Saturday, May 03, 2014

textbook vs. heterodox


But towards the end of the 19th century, discussion of the class inequality of rewards faded away. The marginalist revolution— direct precursor of the mathematical economics of today—dropped the attempt at social realism, by positing a perfectly competitive market economy with numerous “agents,” each of whom would receive the value of his “marginal product”— the exact amount he added to economic value. The existence of power in the market was recognised only in the form of “monopoly”—a single firm in an industry being able to set the price of its product, a problem to be tackled by regulation or trust-busting laws. This new, marginal analysis was intended to bypass the unsettling distributional issues raised by the classical economists. The claim that the market paid every producer what he was worth undercut the socialist argument for redistribution. 
In his massive book, Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, revives the economics of David Ricardo and Karl Marx. His thesis is simple. The growing concentration of capital in fewer hands has enabled its owners to keep it relatively scarce and thus valuable. Agricultural land has dropped out as a factor of production, but urban real estate has taken its place. Capitalist societies therefore have a natural tendency to generate a highly unequal distribution of wealth and income
...
Deeply impressive in its style and learning, Piketty’s argument is nevertheless incomplete. His story is about the super-rich racing ahead of the rich (and everyone else) since the 1980s. He explains this by the power of the rich to set their own pay and the ease with which they can transform their super-salaries into capital. But there may be another explanation, which is that digital technology actually increases the marginal product of the top performers in all fields of endeavour, creating a global elite of superstars who are distinguished from the rest by their exceptional talents. This is the view of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new book The Second Machine Age. To the extent that “technology increases the reach, scale, or monitoring capacity of a decision- maker,” it makes managers more “valuable.” This implies that supermanagers get higher pay because they are more productive, not just because they can set their own salaries.
 
Digital technology can also boost rewards to superstar writers and performers. For example, digitisation and globalisation have “supercharged the ability of authors like JK Rowling to leverage their talents… Rowling’s stories can be captured in movies and video games as well as text, and each of those formats… can be transmitted globally at a trivial cost.”

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Full employment

Political Aspects of Full Employment by Michal Kalecki

Palley and marginal theory

The flimflam defense of mainstream economics by Thomas Palley
The essence of Keynes’ economics was the liquidity preference theory of interest rates and rejection of the claim that price and nominal wage flexibility would ensure full employment. New Keynesians abandon both. They replace liquidity preference theory with loanable funds interest rate theory and they use price and nominal wage rigidity to explain cyclical unemployment.
...In my view, it is better labeled new Pigovian economics since it relies on market imperfections and frictions, which were the hallmarks of Pigou’s economic thinking. That makes for bitter irony as Pigou was Keynes’ greatly respected intellectual opponent in the 1930s and his thinking now passes under the Keynesian banner, displacing Keynes’ own ideas.
This is where it gets complicated:
The “no conceptual failure” claim also stretches the truth. The list of failures includes failure to anticipate the crisis; underestimating the effectiveness of fiscal policy in recessions; failure to incorporate the demand effects of debt and the dangers of debt-deflation; failure to incorporate the demand effects of income distribution; and failure to anticipate secular stagnation. In contrast, heterodox economists did well on all these counts.
 Links?
The Fed and the Financial Crisis by Yglesias

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Game of Thrones

Tywin Lannister: Your mother’s dead. Before long I’ll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children, all of us dead, all of us rotting underground. It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor… but family. You understand? 
[Jaime nods quietly. Tywin thrusts the knife at the table and wipes his hands clean with a cloth] 
Tywin Lannister: You’re blessed with abilities that few men possess. You’re blessed to belong to the most powerful family in the kingdoms. And you’re still blessed with youth. And what have you done with these blessings, eh? You served as a glorified bodyguard for two kings… one a mad man, the other a drunk.

The future of our family will be determined in these next few months. We could establish a dynasty that would last a thousand years… or we could collapse into nothing, as the Targaryens did.
—————
Interesting that Stannis’s Hand Davos had the princess Shireen write to the Iron Bank of Bravos on behalf of Stannis. What will the Iron Bank think when the letter from Stannis has all the lowercase “i”s dotted with hearts?

bloglist

I've added two blogs, Crooked Timber and The Money Illusion, to my bloglist even though I often disagree with the posts and commenters. Still, they are often very thought-provoking.

Baker on Krugman

Paul Krugman and the Economics Fringe by Dean Baker


Orphan Black



AV Club reviews Orphan Black: "Governed By Sound Reason And True Religion"