50 Economics Classics

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I was very chuffed that my GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History was included in 50 Economics Classics: The greatest books distilled by Tom Butler-Bowdon. This is a mildly eclectic – and so rather interesting – list ranging from Liaquat Ahamed to Max Weber, passing through Becker, Coase, Friedman, Jacobs, Krugman, Malthus, Marx, Sen, Smith on the way.

The book has lots of additional reading suggestions, in fact a bonus 50 at the end. Each book included naturally gets only a few pages, the argument in a nutshell, but it adds up to a nice overview of 250 years of economic ideas and is actually a good starting point for someone new to economics wanting a general overview. The list is alphabetical by author but they are arranged by theme in the introduction and each chapter cross-references other on the same theme. Capturing the essence of a book in 3 pages is a difficult task. Tom Butler-Bowdon is obviously a very well-read person with this rare skill.

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100 Years of Economics

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The wonderful Beatrice Cherrier (@Undercoverhist) has been tweeting about the articles in the January 1991 special edition of The Economic Journal, a centenary issue which published articles by eminent economists looking forward to the next century of the subject. For more on the individual articles, go to Beatrice’s tweets (or read the articles!). But she sent me to my shelves to blow the dust of my copy & I thought the contents list was very striking:IMG_4111The first thing that strikes me now is that there are zero women contributors. Another is the poignancy of reaching for this the day after the death of the wonderful Will Baumol. I think he was one of the most creative and observant economists, as well as a truly delightful person, and in a sense paid the penalty for the breadth of his interests in not being more recognised inside and outside the profession. His article in the special issue is in fact very prescient – calling for more eclecticism, more economic history especially in the curriculum, less short-run macro, less “display of technique for its own sake”, more emphasis on behavioural economics.

And this underlines another striking think about the contents list, which is how little it anticipates the current areas of interest in the subject, whether that be inequality or economic geography, behavioural research or data and measurement. Forgivable though – who would like to predict the next 100 years of economics??

And now, off to a day of more disciplinary introspection, at the Economics Network Event on Economics: The Profession and the Public.

 

Fear, greed, fairness, imagination and finance

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I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew Lo. I should say that, apart from being a distinguished MIT finance professor and the co-author of the classic A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, Andrew is an old friend. But this should not put off any readers. This new book will become another essential read for anybody interested in financial markets.

The book aims to do what ultimately all of economics must do, and situate economic decisions and behaviour in the context of our biology and evolutionary history. Behavioural economics and finance have gone some way toward this in introducing the now-familiar heuristics such as loss aversion and framing effects, and herding is a familiar phenomenon in finance models. The issue with these has been how if at all they relate to rational choice models and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis is a synthesis, proposing that context makes the difference, and when conditions are sufficiently stable for long enough, financial markets are efficient. Otherwise, fear, greed, fairness, imagination – the characteristics evolution has given the human brain – kick in.

The opening chapter starts with a powerful demonstration of the potential efficiency of markets: after the Space Shuttle Challenger tragically exploded on 28 January 1986, a five month inquiry pinned the blame on a part, the O-ring, manufactured by one of four contractors, Morton Thiokol. Yet on the day of the accident, the share price of Morton Thiokol plummeted – the markets knew the company was to blame almost immediately, without the expert verdict: “Somehow the stock market in 1986 was able to aggregate all the information about the Challenger accident within minutes, come up with the correct conclusion and apply it to the assets of the company.”  The decline in its market capitalization – about $200m – was  almost exactly equal to the damages, settlement and reduced future cash flow, a later study found.

But often, of course, financial markets are all too obviously sometimes not efficient. The intellectual challenge is to figure out when they are in which mode. The book voyages through neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology and AI to try to answer this. The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis reverses the conventional framing: rather than thinking about a rational benchmark with a set of psychological quirks sometimes kicking in, we are a collection of quirks, but sometimes we can get beyond the heuristics to rational choice.

Frustratingly, although perhaps inevitably, there is no neat list of conditions for being in efficient rather than non-efficient mode: it depends, in particular on having had enough time in stable conditions to learn from experience. But Andrew does hold out hope for the prospects of being able to make better investment decisions – with socially useful outcomes – and being able to manage financial markets better so events like the 2008 crisis are far less likely to recur. In line with the Adaptive Markets perspective, he argues for treating financial markets as an ecosystem (so the interconnections are front of mind), using AI techniques to monitor markets and adjust regulatory instruments such as cyclical buffers. There is an interesting section on the role of technology in finance, including HFT, a technological arms race being one of the predictions of the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Currently, he is exploring ideas from biology such as immune responses and ecosystem management techniques. He also recommends introducing a body similar to the National Transportation Safety Board that would analyse market crashes and make recommendations for regulatory change. (One thing not spelled out here is whether this would have to be a global body.)

The book is a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable read. It is not technical, the explanations are super-clear, and there is some excellent story telling. Andrew recounts how in 1986 he and his co-author Craig MacKinlay, presenting at the NBER the work that turned into A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, were savaged by discussants from the world of academic finance. Since then, the academic community’s faith in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis has wavered significantly, but it is still the benchmark – as the book says, it takes a theory to beat a theory. I find the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis a persuasive theory, but then I firmly believe economics must be consistent with what we learn about ourselves from the other human sciences. I guess the test will come in the shape of how widely market participants themselves embrace it.41CpHzPtybL

 

Books, books, books

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The Publishers Association just published its 2016 figures for the UK book trade, so it’s time for my annual post about (a) how well the publishing industry has innovated its way through the wave of digital disruption compared with the music industry and (b) it isn’t always obvious which goods and services are susbstitutes and which are complements.

From the figures, it looks like digital is becoming steadily a platform for academic and professional texts, and those formats where it is inherently part of the product (audio) – consumer ebook sales have peaked and are declining. This is the substitutes-complements point: it’s always wrong to assume that a new technology will completely replace an old technology, and hard to tell a priori which will settle down to be the majority version in use. It is particularly the case that communications technologies tend to complement each other: on the whole people want more of all, although some do become redundant (telex).

Interestingly, sales of fiction have declined substantially in recent years, while children’s books and non-fiction have increased. This supports my theory about the demand for understanding in uncertain times, although probably it will turn out the growth was mainly stars’ memoirs and recipes….

As for the innovation, there has been experimentation with formats – for example, the popularity of short books (such as the excellent Perspectives series 🙂 – a new one, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin by Dave Birch, will be out soon. Click here to pre-order for a signed copy at a discounted price!). But a key one has been to focus on the inherent distinctiveness of books: their physical bookness. The design and quality of books has improved enormously, in my view.

Of special interest to the academic world, academic and professional sales were up by 10% to £2.4bn. The sales of books rose 9% to £1.1bn,  total income from journals rose 10% to £1.2bn, and the share of journal income from subscriptions fell 1 percentage point to 79% of the total while income from Open Access article processing charges increased by 46% to £81m. For the time being (until government policy irrevocably damages one of the UK’s most successful sectors through a deranged approach to overseas students, and the impact of Brexit on employment and research funding), the UK accounts for 10% of journal article downloads and 12% of citations, and produces 16% of the world’s most‑cited journal articles. Only the US does better, the Yearbook says.

Contradictions of capital

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Below is my review of After Piketty edited by Boushey, Delong and Steinbaum, just posted in the Chronicle Review. (The entire Spring Books issue is well worth a look.)

I also recently received another collection, The Contradictions of Capital in the 21st Century: The Piketty Opportunity, edited by Pat Hudson and Keith Tribe. It includes essays by Ravi Kanbur, Joseph Stiglitz, Avner Offer, among others. I haven’t yet read this one, although its take is more clearly historical and global, whereas After Piketty‘s is more inter-disciplinary.41YEl+rJjaL

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Review of After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality edited by Heather Boushey, J Bradford Delong and Marshall Steinbaum

The Chronicle Review

Contradictions of Capital: Taking on Thomas Piketty

By Diane Coyle

For all the influence economics is supposed to have on policy and the character of our societies, not many economics professors make any impression on public consciousness. Fewer still attain Thomas Piketty’s rock star status (well, minor rock star at any rate) following the publication in English of his Capital in the 21st Century[i] in 2014. Piketty captured and gave authoritative confirmation of something many people believed to be the case, given their own experience and observation: that inequality in western economies had increased to a great degree.

Many economists see Piketty’s dedicated effort – with colleagues Emmanuel Saez and the late Tony Atkinson – to put together the data on income and wealth over a long period of time as the main merit of his work. While there is some debate about the figures, this effort is a titanic contribution to knowledge, making possible further study of the trends and causes of inequality.

The essays in After Piketty have a different focus, however: an assessment of Piketty’s arguments about the dynamics of capitalist economies that generate the observed patterns of income and wealth inequality. Some of these perspectives concern the economics, others the links between economic and social or political forces.

Piketty’s empirical observation is that inequality in the western economies declined through the entire middle part of the 20th century, but from around 1980 it had started to increase again, to return to the levels of the Gilded Age. His theoretical argument is that there is an inherent dynamic in the process of economic growth tending to increase inequality, a dynamic halted and reversed in the 20th century by the two cataclysmic world wars, by the post-war welfare state and social market economies (especially in Europe) and by rapid post-war growth. The key point he makes is that when the growth rate slows, the rate of return on capital falls more slowly, increasing the ratio of capital to income and further widening the gap. This is the r>g formula fashionably adorning some t-shirts for a while.

For economists, there is nothing inexorable about this. As Paul Krugman points out in his essay in After Piketty, the theoretical argument depends (among other things) on it being easy enough to substitute machines for workers, and there is no definitive empirical evidence this is so. Devesh Raval points out a number of other problems. Among them, Piketty uses the term ‘capital’ as an abstraction, but the empirical claim that r>g elides physical capital used in production, housing capital, and the human capital resulting in high earnings for some people. Indeed, the share of top incomes coming from earnings (rather than rents and dividends) is a great contrast with the inequality of the early 20th century. Suresh Naidu underlines this point, calling Piketty’s argument “institution and politics free”: “When wealth is understood as police-backed paper claims over resources, rather than the resources themselves, the undemocratic nature of wealth inequality becomes much clearer.” A number of other essays in the volume round out the economists’ (sympathetic) critique of Piketty’s book.

The two subsequent sections cover extensions of Piketty. His collaborator Emmanuel Saez argues for continuing and extending the data collection effort. This is a significant point: phenomena for which the data are not readily available are invisible in political and policy discourse. In many ways Capital in the 21st Century was published much too late. The political consequences of great inequality were already playing out in the anger and division so visible now in politics in the United States and across Europe. Saez makes the point that although there has been significant data collection since the 1960s and 70s on individual incomes, largely through surveys, this statistical approach severs the connection between income distribution and macroeconomic outcomes. Economists in the late 20th century thinking about the economy in the aggregate largely stopped noticing the macro-level inequality trends. There is little reliable data on wealth (as opposed to incomes) at all, and research into wealth distribution and its evolution is correspondingly sparse (as Mariacristina de Nardi and her co-authors point out in their essay).

Filling some of the other research and policy gaps will be crucial for anyone who considers the extent of modern inequality to be problematic. One made visible by the British EU referendum and the US Presidential election is the spatial dimension. Economies have a geography, something economists have until recently been prone to overlook; financial capital is highly mobile geographically and – as Gareth Jones points out here, has also created ‘extra legal’ zones in tax havens where it can safely land. (In a fascinating book, Capital Without BordersHeather Boushey explores in After Piketty the implications for women’s economic and political autonomy of ‘patrimonial capitalism’, particularly given the gender bias of inheritance.

The book ends with some reflections from Piketty himself. He is disarmingly open to critiques of his work: “I would like to see Capital in the 21st Century as a work-in-progress of social science rather than a treatise about history or economics,” he writes. As he argues here, all the social science disciplines are needed for a complete picture. However, the critiques matter, at least to the extent that one thinks the current degree of inequality is unsustainable. Two other recent books point to contrasting possible futures. In his The Great Leveler[iii], Walter Scheidel paints a picture not unlike Piketty’s of an inexorable internal dynamic whereby societies become progressively more unequal, until this provokes a reset through war or revolution. In complete contrast, Tony Atkinson’s Inequality[iv], published the year before his death, presents a wholly pragmatic 15-point list of policy measures to limit and reduce inequality. Taking these together, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that if you do not adopt the Atkinson approach you get the Scheidel outcome. This was exactly the realization that led to the creation of the post-war social contract in the late 1940s.

The editors’ introduction in After Piketty zeros in on this contradiction at the heart of Piketty’s work and its reception: are there fundamental, intractable laws of capitalist dynamics, making garden-variety policy analysis of inequality ultimately futile? Or rather are there, “historically contingent and institutionally prescribed processes that shape growth and distribution?” Capital in the 21st Century does not resolve this; neither do the essays in After Piketty. Perhaps it is a purely academic question, but to the extent that any of us troubled by the new Gilded Age, we have to act as if the second is true regardless.

Diane Coyle is Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester & Co-Director of Policy@Manchester.

[i] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, Belknap Press, Harvard, Cambridge MA, 2014.

[ii] Brooke Harrington, Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2016.

[iii] Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2017.

[iv] Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2015.