Tag Archives: Piketty

The Piketty Opportunity

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One of the projects that I have been pursuing over the last year or so is now available, and Pat Hudson and I are very pleased with the way it has turned out. We planned the collection in the autumn of 2015, recruited contributors who all delivered on time, it was copy-edited over the summer and went to the printers in early October. Not only are we very grateful to all the contributors for being such good citizens, our publisher Agenda has done a truly excellent job in seeing the project through.  The details can be found here: Agenda Catalogue.

Pat and I are presenting the book at the Core Seminar in Cambridge on 10 November, and there will be a more formal launch event at the LSE on 26 January 2017.

The Political Economy of Debt

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In 1706 and 1707 Acts of Union joined the Kingdom of Scotland to the Kingdom of England. The two countries had in fact shared the same person as monarch since 1603, and there had been previous attempts to fully unite the two kingdoms. It was indebtedness that provided the final impulse: Scotland was virtually bankrupt, and its economic salvation lay in the Union. Adam Smith was safely at Balliol in Oxford when in 1745 the final Jacobite rebellion flared, and was then crushed. But the emergent Scottish Enlightenment of which he became a member had been firmly anti-Jacobite, and the Scottish intelligentsia of the later eighteenth century was broadly united in recognising that the Union had enabled the Scotland in which they lived to flourish.

German Unification has been rather similar; with the difference that the current German President and Chancellor were both born and grew up in the former GDR, a state eventually more bankrupt than Scotland had ever been. For most of the eighteenth century Britain’s monarchs were Hanoverian; its Prime Ministers were all English (not Scottish, Welsh or Irish). It would be hard to imagine an early eighteenth-century Britain ruled by a Scottish king and a Scottish Prime Minister. But that is where Germany is today.

German Unification was enormously costly for Germany – as I remarked in a previous post, winding up the economic restructuring alone cost the equivalent of half the contemporary British national debt.  While the GDR was to all intents and purposes a foreign country by the 1980s, West Germany was committed to integration, and was prepared to pay its price.  Twenty-five years later this has all but been forgotten – but in the context of the relationship of Greece to the EU and the euro, it bears remembering.

Especially in the light of the kind of argument advanced by Thomas Piketty (Die Zeit 8 July 2015) that Germany benefited from debt writeoffs during the interwar years and in 1953, suggesting that Germany is today in no position to refuse Greece similar debt writedowns.  Although Piketty shows in this interview a very sketchy understanding of the postwar political, monetary and economic order, he does at least recognise that Marshall Aid and debt relief occurred because it was in the general European interest; without it, economic recovery could not continue.  German recovery was central to the recovery of the European economy.

The international economic significance of Germany is commonly misunderstood.  Students I taught in the 1990s presumed that Japan, whose population was about half the size of Germany’s again, was also a more significant exporter.  This was not true: while Germany was a smaller economy than Japan, it exported far more – including very large quantities of machine tools, chemicals and pharmaceuticals that the consumer never sees.  The World Bank’s Development Report for 1998/99 shows that Portugal and Greece had a similar population and roughly similar GDPs; but that Portugal exported 35% of its GDP, and Greece 13%.  Germany exported 29% of a GDP nearly eighteen times larger than that of Greece, with a population less than eight times as big.

Today the common European interest turns not on the problem of restarting international flows of goods and services, since in any case the Greek economy never has been a significant contributor to this.  The common interest is linked to the problems of a flawed currency union to which Greece should not have been admitted, even if it had not massaged its national statistics.  This flawed currency union exists because of the political ramifications of German Unification.

Plans for a common European currency date back at least to the early 1950s, became in 1969 an explicit objective of the European Community, but were then stalled by the collapse of the international postwar monetary order in 1973.  The idea was revived in the wake of German Unification by the French President, François Mitterand, as a means of chaining down Germany and the leading European currency, the Deutschmark.  Margaret Thatcher, poorly advised and preoccupied by some very strange ideas about modern Germany, lent her support to Mitterand before her fall in November 1990.  It could therefore be said that the Euro originated as a French plot, aided and abetted by a truly “perfidious Albion” which gave a helpful push to a project which it then refused to join.

The institutional weaknesses of the euro were exposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the ship, now launched, began the process of being rebuilt at sea – not that unusual in the eighteenth century, but technologies were very different then.  Having developed procedures and institutions that lent the union a degree of coherence, it has been derailed once more by the need to bail out an economy that has some modern features, but which is in essence as bankrupt as the GDR.  While Greece is smaller than the GDR was, it cannot simply be annexed by the European Commission, since its population has in any case expressed its will in a referendum that rejected the only real plans anyone had for Greece’s future.  That these are the only existing viable plans was then immediately confirmed by the Greek government, which adopted them as the basis for its “new plan” at a time when a bad situation had become even worse.

And so the dilemma faced by eurozone states is that Grexit has an economic logic but dreadful political ramifications, for the Greeks as much as anyone else.  A monetary system that had begun to emancipate itself from the problems of its flawed political origins is now being asked to pursue ends that are essentially political, contaminating decision-making in the Eurozone.  Politics and economics are always interwoven in complex ways, but they are not the same thing.

In these times much use is made of the word “democracy”, without however much regard for how modern democratic orders actually function.  The recent Greek referendum was a travesty of democratic decision-making in the very country that invented the idea of democracy.  What can be said is that Germany is the model of a modern federal parliamentary democracy.  Its constitution was largely shaped by the Western allies: in fact, largely shaped by Britain, since Germany has a President who functions as an elected constitutional monarch, whereas the French have a President who functions more like an elected monarch of the more traditional kind.  The current divisions between the French and the German governments over the proper approach to Greece as a member of the eurozone are as much an effect of the differing political dynamics of the two countries as anything else.

Thomas Piketty: Kondratiev Redux

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In 1971 I went to hear Ernest Mandel give a lecture at the LSE.  He talked, as always, about the contradictions of capitalism, and the global forces that would drive it on to its eventual doom.  Whenever an event seemed out of place in this determinist story, he put it down to the “dialectic of history”.

Thomas Piketty is a master dialectician.  At several points in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century one can read (eg. pp. 24, 90, 58, 168) qualifications to his main argument that are simply bulldozed aside in the onward march of history.  The history that he constructs has a flimsy theoretical framework, and its empirical foundation has been put through the statistical equivalent of a blender.  It is a big book, but diffusely, not densely, argued.

The analytical basis seems to be elementary neoclassical economics combined with a loose grasp of the economics of Malthus, Ricardo and Marx.  He fails to recognise that Malthus has an underlying mechanism that links population growth to output and prices; while he entirely misses the point that Ricardo’s argument for free trade was linked to his analysis of the long run tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  A deeper understanding of the arguments advanced by Malthus and Ricardo might have enabled him to develop a rather more complex and comprehensive story.

Later on in the book there is some discussion of the idea of “human capital”.  This idea is an unfortunate metaphorical blind alley given its standard form by Gary Becker’s classic work of 1964, Human Capital.  Becker here deployed lifetime returns to education and training over periods in the mid-twentieth century where life-chances depended mainly on nationality, involvement or not in military conflicts, or the sheer luck of being born in the West after the 1940s and not before.  But instead of pointing to the essential vacuity of seeking precise aggregate estimates for “returns” to “investment” in “human capital”, Piketty wonders rather whether more data might clarify the picture (p. 223).

The same kind of problem characterises his use of various formulations related to the long-term growth of economies.  The Cobb-Douglas production function, the Harrod-Domar growth model, the Solow growth model (the “Dual Sector” model of Arthur Lewis is not mentioned, but very relevant): these are all textbook tools for training students, not instruments for practical economic analysis.  Picketty treats these very elementary models as direct ways of making sense of “long-run” trends in real economies, which trends owe a great deal to the highly-aggregated nature of the data he uses.  For a Professor of Economics he has a very attenuated grasp of what economic analysis might offer.

Nonetheless, the prime weakness of this book does not lie in its rudimentary analytical framework, but rather in the way data is employed to account for the flux of economic inequality since the eighteenth century.  Chris Giles in the Financial Times highlighted the way in which conclusions were drawn from smoothed data involving very few countries – that, essentially, the trends identified in the empirical evidence are in some cases created out of aggregated constructs.  When this highly aggregated data is plugged into his simple ratios, it is no surprise that we see stable relationships over time.  That is the outcome of the aggregation, not of the “analysis”.  The level of aggregation at which Piketty is forced to work means that very often we are talking about averages of averages over long periods.  That is one reason why this post suggests that he is the new Kondratiev, whose cyclical “long waves” rested upon price and income data of dubious reliability.

There is another reason to introduce the name of Kondratiev in this context.  Piketty’s story is about long-run trends in “capitalism”.  While there is a nod to Marx in the title of his book, he largely ignores Marx’s efforts at making sense of the new business cycle of the nineteenth century.  Despite recent interest in the work of Joseph Schumpeter, who thought Business Cycles (1939) to be his magnum opus, there is only one passing reference by Piketty to Schumpeter, to his 1942 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.  Even if Kondratiev’s own long waves of fifty or sixty years were provided with a better empirical foundation, the underlying problem with such long-term trends is usually the absence of a unitary cause demonstrably and consistently producing the observed effect.  And if we have a number of causes, or different combinations of causes, are we really talking about the same effect?

As with Mandel, identifying a long-term trend which turns out to be made up of all sorts of apparently random and sometimes contradictory events tells us nothing about the origin, course and resolution of each event.  The grand narrative of Piketty’s r > g sheds no light at all on the real processes by which “capital” in its broadest sense is accumulated, and also suffers random destruction – as, for instance, in the Savings and Loans crisis, the severe recession in the UK housing market from 1988 to 1996, the 1997 Asian crisis, the dotcom bubble, the Argentine default of 2001, and last but not least, the near collapse of the global financial system starting in 2007.  And these are only some comparatively recent financial events that relate to issues of the “accumulation of capital” and its random destruction.

None of this is to deny that the fruits of the growth of the world economy since the early 1800s have been shared unequally, within and between nations.  Argument about this issue among British economic historians goes back at least to the 1950s, when the issue of economic growth versus the distribution of income took the form of the “Standard of Living Debate”.  To put this in perspective, we could ask today whether Robert Malthus with his £500 per annum, free house, coal and candles was not in fact better paid than any modern economist?  Of course, the question makes little sense, mainly because changes to the structure of employment over time blurs trends in individual countries, let alone continents.  So long as we depend on prices and incomes as key indicators of change in the “standard of living” over long periods of time and across large numbers of countries, the results will always be inconclusive.

They can however be augmented with other indicators to make more sense of changes in social and economic structure.  Jane Humphries has for example recently applied modern estimates of human nutritional requirements to historical English households of differing sizes and structures.  When compared with contemporary prices, she is able to draw conclusions about the level of current income, throughout the household life cycle,  required for the basic needs of its members (Economic History Review Vol. 66 (2013) 693-714).  In the early nineteenth century the question of inequality among European households can more or less be reduced in this way to the life-chances represented by nutrition and mortality.  Humphries shines a bright light into such problems of inequality in early nineteenth-century England.  In time, other factors come to play a major part, and then in turn give way to new markers: housing, sanitation, clean water, medical care, working hours, job security, education.

Income and price data have an important part in making sense of all this, but things quickly become very complex.  Sensible argument over policy, including whether there is a need for any policy, requires that this complexity be preserved and properly understood.  Whether such argument is best served by the identification of putative long-run trends is questionable; and a focus on such “trends” leads inexorably to a need for comprehensive “solutions”, like the global tax on capital which Piketty advocates in conclusion.  For that, you would need H. G. Wells’ “world government”.

 

 

Wealth & Welfare

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We are about to move into a rolling commemoration of the Great War that will certainly not be over by Christmas, but promises to be an ongoing media event for the foreseeable future.  So many Australians and New Zealanders wanted to visit Gallipoli in 2015 that there would not have been room for them all on the beaches, so tickets have been allocated.  Battlefield tourism could well overwhelm the actual battlefields.  This is no bad thing, but in the process there is something that needs re-emphasis: that in among the complex impact of the Great War on Great Britain and Ireland, the perspectives of those who before the war had been in the forefront of social and political reform were shattered.  To appreciate this, we need to look back upon the aspirations and hopes of the years before the War not from the standpoint of today, but from that of the 1920s.  We need to find a way back to the prewar world that does not simply label it “prewar”.  Maynard Keynes made this point at the beginning of Economic Consequences of the Peace – that the prewar world was in some respects more “globalised”, more “modern”, than the world of the 1920s and 1930s, let alone the 1940s and 1950s.

This was the perspective of A. C. Pigou, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge since 1908.  He was elected in 1908 at the age of 30 as successor to Alfred Marshall, whose retirement had followed the publication of what quickly became recognised as the leading English-language textbook of economics in 1890, the foundation of the Economic Journal in 1891, and the establishment of the first honours economics degree in the world in 1903.  Cambridge was then, briefly, at the forefront of the new discipline of economics.

In 1912 Pigou published his book Wealth and Welfare, a work that hinged on an issue that Henry Sidgwick had first articulated in his Principles of Political Economy (1883).  Hitherto, Sidgwick noted, the “wealth of nations” was directly associated with the welfare of the populations of these nations.  The wealthier the nation, the better-off its citizens.  However, Sidgwick observed that the new emphasis upon the marginal utilities of consumers carried an interesting implication: that the more equal the distribution of wealth, the “wealthier” the nation.  As Gossen had already argued in 1854, the wealth of a whole kingdom had failed to make Louis XV “happier” than the poorest peasant; while the poorest peasant could be made “happier” with an infinitesimal fraction of the wealth commanded by his king.

Pigou’s book marked the beginning of a new genre of economic texts in Britain that would turn out to be shortlived, terminating in 1936 with Maynard Keynes’ General Theory.  Dealing with what we would call GDP, he sought to distinguish fluctuations in the growth of the economy from variations in degrees of poverty, and the manner in which redistribution from the relatively richer to the relatively poorer might be effected.

The reception of the book was overtaken by the outbreak of war.  Pigou, 36 when the war broke out, remained in Cambridge teaching, driving ambulances on the Italian front during vacations.  When conscription was introduced in 1916 he was subjected to a vicious campaign from Foxwell and Cunningham, two embittered and reactionary former colleagues of Marshall.  It was Neville Keynes, Maynard’s father, who as Registrary of the University of Cambridge handled Pigou’s plea of conscientious objection, at the age of 38 when the call-up included all males to the age of 40.

After the war Pigou played no part in the development of teaching in Cambridge.  He is more or less invisible in the Cambridge Reporter and the faculty archives.  There are no surviving papers.  He confined himself to courses of introductory lectures.  But in 1920 he published the Economics of Welfare, and with this marked the beginning of “welfare economics”.

The Economics of Welfare is a rather complicated revamp of Wealth and Welfare which I discuss in detail HERE.  But more importantly, it did not attract a great deal of attention until the fourth edition of 1932, by which time whole sections, even entire books, had been included, then expelled, from its covers.  Also of course, since the 1930s everyone has referred to the 1932 edition as if it represents a finished foundation, and entirely ignored the fact that this text was radically different from the 1920 version, which in turn was a new version of a 1912 original.  And so by looking at the progressive construction of Pigou’s Economics of Welfare it might be possible to reconsider the invention of a neoclassical “welfare economics” in the 1930s, so remote from the ideas and arguments of 1912.  The idea being that we might be able to ditch the certitudes of the 1930s that founded “modern economics”, and so find our way back to some rather more interesting ideas.

Furthermore, this perspective could well shed light on a rather more recent controversy, over Thomas Piketty’s argument about long-term changes in inequality in his recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  Much of the commentary seems to have been limited to whether his main contention about the concentration of wealth is right or wrong.  It seems fairly obvious that this is true: that we have entered a period of increasing inequality and growing impoverishment.  Whether this is something that could be comprehensively substantiated in the way Piketty wants is a different matter.  Here his leading question is suspect: “What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital?”  Why should one need to think that there is any such “grand dynamic”?  I will take this up in my next post.