The Expropriatress (A WORK IN PROGRESS!)

Doug Henwood:

But, speaking of white people, the liberation of the slaves after the Civil War was probably the greatest expropriation of capital in history. If one counts slaves as wealth—which, grotesquely, was how American society defined them from the country’s founding through 1865—their value was about 150 percent of national income throughout the slavery era. And practically overnight, with Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, they were no longer someone’s property.

"Oh, and she's a fireproof messiah with a trio of flying nuclear dinosaurs at her disposal."

Rolling Stone's top 40 Game of Thrones characters by rank.

All That Is Solid (WORK IN PROGRESS)

Why are fantasy stories set in a pre-capitalist era popular?

Oathkeeper, Brienne and Catelyn, Brienne and Jaime, Pod and Tyrion, Selmy wants to serve a good ruler.

Kingslayer, house guest rules and Freys-Boltons are cursed/ will end up in the Seven Hells for the Red Wedding.

The family is communism/socialism/postcapitalism in embryo. Too each according to their needs from each according to their ability.

appeal of Game of Thrones and fantasy is that it's pre-capitalist. Not everything is reduced to exchange value.

aware of the problematics of a conservative desire for order and father knows best, unquestioning submission to authority. Ross Douthat in his review of K21.

As an honorable man, Ned Stark had a code of accountability. He who passed the sentence should swing the sword. It's why he didn't have an executioner/headsman.

Of course in Westeros and Essos, most people are peasants and dirt poor. Capitalism raised many people out of poverty over the years.

King Robert Baratheon to Cersei on the prospect of the Dothraki invading: "The kingdom is nothing but money-grubbing and backstabbing."

Thoughts on K21 (A WORK IN PROGRESS)

Global Wealth Tax or Barbarism?

That seems to be the choice facing humanity.

mentions of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States. Pethokoukis, Naidu, Shenk.

In the advanced nations, at about 1950 the wealth to income ratio began widening again even has growth remained high until the 1970s? Is this in Solow's review? Krugman and Baker and Kuttner warn against cyncism (see below). But Picketty has a valid point. From his interview with Porter:

The experience of Europe in the early 20th century does not lead to optimism: The democratic systems did not respond peacefully to rising inequality, which was halted only by wars and violent social conflicts. But hopefully we can do better next time. At the end of the day, it is in the common interest to find peaceful solutions. Otherwise there is a serious risk that growing parts of the public opinion turn against globalization.

Baker has an interesting point about the global level:

The top of my list is the loss of China as a source of extremely low cost labor. According to the International Labor Organization, real wages in China tripled in the decade from 2002-2012. While these data are not very accurate, there is little doubt that wages in China are rising rapidly. While Chinese wages still have a long way to go before they are on a par with wages in the United States or Europe, its huge cost advantage is rapidly disappearing. Manufacturers can look for other low-wage havens, but there are no other Chinas out there. The loss of extreme low wage havens is likely to enhance the bargaining power of large segments of the workforce. 

However, perhaps a more fundamental objection to Pikettys' grim future is the fact that a very large share, perhaps a majority, of corporate profit hinges on rules and regulations that could in principle be altered. My favorite example is drug patents. This industry accounts for more than $340 billion a year in sales (@ 2 percent of GDP and 15 percent of all corporate profits). The source of its profits is government granted patent monopolies.

Dean Baker

For Britain and France, the total value of the capital stock—owned, as is almost always the case, largely by the 1 percent (whether aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie, whether it’s France in 1780 or the United States in 2014)—was about seven times national income from 1700 until around 1910. (National income, roughly speaking, is the sum of all forms of income in a given economy—wages, profits, interest, dividends, and so on.) With two world wars and a depression, the capital stock fell to about three times national income. (Curiously, Piketty notes that the monetary destruction of paying for war through taxes and inflation did more damage to the capital stock than the physical destruction of combat itself.) It began to recover around 1950, but was inhibited by extremely high tax rates in the first postwar decades. As of 2010, the capital stock had recovered to between five and six times national income in Britain and France. 

Doug Henwood (emphasis added)

Still, while such deliberation is clearly necessary, political action cannot be factored out of that process just because we happen to have lived through the Cold War’s unmourned collapse. It’s energizing to see that a younger generation of political intellectuals, who were in grade school when the Berlin Wall came down, missed the anticapitalist vaccination. They might be able to take Piketty’s data and cause some genuine trouble with it. Because serious trouble—demonstrations, strikes, insurgent political movements—is what it will take to derail capitalism’s inevitable tendency toward concentration. Short of that, it looks like we’ll be continuing our journey along the road to a new serfdom. 

 Doug Henwood

Despite some losses to financial capital during the Great Depression, the more powerful era of equality in the U.S. began during World War II. The war was a massive macroeconomic stimulus; it produced full employment, stronger unions, and investment of public capital. The government’s wartime policies also repressed private finance in multiple and reinforcing ways, including the Fed’s pegging interest rates on Treasury bonds at a maximum of 2.5 percent, marginal tax rates set as high as 94 percent, and an intensification of the anti-speculative financial regulation of the New Deal. All of this did not end with the war. It had a half-life well into the postwar era, until unions were bashed and finance deregulated beginning in the 1970s.

Robert Kuttner

True, but my question would be, did the ratio of r to g shrink America after the post years or did it start widening after WWII? My guess is that it started widening around the 1970s, if my memory serves. I'll have to scan the reviews.

Piketty mentions some of this briefly but doesn’t focus on the political dynamics, and he is surprisingly blasé about the role of deliberate policy. “Neither the economic liberalization that began around 1980 nor the state intervention that began in 1945 deserves much praise or blame,” he contends. “The most one can say is that state intervention did no harm.”...

Not surprisingly, Piketty is much better informed on the nuances of French politics and economic history. In France, where the prosperity of the postwar boom is known as the Trente Glorieuses—30 glorious years of high growth and full employment—Piketty reports that the wealth distribution was already becoming more unequal again in the late 1940s as capital began recovering its normal place. It was rather high rates of growth, rising real incomes, and the expanding welfare state that made the postwar boom a happy French memory.

 Robert Kuttner (emphasis added)

But doesn't Piketty also credit the Baby Boom and reconstruction for the high growth rates, changes that ended in the 1970s? Japan and Germany went online. Nixon went off the gold standard. Maybe social democratic policies that encouraged high growth rates slowed down the erosion of the r/g ratio?

“In North America,” Piketty writes, “there is no nostalgia for the postwar period because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the same 1.5–2 percent rate throughout the period 1820-2012.” But this is a non sequitur. A two-century average tells us nothing about particular decades, nor does the average per capita output tell us anything about the wage dispersion. In fact, there is great nostalgia in the U.S. for the postwar boom, and appropriately so, precisely because it was a period of steadily rising wages and job security—a period of both rapid growth and more equal distribution. 

He also writes, “The significant compression of income inequality over the course of the 20th century was due entirely to the diminished top income from capital.” But that is misleading, too. What really happened is that the temporary weakening of capital, financially and politically, gave progressives and social democrats an opening that they successfully exploited for three decades after the war.

Robert Kuttner 

This is an important insight [politicians listen to elites only]— and it gains special force these days, when the elite’s views not only favor the elite versus the rest (duh) but have also been systematically wrong, on issues from invading Iraq to giving deficits a higher priority than jobs. 

But there is a danger here of going too far, and imagining that electoral politics is irrelevant. Why bother getting involved in campaigns, when the oligarchy rules whichever party is in power? 

So it’s worth pointing out it does make a difference. Yes, Democrats pay a lot of attention to plutocrats, and even make a point of inviting Patrimonial Capitalism: The Next Generation to White House galas (I would have missed that, even though it’s in my own paper, but for Kathleen Geier. Thanks!). But it’s quite wrong to say that the parties’ behavior in office is the same. As Floyd Norris points out, Obama has in fact significantly raised taxes on very high incomes, largely through special surcharges included in the Affordable Care Act; and what the Act does with the extra revenue is expand Medicaid and provide subsidies on the exchanges, both means-tested programs whose beneficiaries tend to be mainly lower-income adults. The net effect will be significant losses for the super-elite — not crippling losses, to be sure, and hardly anything that will affect their elite status — and major gains to tens of millions of less fortunate Americans. 

If you’re waiting for a revolution, or even a new New Deal, this may seem disappointing. But it matters a lot all the same. 

Krugman

Konczal in his review:

Why does it matter? First, capital ownership is concentrated. In the United States, the top one percent own 35 percent of all capital, and the top 10 percent of wealth holders own roughly 70 percent. The bottom 50 percent have roughly 5 percent. Moreover, Piketty argues that “the past tends to devour the future”—wealth accumulated in the past becomes more dominant and commands more power and attention than wealth being created now. In France, for example, where the inheritance data is best, the wealth of the dead amounts to nearly twice that of the living.

Skidelsky:

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.”

Dean Baker:

Hmm, I don't quite see it that way. To me there is a very specific issue that Piketty raised that relates directly to the Cambridge controversies. He argued that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor was greater than one. Therefore even as the amount of capital increased relative to labor, there was no reason that the rate of profit had to fall proportionately. This raises the prospect of an increasing capital share as economies get richer. 

This relates to the Cambridge controversies since the Cambridge U.K. people argued that the idea of an aggregate production function did not make sense. They pointed out that there was no way to aggregate different types of capital independent of the rate of return. The equilibirum price of any capital good depended on the rate of return. Therefore we can't tell a simple story about how the rate of return will change as we get more capital, since we can't even say what is more capital independent of the rate of return. 

The takeaway from this, or at least my takeaway, is that we don't have a theoretical construct that we can hope more or less approximates how the economy actually works. The theoretical construct doesn't make sense. This means if we want to determine the rate of return to capital we should not be looking to elasticities of substitution, but rather the institutional and political factors that determine the rate of profit.

The debate touched off by Piketty's claim about the elasticity of substitution will inevitably be a fruitless one. We are not going to find a technical relationship in past data that will tell us how profit shares will change as the ratio of capital to labor increases. 

Does any of this mean that the Great Recession proved Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor right? Not as far as I can see....

Baker:

It certainly is worthwhile to know what central bankers think, but is this supposed to be a source of legitimation? After all, even by the I.M.F.'s measures the wealthy countries are losing well over $2 trillion a year due to economies operating below potential GDP. The cumulative losses to the rich countries from the Great Recession are virtually certain to exceed $20 trillion and could well top $30 trillion. Is it supposed to be some sort of validation that the folks who got us here share your view of the world?

This blogpost.

Me on Bernstein on Furman.

Ronin

A samurai without a master. The absence of a socialist movement.

Mankiw's troll of the year

How Inherited Wealth Helps the Economy by Greg Mankiw

Not one of the 54 comments agrees.

nonfarm business sector: labor share

nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share

Profits and managerial compensation versus non-managerial compensation:

Orphan Black

AV Club reviews Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”

AV Club reviews Comedy Bang! Bang!: “Lizzy Caplan Wears All Black And Powder Blue Espadrilles”

Continuum

Is Continuum Preparing To Hit AnotherReset Button? by Charlie Jane Anders

K21

Further Thoughts on Capital and Inequality by David Glasner

It seems to me that these questions around "r" have been answered in other discussions and reviews.

nationalization

disappointing:

Mike Grunwald says nationalization was wrong call.

Calls his cheerleading into question. The banks have been so unrepentant that I believe Krugman was right and Grunwald is wrong to gloat. So the economy didn't collapse without nationalization, so what:

Game of Thrones

AV Club reviews Game Of Thrones (experts): “The Children” (for experts)

AV Club reviews Game Of Thrones: “The Children” (for newbies)

So how does the season end? Arya and Tyrion and Varys cross the Narrow Sea. Dany is caging her dragons and dealing with the backsliding social order of Mereen. Jon Snow, Stannis, Davos, Shireen, and Melisandre are at the Wall with thousands of wildling prisoners. Bran is with the Three-Eyed Raven. Jaime, Cersei, Margaery and Tommen rule in King's Landing. Roose Bolton and Ramsey rule the North.

From the books, Dorne will boil over Oberyn's death. The Iron Islanders will have a Kingsmoot. Brienne and Pod will continue to search for Sansa. Lady Stoneheart will seek revenge.

Abenomics

Shinzo Abe is actually pretty awesome by Noah Smith

monetary policy

John Williams on bubbles and monetary policy by Simon Wren-Lewis

Kalecki

War is the Health of the GDP by Sandwichman

"Does this mean, then that the continued failure of our foreign policy is the only way to pay for the failure of our fiscal policy?"

--Eisenhower

K21

Piketty on Charlie Rose

full employment

The Full Employment Route to Poverty Reduction by Dean Baker

Game of Thrones

The violent wonderland of Game Of Thrones: The audience craves blood, and the show is all too happy to provide it by Sonia Saraiya

The shows creators brought the books to HBO because the books are great, not because of the violence. But HBO does have more sex and violence than regular TV.

Waldman and Brat

Welfare economics: inequality, production, and technology (part 3 of a series) by Steve Randy Waldman

Dave Brat’s unorthodox economics: Adam Smith ‘was from a red state’ by Matt O'Brien

As Zach Beauchamp points out, Brat thinks that most economists have smuggled a utilitarian ethic—maximizing the most good for the most people—into economic analysis, without debating whether there are other, better ethics. 

What would be a better ethic? Well, for Brat that's simple enough: Christianity. He realizes that markets can fail, but he doesn't think regulation is the answer. He thinks religion is. "If markets are bad, which they are, that means people are bad, which they are," he says in a 2011 paper. The answer is to "preach the gospel and change hearts and souls," so we can "make all of the people good"—which means "markets will be good" too. 

Not exactly Dodd-Frank.

Suits

AV Club reviews Suits: “One-Two-Three Go…”

It's interesting how they keep referencing Game of Thrones and had two of the actors (who played Catelyn Stark and Varys) last season. 

In this season, Mike is attempting a hostile takeover of a company in order to keep it together (and of course to make money for his boss, a Gordon Gekko type.) He's in competition with Harvey who is advising another Gordon Gekko type who just wants to gut the company and sell it for parts. 

There's an argument to be made that the change in the tax code (in the 1950s and again in the 1980s?) that made this kind of thing common really hurt the economy and society.

K21

Piketty emails DeLong and Equitable Growth:

We do provide long run series on capital depreciation in the "Capital Is Back" paper with Gabriel [Zucman] (see http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/capitalisback, appendix country tables US.8, JP.8, etc.). The series are imperfect and incomplete, but they show that in pretty much every country capital depreciation has risen from 5-8% of GDP in the 19th century and early 20th century to 10-13% of GDP in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, i.e. from about 1%[/year] of capital stock to about 2%[/year]. 

Of course there are huge variations across industries and across assets, and depreciation rates could be a lot higher in some sectors. Same thing for capital intensity. 

The problem with taking away the housing sector (a particularly capital-intensive sector) from the aggregate capital stock is that once you start to do that it's not clear where to stop (e.g., energy is another capital intensive sector). So we prefer to start from an aggregate macro perspective (including housing). Here it is clear that 10% or 5% depreciation rates do not make sense.

market monetarists

Why are market monetarists such extremists on fiscal policy by Scott Sumner

SIMON WREN-LEWIS NEEDS HELP FIGURING OUT WHAT “NOTHING” AND “ZERO” MEAN, AND THE REAL ASYMMETRY BETWEEN MONETARISTS AND FISCALISTS by Mark Sadowski

K21

What Larry Summers Gets Wrong On Piketty's 'Capital' by Matt Bruenig

In his discussion of the first point, Summers just talks about substitution elasticities (i.e. when the capital stock increases, by how much does the rate of return to capital decrease?), as many other economists have also done. He accuses Piketty of confusing gross returns to capital with returns net of depreciation. But in the book, Piketty specifically says that his figures are net of depreciation. If you want to quibble with his specific data or how he accounts for depreciation in it, then you can do that, but you can't just say "I think he misreads the literature by conflating gross and net returns to capital." He doesn't conflate them. He's careful to explain the importance of depreciation and tries to account for it. 

Additionally, when economists start going into the substitution elasticity stuff (on which Summers himself admits there is not good data), they appear to me to be pushing Piketty into a physicalist capital framework that is totally different from what he is talking about. As I explained in a prior post, Piketty has a social constructivist account of capital. The "capital" he is discussing in his book refers to all tradeable assets that deliver passive returns, not just physical buildings and machines and the like. Models that try to show adding more machines will cause the rate of return to fall proportionally such that the owners of the machines won't grab increasing shares of the national income do not actually address Piketty's "capital." Summers falls into that trap here.
...

Read the entire post for the overall point, but the gist here is that those who hold big piles of wealth see their wealth and capital income increase each year by r * s. They don't need their s to be 100% to see their holdings grow at a faster rate than those without big piles of wealth (i.e. those who only make money by working). So long as their savings rate is sufficiently higher (how much is sufficiently higher depends on the spread between r and g) than those with only labor incomes, they will perpetually gain on those people in terms of wealth and income. Piketty has not mistakenly assumed all capital income is saved at 100%. Summers has that wrong.

Louie CK

AV Club reviews Louie: “In The Woods”

The science teacher was the getaway driver in Ronin.

economic tradeoffs?

Financial Stability and Monetary Policy: Happy Marriage or Untenable Union? by John C. Williams

neoclassical economics response to K21

On page 10:

Jason Furman:

Moreover, economic theory is unclear about whether slowing growth would in fact result in a rise in r – g. In general when growth rates fall, the ratio of capital to income rises, and the increased prevalence of capital drives down the rate of return on capital. Whether the return on capital falls more or less than the growth rate depends on how substitutable capital and labor are, with less substitutability meaning that the extra capital will be less useful thus driving its return down more. Unfortunately, the degree of this substitutability has not been clearly established, although Piketty's assumption that it is sufficient to prevent a large fall in the rate of return on capital is a plausible reading of the aggregate data.

In addition, the return on capital is also determined by individuals’ willingness to provide funds, that is, to save, and with slower consumption growth on the horizon (in part because of longer periods of retirement), individuals should be willing to save more for a given rate of interest—further driving down the interest rate and the return on capital.

As a result it is ambiguous whether or not r – g would increase or decrease as a result of lower growth rates. In fact, many standard economic models imply that r would fall by more than g so that lower growth rates would actually lead to a reduction in r – g and consequently push in the direction of less inequality.

It is worth noting that, separate from Piketty’s argument about increases in the capital share, it is plausible that continuing increases in income inequality within capital income in the United States will occur simply as a result of the large increases in inequality within labor income that have already occurred.

K21 and r

DeLong:

1. That Piketty has no real theory of what determines the rate of profit, and so doesn't have a real theory of wages either. This is what led toMatt Rognlie's complaints and his claims that Piketty ought to be saying that the processes of wealth accumulation he identifies (a) reduce the salience of the rich--that although they own more wealth relative to a year's national income they receive a smaller share of national income--and (b) amplify the real incomes of the not-rich and (c) lead not to less but more income inequality.
   This criticism is, I think, in large part a consequence of criticism (1): if you have a physical-factor-of-production definition of "capital" in the forefront of your mind, it is a very natural criticism to make. Piketty seems to need an additional argument here: that control over wealth shapes politics, and that politics will make sure that the rate of profit does not fall too far--that wealth is not allowed to compete with itself and so lower the rate of return and boost wages substantially as the process of wealth accumulation continues. It seems to me that Piketty has a good case here. But I think he needs to make it.
   If he were to make it, what would he say? Suresh Naidu, I think, lays out the issues rather well. He speaks of the "'domesticated' version of [Piketty's] argument... a story about technology and the world market making capital and labor more and more substitutable over time, and this is why r does not fall very much as wealth accumulates.... This is story that is told to academic economists, and it is plausible, at least on the surface..." The problem for Piketty is that it is only plausible. There are the Matt Rognlie's who believe that capital and labor are not (yet) that substitutable (if they ever will be), and consequently that capital accumulation raises the bargaining power of labor by enough to guarantee rapidly-rising real wages and probably a rising labor share and thus a decreased salience of capital ownership in income if not in wealth. They look forward to at least a partial euthanasia of the rentier, and see the process of accumulation that Piketty describes as an equalizing rather than an unequalizing process. Thus, I think, the 'domesticated' version of Piketty--the one that speaks of wealth-as-productive capital, and of the return to wealth as the marginal physical product of that capital times the value of undifferentiated output, is relatively weak.
   Suresh, however, does not believe in the 'domesticated' Piketty. He writes: "There is another story... that the rate of return on capital is set much more by institutions, norms and expectations than by supply and demand.... I think the production approach is less plausible... housing [with land] plays such a large role... [i the 'domesticated' version] average wages would have increased along with K/Y [if factors are paid marginal products].... The (really great) sections from the book on corporate governance actually suggest something quite different... a gap between cash-flow rights and control rights.... This political dimension of capital, the difference between the valuation written down in the balance sheet and the real power to dispose of the asset, is something that the institutional view of capital can capture better than the marginal product view..." And here we have passed out of neoclassical economics entirely. Factors of production are no longer paid their marginal products. Instead, wealth controls government. Government sets barriers to keep those kinds of property that the wealthy control safe from competition and earning their rents. The government is an executive committee for managing the affairs of the ruling class. And, as a bonus, the property rights system acts as a fetter on the process of economic development because it is tuned not toward equalizing private and social values but toward enriching the already-rich.
   As Suresh points out, if you adopt the 'domesticated' version of Piketty, then, first of all, nothing can be done save for progressive taxation: "This is, I think, also a fruitful interpretation of what was at stake behind the old capital controversies.... If it is just a very high substitutability... labor market reforms are... off the table, as firms just replace workers with machines if you try to raise the wage..." In the 'domesticated' version, the market is working: labor is low-paid because it is not very valuable and capital is high-paid because it is very useful indeed. Plus, I would add, the 'domesticated' version is subject to Matt Rognlie's critique in a way that the wild version is not.
   But by now we have arrived at the point that Piketty needs to write another book--a book about control rights and cash flow rights and the political economy of distribution and the state, a book that is (mostly) hidden behind Piketty's assumption that r will not fall by much as W/Y rises...
2. That Piketty's argument that the rate of profit has a floor needs to be spelled out. this is essentially (3) in a different form: the argument that accumulation might lead to more wealth equality but less income inequality and much higher real wages is a serious and important one. Piketty does not believe it. But what I see as his failure to deal with it head-on and convincingly is the biggest hole in the book.

Piketty, MM & MMT, Marx

OVER AT EQUITABLE GROWTH: DEPRECIATION RATES ON WEALTH IN THOMAS PIKETTY'S DATABASE: MONDAY FOCUS: JUNE 9, 2014 by DeLong

Monetarist vs Fiscalist by Simon Wren-Lewis

Henwood tweets: 

@rortybomb @delong my political coda was out of Marx. I’d be happy never to see another critique rooted in value theory though

aggregate production function and marginal productivity theory

Gross (with depreciation) versus net. Elasticity of substitution.

Piketty’s Fair-Weather Friends by Seth Ackerman

The problem for the book is that its gloomy forecast of a return to “patrimonial capitalism” is based on the prediction that over the next decades, the gap between r and g will widen due to a fall in the growth rate (g). No one has a problem with the prediction of falling growth — all else equal, this will happen simply if population growth slows, as it almost certainly will. The problem is that if growth slows while the rate of saving (i.e. investment) stays constant, capital will start accumulating faster than output is rising, meaning the measured capital-output ratio will increase. 

But marginal productivity theory sees a rise in the capital-output ratio as an increase in the “supply of capital,” which, in classic supply-and-demand logic, ought to bring about a reduction in its “price” — that is, a fall in r. According to the theory, this should neutralize the effect on the r-g gap. 

In his faint-praise review of Piketty’s book, Larry Summers was unyielding on this point: “Economists universally believe in the law of diminishing returns,” he insisted, in a line resounding with the thud of a fist pounding a lectern. Piketty’s forecast of rising r - g must be rejected, Summers concluded, because “as capital accumulates, the incremental return on an additional unit of capital declines.” 

Piketty had of course been aware of this issue when he wrote the book, and he made an attempt to reconcile his argument with conventional theory. He contended that as growth slows and the capital-output ratio rises, r might decline (as theory predicts) but the magnitude of the decline might still be small enough to permit a net widening in the r - g gap. 

The technical term for the quantitative relationship involved (that is, between the size of a change in the capital-output ratio and the size of the change in r that supposedly results, or vice versa) is the elasticity of substitution: the higher the elasticity, the smaller the “response” of r to a given change in the volume of capital. When the elasticity is higher, it’s taken to signify that the force of diminishing returns to capital is weaker, due to richer technological opportunities for labor-saving investment. 

As Summers pointed out in his review, “economists have tried forever to estimate elasticities of substitution with many types of data,” so there’s a large literature on the subject. This is the so-called production function literature, which tries to apply marginal productivity theory empirically by estimating the supposed causal relationships between quantities of labor and capital inputs, on the one hand, and the quantity of output on the other. Piketty’s argument was that the elasticity needed for his forecast to come true isn’t all that much higher than at least a few of the estimates found in the existing production function literature. 

But in saying so, he made a crucial error. He confused two different ways of measuring the elasticity: the usual (gross) measure, which counts depreciation as part of the return to capital, and his own (net) measure, which doesn’t. 

When this discrepancy is accounted for, the elasticity Piketty requires turns out to be far, far higher than any known estimate. This was first pointed out in mid-April by Matt Rognlie, an MIT graduate student and blogger. The problem was ruefully acknowledged by Brad DeLong, the former Clinton administration economist, who is sympathetic to Piketty’s project. 

Summers’s review a month later in the journal Democracy sealed the judgment: Piketty “misreads the literature by conflating gross and net returns to capital,” Summers wrote. “I know of no study suggesting that measuring output in net terms, the elasticity of substitution is greater than 1, and I know of quite a few suggesting the contrary.” 

A reader at this point could be forgiven for feeling confused. Didn’t Piketty gather his own data? He did, of course. That Herculean effort by him and his team of international colleagues, compiling statistics on historical rates of return and capital volumes in many countries going back to the eighteenth century, is the one point on which all reviews are unanimous in their praise. 

As Piketty makes clear, those data — which he’s made freely available on the internet for anyone to check — are indeed “explained” by a net elasticity of 1.3-1.6, which would indicate an extremely weak force of diminishing returns to capital. Yet it’s also true that this figure is far higher than any found in the existing literature — probably more than twice as high as the highest typical estimates. 

What should we make of this?

First, Piketty’s estimate of the elasticity of substitution can’t really be compared with those in the literature. His is based on economy-wide data covering decades and centuries while estimates in the literature typically cover only a few years, and often just a few industries. Moreover, his pertain to all private wealth, while the literature focuses narrowly on production capital. These are very different concepts. 

But most importantly, given the flawed marginalist theory behind it, and its even more flawed basis of measurement — a subject there’s no space to go into here, but which marks a fundamental critique of the production function literature advanced in an important book published just two months before Piketty’s — the elasticity of substitution simply cannot be regarded as a meaningful measure of an economy’s technology (or anything else), or as providing any clue to its future. 

What’s essential, rather, is Piketty’s empirical demonstration that the rate of return on wealth has been remarkably stable over centuries — and, contraSummers, with no visible tendency to vary in any consistent way against the “supply of capital.” 

Therefore, if we expect growth to slow, the most reasonable expectation is that the r - g gap will in fact increase, and inherited wealth will expand.

Three Ways of Looking at alpha = r k

Three Ways of Looking at alpha = r k by JW Mason

Piketty's "first law of capitalism" is the accounting identity

α = r k

where α is the share of capital income in total output, r is the average return on capital, and k is the aggregate capital-output ratio.

As accounting, this is true by definition. As economics, what kind of economic behavior does it describe? There are three ways of looking at it. 

In the standard version, the profit share is determined by a production function, which is given by technology. The profit rate r* required by capital owners is fixed by technology in combination with time preferences. In this closure, k is the endogenous, or adjusting, variable.  Investment rises or falls whenever the realized profit rate differs from the required rate, thus keeping k at the level that satisfies the equation for r  = r*. 

In Piketty’s version, r is fixed (somehow; the mechanism is not clear) and k is determined by savings behavior and (exogenous) growth according to his "second law of capitalism": 

k = s/g

That leaves α to passively accommodate r and k. Capitalists get whatever the current capital stock and fixed profit rate entitle them to, and workers get whatever is left over; in effect, workers are the residual claimants in Piketty's system. (This is the opposite of the classical view, in which wages are fixed and capitalists get the residual.)

In a third interpretation, we could say that α and r are set institutionally -- α through some kind of bargaining process, or by the degree of monopoly, r perhaps by the interest rate set in the financial system. The value of the capital stock is then given by capitalizing the flow of profits α Y at the discount rate r. (Y is total output.) This interpretation is the natural one if we think of “capital” as a claim to a share of the surplus as opposed to physical means of production. 

This interpretation clearly applies to pure land, or to the market value of a particular firm. What if it applied to capital in general? Since claims on the surplus -- including claims exercised through nonproduced assets like land -- are not created by reserving output from consumption, aggregate savings would be a meaningless accounting construct in this case. (Or we could adopt a Hicksian view of saving in which it equals the change in net wealth by definition.) Looking at things this way also puts r > g in a different light. Suppose we think of the capital stock as a whole as something like the stock of a firm, which entitles the owners to the flow of profits from that firm. If the profits today are α Y and output is expected to grow at a rate g, what is the value of the stock today? If we discount future profits at r, then it is the sum from t=0 to t=infinity of α Y (1 + g)^t / (1 + r)^t, which works out to α Y / (r - g). So if we can take the rate of return on capital as the discount rate on future profits, then r > g is implied by a finite value of the capital stock.

We shouldn't ask what capital "really" is. It really is a quantity of money in a process of self-expansion, and it really is a mass of means of production, and it really is authority over the production process. But the particular historical questions Piketty is interested in may be better suited to thinking of capital as a claim on the social surplus than as a physical quantity of means of production. Seth Ackerman has some very interesting thoughts along these lines in his contribution to the Jacobin symposium on the book. 

Game of Thrones

Game Of Thrones (experts): “The Watchers On The Wall” (for experts)

Game Of Thrones (experts): “The Watchers On The Wall” (for newbies)

Halt And Catch Fire: “FUD”

Abenomics

Japan growth up

Orphan Black

AV Club reviews Orphan Black: “Variable And Full Of Perturbation”

Avant Gardener

Courtney Barnett's Avant Gardener

Pitchfork

One of the tags on Melbourne-based songwriter Courtney Barnett's Bandcamp page is "slacker," a term with roots in the 1890s but stronger ties to a decade about a hundred years later. Barnett's music-- like the term-- feels older, too. Building on the wordy irreverence of mid-'60s Bob Dylan and a Byrds-ian blend of psychedelia, folk and country, "Avant Gardener" tells the story of a girl dragging her underemployed ass out of bed late on a Monday morning to try her hand at gardening-- at which point she suffers a panic attack. 

The scene unfolds like a dream: "Halfway down High Street, Andy looks ambivalent/ He's probably wondering what I'm doing getting in an ambulance," Barnett sings, her voice drifting through the lines in sweet speak-sing. "The paramedic thinks I'm clever 'cause I play guitar/ I think she's clever 'cause she stops people dying." They're both right. Later, the song's poor narrator struggles to get a good pull on her asthma inhaler. "I was never good at smoking bongs," she confesses. Some slacker.

AVANT GARDENER

I sleep in late
Another day
Oh what a wonder
Oh what a waste.
It’s a monday
It’s so mundane
What exciting things
Will happen today?
The yard is full of hard rubbish it’s a mess and
I guess the neighbours must think we run a meth lab
We should ammend that
I pull the sheets back
It’s 40 degrees
And i feel like i’m dying.
Life’s getting hard in here
So i do some gardening
Anything to take my mind away from where it’s sposed to be.
The nice lady next door talks of green beds
And all the nice things that she wants to plant in them
I wanna grow tomatoes on the front steps.
Sunflowers, bean sprouts, sweet corn and radishes.
I feel pro-active
I pull out weeds
All of a sudden
I’m having trouble breathing in.

My hands are shaky
My knees are weak
I can’t seem to stand
On my own two feet
I’m breathing but i’m wheezing
Feel like i’m emphysem-in’
My throat feels like a funnel
Filled with weet bix and kerosene and
Oh no, next thing i know
They call up triple o
I’d rather die than owe the hospital
Till I get old
I get adrenalin
Straight to the heart
I feel like Uma Thurman
Post-overdosing kick start
Reminds me of the time
When i was really sick and i
Had too much psuedoefedryn and i
Couldn’t sleep at night
Halfway down high street, andy looks ambivalent
He’s probably wondering what i’m doing getting in an ambulance
The paramedic thinks i’m clever cos i play guitar
I think she’s clever cos she stops people dying
Anaphylactic and super hypocondriactic
Should’ve stayed in bed today
I much prefer the mundane.
I take a hit from
An asthma puffer
I do it wrong
I was never good at smoking bongs.
I’m not that good at breathing in.

oedipal

This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

from the controversial Jacobin piece on bro-bashing. "While intergenerational critique is both healthy and necessary, I’d hope we could transcend the Oedipal alienation of “This Be the Verse…”" I don't think it's Oedipal, just realistic. Parents can be assholes because they're miserable. There's little accountability. And possibly parents are easily tempted to fuck up their kids. Power corrupts. So don't have kids.

This started with a feminist lefty tweeting about a "bro-battle" between Henwood and Piketty. If I remember correctly Henwood used to write about Harold Bloom who wrote about the fimsily related Anxiety of Influence in literature.

Henwood's criticism of Piketty was that he was too moderate. Henwood is also a critic of DeBlasio and Obama, so perhaps Aaron Bady is a supporter of them and considers Henwood's criticisms as "prolier-than-thou" and leftier than thou and conceives of it as tough "bro" behavior. But then again he mentions "data."