK was down to excess demand, of which reckless fiscal policy was a part – though you might alternatively argue that it was reckless borrowing by the private sector that the government turned a blind eye to. It also suggests that the lacklustre economic performance of the UK economy since 2008 reflects a lot more than just weak demand management: it is chickens coming home to roost.

This takes me to two very important conclusions. The first is that we have to be very careful about the recommendations of macroeconomists – and the eco-system of commentators and policy types that use macroeconomics as their starting point. The bandying about of aggregate statistics is all very well – but the aggregates hide as well as reveal – and we need to base economic prescriptions on the complexities of the real economy. That is hard, but necessary.

The second point is that overall productivity is indeed stuck in a rut, and has been since well before 2008. It must reflect structural issues in real economy – and not simply laziness amongst mediocre firms or poor macroeconomic management. There is no shortage of potential culprits: demographics; the nature of modern technology; the temporary nature of gains from trade with Asian economies. The world may still be becoming a better place – but because of things that are not captured in GDP, and hence productivity statistics. The problem for public policy is that tax revenues are largely driven by GDP (which is why it is an important statistic) – so we can’t expect an ever increasing flow of tax revenue to fund public services. In the long run we must either reduce the demand for public services (healthier people, fewer crimes, less skewed income distribution, etc.), raise taxes, or compromise what level of services and benefits we think that a civilised state should provide.

And that is a completely new way of thinking about public policy. The political right have grasped this (for the wrong reasons, perhaps) – but the left has not.

The US Republican company tax reform might be a good idea

I like to see the bright side. With the accession of Donald Trump as US President, alongside the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, that is hard. Mostly, I simply hope that the process of challenge will make liberals stronger and harder. There is too much complacency in liberal thinking. And there is more cosying up to vested interests than we might like to think.

And among the flood of bad ideas coming out ot the new administration, there may be the odd good one. Reforming company tax might be one of them.

What I am thinking of are the plans proposed by Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Liberals should support it, though alas many won’t because of who is proposing it, rather than its merits. One part of the plan is to cut the rate of company tax to 20%, but reduce the number of deductions. This is an old debate. I am sympathetic to lower marginal rates and fewer deductions, though 20% is aggressive. I do not share the view that company profits should not be taxed, and that the burden of taxation should entirely be on distribution of profit instead.

There’s another old idea in the mix too: 100% write off of capital investments in the year the money is spent. Older British accountants like me will remember that we had that system here in the 1980s – called 100% capital allowances. It was the basis of many a tax avoidance scheme, and perhaps tilted the balance too much in favour of investing in plant rather than people. But there is some merit to it.

But the really interesting idea is the so-called “border adjustment”. This exempts from tax sales outside the US, and disallows as deductions spending on imports. This can be painted in different ways. To nativists this sounds like encouraging exports and discouraging imports. Alternatively it can be presented as a sort of value-added tax, which is well-established here in Europe. Neither presentation does it justice. It is not VAT, not least because the costs paying people is within its scope. And its effect on corporate incentives can be beneficial to the world economy rather than detrimental. It amounts to a constructive proposal to deal with a major problem: the taxation of transnational businesses.

At the moment companies are taxed by the location of profits, apportioned “fairly” using general accounting principles. This falls foul of manipulation through transfer pricing – what country-level subsidiaries within a transnational business charge each other. Thus when a multinational sells you something in Britain, it may treat as part of its costs the use of intellectual property based in a low tax regime, such as the Netherlands or Luxembourg. National tax authorities have been fighting a losing battle against abuse. The G20 recently adopted some new rules to reduce abuse, but this is sticking plaster to repair a fracture. It is best seen as an attempt by corporate lobbyists to stave off more radical approaches.

One such radical approach to reform corporate tax is unitary taxation. This method means that tax authorities assess a business’s global profit, and then allocate it to country based on the location of some combination of sales, employment or property. This is how US states tax the profits of US businesses, mostly allocating them using the Massachusetts formula. I have been advocating this for years internationally, but I have unable to persuade even the Liberal Democrats to pursue the idea.

Mr Ryan’s border adjustments are an alternative idea, and look simpler. In essence corporate taxes would be based on the location of revenues – something that would not be easy to distort. So, applied in the UK, Amazon or Starbucks would not be able to use spurious intellectual property charges to relocate profits to tax havens. Overall the scheme favours countries that have trade deficits (like the UK or US) rather than surpluses (like Germany or China), but that is no bad thing.

And probably unilateral action by the US is the only way much is going to happen. Multinational forums like the G20, and even the European Union, have completely failed to deal with this problem. Only the US has the power for unilateral implementation. Where it leads, others will be forced to follow. And post-Brexit Britain should be able to follow quickly.

Alas the power of corporate lobbyists in our democracies remains massive. They are masters of quietly undermining radical ideas and promoting “compromises” that have only superficial effects. Mr Trump is a sceptic, and that’s a very bad start. The hope must be that Mr Ryan will get his way in the inevitable horse-trading between the presidency and congress. Mr Trump may be sceptical, but he is not strongly against it either.

But even if this reform attempt fails, I hope that liberals everywhere will take on the challenge of corporate tax evasion with a radical approach, such as border adjustment or unitary tax. Alas I am not optimistic.

New monetarism: a challenge to conventional economics

Followers of my blog may have noticed quite prolonged exchanges in the comments section between me and Peter Martin. We are both amateur economists so this kind of exchange helps to sharpen thinking, absent an academic or journalistic environment. In order that I might understand Peter’s critique better, he suggested that I view this video of Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Ms Kelton advocates a system referred to as “Modern Monetary Theory” or, sometimes, “neo-chartalism”. (I will use “neo-chartalism” henceforth as it is easier to write; the “neo” is needed because I think a lot has been added to the basic idea of chartalism). When, as I recently blogged, mainstream macroeconomic thinking is in a sad state, it behoves us to look at those challenging it. This is an interesting idea to pick apart.

The core idea is in fact quite an old one – the original chartalism dates from 1905 and its ideas can be traced back further than that. It is that money is a state artifact, and as such the state has much more latitude in its management than conventional wisdom allows. This is in opposition to the more conventional view that money evolved primarily as a means of exchange to facilitate a market economy, and that the state’s powers to manage it must be constrained or it will be devalued. It is also contrasted with an idea of money that is intimately linked to precious metals (“metalism”), which is a bit cranky these days.

The chartalist view is that money’s primary function is as a voucher with which to pay taxes. It stems from the need of states to commandeer resources to fulfill its functions; this it does through the imposition of liabilities on citizens, which we call taxes. It uses currency values to denominate these liabilities, and then puts physical currency into circulation so that they can be settled. It does this in the first instance by paying its servants and suppliers in this currency. Since everybody needs currency to pay taxes, it quickly evolves into the primary medium of exchange for the whole economy. This allows a banking system to develop for the provision of credit, which in turn facilitates the evolution of money from precious metal coins, to vouchers for precious metal, to fiat money not backed by anything at all. The utility of fiat money, which people not so long ago would have been quite unable to comprehend, is perhaps the ultimate vindication of chartalism. Money is simply what the state says it is; it needs no greater authority than that. And it follows that the state need never run out of money, because it can create all it needs.

This narrative of money is compelling. Historical research comprehensively refutes the idea in old economics textbooks that money somehow evolved from a barter economy. Indeed the core chartalist narrative of money is now so widely held that it is fair to call it mainstream. I doubt that most modern economics textbooks repeat the barter myth. That states can create all the money they need (usually, and misleadingly, called “printing” money) is old news, though, and, indeed, has been an enduring theme of economic debate since the hyperinflation that followed the First World War in Germany and Austria. The chartalist view on this is distinctive: the act of the state creating money does not of itself devalue it: that depends on the context in which it is done. The problem in post war Germany and Austria was that reparations were making unbearable demands on these states.

But this narrative tells you little by itself. It is what neo-chartalists build on this foundation that sets them apart from other economists. My main disappointment with Ms Kelton is that she spends too much time revelling in the brilliance of the initial insight (including a very useful idea of a pyramid of exchange, which explains why local currencies are unlikely to succeed), and too little in explaining where she thinks it leads and why. In trying to explain it I will identify ideas that are implicit in what she says, rather than part of an explicit structure.

The next key idea, and the one that makes neo-chartalism truly distinctive, is that fiscal and monetary policy should form a unity. The best way of putting more spending power into an economy is for the state to loosen fiscal policy – to spend more or tax less; the best way to cool an economy down is to tighten fiscal policy. Fiscal policy directly affects the amount of money flowing in the economy. And a looser fiscal policy can always be supported by the creation of more money. This is very different from the pre-crash consensus, which suggested that fiscal and monetary policy should often pull in opposite directions – with only a marginal role for fiscal policy at all. And even after the crash the British coalition government had a policy of tight fiscal policy balanced by loose monetary policy. Chartalists say this was a mistake: fiscal policy should have been kept loose up to the point where economic capacity was fully utilised, with monetary policy providing support as required; only then should the brakes be jammed on (although may impression is that they are reluctant to admit that the brakes should ever be jammed on – I may be being unfair).

Here too, I think that neo-chartalists are onto something. I was coming to a similar conclusion, albeit by a different route: the application of the Mundell-Fleming model for open international economies. Ironically Mundell-Fleming is an old-school idea, and regarded with suspicion by neo-chartalists (for example Professor Bill Mitchell of the University of Newcastle, NSW, a leading chartalist). Mundell-Fleming suggests that a floating exchange rate neutralises fiscal policy; but not if it is harmonised with monetary policy. Under a fixed exchange rate system, monetary policy automatically harmonises with fiscal policy, and even amplifies it. The neo-chartalists are surely right that monetary policy by itself is a very inefficient means of managing demand compared to fiscal policy – but it can be an important adjunct to it.

Perhaps the difference between me and the neo-chartalists is that I think the aggressive use of fiscal policy leads to state management of exchange rates,which is not, incidentally, necessarily a fixed exchange rate, and certainly not a currency union. But that is a discussion that needs to be taken elsewhere.

A third key building block of neo-chartalism is that a powerful, fully sovereign state is a force for good. Ms Kelton regards the sacrifice of sovereignty involved in the creation of the Euro with near disbelief. Why on earth would anybody want to do something so stupid? This marks neo-chartalism as a political idea of the left, and its faith in a strong state as the instrument of democratic will. The right view a strong state with suspicion or hostility – as something that uses its power to escape democratic control and further the interests of the state sector at the expense of everybody else. To see the importance of this aspect of the debate, you only have to look at Zimbabwe, where the state’s ability to create money has been a critical way for Robert Mugabe’s regime to retain power; in order to curb the political excesses of the Zimbabwe government it was necessary to adopt the US dollar as currency. Now that Mugabe is on top, he is trying to create his own currency again – but to secure his political status, not to advance the Zimbabwean economy. Strengthening the state’s power on money creation will place a real strain on democratic institutions. Things look all very easy when the state needs to create money to stimulate: but can it be trusted to reverse course when the economy overheats? History suggests that governments tend to deny that an economy is overheating until long after inflation has set in. The Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez even went as far as politicising the state statistics bureau to cover up inflation statistics. In Britain we may remember the stagflation of the 1970s, or, more recently, Gordon Brown adjusting his fiscal rules just when they called for tightening. I think this is a big problem, but not necessarily an insoluble one.

Interestingly there is a divergence of opinion on the radical left here. People such as the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis think that there is virtue in the idea of a supra-national system for the management of money – a sort of new Bretton Woods – that would curb a state’s power to create money. It is no coincidence that this view comes from somebody used to the challenges of managing a small country, whereas Ms Kelton hails from the USA, which in effect has its cake and eats it by controlling a world currency while remaining a sovereign state.

There are some further ideas important to the construction of neo-chartalist policy:

A optimal private sector (i.e. the aggregation of net private consumption and net business income) should operate at a surplus – i.e. they should be net savers. Excessive private sector debt follows if they are net borrowers, and that is destabilising; public debt is much safer because the state can create the currency to repay it. The private surplus must be balanced by either or both of an external surplus (e.g. net exports) or a public sector deficit. Since not all economies may have an external surplus, this means that it will often be the case that a permanent budget deficit is perfectly healthy (with the US and UK economies being examples). An inappropriate budget surplus could lead to a private sector debt boom – which is what happened to President Clinton’s USA in Ms Kelton’s view.
Sovereign states with control over their own money have nothing to fear from an external deficit – which implies that the state or private citizens must obtain funding from foreigners. The key is that the country must borrow in its own currency – so that it can create the money to repay it. That a country might be forced to borrow in foreign currency is a major weakness in the whole edifice, I think. It is far from clear why exporters from surplus countries should always be in a weaker bargaining position than importers from deficit ones, and so be forced to accept the importer’s currency.
The developed world is suffering from a chronic lack of demand. Neo-chartalists follow pre-crash neo-Keynesians in believing that the key indicator of excess demand in an economy is inflation (as opposed to asset prices or trade deficits). And since inflation does not appear currently to be a threat in any major economy, there must be plenty of scope to expand fiscal policy. Neo-chartalists do not appear to take seriously the idea that their may be darker forces at work in the economy, reducing economic potential – something that I have long argued. Ms Kelton produced a graph to illustrate where the US economy could be by projecting forwards its growth rate from before the crash – something guaranteed to leave me spitting with fury! They also seem to have little truck with the “Austrian school” idea that a certain degree of slack is required in an economy in order to sustain the forces of creative destruction – and that recessions may be positively beneficial.

In summary: the neo-chartalists are re-writing the conventional wisdom on what money actually is, and have useful things to say about the role of fiscal policy. But beyond that my first reaction is that it is a modest idea that has pretensions beyond itself. It seems applicable in some contexts, but not as a general rule. And yet neo-chartalists are a valuable part of the dialectic from which a new economic synthesis will form. They do not deserve the disdain with which conventional economists treat them. Indeed many of the ideas I have briefly discussed here are a well worth a revisit. I want to dig further into to the topics raised in this blog: the role and management of state power; the relationships between public, private and external balances; managing an economy in the wider world; and demand management vs deeper economic forces.

A discipline that still reserves a place for real business cycle extremists, surely has a place for the new monetarists too.

Macroeconomics is becoming a pseudoscience, and that’s not good for us

Recently the FT’s Wolfgang Munchau referred to an article by prominent US economist Paul Romer, The Trouble with Macroeconomics, published in September 2016. Mr Munchau used it as an argument to rethink the conventional wisdom of macroeconomic management, such as independent central banks and inflation targeting. I agree we need a rethink, but Mr Romer’s article is the wrong jumping-off point for that idea. Instead Mr Romer shows that academic macroeconomics has lost touch with the real world.

Mr Romer references the Trouble with Physics an article from 2007 by Lee Smolin. At this time there was a lot of nonsense going on in theoretical physics, in particular with the idea of string theory. String theory attempts to be a theory of everything, and at its core is a lot of hard mathematics. But it makes no verifiable predictions and, indeed, seems to avoid areas where there is any danger that data might challenge it. It is more metaphysics than physics. And yet it commanded a sizeable academic following, including a number of big hitters – or at least it did in 2007.

Mr Romer suggests that something similar is happening in academic macroeconomics. People are creating elaborate models whose complexity runs well ahead of any data that can test their relationship to reality. This is covered up by sophistry and obfuscation. By itself this is not so strange, except that people are reluctant make public criticisms of these models, and the often prominent academics whose names attach to them. And yet that process of criticism is the stuff very of science. This makes it a pseudoscience – something that adopts the outward language of a science, but where a core set of beliefs and people are beyond criticism. (There is, of course, always a core set of beliefs in any system that are beyond challenge, including science, but I am talking about something wider here).

The prime target of Mr Romer’s criticism is a theoretical system referred to as the real business cycle. This was developed in the 1980s, and commanded supporters such as Chicago Nobel laureate Robert Lucas. It suggests that government actions, such as fiscal and monetary policy, have little effect on the real economy, and that the business cycle is almost entirely driven by changes to technology, a macroeconomists’ way of saying “just noise”. The real business cycle was presented to me as an economics undergraduate in 2006 as a curiosity that was so silly that it didn’t need comment or study. I can think of no serious piece of economic policy in recent years, and certainly since the financial crash of 2008, that makes reference to it. So it was a surprise to me to read that it remains the subject of serious academic support in the US – and that other serious academics look the other way rather than criticise it.

While Mr Romer spends most of his paper taking apart models based on the real business cycle, he makes it clear that this is a general problem, affecting Keynesian models too. And in particular the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models that are used for economic forecasting, and so hard-wired into economic management. Economists like to create huge models with lots of variables, and then pump huge amounts of data through them. But it is mathematically impossible to identify, that is to fix, the variables without building assumptions into the model about how they relate to each other – which the model is then unable to test. The models are therefore more a product of their assumptions than a test of those assumptions against data. Mr Romer complains of a conspiracy of silence not to undermine the fragility of all this. This ressembles string theory and other hobby horses of theoretical physics – though these days I read a lot about constructive work going on in physics, as scientists grapple with the problems of dark energy and dark matter. Also I think theoretical physicists are much more transparent about what they are doing – so far as I can see they aren’t even pretending that what they do is useful, except in some abstract sense of advancing the boundaries of human thought. Macroeconomists are dishonest by comparison.

How has all this come about? I don’t think it helps that macroeconomics has been politicised, and in the highly polarised environment of US politics. Real business cycle models are beloved of the right, as a basis for cutting government down to size; DGSE models are liked by the left, as the basis of fiscal and monetary intervention. Pretty much any important development in macroeconomics is parsed for its political significance. Neutrality does not seem to be an option – and yet cloaking policy prescriptions in academic mumbo-jumbo make them look more authoritative, and so demand for academic economists remains strong. US academics used to knock seven bells out of each other (the famous dispute between “salt water” and “fresh water” institutions) – but no doubt they now realise that this just devalues the whole discipline, and so the different schools ignore each other instead. Besides, they both rely on similar conceits.

How much does this matter? Those involved in the practical business of running economies have long since ignored real business cycle theory. Econometric models are used, but with a great deal of caution. Alternative ways of constructing models might be fruitful (for example Kingston’s Professor Steve Keen suggests the use of non-equilibrium complexity theory, as used in meteorology) – but these are liable to suffer from same identification problem. The future is inherently unpredictable. Practical economists can get on with the job without help from an increasingly irrelevant academia.

And yet there is a clear crisis in economic management. Too many people in developed economies feel left behind, fueling political instability that will not help economic management. The authority of the western democratic and inclusive system of government is waning as a result. If academic macroeconomists coud somehow change the direction of their discipline, rather than resorting to obfuscation to insist they were right all along, and deluding themselves that massive computer models are telling us anything useful, then the outlook would be better.

Why did the dollar rise with Trump but the pound fall with Brexit?

If you are part of the conventional liberal “elite” like me, 2016 has been marked by two colossal acts of democratic self-harm: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. It is easy to understand why the pound sunk after Brexit. By why has the US dollar being doing so well after the election of Donald Trump as president? It is a useful lesson in macroeconomics.

The first thing to say, though, is that the way most of the media cover such market movements is unhelpful. They talk of sentiment and emotional judgements made by anthropomorphised “markets”. These may provide a satisfactory story line for a journalist, but they yield no real insight and no predictive power. They are simply projections onto past events. But very often, and this is no exception, far more satisfactory explanations are available, based on the way money flows through economies and financial markets.

Take Brexit. The obvious explanation is that markets (sticking with the anthropomorphism for now) take a dim view of Britain’s prospects amid the confusion and uncertainty thrown up by Brexit. But by itself that explanation is inadequate. The fall in Sterling was not matched by falls in stock markets (after an initial wobble) and other markets which also depend on future economic prospects. In fact there seems to be much more of a wait-and-see approach by the people and institutions who set market prices.

But wait-and-see is not so neutral. The UK runs a substantial current account deficit (5.7% of GDP according to the Economist, the highest of the 43 countries in its data table – and the second largest in money terms, at nearly $150bn in the last year). That means that the country is consuming much more than it is producing, which in turn means that the country is spending more pounds than it is getting back from exports, etc (or spending more foreign currency on imports than it is getting from exports). This deficit must be made up from the capital account – by investors buying UK assets of one sort or another (or Britons selling off foreign assets). Wait-and-see means that foreigners are more likely to defer making investments, which reduces the demand for Sterling on capital markets, causing its price to fall. This makes UK assets more attractive, UK exports more competitive and imports less attractive. All perfectly textbook.

So, what about the US? This country has a current account deficit too (2.6% of GDP which is $488bn in money terms, the largest current account balance in any direction by some margin, in the Economist table). Surely there is a lot of waiting and seeing to be done here, as Mr Trump’s policies, shall we say, lack clarity? But there are a number of differences with the UK. The first of these is that the US is an economic superpower, which dominates global financial markets, with the dollar used as the top reserve currency. It is much easier for the country to draw in investment that the aging middle-ranking country that is the UK. It has much more secure access to liquid, short-term funding. And with a huge domestic market the outlook for its businesses look less precarious than that for British ones.

But the most important difference is that, for all Mr Trump’s lack of clarity, what is known about him, and the Republicans who control Congress, points to a loosening of fiscal policy. This mainly takes the form of tax cuts. This increases the demand for dollars, because it will increase spending in the US domestic economy. Exactly how remains to be seen. On one version US corporations will repatriate foreign profits and invest in infrastructure. This is all uncertain – but Mr Trump and the Republicans in Congress certainly agree on tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest. And this happens at a time when most people are convinced that the US is running at close to capacity – so there is no question of fiscal laxity being complemented by monetary laxity, which would allow the increased demand for dollars to be met by extra supply. Indeed the Federal Reserve is in the process of tightening policy, and increased interest rates this month.

This economic dynamic is often not appreciated – that in a world of freely floating currencies and open capital markets, loose fiscal policy leads to an appreciation of the currency. But there are plenty of examples if you look for them. When Germany unified in the early 1990s, it involved a considerable relaxation of fiscal policy – which caused the Mark to appreciate, and a crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 that forced Sterling to leave, shredding the credibility of John Major’s Conservative Government. My Economics lecturer at UCL used the British government of the mid-noughties as another example – the government ran a larger budget deficit than was warranted at that point in the economic cycle, at a time when banking laxity had already led to excess demand in the economy.

The effect of fiscal policy on a floating currency is part of what is known by economists as the Mundell-Fleming model, proposed independently by economists Robert Mundell and Marcus Fleming, leading theorists of floating currencies. It is one of the reasons that floating currencies are not quite the free lunch suggested by many Anglo-Saxon commentators. It means that a floating rate tends to neutralise fiscal policy (just as a fixed rate neutralises monetary policy). As a currency appreciates, the current account reduces (or deficit gets larger), and any increase in aggregate demand is lost across the world economy. Unless monetary policy operates in the same direction (including “printing money” to monetise the budget deficit), in which case you are in effect operating a managed exchange rate policy. This often ends in inflation or default.

This points to one of the tensions in Mr Trump’s economic policy. Fiscal laxity will lead to a widening trade deficit – exactly the opposite to what he promised on campaign. That will tend to force him into protectionist policies, which in turn could create a doom-loop of global proportions. Many believe that we have the makings of another global financial crisis, especially given developments in the Chinese economy – for example read this from Yanis Varoufakis.

But another tension could be that Mr Trump’s fiscal stimulus proves ineffective. The rich people and corporations that benefit from the tax cuts save most of their winnings; planned infrastructure spending is lost to political friction; and Congress insists on dismantling the social safety net, especially Medicare, sucking demand out of the system by hitting the less well-off. That would mean that growth is disappointing, breaching another Trump campaign promise.

But that’s in the future. For now participants in the financial markets are readying themselves for more demand for dollars, and weaker demand for pounds. They aren’t taking a view on the wisdom or otherwise of either Brexit or the new US regime.

Back to the village? Globalisation is changing direction

The human mind is hard-wired to think that present trends will continue, as many a study cited by behavioural economists attests. It takes a real effort to see things another way, even when there is evidence aplenty. So it seems inevitable that technology change and globalisation will continue to hollow out society, destroying jobs while a rich elite enjoys the high life in specially protected enclaves. But a change of direction is coming.

Recently I read a review in the Economist of a book by Richard Baldwin: The Great Convergence Information Technology and the New Globalisation. This is another variation on the same old story of advancing globalisation, but it offers a narrative that is useful.

Mr Baldwin sees the advance of technology affecting the human economy in two waves. Originally mankind was stuck in a village economy, forced to produce virtually all it consumed. The first wave of technological revolution detached production from consumption through advances in the technologies of transport. Goods (and energy) could be moved cheaply and easily. Society rearranged itself around industrial centres that produced things that were distributed worldwide. But knowledge, ideas and skills did not move so easily, which meant that production was concentrated in integrated geographical clusters.

The second revolution came with information technology, which allowed the spreading of knowhow, which in turn allowed the traditional clusters to fragment. Sub-assemblies could be manufactured far away. And indeed whole factories could be transplanted from Detroit to Mexico. This proved wrenching for the developed countries, but a big opportunity for the rest of the world. It is a backlash against this process which is behind the current wave of political turmoil. Mr Baldwin seems to assume that this process has further to run, and that we should facilitate its progress.

He may be right, but we should not miss two further dynamics, both based on conventional economic theory. The first dynamic is convergence – a different aspect to that suggested in the book’s title. Just why is it that so many factories have been relocated to developing world countries? The knowledge economy facilitates the move, but does not tell us why it is happening. It happens because workers in the developing world are paid less than those in the developed countries. But why?

The reason is that developing world economies have very low productivity. This low productivity is mainly because they have very inefficient agriculture, which ties up a huge proportion of the workforce, and which is massively uncompetitive in world terms. This drags down the cost of labour. But as developing world societies adopt modern technologies, and as more of their populations flock to cities, the productivity gap between town and country reduces. We have witnessed this in Japan, followed by South Korea and Taiwan. Now mainland China is following these exemplars. This means that what economists call comparative advantage (driven by the balance between different sectors of an economy, and considered to be the main engine of trade) is equalising. It’s quite a subtle point (which I explore in my economics essay on trade on why global trade is going into reverse), but the upshot is that the economics of outsourcing overseas is becoming less attractive.

There is plenty of evidence that this trend is quite advanced. It does not mean that large numbers of manufacturing jobs are coming back to developed countries though – because many of the jobs have been automated away. It does mean that future disruptions wrought by technology (and there are more to come, especially in white-collar work) will be less international in scope.

The second dynamic comes from looking at the economic impact of consumption. Not so long ago, the world’s consumption was mainly food. The agriculture sector comprised most of the economy. Now agriculture takes up a tiny share of national consumption in developed economies, and we take it for granted. That same process is evident with so much else of what we consume. Manufacturing industry is vanishing as a proportion of the economy. Various parts of service industry are following suit. So what does that leave? Increasingly our economic activity is about interpersonal contact with people in or around our neighbourhoods: hospitals, care homes, schools, gyms, restaurants, cabs and so on.

And what about technology itself? Though we hear much about it driving a process of mass automation, including through the use of algorithms in artificial intelligence, we may not have noticed that much technology is not about this at all. It is about the empowerment of individuals. Think about what you can do with your smartphone. Think of the personal liberation that comes about through such services as Uber (though not for the drivers perhaps, admittedly). And think about additive manufacturing (or 3-D printing) that makes it more economic to have a production run of one. And think of energy technology. The idea of massive nuclear power stations at the heart of a huge grid of high voltage cables is fading, as it becomes harder to make the economics work. It is being replaced by the idea of localised renewable energy sources, much more efficient consumption, supplemented by medium-sized power stations.

Put these things together and you might start to see the village coming back together again. The centrifugal forces are becoming centripetal. Not yet, to be sure, but the idea is becoming more technologically viable. And there is human need: most people crave denser social networks where recent trends have weakened them.

The new village will be very different from the old one. The old village was very insular, with people rarely mixing with their neighbours. In the new village people will travel freely, and the interchange of ideas will be global. And the new village remains dependent on national and global supply networks and information infrastructure. But most economic activity will be within the village (which could be a small town or suburb or network of actual villages in fact- or perhaps even a large town). The old village was a prison. The new village, or the liberal vision of one, should not be.

Let me hazard a further guess at this new village economy: public services will comprise a very high proportion of what it does. Education, health care, public protection, social care; I do not think these will be marked by high productivity gains in the future, so their importance in the overall economy will rise. And much of the infrastructure that the new society will depend on will be provided by natural monopolies, many of which will end up being run publicly, if not run publicly already. That poses some big challenges for governance and tax.

Those challenges will be among the many for public policy posed by this trend. Another is the status of that liberal icon, free trade. We are stuck in an old way of thinking about it, appropriate to older phases of technological advance. We will be still be dependent on the free trade of things, even if the distances shrink: but things will be less important to us, compared to the services we receive from our neighbours. Free trade may hollow these out by sucking resources away to centres of power elsewhere. Compare a Starbucks to a locally run café.

And another point is that I am coming at this with a very optimistic and liberal gloss, but there may be darker ways that these trends can take shape, with a return to insularity.

But that said, we need to adapt our political ideas to the world as it is, and what it is becoming. We should neither expect current trends to continue forever, nor for the past to return. Not enough political thinkers are responding to this challenge.